Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke Read Online Free PDF Page B

building, leaving enough room for my ship to land, and let the sea flow in. I thought that ten zets of water would keep them from doing any mischief. How foolish that moat looks now.
    ‘These preparations took several weeks for it was not very often that I was able to leave England. In my little space-yacht the journey from London to Termite Island took under half a sector so little time was lost in this way. The laboratory was equipped with everything I considered might be useful and many things for which I could see no conceivable use, but which might possibly be required. The most important instrument was a high-powered gamma-ray televisor which I hoped would reveal to me all the secrets hidden from ordinary sight by the walls of the termitary. Perhaps equally useful was a very sensitive psychometer, of the kind we use when exploring planets on which new types of mentalities may exist, and which we might not detect in the ordinary way. The device could operate on any conceivable mind frequency, and at its highest amplification could locate a man several hundred miles away. I was certain that even if the termites possessed only the faintest glimmers of an utterly alien intelligence, I would be able to detect their mental processes.
    ‘At first I made relatively little progress. With the televisor I examined all the nearest termitaries, and fascinating work it was following the workers along the passages of their homes as they carried food and building materials hither and thither. I watched the enormous bloated queen in the royal nursery, laying her endless stream of eggs: one every few seconds, night and day, year after year. Although she was the centre of the colony’s activities, yet when I focused the psychometer on her the needles did not so much as flicker. The very cells of my body could do better than that! The monstrous queen was only a brainless mechanism, none the less mechanical because she was made of protoplasm, and the workers looked after her with the care we would devote to one of our useful robots.
    ‘For a number of reasons I had not expected the queen to be the ruling force of the colony, but when I began to explore with psychometer and televisor, nowhere could I discover any creature, any super-termite, which directed and supervised the operations of the rest. This would not have surprised the scientists of Three, for they hold that the termites are governed by instinct alone. But my instrument could have detected the nervous stimuli which constitute automatic reflex actions, and yet I found nothing. I would turn up the amplification to its utmost, put on a pair of those primitive but very useful “head-phones” and listen hour on hour. Sometimes there would be those faint characteristic cracklings we have never been able to explain, but generally the only sound was the subdued washing noise, like waves breaking on some far-off beach, caused by the massed intellects of the planet reacting on my apparatus.
    ‘I was beginning to get discouraged when there occurred one of those accidents which happen so often in science. I was dismantling the instrument after another fruitless investigation when I happened to knock the little receiving loop so that it pointed to the ground. To my surprise the needles started flickering violently. By swinging the loop in the usual way I discovered that the exciting source lay almost directly underneath me, though at what distance I could not guess. In the phones was a continuous humming noise, interspersed with sudden flickerings. It sounded for all the world like any electric machine operating, and the frequency, one hundred thousand mega mega cycles, was not one on which minds have ever been known to function before. To my intense annoyance, as you can guess, I had to return to England at once, and so I could not do anything more at the time.
    ‘It was a fortnight before I could return to Termite Island, and in that time I had to overhaul my little space-yacht