Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke [23]
Stormgren wondered what he was thinking. He wondered too, if Wainwright had made any contact with the men who had kidnapped him. He doubted it, for he believed Wainwright's disapproval of violence to be perfectly genuine. The extremists in his movement had discredited themselves thoroughly, and it would be a long time before the world heard of them again.
The head of the Freedom League listened carefully while the draft was read to him. Stormgren hoped he appreciated this gesture, which had been Karellen's idea. Not for another twelve hours would the rest of the world know of the promise that had been made to its grandchildren.
"Fifty years," said Wainwright thoughtfully. "That is a long time to wait."
"For mankind, perhaps, but not for Karellen," Stormgren answered. Only now was he beginning to realize the neatness of the Overlords' solution. It had given them the breathing space they believed they needed, and it had cut the ground from beneath the Freedom League's feet. He did not imagine that the League would capitulate, but its position would be seriously weakened. Certainly Wainwright realized this as well.
"In fifty years," he said bitterly, "the damage will be done. Those who remembered our independence will be dead; humanity will have forgotten its heritage."
Words-empty words, thought Stormgren. The words for which men had once fought and died, and for which they would never die or fight again. And the world would be better for it.
As he watched Wainwright leave, Stormgren wondered how much trouble the Freedom League would still cause in the years that lay ahead. Yet that, he thought with a lifting of his spirits, was a problem for his successor.
There were some things that only time could cure. Evil men could be destroyed, but nothing could be done with good men who were deluded.
"Here's your case," said Duval. "It's as good as new."
"Thanks," Stormgren answered, inspecting it carefully none the less. "Now perhaps you'll tell me what it was all about, and what we are going to do next."
The physicist seemed more interested in his own thoughts.
"What I can't understand," he said, "is the ease with which we've got away with it. Now if I'd been Kar-"
"But you're not. Get to the point, man. What did we discover?"
"Ah me, these excitable, highly-strung Nordic races!" sighed Duval. "What we did was to make a type of low-powered radar set. Besides radio waves of very high frequency, it used far infrared-all waves, in fact, which we were sure no creature could possibly see, however weird an eye it had."
"How could you be sure of that?" asked Stormgren, becoming intrigued by the technical problem in spite of himself.
"Well-we couldn't quite be sure," admitted Duval reluctantly. "But Karellen views you under normal lighting, doesn't he? So his eyes must be approximately similar to ours in spectral range. Anyway, it worked. We've proved that there is a large room behind that screen of yours. The screen is about three centimetres thick, and the space behind it is at least ten metres across. We couldn't detect any echo from the far wall, but we hardly expected to with the low power which was all we dared use. However, we did get this."
He pushed across a piece of photographic paper on which was a single wavy line. In one spot was a kink like the autograph of a mild earthquake.
"See that little kink?"
"Yes; what is it?"
"Only Karellen."
"Good Lord! Are you sure?"
"It's a pretty safe guess. He's sitting, or standing, or whatever it is he does, about two metres on the other side of the screen. If the resolution had been a bit better, we might even have calculated his size."
Stormgren's feelings were very mixed as he stared at that scarcely visible inflexion of the trace. Until now, there had been no proof that Karellen even had a material body. The evidence was still indirect, but he accepted it without question.
"The other thing we had to do," said Duval, "was to