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

occurred to me, as indeed it had to many previous students, that a termitary may be compared to a vast machine, whose component parts are not of metal but of protoplasm, whose wheels and cogs are separate insects, each with some preordained role to perform. It was not until later that I found how near the truth this analogy was.
    ‘Nowhere in the termitary is there any waste or disorder, and everywhere there is mystery. As I considered the matter it seemed to me that the termites were much more worthy of our attention, from the purely scientific point of view, than man himself. After all, man is not so very different from ourselves, though I shall annoy many by saying so, yet these insects are utterly alien to us in every way. They work, live and die for the good of the state. To them the individual is nothing. With us, and with man, the state exists only for the individual. Who shall say which is right?
    ‘These problems so engrossed me that I eventually decided to study the little creatures myself with all the instruments at my command, instruments of which the naturalists of Three had never dreamt. So I selected a small uninhabited island in a lonely part of the Pacific, the greatest ocean of Three, where the strange mounds of the termites clustered thickly, and constructed on it a little metal building to serve as a laboratory. As I was thoroughly impressed by the creatures’ destructive powers, I cut a wide circular moat round the 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