The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [25]
A voice from the back row was already shouting, “You mean General Zod?” And another voice came up with, “And the girl, Urna.” And then half a dozen others put in, “And Non!”
The professor gave them all a grin. “I’m happy to see that so many of you are so well versed in the classics. Anyway, trust me on this. They don’t exist. No hideous space aliens are going to decide to exterminate us, and now let’s get out of here before they call the campus police.”
Although Dr. Joris Vorhulst had never heard of the Grand Galactics or any of their client species—and would have been likely to give a very different answer if he had—he, technically, was still quite right in what he said. No space aliens were going to decide to exterminate the human race. The only space aliens interested in the subject had already made the decision to do so and had then gone on to more entertaining matters.
The Grand Galactics were not motivated to keep their turf clear of inimical species out of any notion of living in peace and amity. What they desired, and attained, was an existence with the least possible distraction from their main interests. Some of these interests had to do with their plans for an ideal galactic environment, which they had some hope of attaining in another ten or twenty billion years. Other interests were more like what humans might call the appreciation of beauty.
The Grand Galactics found many things “beautiful,” including what humans would describe as numbering, nucleonics, cosmology, string (and non-string) theory, causality, and many other areas. In their enjoyment of the fundamental aspects of nature, they might spend centuries—millennia, if they chose—contemplating the rich spectral changes as, one by one, some single atom lost its orbital electrons. Or they might study the distribution of prime numbers greater than 1050, or the slow maturation of a star from wispy gas and thin-scattered particles through the initiation of nuclear burning to its terminal state as a cooling white dwarf or, again, as a cloud of wisps and particles.
Oh, they did have other concerns. One, for example, was their project of increasing the proportion of heavy elements relative to primordial hydrogen in the galaxy’s chemical makeup. (They had a valid reason for this program, but not one that contemporary human beings would have understood.) Their other concerns were even less comprehensible to the likes of humanity. But, yes, they did consider the suppression of potentially dangerous civilizations worth doing.
Therefore the data concerning planet Earth required action. Their cease and desist order radioed to the human planet at light’s lazy stroll was still years from reaching its target. It would not be enough. Would not matter at all, in fact, because more urgent action was required. These upstart bipedal vertebrates not only possessed the technology of nuclear fission and fusion to an extent capable of creating inconveniencing weaponry, they already possessed a vast planetwide weapons industry to build on. The situation was even more annoying than the Grand Galactics had supposed, and they did not tolerate annoyance well.
They elected to terminate this particular annoyance.
When the Grand Galactics wished to convey an instruction to one of their client races, they had several delivery systems available. There was, for example, simple radio, efficient but ponderously slow. No electromagnetic signal—light, radar, that kind of thing—could go any faster than Dr. Einstein’s beloved c, which is to say an absolute maximum speed of some three hundred thousand kilometers a second. The Grand Galactics had devised some faster machines, sneaking through loopholes in relativity, but those were at most four or five times more speedy.
The Grand Galactics themselves, however—or any detachable fragment of them—being what ineffably nonbaryonic