by Carol
I was asleep when I passed the beacon again, so I don’t know what they had to say. It was Olsen’s call that woke me up.
“Congratulations, Masters! When you reach Mars, tell them to hold the special and second prizes for me. And I’ll remember the trick. Clear dodging!” He was still heading in toward the beacon on deceleration, and less than eighty hours had passed.
Well, there wasn’t much more to it, except for the sleeping and the ravings of that fool announcer back on Kor. I reversed without any trouble at about the point where I’d stopped accelerating, and began braking down for Mars. Then the monotony of the trip began again, with the automat doing all the work. The tubes, safe for six days, would be used only about three and a half and I had soup to spare.
Miraculously, they had the landing pit cleared when I settled down over Kor, and the sweetest-looking white ambulance was waiting. I set her down without a jolt, slipped out, and was inside the car before the crowds could get to me. They’ve finally learned to protect the winning dodger that way.
Jimmy was inside, chewing on an unlit cigarette. “O. K.” he told the ambulance driver, “take us to Mom Doughan’s. Hi, kid. Made it in a hundred and forty-five hours. That gives you first and special, so you’re out of the red. Nice work!”
I couldn’t help rubbing it in a little. “Next time, Jimmy, bet on a Masters if you want to go through with those endowments of yours.”
Jimmy’s face was glum, and the cigarette bobbed up and down in his mouth in a dull rhythm, but his eyes crinkled up and he showed no rancor at the crack. “There won’t be any endowments, kid. Should have stuck to the old handicapping, instead of trying to start something new. I’m cleaned, lock, stock, and barrel. Anyway, those endowments dreams were just sort of a habit.”
“You’ve still got your formula.”
“Um-hm-m-m. Your fuel formula; I’m sticking to the old habits and letting the newfangled ideas go hang.”
I stopped playing with him then. “That’s where you’re wrong, Jimmy. I did a lot of thinking out there, and I’ve decided some habits are things to get rid of.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound very convinced. “How’d you mean?”
“Well, take the old idea that the shortest time is made on the shortest possible course; that’s a habit with pilots, and one I had a hard time breaking. But look what happened. And dad had one habit, you another, and you’d both have been better off without those fixations.”
“Um-hm-m-m. Go on.”
“Dad thought a fuel was good only in racing, because he was used to thinking in terms of the perambulating soup cans,” I explained. I’d done plenty of thinking on the way in, when I was awake, so I knew what I was talking about. “You had a habit of thinking of everything in terms of betting. Take that fuel. You say it gives eighty-percent efficiency. Did you ever stop to think there’d be a fortune in it for sale to the commercials? The less load they carry in fuel, the more pay cargo.”
“Well, I’ll be—” He mulled it over slowly, letting the idea seep in. Then he noticed the cigarette dangling in his mouth and started to light it.
I amplified my scheme. “We’ll market it fifty-fifty. You put up the fuel and salesmanship; I’ll put up the prize money and technical knowledge. And if you’re looking for fame, there ought to be some of that mixed in there, too.”
“Um-hm-m-m.” Jimmy stuck out his hand. “Shake on the partnership, Len. But, if you don’t mind, I’ll use the money like I said. These endowment ideas sort of get to be a habit with me.”
1939
A MEETING WITH MEDUSA
Arthur C. Clarke
We have enjoyed the company of Arthur Clarke in all sorts of exotic places—Rio de Janeiro. London, a small hotel on Lake Biwa, Japan, and heaven knows where all. It began to seem to us that Arthur was everywhere, and so when we found ourselves in Moscow and Leningrad a year or Iwo ago, the first person we looked for was Arthur Clarke. “Clarke?” said our hosts. “Oh, no. He isn’t here. He has never been fn the Soviet Union.” But then, just as we began to feel a real triumph, they added, “But he is expected shortly.”
(This particular story is one about which I have quite mixed feelings. On the one hand I have to think it is a masterpiece, since it beat out my story, “The Gold at the Starbow’s End,” for The Nebula award for best of its class. On the other hand, for the same reason I sometimes wish that it had never been written.)
A DAY TO REMEMBER
The Queen Elizabeth was five kilometers above the Grand Canyon, dawdling along at a comfortable 180, when Howard Falcon spotted the camera platform closing in from the right. He had been expecting it—nothing else was cleared to fly at this altitude—but he was not too happy to have company. Although he welcomed any signs of public interest, he also wanted as much empty sky as he could get. After all, he was the first man in history to navigate a ship half a kilometer long.
So far, this first test flight had gone perfectly; ironically enough, the only problem had been the century-old aircraft carrier Chairman Mao, borrowed from the San Diego naval museum for support operations. Only one of Mao’s four nuclear reactors was still operating, and the old battlewagon’s top speed was barely thirty knots. Luckily, wind speed at sea level had been less than half this, so it had not been too difficult to maintain still air on the flight deck. Though there had been a few anxious moments during gusts, when the mooring lines had been dropped, the great dirigible had risen smoothly, straight up into the sky, as if on an invisible elevator. If all went well, Queen Elizabeth IV would not meet Chairman Mao for another week.
Everything was under control: all test instruments gave normal readings. Commander Falcon decided to go upstairs and watch the rendezvous. He handed over to his second officer and walked out into the transparent tubeway that led through the heart of the ship. There, as always, he was overwhelmed by the spectacle of the largest space ever enclosed by man.
The ten spherical gas cells, each more than 100 meters across, were ranged one behind the other like a line of gigantic soap bubbles. The tough plastic was so clear that he could see through the whole length of the array and make out details of the elevator mechanism almost half a kilometer from his vantage point. All around him, like a three-dimensional maze, was the structural framework of the ship—the great longitudinal girders running from nose to tail, the fifteen hoops that were the ribs of this skyborne colossus, whose varying sizes defined its graceful, streamlined profile.
At this low speed, there was very little sound—merely the soft rush of wind over the envelope and an occasional creak of metal as the pattern of stresses changed. The shadowless light from’ the rows of lamps far overhead gave the whole scene a curiously submarine quality, and to Falcon this was enhanced by the spectacle of the translucent gasbags. He had once encountered a squadron of large but harmless jellyfish, pulsing their mindless way above a shallow tropical reef, and the plastic bubbles that gave Queen Elizabeth her lift often reminded him of these—especially when changing pressures made them crinkle and scatter new patterns of light.
He walked fifty meters down the axis of the ship, until he came to the forward elevator, between gas cells one and two. Riding up to the observation deck, he noticed that it was uncomfortably hot and dictated a brief memo to himself on his pocket recorder. The Queen obtained almost a quarter of her buoyancy from the unlimited amounts of waste heat produced by her fusion power plant; on this lightly loaded flight, indeed, only six of the ten gas cells contained helium and the remaining four were full of air; yet she still carried 200 tons of water as ballast. However, running the cells at high temperatures did produce problems in refrigerating the accessways; it was obvious that a little more work would have to be done here.
A refreshing blast of cooler air hit him in the face when he stepped out onto the observation deck and into the dazzling sunlight streaming through the Plexiglas roof. Half a dozen workmen, with an equal number of superchimp assistants, were busily laying the partly completed dance flo
or, while others were installing electric wiring and fixing furniture. It was a scene of controlled chaos and Falcon found it hard to believe that everything would be ready for the maiden voyage, only four weeks ahead. Well, that was not his problem, thank goodness. He was merely the captain, not the cruise director.
The human workers waved to him and the simps flashed toothy smiles as he walked through the confusion into the already completed sky lounge. This was his favorite place in the whole ship and he knew that once she was operating, he would never again have it all to himself. He would allow himself just five minutes of private enjoyment.
He called the bridge, checked that everything was still in order and relaxed into one of the comfortable swivel chairs. Below, in a curve that delighted the eye, was the unbroken silver sweep of the ship’s envelope. He was perched at the highest point, surveying the whole immensity of the largest vehicle ever built. And when he had tired of that—all the way out to the horizon was the fantastic wilderness carved by the Colorado River in half a billion years of time.
Apart from the camera platform (it had now fallen back and was filming from amidships), he had the sky to himself. It was blue and empty, clear down to the horizon. In his grandfather’s day, Falcon knew, it would have been streaked with vapor trails and stained with smoke. Both had gone; the aerial garbage had vanished with the primitive technologies that spawned it, and the long-distance transportation of this age arced too far beyond the stratosphere for any sight or sound of it to reach Earth. Once again, the lower atmosphere belonged to the birds and the clouds—and now to Queen Elizabeth IV.
It was true, as the old pioneers had said at the beginning of the twentieth century; this was the only way to travel—in silence and luxury, breathing the air around you and not cut off from it, near enough to the surface to watch the ever-changing beauty of land and sea. The subsonic jets of the 1980s, packed with hundreds of passengers seated ten abreast, could not even begin to match such comfort and spaciousness.
Of course, the Q. E. would never be an economic proposition; and even if her projected sister ships were built, only a few of the world’s quarter of a billion inhabitants would ever enjoy this silent gliding through the sky. But a secure and prosperous global society could afford such follies and, indeed, needed them for its novelty and entertainment. There were at least a million men on Earth whose discretionary income exceeded a thousand new dollars a year, so the Queen would not lack for passengers.
Falcon’s pocket communicator beeped; the copilot was calling from the bridge.
“OK for rendezvous, Captain? We’ve got all the data we need from this run and the TV people are getting impatient”
Falcon glanced at the camera platform, now matching his speed a quarter of a kilometer away.
“OK,” he replied. “Proceed as arranged. I’ll watch from here.”
He walked back through the busy chaos of the observation deck, so that he could have a better view amidships. As he did so, he could feel the change of vibration underfoot; by the time he had reached the rear of the lounge, the ship had come to rest. Using his master key, he let himself out onto the small external platform flaring from the end of the deck; half a dozen people could stand there, with only low guardrails separating them from the vast sweep of the envelope—and from the ground, thousands of meters below. It was an exciting place to be and perfectly safe even when the ship was traveling at speed, for it was in the dead air behind the huge dorsal blister of the observation deck. Nevertheless, it was not intended that the passengers would have access to it; the view was a little too vertiginous.
The covers of the forward cargo hatch had already opened like giant trap doors and the camera platform was hovering above them, preparing to descend. Along this route, in the years to come, would travel thousands of passengers and tons of supplies; only on rare occasions would the Queen drop down to sea level and dock with her floating base.
A sudden gust of crosswind slapped Falcon’s cheek and he tightened his grip on the guardrail. The Grand Canyon was a bad place for turbulence, though he did not expect much at this altitude. Without any real anxiety, he focused his attention on the descending platform, now about fifty meters above the ship. He knew that the highly skilled operator who was flying the remotely controlled vehicle had performed this very simple maneuver a dozen times already; it was inconceivable that he would have any difficulties.
Yet he seemed to be reacting rather sluggishly; that last gust had drifted the platform almost to the edge of the open hatchway. Surely the pilot could have corrected before this…did he have a control problem? It was very unlikely; these remotes had multiple-redundancy, fail-safe takeovers and any number of backup systems. Accidents were almost unheard of.
But there he went again, off to the left. Could the pilot be drunk? Improbable though that seemed, Falcon considered it seriously for a moment. Then he reached for his microphone switch.
Once again, without warning, he was slapped violently in the face. He hardly felt it, for he was staring in horror at the camera platform. The distant operator was fighting for control, trying to balance the craft on its jets—but he was only making matters worse. The oscillations increased—twenty degrees, forty, sixty, ninety…
“Switch to automatic, you fool!” Falcon shouted uselessly into his microphone. “Your manual control’s not working!”
The platform flipped over onto its back; the jets no longer supported it but drove it swiftly downward. They had suddenly become allies of the gravity they had fought until this moment.
Falcon never heard the crash, though he felt it; he was already inside the observation deck, racing for the elevator that would take him down to the bridge. Workmen shouted at him anxiously, asking what had happened. It would be many months before he knew the answer to that question.
Just as he was stepping into the elevator cage, he changed his mind. What if there were a power failure? Better be on the safe side, even if it took longer and time was of the essence. He began to run down the spiral stairway enclosing the shaft.
Halfway down, he paused for a second to inspect the damage. That damned platform had gone clear through the ship, rupturing two of the gas cells as it did so. They were still collapsing slowly, in great falling veils of plastic. He was not worried about the loss of lift—the ballast could easily take care of that, as long as eight cells remained intact. Far more serious was the possibility of structural damage; already he could hear the great latticework around him groaning and protesting under its abnormal loads. It was not enough to have sufficient lift; unless it was properly distributed, the ship would break her back.
He was just resuming his descent when a superchimp, shrieking with fright, came racing down the elevator shaft, moving with incredible speed hand over hand along the outside of the latticework. In its terror, the poor beast had tom off its company uniform, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to regain the freedom of its ancestors.
Falcon, still descending as swiftly as he could, watched its approach with some alarm; a distraught simp was a powerful and potentially dangerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning. As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “Boss.” Even now, Falcon realized, it looked toward humans for guidance; he felt sorry for the creature, involved in a man-made disaster beyond its comprehension and for which it bore no responsibility.
It stopped opposite him, on the other side of the lattice; there was nothing to prevent it from coming through the open framework if it wished. Now its face was only inches from his and he was looking straight into the terrified eyes. Never before had he been so close to a simp and able to study its features in such detail; he felt that strange mingling of kinship and discomfort that all men experience when they gaze thus into the mirror of time.
His presence seemed to have calmed the creature; Falcoln pointed up the shaft, back toward the observation de
ck, and said very clearly and precisely: “Boss—boss—go!” To his relief, the simp understood; it gave him a grimace that might have been a smile and at once started to race back the way it had come. Falcon had given it the best advice he could; if any safety remained aboard the Queen, it was in that direction. But his duty lay in the other.
He had almost completed his descent when, with a sound of rending metal, the vessel pitched nose down and the lights went out. But he could still see quite well, for a shaft of sunlight streamed through the open hatch and the huge tear in the envelope. Many years ago, he had stood in a great cathedral nave, watching the light pouring through the stained-glass windows and forming pools of multicolored radiance on the ancient flagstones. The dazzling shaft of sunlight through the ruined fabric high above reminded him of that moment. He was in a cathedral of metal, falling down the sky.
When he reached the bridge and was able for the first time to look outside, he was horrified to see how close the ship was to the ground. Only a thousand meters below were the beautiful and deadly pinnacles of rock and the red rivers of mud that were still carving their way down into the past. There was no level area anywhere in sight where a ship as large as the Queen could come to rest on an even keel.
A glance at the display board told him that all the ballast had gone. However, rate of descent had been reduced to a few meters a second; they still had a fighting chance.
Without a word, Falcon eased himself into the pilot’s seat and took over such control as remained. The instrument board showed him everything he wished to know; speech was superfluous. In the background, he could hear the communications officer giving a running report over the radio. By this time, all the news channels of Earth would have been preempted and he could imagine the utter frustration of the program controllers. One of the most spectacular wrecks in history was occurring—without a single camera to record it. The last moments of the Queen would never fill millions with awe and terror, as had those of the Hindenburg a century and a half before.