Childhood’s End: That’s No Way to Get to Heaven

Childhood’s End: That’s No Way to Get to Heaven Feraco Myth to Science Fiction 14 January 2013

“‘All political problems can be solved by the correct application of power.’ ‘That sounds a rather cynical remark. It’s a little too much like “Might is Right.” In our own past, the use of power has been notably unsuccessful in solving anything.’ ‘The operative word is correct. You have never possessed real power, or the knowledge necessary to apply it. As in all problems, there are efficient and inefficient approaches. Suppose, for example, that one of your nations, led by some fanatical ruler, tried to revolt against me. The highly inefficient answer to such a threat would be some billions of horsepower in the shape of atomic bombs. If I used enough bombs, the solution would be complete and final. It would also, as I remarked, be inefficient – even if it possessed no other defects.’

‘And the efficient solution?’ ‘That requires about as much power as a small radio transmitter – and rather simple skills to operate. For it’s the application of the power, not its amount, that matters. How long do you think Hitler’s career as dictator of Germany would have lasted, if wherever he went a voice was talking quietly in his ear? Or if a steady musical note, loud enough to drown all other sounds and to prevent sleep, filled his brain night and day? Nothing brutal, you appreciate. Yet, in the final analysis, just as irresistible as a tritium bomb.’” (62-63)

“The Overlords seemed largely indifferent to forms of government, provided that they were not oppressive or corrupt. Earth still possessed democracies, monarchies, benevolent dictatorships, communism, and capitalism. This was a source of great surprise to many simple souls who were quite convinced that theirs was the only possible way of life. Others believed that Karellen was merely waiting to introduce a system which would sweep away all existing forms of society, and so had not bothered with minor political reforms. But this, like all other speculations concerning the Overlords, was pure guesswork. No one knew their motives: and no one knew toward what future they were shepherding mankind.” (19)

“The invaders had brought peace and prosperity to Earth – but who knew what the cost might be? History was not reassuring; even the most peaceable of contacts between races at very different cultural levels had often resulted in the obliteration of the more backwards society.” (21)

“For the past month, the world’s papers had divided themselves into two sharply defined groups. The Western press, on the whole, approved of Karellen’s plan to make all men citizens of the world. The Eastern countries, on the other hand, were undergoing violent but largely synthetic spasms of national pride. Some of them had been independent for little more than a generation, and felt that they had been cheated out of their gains. Criticism of the Overlords was widespread and energetic: after an initial period of extreme caution, the press had quickly found that it could be as rude to Karellen as it liked and nothing would happen. Now it was excelling itself.

Most of these attacks, though very vocal, were not representative of the great mass of the people. Along the frontiers that would soon be gone forever the guards had been doubled, but the soldiers eyed each other with a still inarticulate friendliness. The politicians and the generals might storm and rave, but the silently waiting millions felt that, none too soon, a long and bloody chapter of history was coming to an end.” (23)

“I can understand your fear that the traditions and cultures of little countries will be overwhelmed when the world state arrives. But you are wrong; it is useless to cling to the past. Even before the Overlords came to Earth, the sovereign state was dying. They have merely hastened its end: no one can save it now – and no one should try.” – Stormgren (37)

“‘In fifty years,’ Wainwright said bitterly, ‘the damage will be done. Those who remember our independence will be dead; humanity will have forgotten its heritage.’ Words – empty words, thought Stormgren. The words for which men had fought and died, and for which they would never die or fight again. And the world would be better for it.” (48)

“During the next fifty years there will be many crises, but they will pass. The pattern of the future is clear enough, and one day all these difficulties will be forgotten – even to a race with memories as long as yours.” – Karellen (51)

“‘I have often wondered what your real work might be. Tidying up our world and civilizing the human race is only a means – you must have an end as well. Will we ever be able to come out into space and see your universe – perhaps even help you in your tasks?’ ‘You can put it that way,’ said Karellen – and now his voice held a clear yet inexplicable note of sadness that left Stormgren strangely perturbed. ‘But suppose, after all, your experiment fails with man? We have known such things in our own dealings with primitive human races. Surely you have had your failures too?’ ‘Yes,’ said Karellen, so softly that Stormgren could scarcely hear him. ‘We have had our failures.’ ‘And what do you do then?’ ‘We wait – and try again.’” (52-53)

“‘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, thought Stormgren, 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 must have darkened that past would be lost forever down the dim corridors of prehistoric time.” (55)

“It was a tribute to the Overlords’ psychology, and to their careful years of preparation, that only a few people fainted. Yet there could have been fewer still, anywhere in the world, who did not feel the ancient terror brush for one awful instant against their minds before reason banished it forever. There was no mistake. The leathery wings, the little horns, the barbed tail – all were there. The most terrible of all legends had come to life, out of the unknown past.” (61)

So we come to the end of Stormgren’s age. The times of kidnapping dignitaries for any sort of purpose, political or otherwise, have faded into the past; Karellen will not need to send a chain of machines to rescue his newest attaché, partly because the need for the crime no longer exists and partly because he no longer requires said attaché. The Overlords can now walk among us; we even meet Rashaverak when he’s perusing the books in Rupert Boyce’s library, and mentally criticize his reading choices at that.

Stormgren’s secret flashgun trick works – not because it was brilliant, but because Karellen didn’t want him to die without knowing what he most desperately sought. (It’s also a matter of trust, and Karellen is either extremely lucky or extremely perceptive – for Stormgren never tells anyone what he saw.) Similarly, Jan Rodricks’s “Jonah and the Whale” trick works well enough to land him safe passage as a stowaway aboard an Overlord ship, bound for their homeworld around NGS 549672 (the name we gave the star in the Carina constellation that serves as the Overlords’ sun). To Jan’s credit, he and Sullivan are able to fool the Overlords just long enough to make it past the ship’s successful launch; once it’s zipped away, there’s no real point in bringing him back.

This is, of course, for two reasons. The first, as Jan alludes to in his letter to his sister Maia, is a matter of relativity. One of the central conceits of the Star Trek universe is that mankind develops a technology that allows him to travel safely beyond the speed of light, in defiance of every law of physics we currently understand. While we have no means of testing this ourselves just yet, the theory of relativity states that beyond light speed lies nothing – that’s infinite velocity for something with mass. (Light, being massless, can obviously travel at light speed.) Instead, objects with mass can approach light/infinite speed, but never reach it.

Moreover, the closer one gets to infinite speed, the odder one’s interactions with space and time. For as one nears that universal speed limit, one begins to perceive time differently – more slowly, to be specific. Once you pass a certain speed, the faster you go, the slower time moves for you. So if I zip out of our solar system at, say, .83 of light speed, I could travel for what I perceive to be one month. But when that month ended and I returned home, I would find that many, many years had passed.

Since the Overlords’ Stardrive (the secrets of which are unknown to mankind) gets them exceptionally close – more than 99 percent – of the way to light speed, they can make a journey that would take forty years of normal time in the span of two months. If they turned around after having discovered Jan on board, they would have returned him to a world where everyone he’d known was already dead. Simply getting him to the homeworld and back again would take eighty years of our time; it’s simply not worth it.

The other reason, of course, is that it makes no difference whether Jan leaves Earth, nor whether he sees the Overlords’ world. Whatever understanding he gains from the trip – and he gains a great deal – won’t ultimately have any relevance. (Then again, if what Jan does is irrelevant, does anything we do matter?) At this point in the book, the reason the Overlords arrived in our skies to begin with still hasn’t been explained…and once it is, we begin to understand, in Jan’s words, that “the universe, in all its awful immensity…was no place for man.” But to get to that point, we need to move through the so-called Golden Age.

It’s a period marked as much by absences as triumphs. No ignorance, no disease, no poverty, no fear, and no war. Cities were rebuilt, or abandoned once they outlived their usefulness. Production and manufacturing became increasingly mechanical and automatic. All of the ordinary necessities of life were virtually free; men worked for luxuries, or not at all.

The governmental freedom the Overlords had permitted earlier (i.e., all forms could persist as long as they were not oppressive) seemed unimportant in an age where global travel was possible; boundaries and borders still existed for postal purposes, but everyone read and spoke English, everyone owned televisions, and anyone could travel wherever he or she liked within a day. (Remember, of course, that this was written three to four decades before the popularization of the Internet, let alone the coarsening of televised news; had Clarke written Childhood’s End more recently, he surely would have used computers rather than televisions as the source of interconnecting information.)

With the specter of war removed, mankind plows all of the money previously set aside or spent on weaponry and defense into other areas; this is one of the principal reasons why the world can suddenly support a basic standard of living for all of its inhabitants. Crimes like burglary had essentially vanished; crimes of passion still existed but were very rare, particularly now that most of the stressors in ordinary human lives had been removed. For example, with the dawn of foolproof contraceptives and foolproof parent-identification tests, sexual mores underwent significant changes; when coupled with spiritual changes, the nature of long-term relationships shifted as well.

Life was slower, more tranquil. Education took longer and was far more thorough, and people returned to school for refreshers throughout their lives. Vehicles moved through air rather than along the Earth’s surfaces. Buddhism still existed in “purified” form, but it was a secular age; the use of a device that could peer into the past revealed the origins of the world’s faiths, and none survived in popular form.

Science also declined, along with religion: why spend a lifetime searching for something the Overlords could already do? There was the indulgence of curiosity, certainly, as well as an explosion in interest in what Clarke called the “descriptive sciences”. Only theory fell to the wayside. And without strife and conflict, creative art largely disappeared. But whether Kant would’ve approved or not, people were happy.

Chapters Seven and Eight work in tandem, establishing some of our new characters – decades have passed since Stormgren died – and to hint at the Overlords’ “true work” (they seem oddly interested in “psychic episodes,” as well as garden-variety psychological study). George and Jean Greggson don’t seem particularly pleasant or interesting: whether this is intentional (highlighting Stormgren’s positive characteristics by contrast, or showing how humans are changing in the new era) or not (Clarke’s tin-eared dialogue, the only blemish on an otherwise excellent read, may just be bad writing) I leave for you to decide. But they both end up becoming tremendously important, as the “séance sequence” at Boyce’s place first indicates.

Boyce himself is a fairly simple character in whom Clarke invests a minimum of attention. As a high-ranking animal caretaker and observer, Boyce is quite wealthy; by dint of his position, he also has access to some of the Overlords’ “toys.” A man of science, he nonetheless takes an aggressive interest in the paranormal, and it’s his collection of books on the subject that draw Rashaverak to his library the night of the party George and Jean attend. Jean shares Boyce’s interests, while George dismisses them. Both, reluctantly or otherwise, participate in the extended “séance sequence”…and that’s where things start getting very, very odd.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to talk about Jan Rodricks, who’ll be our protagonist for much of the rest of the book. As an astronomer, he’s a member of a tragic profession, studying the stars we’ll forever be denied. He shares some characteristics with Rikki Stormgren: both are intelligent, both tend to isolate themselves, both feel a burning curiosity to discover things they know they’ll probably never see, and they both hatch risky plans in order to learn more about the Overlords. It’s Jan who, at the end of the séance, asks which star is the Overlords’ sun, and only he understands the answer the disc spits back.

The answers from the séance in general, like Van Ryberg’s “Why the devil won’t he show himself?” line, take on greater significance once you come to understand what the people there are tapping into, and why the Overlords have not only arrived, but stayed. When asked, “Who are you?”, the disc replies: “I am all.” The thing that’s most surprising about the coordinates the disc spits out for the Overlords’ sun is not that they’re accurate, but that they’re given in our language – or at least the terminology we use for designating and cataloging distant stars. The Overlords do not call their sun NGS 549672, and Jan realizes this means Rashaverak couldn’t have been the source of the answer the disc provided.

It’s a bizarre sequence, but it’s the first indication that something is, well, wrong. And the abbreviated conversation between Karellen and Rashaverak that follows – business about conduits and Prime Contacts that we don’t really understand – manages to convey that something significant is happening. By the end of the book, we understand how Jean Morrel was the conduit for the information the disc spelled out; we understand why the disc says it is “all”; we learn the quiet tragedy of the Overlords’ entire existence; and we understand why Clarke titled this book Childhood’s End. No other title fits so well.

Childhood’s End: That’s No Way to Get to Heaven