The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack: 25 Classic and Modern Science Fiction Stories

by Arthur C. Clarke

  There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the clock ticked down to zero and the Saturn VI bellowed its liftoff roar across the palmettos. Even the people who thought it was a waste of money were whispering, “Go, baby, go!” while the rocket struggled to lift the spaceship into orbit. I was in the control center, and people later told me that my speech synthesizer was saying, “Don blah huh,” over and over again, but what I was really saying was, “Don’t blow up, don’t blow up!”

  Miraculously, it didn’t. The Saturn put them into orbit, the final stage launched them out past the Moon for a gravity assist, and the ion rocket kicked in and propelled them gently on toward Mars.

  The tabloids went especially nuts during the eight months it took our guys to get there; the grinning vacuousness that seems to affect all astronaut transmissions meant for public consumption—even Alexander’s, I’m sorry to say—palled after only a couple of weeks, and was replaced in the headlines by rampant speculation over the “real” reason for the mission. Surely it was a humanitarian gesture to take Alexander home! Or a rendezvous with the Aztecs known to inhabit Olympus Mons! And just what kind of torrid romantic doings were really going on when the cameras weren’t rolling? The most amusing of the stories were faxed to the crew until Mary Paiz, speaking for them all, sent back a transmission asking us to stop. If Alexander had a reaction, he didn’t show it.

  After that they lived in their own private little world. Their recycling equipment kept them alive and healthy, and the entertainment system and scientific instruments (indistinguishable from their point of view) kept them sane, and before they knew it they were braking into orbit around Mars.

  They spent a few days sending out communications satellites so they would be in constant contact with each other no matter how far apart they got on the ground, mapping their landing site, and making sure the automatic instruments would continue to take pictures and other readings while they were gone. Then when they were sure their transfer vehicle would be warm and waiting for them when they got back, they climbed into the lander and headed down.

  No waiting in orbit for one poor astronaut like the Apollo guys had done. All four went to the surface, and all four would contribute equally to the exploration. We had enough missions planned for everybody to have their fill.

  They landed in the Valles Marineris, down at the lower end where there would be lots of flood debris and erosion would have exposed plenty of geological strata for them to study without digging. The valley was so wide at that point that the sides were over the horizon, and all of it was flood plain. The ultralight airplanes would allow them to range farther afield, but that’s where everyone expected the action to be.

  Except the tabloid-reading public, of course. They wanted to know about the face and the pyramid. Never mind that photos from orbit showed two unassuming hills and a few eroded craters; people were sure that an on-site investigation would turn up alien artifacts by the truckload. When they learned that NASA had scheduled an ultralight flyby only after all the other mission objectives had been met, the ruckus could be heard all the way to Mars.

  NASA didn’t budge. We released new photos from orbit showing the same thing we already knew from the last orbital survey, and the crew went on about the business of setting up their dome and making their first cautious forays into the Martian wilderness.

  Cautious was the word. Mars is barely more habitable than the Moon. The air is thin and mostly carbon dioxide, so the astronauts had to wear pressure suits at all times, but there’s just enough of it for a cold wind to suck the heat out of a suit in practically no time. A single mistake could be fatal, and everyone made their share of mistakes. Not long after they got there, Mary slipped with a rock hammer and punctured her pressure suit, but Alex dragged her back to the dome and tossed her inside before she ran out of air. Dave didn’t reinstall one of the dome’s two air recycling canisters properly after he recharged it and nearly asphyxiated them all in their sleep. Shawnee stayed out too long after dusk and nearly froze to death before she could make it back to the dome.

  And the ultralight airplanes turned out to be much trickier to fly than we had hoped. The problem was mostly on takeoff and landing, when they made the transition from hovering on their jet exhaust to actually flying. Mars’s atmosphere is too thin to make a rolling takeoff practical, especially on rocky ground, so the ultralights were designed like Harrier jets, with vectored thrust engines that could be rotated downward for takeoff and landing. Problem was, at inbetween angles they really affected the wings’ lift, and there was a configuration in the middle where the engines didn’t have enough thrust for the plane to hover anymore and the wings didn’t have enough lift for it to fly, so if you weren’t moving fast enough when you went through that phase you fell like a rock.

  Alex found out about it the first time he took one of the planes up for a test flight. He was going through the checklist, calling out his actions as he rose to about fifty feet, brought the nose up, and increased the thrust for flight, when he crossed through the dead zone. “Throttle up to eighty percent, engines running smooth, tilting forward to—shit!” The stall warning buzzer overrode his voice for a moment, then his words became intelligible again as he said, “—nose down, throttles to full, gaining speed. Starting to feel some response to the controls. Okay, I think I’m flying now, but that didn’t feel right at all. I’m going to bring it around for a visual.”

  “Roger,” Dave said. “I’ve got the binks on you. Don’t see anything wrong from here, but maybe when you come around. You sure you don’t want to land?”

  “Not until I find out what happened,” Alex said. He had the pilots’ almost instinctive urge to put air rather than rock beneath him when he had a problem. He banked the plane around and did a slow pass over the dome—slow being about a hundred miles an hour in the thin Martian air.

  Dave gave him a close inspection with binoculars, but didn’t see anything wrong. “Looks copacetic, ol’ boy,” he said.

  The ultralights were mostly wing, since Mars’s atmosphere is so thin. Alex waggled them a little, then jounced the plane up and down a bit with the elevator. “Flies like a pregnant cow,” he reported. “Just like it did in the simulator. But I never felt anything like that dropout before. I’m going to take it up a ways and see if I can repeat it.”

  “You sure you want to do that?” Dave asked him.

  “I don’t want to try landing until I know what happened,” Alex replied.

  Back home at mission control we were all pulling our hair out. We had a man in the air with a problem—a hundred and fifty million miles away. What we were hearing had happened thirteen minutes ago. Alex could have been dead already and we wouldn’t know it until the radio signal carrying his last words caught up to us. We had people in the simulator trying to figure out what had happened up there the moment we heard there was a problem, but even if they figured it out instantly, it would be thirteen more minutes before their solution helped Alex any.

  So we hung onto our butts and gritted our teeth while we listened to Alex calmly describe everything he did. “Climbing through eight thousand. I can see quite a ways from up here. Man oh man, a hell of a lot of water must have come through this canyon. It looks like it was cut with a fire hose. Okay, I’m at ten oh and slowing. Bringing the engines backward to hover. Angle at ten, twenty, thirty—there it goes! Get back here, you bastard! Throttling up and tilting on back to forty, fifty, sixty. Airspeed down to forty, thirty, twenty. It’s looking stable now. Hovering like a balloon. Plenty of control. It’s just in that transitional phase where it all goes to hell for a second.”

  He tried switching back over to forward flight, and sure enough the same thing happened, so he brought it to a stop again and tried it over and over until he learned how to compensate for it. “All right, here’s what we’re going to have to do,” he said as he dropped back down toward the base for a landing. “It’ll suck fuel like a tank rupture, but we’ve got to go up and down like an elevator
for at least a thousand feet before we switch flight modes, ’cause we’re going to lose a couple hundred feet in transition.”

  Mary said, “Why the hell didn’t they figure that out back home?”

  “Who knows?” Alex said. “Planes always act squirrelly at low speed. They couldn’t test these things in partial vacuum for more than a few seconds at a time, ’cause they don’t have a vacuum pump that’ll keep up with a wind tunnel. And they sure as hell couldn’t test it at a third of a gee.” He laughed. “I’ll bet they’re scurrying to figure it out now.”

  He was right about that. Everybody involved in the ultralight design ran for days without sleep trying to understand what had happened and how to correct for it with materials the Mars crew had on hand. They figured it out, too, and cobbled together a fix out of an empty fuel tank and duct tape that reduced the instability to about half what it was originally, but that was the best they could do. The problem was inherent in the wing design, and there wasn’t anything they could do on site to correct for that.

  So the crew went on with their jobs, flying planes that were ready to smash them into the ground at a moment’s notice. It was either that or forget about ninety percent of the mission objectives, but this was our only shot at Mars. There was no money for another mission, and even if the money miraculously showed up in the budget, these four wouldn’t be going back. There wasn’t any question what they would do. I’d have done the same thing in their place.

  I keep telling myself that.

  Mars Mission a Coverup!

  Why NASA Won’t Ask the Questions YOU Want Answered!

  For months nobody had any more problems with the planes. All four astronauts flew them dozens of times each, and they got so used to the instability that we nearly forgot it was there. With all the new discoveries the crew were making about Mars we had so much else to think about that the airplane problem faded into the background.

  When we lost the first plane it had nothing to do with the flight problem anyway. A dust storm got it during the night, plucked it away like it had never been there. Alex said the crew never even heard a noise. They just looked out in the morning after a hard blow and saw that it was gone, and the other plane was missing a couple feet of fabric at the end of its left wing.

  They were able to fix that easily enough and go on flying. Fortunately there weren’t that many flights left in the mission plan. They had accomplished all the major objectives, and now they were working their way down the “wish list,” the extra projects that they could do if there was time before their launch window opened for the return trip to Earth.

  One of those was a long-range flight to check another site on the planet for signs of life. They had found dozens of tantalizing clues, including rocks like the one found in Antarctica that contained what might have been fossilized microbes, and colored layers of sediment that had unusually high concentrations of carbon, but they hadn’t found proof that life had ever existed on the planet, much less that it existed now. That was the one big question everyone wanted an answer to, and it was looking like the crew was going to come home empty-handed.

  They had already flown the two-thousand-mile length of the canyon, so when Alex proposed taking a flight of similar length northward to check out another site, nobody argued that the distance was too great. Nobody argued much at all until he revealed his intended landing site: the pyramid and face in Cydonia.

  Maybe it was his idea of a practical joke. Or maybe it was revenge. He knew that actual video footage of the area taken from a low-flying plane would ruin the site forever as an object of new-age pseudoscience. Maybe he wanted to get back at the tabloids that had made his life miserable. We’ll never know. All we know for sure is that he justified his choice by pointing out that the geology at Cydonia was different from what they had been studying, so since they had come up empty-handed on the search for life where they were, it made a good candidate for further exploration.

  And going there incidentally fulfilled the wishes of a large portion of the population who had paid for the mission.

  Nobody missed the irony of sending the “space alien” to check out the site. I think Alex probably enjoyed that. And he certainly enjoyed the idea of getting out by himself for a few days. With the prospect of another eight months in a can with his three crewmates coming up, he wanted as much solitude as he could soak in before they left.

  So he packed his toothbrush and enough food and water for a week, and took off for Cydonia. He would have to spend a couple of cramped nights sleeping in the cockpit of the plane, but he didn’t care about that. He had camped out plenty of times in pup tents on fishing trips in Wyoming; he was used to sleeping in tight quarters.

  This had to be the happiest time in his life. Here was a kid from a small western town, a strange-looking kid that practically the whole world had made fun of—making a solo flight a sixth of the way around Mars. He was exactly where he wanted to be, and he’d gotten there despite all the superstitious, credulous, and downright malicious people who stood in his way. And not only that, but he had made his mother proud. Hell, he had made his father proud, and that’s saying something.

  A straight route would have taken him to the east of the Chryse site where Viking 1 had landed, but he took the extra time to fly over it, swooping low and circling around to take pictures of the fragile little lander sitting there on the boulder-strewn plain.

  Everyone back home had grown familiar with images of the habitat site from the air. Its bubble and lander and power generator provided a comforting picture of home away from home, a place we could all imagine ourselves living in our dreams. The Viking probe had the exact opposite effect. It looked lost down there among the rocks, a tiny speck of technology amid a vast, forbidding landscape, its dish antenna still pointing into the sky like a hand reaching for the planet it could never touch again.

  “That’s, um, the Viking probe,” Alex said quietly after his third circle around it. “I guess I’ll be going on to Cydonia now.”

  By the time he got there, hours later, his sense of humor had returned. As he approached the pyramid and the face, his onboard video camera showed the now-familiar rounded hills and craters that we know them to be, but he talked as if an entire Martian city were unfolding beneath him.

  “Oh my God!” he said, “there it is. Look at the buildings, and the elevated walkways, and the flags waving from the tops of the towers. They look like—yes, yes, they’re Buffalo on a field of blue! They’re Wyoming flags! Proof positive that this is the site of a massive government coverup. And there’s the face. Is it a space alien? Sorry to say it doesn’t look a thing like me. In fact it looks more like my dad. Hi, Dad.” He banked the plane around so the bumpy hill was right in front of him. “Look, it’s speaking! What’s it saying? Looks like, ‘Nyah, nyah, fooled you!’ And now it’s fading away. Yes, it’s turning into just an ordinary hill with craters in it. Oh, what cruel fate!”

  He banked away. “Well, what a disappointment that was, eh? I guess I’ll just land over there by what used to be its chin and see about doing some real science.”

  Mary, who had been monitoring his signal over the satellite link, was laughing out loud. Most of us at Mission Control were, too, but a few people weren’t. Space flight was a popularity game, and Alex had just cost us some supporters.

  He didn’t care. I never got the chance to ask him, but I know what he thought of that kind of support anyway.

  He brought the plane in high, making his customary “Yee-ha!” yell as he went through the roller coaster moment, then set it down light as a feather on the rocky ground at the base of the hill. He jumped out and tied down the wings so a stray gust of wind wouldn’t blow away his ride home, then turned around and trudged through the rocks to see what he could see.

  He did not send another transmission for seventeen minutes.

  When he did, there was a peculiar strained quality to his voice. “Mary,” he said. “Houston. I’ve found something.”


  The tone of Mary Paiz’ answering transmission clearly showed that she expected another joke announcement. “Copy, Buck.”

  “No kidding, Wilma. Hold on. Going to visual.” He switched on his video camera and broadcast an image of a jagged stone in a field of other stones. “See this?”

  “Wonderful rock, Alexander.”

  “Not the rock. This patch here.” His finger prodded a shadowy area. “See this? Well, close up it looks like velvet.”

  “Velvet?” asked Mary.

  “Yeah. It’s fuzzy, and I can’t get light to reflect from it, not even from my helmet lamp. It looks like—” He paused.

  “Like what?” Mary said.

  “I was going to say ‘lichen,’ but it’s soft,” he said. “Springy. Like some kind of…” His reluctance to say the word was palpable.

  After about five seconds of dead silence—which seemed like the longest hesitation in the history of the solar system—Mary prompted him again. “Alex? Come in, Alex.”

  The broadcast image grew as Alexander zoomed in. He described the image out loud in case the transmission wasn’t getting through. “Okay. Reality check. At ten power I see little stalks with cup-shaped ends, all packed together so there’s hardly any space between them. They’re stuck to the rock by more little cups that look quite a bit like the ones on top. I’m trying not to be too credulous here, but that’s definitely an organized structure. A biological structure.”

  “Are you shittin’ me?” Mary asked.

  “Live transmission,” Alex reminded her. “But no, I’m not. This is for real. They look like plants of some sort.”

  “Holy…. Wow. And us with less than a week left on the planet.”

  “Well, you know how it is. You don’t find the souvenirs you want until the end of your vacation.”