Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke by Arthur Clarke C. Read Free Book Online

enormous ray generators, but swift as he was the almost instant acting relays of the termite mind were far swifter. Though, in any case, the outcome would have been the same.
    The great spherical screens did not flare even once as the enemy struck home. Their slim rapier of pure heat was driven by only a score of horsepower, while behind the shields of the warship were a thousand million. But the feeble heat beam of the termites never passed through those screens – it reached out through hyperspace to gnaw at the very vitals of the ship. The Martians could not check an enemy who struck from within their defences, an enemy to whom a sphere was no more a barrier than a hollow ring.
    The termite rulers, those alien beings from outer space, had kept their agreement with the old lords of Earth, and had saved man from the danger his ancestors had long ago foreseen.
    But the watching assembly knew only that the screens of the ship which had been blazing fiercely one moment had erupted in a hurricane of flame and a numbing concussion of sound, while for a thousand miles around fragments of white-hot metal were dropping from the heavens.
    Slowly the President turned to face the Council and whispered in a low, strained voice, ‘I think it had better be planet Two, after all.’

Reverie
First published in New Worlds , Autumn 1939
Not previously collected in book form
    ‘All the ideas in science fiction have been used up!’
    How often we’ve heard this moan from editors, authors and fans, any one of whom should know better. Even if it were true, which is the last thing it is, it would signify nothing. How long ago do you think the themes of ordinary, mundane fiction were used up? Somewhere in the late Paleolithic, I should say. Which fact has made exactly no difference to the overwhelming outrush of modern masterpieces, four a shilling in the third tray from the left.
    No. The existing material is sufficient to provide an infinite number of stories, each individual and each worth reading. Too much stress is laid on new ideas, or ‘thought-variants’, on ‘novae’. They are all very well in their way – and it’s a way that leads to strange, delightful regions of fantasy – but at least as important are characterisation and the ability to treat a commonplace theme in your own individual style. And for this reason, in spite of all his critics, I maintain that if any could equal Weinbaum, none could surpass him.
    If, in addition to its purely literary qualities, a story has a novel idea, so much the better. Notwithstanding the pessimists, there are a million million themes that science fiction has never touched. Even in these days of deepening depression, a few really original plots still lighten our darkness. ‘The Smile of the Sphinx’ was such a one; going a good deal further back we have ‘The Human Termites’, perhaps the best of all its kind before the advent of ‘Sinister Barrier’.
    As long as science advances, as long as mathematics discovers incredible worlds where twice two would never dream of equalling four, so new ideas will come tumbling into the mind of anyone who will let his thoughts wander, passport in hand, along the borders of Possibility. There are no Customs regulations; anything you see in your travels in those neighbouring lands you can bring back with you. But in the country of the Impossible there are many wonders too delicate and too fragile to survive transportation.
    Nothing in this world is ever really new, yet everything is in some way different from all that has gone before. At least once in his life even the dullest of us has found himself contemplating with amazement and perhaps with fear, some thought so original and so startling that it seems the creation of an exterior, infinitely more subtle mind. Such thoughts pass through the consciousness so swiftly that they are gone before they can be more than glimpsed, but sometimes like comets trapped at last by a giant sun, they cannot