Earthlight st-2

by Arthur Clarke

  When he had gazed his fill at Mars, he searched for Saturn. The sheer beauty of the spectacle took his breath away: it seemed impossible that he was not looking at some perfect work of art, rather than a creation of nature. The great yellow globe, slightly flattened at the poles, floated at the center of its intricate system of rings. The faint bands and shadings of atmospheric disturbances were clearly visible, even across two thousand million kilometers of space. And beyond the concentric girdles of the rings, Sadler could count at least seven of the planet’s moons.

  Though he knew that the instantaneously operating eye of the television camera could never rival the patient photographic plate, he also looked for some of the distant nebulae and star clusters. He let the field of view drift along the crowded highway of the Milky Way, checking the image whenever some particularly beautiful group of stars, or cloud of glowing mist appeared upon the screen. After a while, it seemed to Sadler that he had become intoxicated with the infinite splendor of the skies; he needed something that would bring him back into the realm of human affairs. So he turned the telescope on Earth.

  It was so huge that even under the weakest power he could get only part of it on the screen. The great crescent was shrinking fast, but even the unlit portion of the disk was full of interest. Down there in the night were the countless phosphorescent glows that marked the positions of cities—and down there was Jeannette, sleeping now, but perhaps dreaming of him. At least he knew that she had received his letter; her puzzled but guarded reply had been reassuring, though its loneliness and unspoken reproach had torn at his heart. Had he, after all, made a mistake? Sometimes he bitterly regretted the conventional caution which had ruled the first year of their married life. Like most couples on the overpopulated planet that swam before his eyes, they had waited to prove their compatibility before embarking on the adventure of parenthood. In this age, it was a definite social stigma to have children before one had been married for several years—it was a proof of fecklessness and irresponsibility.

  They had both wanted a family, and now that such matters could be decided in advance had intended to start with a son. Then Sadler had received his assignment, and realized for the first time the full seriousness of the interplanetary situation. He would not bring Jonathan Peter into the uncertain future that lay ahead.

  In earlier ages, few men would have hesitated for such a reason. Indeed, the possibility of their own extinction had often made them even more anxious to seek the only immortality human beings can know. But the world had been at peace for two hundred years, and if war came now the complex and fragile pattern of life on Earth might be broken into fragments. A woman burdened with a child might have little chance of survival.

  Perhaps he was being melodramatic, and had let his fears overpower his sense of judgment. If Jeannette had known all the facts, she would still not have hesitated; she would have taken the chance. But because he could not talk to her freely, he would not take advantage of her ignorance.

  It was too late for regret; all that he loved lay there on that sleeping globe, sundered from him by the abyss of space. His thoughts had come full circle. He had made the journey from star to man, across the immense desert of the Cosmos to the lonely oasis of the human soul.

  Chapter XII

  “I’ve no reason to suppose,” said the man in the blue suit, “that anyone suspects you, but it would be difficult to meet inconspicuously in Central City. There are too many people around, and everybody knows everybody else. You’d be surprised how hard it is to get any privacy.”

  “You don’t think it will seem odd for me to come here?” asked Sadler.

  “No, most visitors do, if they can manage it. It’s like going to Niagara Fails—something no one wants to miss. You can’t blame them, can you?”

  Sadler agreed. Here was one spectacle that could never be a disappointment, that would always surpass any advance publicity. Even now the shock of stepping out onto this balcony had not completely worn off; he could well believe that many people were physically incapable of coming as far as this.

  He was standing above nothingness, encased in a transparent cylinder jutting out from the edge of the canyon. The metal catwalk beneath his feet, and the slim hand rail, were the only tokens of security granted to him. His knuckles still grasped that railing tightly.

  The Hyginus Cleft ranks among the greatest wonders on the Moon. From end to end it is more than three hundred kilometers long, and in places it is five kilometers wide. It is not so much a canyon as a series of interlinked craters, branching out in two arms from a vast central well. And it is the gateway through which men have reached the buried treasures of the Moon.

  Sadler could now look down into the depths without flinching. Infinitely far below, it seemed, some strange insects were slowly crawling back and forth in little pools of artificial light. If one shone a torch upon a group of cockroaches, they would have looked like this.

  But those tiny insects, Sadler knew, were the great mining machines at work on the floor of the canyon. It was surprisingly flat down there, so many thousands of meters below, for it seemed that lava had flooded into the cleft soon after it was formed, and then congealed into a buried river of rock.

  The Earth, almost vertically overhead, illuminated the great wall immediately opposite. The canyon marched away to right and left as far as the eye could follow, and sometimes the blue-green light falling upon the rock face produced a most unexpected illusion. Sadler found it easy to imagine, if he moved his head suddenly, that he was looking into the heart of a gigantic waterfall, sweeping down forever into the depths of the Moon.

  Across the face of that fall, on the invisible threads of hoisting cables, the ore buckets were rising and dropping. Sadler had seen those buckets, moving on the overhead lines away from the Cleft, and he knew that they were taller than he was. But now they looked like beads moving slowly along a wire, as they carried their loads to the distant smelting plants. It’s a pity, he thought to himself, that they’re only carrying sulphur and oxygen and silicon and aluminum—we could do with fewer of the light elements and more of the heavy ones.

  But he had been called here on business, not to stand gaping like a tourist. He pulled the coded notes from his pocket, and began to give his report.

  It did not take as long as he could have wished. There was no way of telling whether his listener was pleased or disappointed at the inconclusive summary. He thought it over for a minute, then remarked, “I wish we could give you some more help, but you can imagine how shorthanded we are now. Things are getting rough; if there is going to be trouble, we expect it in the next ten days. There’s something happening out around Mars, but we don’t know what it is. The Federation has been building at least two ships of unusual design, and we think they’re testing them. Unfortunately we haven’t a single sighting, only some rumors that don’t make sense but have worried Defense. I’m telling you this to give you more background. No one here should know about it, and if you hear anybody talking on these lines it will mean that they’ve somehow had access to classified information.

  “Now about your short list of provisional suspects. I see you’ve got Wagnall down, but he’s clear with us.”

  “O.K. I’ll move him to List B.”

  “Then Brown, Lefevre, Tolanski—they’ve certainly had no contacts here.”

  “Can you be sure of that?”

  “Fairly. They use their off-duty hours here in highly non-political ways.”

  “I’d suspected that,” Sadler remarked, permitting himself the luxury of a smile. “I’ll take them off altogether.”

  “Now this man Jenkins, in Stores. Why are you so keen on keeping him?”

  “I’ve no real evidence at all. But he seems about the only person who’s taken any objection to my nominal activities.”

  “Well, we’ll continue to watch him from this end. He comes to town quite often, but of course he’s got a good excuse—he does most of the local purchasing. That leaves you wi
th five names on your A list, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, and frankly, I’ll be very surprised if it’s any of them. Wheeler and Jamieson we’ve already discussed. I know that Maclaurin’s suspicious of Jamieson after that trip out to the Mare Imbrium, but I don’t put much reliance on that. It was largely Wheeler’s idea, anyway.

  “Then there are Benson and Carlin. Their wives come from Mars, and they keep getting into arguments whenever the news is being discussed. Benson’s an electrician in Tech Maintenance; Carlin’s a medical orderly. You could say they have some motive, but it’s a pretty tenuous one. Moreover, they’d be rather too obvious suspects.”

  “Well, here’s another we’d like you to move up to your List A. This fellow Molton.”

  “Dr. Molton?” exclaimed Sadler in some surprise. “Any particular reason?”

  “Nothing serious, but he’s been to Mars several times on astronomical missions and has some friends there.”

  “He never talks politics. I’ve tackled him once or twice and he just didn’t seem interested. I don’t think he meets many people in Central City—he seems completely wrapped up in his work and I think he only goes into town to keep fit in the gym. You’ve nothing else?”

  “No—sorry. It’s still a fifty-fifty case. There’s a leak somewhere, but it may be in Central City. The report about the Observatory may be a deliberate plant. As you say, it’s very hard to see how anyone there could pass on information. The radio monitors have detected nothing except a few unauthorized personal messages which were quite innocent.”

  Sadler closed his notebook and put it way with a sigh. He glanced once more down into the vertiginous depths above which he was so insecurely floating. The cockroaches were crawling briskly away from a spot at the base of the cliff, and suddenly a slow stain seemed to spread across the floodlit wall. (How far down was that? Two kilometers? Or three?) A puff of smoke emerged, and instantly dispersed into the vacuum. Sadler began to count the seconds to time his distance from the explosion, and had got to twelve before he remembered that he was wasting his efforts. If that had been an atom bomb, he would have heard nothing here.

  The man in blue adjusted his camera strap, nodded at Sadler, and became the perfect tourist again.

  “Give me ten minutes to get clear,” he said, “and remember not to know me if we meet again.”

  Sadler rather resented that last advice. After all, he was not a complete amateur. He had been fully operational for almost half a lunar day.

  Business was slack at the little cafe in the Hyginus station, and Sadler had the place to himself. The general uncertainty had discouraged tourists; any who happened to be on the Moon were hurrying home as fast as they could get shipping space. They were probably doing the right thing; if there was trouble, it would be here. No one really believed that the Federation would attack Earth directly and destroy millions of innocent lives. Such barbarities belong to the past—so it was hoped. But how could one be sure? Who knew what might happen if war broke out? Earth was so fearfully vulnerable.

  For a moment Sadler lost himself in reveries of longing and self-pity. He wondered if Jeannette had guessed where he was. He was not sure, now, that he wanted her to know. It would only increase her worries.

  Over his coffee—which he still ordered automatically though he had never met any on the Moon worth drinking—he considered the information his unknown contact had given to him. It had been of very little value; he was still groping in the dark. The tip about Molton was a distinct surprise, and he did not take it too seriously. There was a kind of trustworthiness about the astrophysicist which made it hard to think of him as a spy. Sadler knew perfectly well that it was fatal to rely on such hunches, and whatever his own feelings, he would now pay extra attention to Molton. But he made a private bet with himself that it would lead nowhere.

  He marshaled all the facts he could remember about the head of the Spectroscopy Section. He already knew about Mol-ton’s three trips to Mars. The last visit had been over a year ago, and the director himself had been there more recently than that. Moreover, among the interplanetary brotherhood of astronomers, there was probably no member of the senior staff who did not have friends on both Mars and Venus.

  Were there any unusual features about Molton? None that Sadler could think of, apart from that curious aloofness that seemed to conflict with a real inner warmth. There was, of course, his amusing and rather touching “flower-bed,” as he had heard someone christen it. But if he was to start investigating innocent eccentricities like that, he’d never get anywhere.

  — There was one thing that might be worth looking into, however. He’d make a note of the shop where Molton purchased his replacements (it was almost the only place outside the gym he ever visited), and one of the counter-agents in the city could sniff around it. Feeling rather pleased with himself at thus proving he was missing no chances, Sadler paid his bill and walked up the short corridor connecting the cafe with the almost deserted station.

  He rode the spur-line back to Central City, over the incredibly broken terrain past Triesnecker. For almost all the journey, the monorail track was accompanied by the pylons passing their loaded buckets out from Hyginus, and the empty ones back. The long cables, with their kilometer spans, were the cheapest and most practical means of conveyance—if there was no particular hurry to deliver the goods. Soon after the domes of Central City appeared on the skyline, however, they changed direction and curved off to the right. Sadler could see them marching away down to the horizon toward the great chemical plants which, directly or indirectly, fed and clothed every human being on the Moon.

  He no longer felt a stranger in the city, and went from dome to dome with the assurance of a seasoned traveler. The first priority was an overdue haircut; one of the Observatory cooks earned some extra money as a barber, but having seen the results, Sadler preferred to stick to the professionals. Then there was just time to call at the gym for fifteen minutes in the centrifuge.

  As usual, the place was full of Observatory staff making sure they would be able to live on Earth again when they wished to. There was a waiting list for the centrifuge, so Sadler dumped his clothes in a locker and went for a swim until the descending whine of the motor told him that the big machine was ready for a new cargo of passengers. He noticed, with wry amusement, that two of his List-A suspects—Wheeler and Molton—and no less than seven of the Class-B ones were present. But it was not so surprising about Class B. Ninety per cent of the Observatory staff were on that unwieldly list, which if it had been titled at all would have been called: “Persons sufficiently intelligent and active to be spies, but concerning whom there is no evidence one way or the other.”

  The centrifuge held six people, and had some ingenious safety device which prevented its starting unless the load was properly balanced. It refused to co-operate until a fat man on Sadler’s left had changed places with a thin man opposite; then the motor began to pick up speed and the big drum with its slightly anxious human cargo started to turn on its axis. As the speed increased, Sadler felt his weight steadily mounting. The direction of the vertical was shifting, too—it was swinging round toward the center of the drum. He breathed deeply, and tried to see if he could lift his arms. They felt as if they were made of lead.

  The man on Sadler’s right staggered to his feet and began to walk to and fro, keeping within the carefully defined white lines that marked the limits of his territory. Everyone else was doing the same; it was uncanny to watch them standing on what, from the point of view of the Moon, was a vertical surface. But they were glued to it by a force six times as great as the Moon’s feeble gravity—a force equal to the weight they would have had on Earth.

  It was not a pleasant sensation. Sadler found it almost impossible to believe that until a few days ago he had spent his entire existence in a gravity field of this strength. Presumably he would get used to it again, but at the moment it made him feel as weak as a kitten. He was heartily glad when the centrifuge slowed down a
nd he was able to crawl back into the gentle gravity of the friendly Moon.

  He was a tired and somewhat discouraged man as the monorail pulled out of Central City. Even the brief glimpse he caught of the new day, as the still-hidden sun touched the highest pinnacles of the western mountains, failed to cheer him. He had been here more than twelve days of Earth time, and the long lunar night was ending. But he dreaded to think what the day might bring.

  Chapter XIII

  Every man has his weakness, if you can find it. Jamieson’s was so obvious that it seemed unfair to exploit it, but Sadler could not afford to have any scruples. Everyone in the Observa-tary regarded the young astronomer’s painting as a subject for mild amusement, and gave him no encouragement at all. Sadler, feeling a considerable hypocrite, began to play the role of sympathetic admirer.

  It had taken some time to break through Jamieson’s reserve and to get him to speak frankly. The process could not be hurried without arousing suspicion, but Sadler had made fair progress by the simple technique of supporting Jamieson when his colleagues ganged up on him. This happened, on the average, every time he produced a new picture.

  To steer the conversation from art to politics took less skill than might have been expected, for politics was never very far away these days. Yet oddly enough, it was Jamieson himself who raised the questions that Sadler had been trying to ask. He had obviously been thinking hard, in his methodical way, wrestling with the problem that had concerned every scientist, to a greater and greater extent, since the day when atomic power was born on Earth.

  “What would you do,” he asked Sadler abruptly, a few hours after the latter’s return from Central City, “if you had to chose between Earth and the Federation?”

  “Why ask me?” replied Sadler, trying to conceal his interest.