The Space Trilogy

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “When did you write Martian Dust?”

  Gibson did some rapid mental arithmetic.

  “In ‘73 or ‘74.”

  “I didn’t know it was as early as that. But that’s part of the explanation. Space-travel was just about to begin then, and everybody knew it. You had already begun to make a name with conventional fiction, and Martian Dust caught the rising tide very nicely.”

  “That only explains why it sold then. It doesn’t answer my other point. It’s still quite popular, and I believe the Martian colony has taken several copies, despite the fact that it describes a Mars that never existed outside my imagination.”

  “I attribute that to the unscrupulous advertising of your publisher, the careful way you’ve managed to keep in the public eye, and—just possibly—to the fact that it was the best thing you ever wrote. Moreover, as Mac would say, it managed to capture the Zeitgeist of the ‘70s, and that gives it a curiosity value now.”

  “Hmm,” said Gibson, thinking matters over. He remained silent for a moment; then his face creased into a smile and he began to laugh.

  “Well, share the joke. What’s so funny?”

  “Our earlier conversation. I was just wondering what H. G. Wells would have thought if he’d known that one day a couple of men would be discussing his stories, halfway between Earth and Mars.”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” grinned Norden. “We’re only a third of the way so far.”

  It was long after midnight when Gibson suddenly awoke from a dreamless sleep. Something had disturbed him—some noise like a distance explosion, far away in the bowels of the ship. He sat up in the darkness, tensing against the broad elastic bands that held him to his bed. Only a glimmer of starlight came from the porthole-mirror, for his cabin was on the night side of the liner. He listened, mouth half opened, checking his breath to catch the faintest murmur of sound.

  There were many voices in the Ares at night, and Gibson knew them all. The ship was alive, and silence would have meant the death of all aboard her. Infinitely reassuring was the unresting, unhurried suspiration of the air-pumps, driving the man-made trade winds of this tiny planet. Against that faint but continuous background were other intermittent noises: the occasional “whirr” of hidden motors carrying out some mysterious and automatic task, the “tick,” every thirty seconds precisely, of the electric clock, and sometimes the sound of water racing through the pressurized plumbing system. Certainly none of these could have roused him, for they were as familiar as the beating of his own heart.

  Still only half awake, Gibson went to the cabin door and listened for a while in the corridor. Everything was perfectly normal; he knew that he must be the only man awake. For a moment he wondered if he should call Norden, then thought better of it. He might only have been dreaming, or the noise might have been produced by some equipment that had not gone into action before.

  He was already back in bed when a thought suddenly occurred to him. Had the noise, after all, been so far away? That was merely his first impression; it might have been quite near. Anyway, he was tired, and it didn’t matter. Gibson had a complete and touching faith in the ship’s instrumentation. If anything had really gone wrong, the automatic alarms would have alerted everyone. They had been tested several times on the voyage, and were enough to awaken the dead. He could go to sleep, confident that they were watching over him with unresting vigilance.

  He was perfectly correct, though he was never to know it; and by the morning he had forgotten the whole affair.

  The camera swept out of the stricken council chamber, following the funeral cortège up the endlessly twining stairs, and on to the windy battlements above the sea. The music sobbed into silence; for a moment, the lonely figures with their tragic burden were silhouetted against the setting sun, motionless upon the ramparts of Elsinore. “Good night, sweet prince…” The play was ended.

  The lights in the tiny theatre came on abruptly, and the State of Denmark was four centuries and fifty million kilometres away. Reluctantly, Gibson brought his mind back to the present, tearing himself free from the magic that had held him captive. What, he wondered, would Shakespeare have made of this interpretation, already a lifetime old, yet as untouched by time as the still older splendours of the immortal poetry? And what, above all, would he have made of this fantastic theatre, with its latticework of seats floating precariously in mid-air with the flimsiest of supports?

  “It’s rather a pity,” said Dr. Scott, as the audience of six drifted out into the corridor, “that we’ll never have as fine a collection of films with us on our later runs. This batch is for the Central Martian Library, and we won’t be able to hang on to it.”

  “What’s the next program going to be?” asked Gibson.

  “We haven’t decided. It may be a current musical, or we may carry on with the classics and screen ‘Gone With the Wind.’ “

  “My grandfather used to rave about that; I’d like to see it now we have the chance,” said Jimmy Spencer eagerly.

  “Very well,” replied Scott. “I’ll put the matter to the Entertainments Committee and see if it can be arranged.” Since this Committee consisted of Scott and no one else, these negotiations would presumably be successful.

  Norden, who had remained sunk in thought since the end of the film, came up behind Gibson and gave a nervous little cough.

  “By the way, Martin,” he said. “You remember you were badgering me to let you go out in a spacesuit?”

  “Yes. You said it was strictly against the rules.”

  Norden seemed embarrassed, which was somewhat unlike him.

  “Well, it is in a way, but this isn’t a normal trip and you aren’t technically a passenger. I think we can manage it after all.”

  Gibson was delighted. He had always wondered what it was like to wear a spacesuit, and to stand in nothingness with the stars all around one. It never even occurred to him to ask Norden why he had changed his mind, and for this Norden was very thankful.

  The plot had been brewing for about a week. Every morning a little ritual took place in Norden’s room when Hilton arrived with the daily maintenance schedules, summarizing the ship’s performance and the behaviour of all its multitudinous machines during the past twenty-four hours. Usually there was nothing of any importance, and Norden signed the reports and filed them away with the log book. Variety was the last thing he wanted here, but sometimes he got it.

  “Listen, Johnnie,” said Hilton (he was the only one who called Norden by his first name; to the rest of the crew he was always “Skipper”). “It’s quite definite now about our air-pressure. The drop’s practically constant; in about ten days we’ll be outside tolerance limits.”

  “Confound it! That means we’ll have to do something. I was hoping it wouldn’t matter till we dock.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t wait until then; the records have to be turned over to the Space Safety Commission when we get home, and some nervous old woman is sure to start yelling if pressure drops below limits.”

  “Where do you think the trouble is?”

  “In the hull, almost certainly.”

  “That pet leak of yours up round the North Pole?”

  “I doubt it; this is too sudden. I think we’ve been holed again.”

  Norden looked mildly annoyed. Punctures due to meteoric dust happened two or three times a year on a ship of this size. One usually let them accumulate until they were worth bothering about, but this one seemed a little too big to be ignored.

  “How long will it take to find the leak?”

  “That’s the trouble,” said Hilton in tones of some disgust. “We’ve only one leak detector, and fifty thousand square meters of hull. It may take a couple of days to go over it. Now if it had only been a nice big hole, the automatic bulkheads would have gone into operation and located it for us.”

  “I’m mighty glad they didn’t!” grinned Norden. “That would have taken some explaining away!”

  Jimmy Spencer, who as usual got th
e job that no one else wanted to do, found the puncture three days later, after only a dozen circuits of the ship. The blurred little crater was scarcely visible to the eye, but the supersensitive leak detector had registered the fact that the vacuum near this part of the hull was not as perfect as it should have been. Jimmy had marked the place with chalk and gone thankfully back into the airlock.

  Norden dug out the ship’s plans and located the approximate position from Jimmy’s report. Then he whistled softly and his eyebrows climbed towards the ceiling.

  “Jimmy,” he said, “does Mr. Gibson know what you’ve been up to?”

  “No,” said Jimmy. “I’ve not missed giving him his astronautics classes, though it’s been quite a job to manage it as well as—”

  “All right, all right! You don’t think anyone else would have told him about the leak?”

  “I don’t know, but I think he’d have mentioned it if they had.”

  “Well, listen carefully. This blasted puncture is smack in the middle of his cabin wall, and if you breathe a word about it to him, I’ll skin you. Understand?”

  “Yes,” gulped Jimmy, and fled precipitately.

  “Now what?” said Hilton, in tones of resignation.

  “We’ve got to get Martin out of the way on some pretext and plug the hole as quickly as we can.”

  “It’s funny he never noticed the impact. It would have made quite a din.”

  “He was probably out at the time. I’m surprised he never noticed the air current; it must be fairly considerable.”

  “Probably masked by the normal circulation. But anyway, why all the fuss? Why not come clean about it and explain what’s happened to Martin? There’s no need for all this melodrama.”

  “Oh, isn’t there? Suppose Martin tells his public that a 12th magnitude meteor has holed the ship—and then goes on to say that this sort of thing happens every other voyage? How many of his readers will understand not only that it’s no real danger, but that we don’t usually bother to do anything even when it does happen? I’ll tell you what the popular reaction would be: ‘If it was a little one, it might just as well be a big ‘un.’ The public’s never trusted statistics. And can’t you see the headlines: ‘Ares Holed by Meteor!’ That would be bad for trade!”

  “Then why not simply tell Martin and ask him to keep quiet?”

  “It wouldn’t be fair on the poor chap. He’s had no news to hang his articles on to for weeks. It would be kinder to say nothing.”

  “O.K.,” sighed Hilton. “It’s your idea. Don’t blame me if it backfires.”

  “It won’t. I think I’ve got a watertight plan.”

  “I don’t give a damn if it’s watertight. Is it airtight?”

  All his life Gibson had been fascinated by gadgets, and the spacesuit was yet another to add to the collection of mechanisms he had investigated and mastered. Bradley had been detailed to make sure that he understood the drill correctly, to take him out into space, and to see that he didn’t get lost.

  Gibson had forgotten that the suits on the Ares had no legs, and that one simply sat inside them. That was sensible enough, since they were built for use under zero gravity, and not for walking on airless planets. The absence of flexible leg-joints greatly simplified the designs of the suits, which were nothing more than perspex-topped cylinders sprouting articulated arms at their upper ends. Along the sides were mysterious flutings and bulges concerned with the air conditioning, radio, heat regulators, and the low-powered propulsion system. There was considerable freedom of movement inside them: one could withdraw one’s arms to get at the internal controls, and even take a meal without too many acrobatics.

  Bradley had spent almost an hour in the airlock, making certain that Gibson understood all the main controls and catechizing him on their operation. Gibson appreciated his thoroughness, but began to get a little impatient when the lesson showed no sign of ending. He eventually mutinied when Bradley started to explain the suit’s primitive sanitary arrangements.

  “Hang it all!” he protested, “we aren’t going to be outside that long!”

  Bradley grinned.

  “You’d be surprised,” he said darkly, “just how many people make that mistake.”

  He opened a compartment in the airlock wall and took out two spools of line, for all the world like fishermen’s reels. They locked firmly into the mountings on the suits so that they could not be accidentally dislodged.

  “Number One safety precaution,” he said. “Always have a lifeline anchoring you to the ship. Rules are made to be broken—but not this one. To make doubly sure, I’ll tie your suit to mine with another ten meters of cord. Now we’re ready to ascend the Matterhorn.”

  The outer door slid aside. Gibson felt the last trace of air tugging at him as it escaped. The feeble impulse set him moving towards the exit, and he drifted slowly out into the stars.

  The slowness of motion and the utter silence combined to make the moment deeply impressive. The Ares was receding behind him with a terribly inevitability. He was plunging into space—at last—his only link with safety that tenuous thread unreeling at his side. Yet the experience, though so novel, awoke faint echoes of familiarity in his mind.

  His brain must have been working with unusual swiftness, for he recalled the parallel almost immediately. This was like the moment in his childhood—a moment, he could have sworn until now, forgotten beyond recall—when he had been taught to swim by being dropped into ten meters of water. Once again he was plunging headlong into a new and unknown element.

  The friction of the reel had checked his momentum when the cord attaching him to Bradley gave a jerk. He had almost forgotten his companion, who was now blasting away from the ship with the little gas jets at the base of his suit, towing Gibson behind him.

  Gibson was quite startled when the other’s voice, echoing metallically from the speaker in his suit, shattered the silence.

  “Don’t use your jets unless I tell you. We don’t want to build up too much speed, and we must be careful not to get our lines tangled.”

  “All right,” said Gibson, vaguely annoyed at the intrusion into his privacy. He looked back at the ship. It was already several hundred meters away, and shrinking rapidly.

  “How much line have we got?” he asked anxiously. There was no reply, and he had a moment of mild panic before remembering to press the “TRANSMIT” switch.

  “About a kilometre,” Bradley answered when he repeated the question. “That’s enough to make one feel nice and lonely.”

  “Suppose it broke?” asked Gibson, only half joking.

  “It won’t. It could support your full weight, back on Earth. Even if it did, we could get back perfectly easily with our jets.”

  “And if they ran out?”

  “This is a very cheerful conversation. I can’t imagine that happening except through gross carelessness or about three simultaneous mechanical failures. Remember, there’s a spare propulsion unit for just such emergencies—and you’ve got warning indicators in the suit which let you know well before the main tank’s empty.”

  “But just supposing,” insisted Gibson.

  “In that case the only thing to do would be to switch on the suit’s S.O.S. beacon, and wait until someone came out to haul you back. I doubt if they’d hurry, in such circumstances. Anyone who got himself in a mess like that wouldn’t receive much sympathy.”

  There was a sudden jerk; they had come to the end of the line. Bradley killed the rebound with his jets.

  “We’re a long way from home now,” he said quietly.

  It took Gibson several seconds to locate the Ares. They were on the night side of the ship so that it was almost wholly in shadow; the two spheres were thin, distant crescents that might easily have been taken for Earth and Moon, seen from perhaps a million kilometres away. There was no real sense of contact: the ship was too small and frail a thing to be regarded as a sanctuary any more. Gibson was alone with the stars at last.

  He was always g
rateful that Bradley left him in silence and did not intrude upon his thoughts. Perhaps the other was equally overwhelmed by the splendid solemnity of the moment. The stars were so brilliant and so numerous that at first Gibson could not locate even the most familiar constellations. Then he found Mars, the brightest object in the sky next to the Sun itself, and so determined the plane of the ecliptic. Very gently, with cautious bursts from his gas jets, he swung the suit round so that his head pointed roughly towards the Pole Star. He was “the right way up” again, and the star patterns were recognizable once more.

  Slowly he made his way along the Zodiac, wondering how many other men in history had so far shared this experience. (Soon, of course, it would be common enough, and the magic would be dimmed by familiarity.) Presently he found Jupiter, and later Saturn—or so he imagined. The planets could no longer be distinguished from the stars by the steady, unwinking light that was such a useful, though sometimes treacherous, guide to amateur astronomers. Gibson did not search for Earth or Venus, for the glare of the sun would have dazzled him in a moment if he had turned his eyes in that direction.

  A pale band of light welding the two hemispheres of the sky together, the whole ring of the Milky Way was visible. Gibson could see quite clearly the vents and tears along its edge, where entire continents of stars seemed trying to break away and go voyaging alone into the abyss. In the Southern Hemisphere, the black chasm of the Coal Sack gaped like a tunnel drilled through the stars into another universe.

  The thought made Gibson turn towards Andromeda. There lay the great Nebula—a ghostly lens of light. He could cover it with his thumbnail, yet it was a whole galaxy as vast as the sky-spanning ring of stars in whose heart he was floating now. That misty spectre was a million times farther away than the stars—and they were a million times more distant than the planets. How pitiful were all men’s voyagings and adventures when seen against this background!

  Gibson was looking for Alpha Centauri, among the unknown constellations of the Southern Hemisphere, when he caught sight of something which, for a moment, his mind failed to identify. At an immense distance, a white rectangular object was floating against the stars. That, at least, was Gibson’s first impression; then he realized that his sense of perspective was at fault and that, in fact, he was really seeing something quite small, only a few meters away. Even then it was some time before he recognized this interplanetary wanderer for what it was—a perfectly ordinary sheet of quarto manuscript paper, very slowly revolving in space. Nothing could have been more commonplace—or more unexpected here.