The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [37]
The reporter was so deferential that Stormgren found it surprising. He had almost forgotten that he was not only an elder statesman but, outside his own country, almost a mythical figure.
“Mr. Stormgren,” the intruder began, “I’m very sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you would mind answering a few questions about the Overlords?”
Stormgren frowned slightly. After all these years, he still shared Karellen’s dislike for the word.
“I do not think,” he said, “that I can add a great deal to what has already been written elsewhere.”
The reporter was watching him with a curious intentness.
“I thought that you might,” he answered. “A rather strange story has just come to our notice. It seems that, nearly thirty years ago, one of the Science Bureau’s technicians made some remarkable pieces of equipment for you. We wondered if you could tell us anything about it.”
For a moment Stormgren was silent, his mind going back into the past. He was not surprised that the secret had been discovered: indeed it was amazing that it had taken so long. He wondered how it had happened, not that it mattered now.
He rose to his feet and began to walk back along the jetty, the reporter following a few paces behind.
“The story,” he said, “contains a certain amount of truth. On my last visit to Karellen’s ship I took some apparatus with me, in the hope that I might see the Supervisor. It was rather a foolish thing to do but—well, I was only sixty at the time.”
He chuckled to himself and then continued.
“It’s not much of a story to have brought you all this way. You see, it didn’t work.”
“You saw nothing?”
“No, nothing at all. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait—but after all, there are only twenty years to go.”
Twenty years to go. Yes, Karellen had been right. By then the world would be ready, as it had not been when he had spoken that same lie to Duval thirty years before.
Yet was it a lie? What had he really seen? No more, he was certain, than Karellen had intended. He was as sure as he could be of anything that the Supervisor had known his plan from the beginning, and had foreseen every moment of its final act.
Why else had that enormous chair been already empty when the circle of light blazed upon it? In the same moment he had started to swing the beam, but he was too late. The metal door, twice as high as a man, was closing swiftly when he first caught sight of it—closing swiftly, yet not quite swiftly enough.
Karellen had trusted him, had not wished him to go down into the long evening of his life still haunted by a mystery he could never solve. Karellen dared not defy the unknown powers above him (were they of that same race too?) but he had done all that he could. If he had disobeyed Them, They could never prove it.
“We have had our failures.”
Yes, Karellen, that was true: and were you the one who failed, before the dawn of human history? It must have been a failure indeed, for its echoes to roll down all the ages, to haunt the childhood of every race of man. Even in fifty years, could you overcome the power of all the myths and legends of the world?
Yet Stormgren knew there would be no second failure. When the two races met again, the Overlords would have won the trust and friendship of Mankind, and not even the shock of recognition could undo that work. They would go together into the future, and the unknown tragedy that had darkened the past would be lost forever down the dim corridors of prehistoric time.
And Stormgren knew also that the last thing he would ever see as he closed his eyes on life would be that swiftly turning door, and the long black tail disappearing behind it.
A very famous and unexpectedly beautiful tail.
A barbed tail.
BREAKING
STRAIN
“Breaking Strain” was written in the summer of 1948, and although its deliberately low-key treatment