The Complete Short Stories

The planet’s entire computer system is still at an ultra-high state of arousal, registering a recent all-out response to extreme peril. Only a small volume of signal traffic moves between the satellite links, but there are gigantic memory stores with a capacity far in excess of the system’s needs. These memory banks are now full, guarded by complex codes that we have been unable to break, and are perhaps the treasure house and terminal repository of the planet’s ancestral knowledge.

So impressive are the defences of the system that we are now convinced that it was these computers that authorised the transmission of the emergency signal summoning us to their world’s rescue.

However, there is still no sign of the inhabitants, and no response to our broadcast greetings. The cities and their suburbs, the airports and highways remain silent. Meanwhile we are carrying out a survey of these people, and of their values and civic virtues, and have come across a number of striking paradoxes. It is clear that their technological and scientific skills are of an advanced order, allowing them to construct the vast cities that dominate the planet’s surface. An immense infrastructure of roads, bridges and tunnels has been laid down in the recent past, augmented by an aviation system that reaches the remotest outposts of their world.

The planet’s mineral, energy and agricultural resources have been efficiently, and even ruthlessly, exploited. A simple but evidently attractive system of barter, based on the concept of money, facilitates the transfer of manufactured goods and services, and the surplus wealth generated has funded an ever-expanding science and technology. Space-flight, except in its most primitive forms, still lies beyond the abilities of these people, but they have harnessed the energy of the atom, deciphered the molecular codes that oversee their own reproduction, and seem well on the way to banishing disease and solving the mysteries of life and immortality.

At the same time, our researches have shown that despite these achievements the peoples of this planet have in other respects scarcely raised themselves above the lowest levels of barbarism. The enjoyment of pain and violence is as natural to them as the air they breathe. War above all is their most popular sport, in which rival populations, and frequently entire continents, attack each other with the most vicious and destructive weapons, regardless of the death and suffering that follow. These conflicts may last for years or decades. Nations nominally at peace devote a large proportion of their collective income to constructing arsenals of lethal weapons, and satisfy the appetites of their populations with a display of brutal entertainments in which violence, humiliation and murder are almost the sole ingredients.

Not surprisingly, our latest research confirms that the imminent threat to which their computers alerted us was in fact represented by the existence of these people. They constituted the danger that was about to overwhelm their planet, and it was to save themselves that the computer networks summoned us from the far side of the universe.

The deadline set by the computers, the crucial hour when one millennium gave way to another, perhaps explains the reason for their alarm. Given these people’s hunger for violence, it may be that they saw the birth of a new millennium as a licence for an even greater carnival of destruction. They waited at the threshold of space, a barbaric horde with the secret of immortality within their grasp, eager to play with their own psychopathology as the ultimate game.

The prospect of this virulent plague spreading across the universe must have prompted the planet’s computers to call a halt. But the ultimate mystery remains of where the inhabitants have disappeared. If they have been physically annihilated in an act of planetary hygiene there is no trace of the billions of corpses or of the vast necropolis needed to inter them.

A possible explanation occurs to us as we prepare to return to our home star. Driven by the need for a more lifelike replica of the scenes of carnage that most entertained them, the people of this unhappy world had invented an advanced and apparently interiorised version of their television screens, a virtual replica of reality in which they could act out their most deviant fantasies. These three-dimensional simulations were generated by their computers, and had reached a stage of development in the last years of the millennium in which the imitation of reality was more convincing than the original. It may even have become the new reality to the extent that their cities and highways, their fellow citizens and, ultimately, themselves seemed mere illusions by comparison with the electronically generated amusement park where they preferred to play. Here they could assume any identity, create and fulfil any desire, and explore the most deviant dreams.