The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [150]
The president turned to look at his own screen, just in time for the scene on the screens in the rest of the world to show the reality of what the president had promised. From all directions warplanes, arranged in precise flights and Vs, were heading in toward a single target, the Qattara Depression. Ranjit recognized some of them—supersonic flying wings; immense old B-52s, originally deployed in the Vietnam War and still going strong; the tiny, fast stealth fighter-bombers—Ranjit counted at least a dozen different types of aircraft, all heading to the same point on the map—
And then, suddenly and without warning, they weren’t.
To Ranjit it looked like nothing as much as one of those radio dog fences, where the animal gets a shock from buried wiring any time he tries to pass a certain point in his run. The planes did the same thing. As they reached a certain point along the perimeter of a circle drawn with the Qattara Depression as its center, the orderly patterns of Vs faltered, ceased to be coherent, one by one lost power. Nothing exploded. There were no flames, and no sign of enemy action. All that happened was that the mighty air fleet no longer displayed the torches of flame that were their jet exhausts. Those had winked out.
Lacking thrust, the planes did their best to glide to the ground, but their best was very poor. Within a matter of minutes the screens were displaying five or six hundred funeral pyres, each marking the point at which a member of the mighty striking force had hit the ground, the fuel that remained in its tanks immediately exploding.
And within the perimeter of the invaders’ camp, the various bits of busy machinery, paying no attention at all, kept right on with their arcane tasks.
For the One Point Fives themselves the Qattara Depression was pure heaven.
They particularly loved the brackish water of the oasis. It was purer than any water they had seen for generations on their own planet. Oh, sure, there were a few chemicals that had to be filtered out. But there were hardly any radioactive contaminants, and no positron emitters at all!
And the air! You could very nearly breathe it without a filter! True, it was on the warmish side—around 45°C, or perhaps 110°F, in the several confusing ways the human population had of measuring temperatures—but once they had finished digging their tunnel from the depression to the sea, there would be plenty of cooling Mediterranean waters to make the climate livable.
They were, in fact, about as happy as an enslaved race of largely prosthetic beings can be, except for one annoying thing.
As usual it was the Nine-Limbeds who were making trouble. The Nine-Limbeds had agreed to the destruction of the attacking aircraft because no actual local sentients’ lives were endangered, all of the war planes being of course remotely controlled. But, infuriatingly, the attack had destroyed some human life anyway.
A party of oil prospectors had had the bad luck to be setting up their seismometers just where one of the American bombers crashed. True, only eleven human beings had been killed, less than 0.0000001 percent of the human race. By any rational count that was hardly enough to worry about.
But the Nine-Limbeds kept caterwauling about it. Human ideas of justice and reparations were not the same as their own, as they knew from eavesdropping on every major human activity and a good many minor ones. Finally the council of the One Point Fives gave in. “What can we do to heal the situation?” they asked. “That is, other than leaving this extraordinarily inviting place to go back to our own planet, which we are not going to do.”
“Reparations,” said the experts of the Nine-Limbeds at once. “You must pay them. Through our eavesdropping program we have ascertained that nearly anything that goes wrong in the affairs of these human beings can be repaired by paying reparations, in the form of money. Would you be willing to do that?”
It didn’t take the One Point Fives long to answer