they left a week early so they wouldn't be there when it finished
A lama in a silk robe sits in an office high above the Manhattan streets, puts away the slide rule he has been using for currency conversions, and asks to rent a computer.
Dr. Wagner, who leases them, has never been asked to ship a Mark V to a Tibetan monastery. The lama explains. The Mark V does arithmetic to ten digits; the monks have no use for numbers. They want letters. They have an alphabet of their own, and they believe every true name of God can be written in it, in nine letters or fewer. For three centuries, since the lamasery was founded, they have been writing the names out by hand, one permutation at a time. At that rate the job takes fifteen thousand years. A Mark V with its output circuits rewired to print words can do it in a hundred days.
There are rules. No letter may appear more than three times running. Wagner says surely you mean two; the lama says three, and that explaining why would take too long even if Wagner spoke the language. The parts can fly as far as India and the monks will carry them from there. The lama produces a certified balance at the Asiatic Bank. The monastery already has a diesel generator, fifty kilowatts, installed to drive the motors on the prayer wheels.
Wagner thinks about generations of monks in the mountains compiling lists of gibberish and asks himself whether there is any limit to the follies of mankind. Then he takes the order.
Two engineers go up with the machine, George Hanley and Chuck, hired for the three months the run should take. Somebody at the lab christens it Project Shangri-La. The Mark V is silent once it's running. All the noise comes from the electromatic typewriters, which patter all day like rain, and from the monks who cut each sheet up and paste the names into enormous books. The High Lama drops in every afternoon to watch the paper roll out. The engineers call him Sam Jaffe, after the actor who played the High Lama in Lost Horizon, though he looks nothing like him.
Three months in, George is leaning on the parapet with two thousand feet of drop under him, staring at mountains he has never bothered to learn the names of. His recurring nightmare is that Sam will extend the project to the year 2060. He misses television commercials. He wants home.
Chuck comes out smoking one of the cigars that have made him popular with the monks, who, it turns out, enjoy most of the pleasures of life and go down to the village a lot. Chuck has news. Sam has said what the list is for. When it is complete, about nine billion names, the human race will have done the thing it was made to do. God steps in and winds everything up.
So when we finish our job, George says, it's the end of the world. Chuck says that is exactly what he said to Sam, and Sam looked at him like a slow student and said it was nothing as trivial as that.
Neither of them believes a word. What Chuck is afraid of is the morning after: the list done, no trumpet, and the only machine in the building theirs. George tells a story from his childhood in Louisiana, a preacher who named the Sunday the world would end. People sold their houses, nothing happened, and they decided he had got his sums wrong and went on believing. Chuck points out that this is not Louisiana.
So they rig it. The run has four days left at twenty hours a day and the transport comes in a week. Find something that needs replacing during an overhaul, fix it slowly, and be down at the airfield when the last name comes out of the register. George says it would be the first time in his life he walked out on a job. He does it anyway.
it's like we racin to the finish line before the track crumbles
Seven days later they are on mountain ponies going down the switchbacks and George is still saying he doesn't like it. He isn't running because he's scared, he says. He is sorry for the old guys up there and doesn't want to be around when they find out what suckers they've been. Chuck says that when he said goodbye he had the feeling Sam knew they were walking out, and didn't care, because the machine was running fine and for him there wasn't going to be an after.
At the last bend with a view, George turns in the saddle. The lamasery is a black shape against the afterglow with lights in it like portholes on a liner. Electric lights, on the same circuit as the Mark V. He wonders how much longer they will share it, and whether the monks will smash the machine or just sit down and begin again.
Below them the DC-3 sits at the end of the strip like a small silver cross. Two hours and they are gone. The sky is clear, no weather to ground the pilot, which was George's last remaining worry. He tries to sing and gives up; the mountains don't encourage it. He looks at his watch. Should be there in an hour, he calls back, and then, as an afterthought, wonders whether the computer has finished its run. It was due about now.
Chuck doesn't answer. George twists round and finds his face, a white oval tipped up at the sky.
Arthur C. Clarke published the story in 1953 in Frederik Pohl's Star Science Fiction Stories, and in 2004 it was given the Retro Hugo for the best short story of 1954. Everyone remembers its last nine words. Fewer people remember that the two men who got the job done were an hour from the runway, doing the arithmetic on a wristwatch, when "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."
The painting: Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhône (1888), Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Public domain.
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