Read The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke for Free Online

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 owing to an electrical fault. At some time in her history, which I know to have been an eventful one, she had been fitted with ray screens. They were, moreover, very good ray screens, much too good for a law-abiding ship to possess. I have every reason to believe, in fact, that more than once they have defied the cruisers of the Assembly. I did not much relish the task of checking over the complex automatic relay circuits, but at last it was done and I set off at top speed for the Pacific, travelling so fast that my bow wave must have been one continuous explosion. Unfortunately, I soon had to slow down again, for I found that the directional beam I had installed on the island was no longer functioning. I presumed that a fuse had blown, and had to take observations and navigate in the ordinary way. The accident was annoying but not alarming, and I finally spiralled down over Termite Island with no premonition of danger.
    ‘I landed inside my little moat, and went to the door of the laboratory. As I spoke the key-word, the metal seal slid open and a tremendous blast of vapour gushed out of the room. I was nearly stupefied by the stuff, and it was some time before I recovered sufficiently to realise what had happened. When I regained my senses I recognised the smell of hydrogen cyanide, a gas which is instantly fatal to human beings but which only affects us after a considerable time.
    ‘At first I thought that there had been some accident in the laboratory, but I soon remembered that there were not enough chemicals to produce anything like the volume of gas that had gushed out. And in any case, what could possibly have produced such an accident?
    ‘When I turned to the laboratory itself, I had my second shock. One glance was sufficient to show that the place was in ruins. Not a piece of apparatus was recognisable. The cause of the damage was soon apparent—the power plant, my little atomic motor, had exploded. But why? Atomic motors do not explode without very good reason; it would be bad business if they did. I made a careful examination of the room and presently found a number of little holes coming up through the floor—holes such as the termites make when they travel from place to place. My suspicions, incredible though they were, began to be confirmed. It was not completely impossible that the creatures might flood my room with poisonous gas, but to imagine that they understood atomic motors—that was too much! To settle the matter I started hunting for the fragments of the