Now it was gone, as though it had never been. In a moment of time the toil and treasure of centuries had been swept away. The vanished streets could still be traced as faint marks in the vitrified ground, but of the houses, nothing remained. Steel and concrete, plaster and ancient oak – it had mattered little at the end. In the moment of death they had stood together, transfixed by the glare of the detonating bomb. Then, even before they could flash into fire, the blast waves had reached them and they had ceased to be. Mile upon mile the ravening hemisphere of flame had expanded over the level farmlands, and from its heart had risen the twisting totem-pole that had haunted the minds of men for so long, and to such little purpose.
The rocket had been a stray, one of the last ever to be fired. It was hard to say for what target it had been intended. Certainly not London, for London was no longer a military objective. London, indeed, was no longer anything at all. Long ago the men whose duty it was had calculated that three of the hydrogen bombs would be sufficient for that rather small target. In sending twenty, they had been perhaps a little overzealous.
This was not one of the twenty that had done their work so well. Both its destination and its origin were unknown: whether it had come across the lonely Arctic wastes or far above the waters of the Atlantic, no one could tell and there were few now who cared. Once there had been men who had known such things, who had watched from afar the flight of the great projectiles and had sent their own missiles to meet them. Often that appointment had been kept, high above the Earth where the sky was black and sun and stars shared the heavens together. Then there had bloomed for a moment that indescribable flame, sending out into space a message that in centuries to come other eyes than Man’s would see and understand.
But that had been days ago, at the beginning of the War. The defenders had long since been brushed aside, as they had known they must be. They had held on to life long enough to discharge their duty; too late, the enemy had learned his mistake. He would launch no further rockets; those still falling he had dispatched hours ago on secret trajectories that had taken them far out into space. They were returning now unguided and inert, waiting in vain for the signals that should lead them to their destinies. One by one they were falling at random upon a world which they could harm no more.
The river had already overflowed its banks; somewhere down its course the land had twisted beneath that colossal hammer-blow and the way to the sea was no longer open. Dust was still falling in a fine rain, as it would do for days as Man’s cities and treasures returned to the world that had given them birth. But the sky was no longer wholly darkened, and in the west the sun was settling through banks of angry cloud.
A church had stood here by the river’s edge, and though no trace of the building remained, the gravestones that the years had gathered round it still marked its place. Now the stone slabs lay in parallel rows, snapped off at their bases and pointing mutely along the line of the blast. Some were half flattened into the ground, others had been cracked and blistered by terrific heat, but many still bore the messages they had carried down the centuries in vain.
The light died in the west and the unnatural crimson faded from the sky. Yet still the graven words could be clearly read, lit by a steady, unwavering radiance, too faint to be seen by day but strong enough to banish night. The land was burning: for miles the glow of its radioactivity was reflected from the clouds. Through the glimmering landscape wound the dark ribbon of the steadily widening river, and as the waters submerged the land that deadly glow continued unchanging in the depths. In a generation, perhaps, it would have faded from sight, but a hundred years might pass before life could safely come this way again.
Timidly the waters touched the worn gravestone that for more than three hundred years had lain before the vanished altar. The church that had sheltered it so long had given it some protection at the last, and only a slight discolouration of the rock told of the fires that had passed this way. In the corpse-light of the dying land, the archaic words could still be traced as the water rose around them, breaking at last in tiny ripples across the stone. Line by line the epitaph upon which so many millions had gazed slipped beneath the conquering waters. For a little while the letters could still be faintly seen; then they were gone forever.
Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,
To digg the dvst encloased heare
Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones,
And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.
Undisturbed through all eternity the poet could sleep in safety now: in the silence and darkness above his head, the Avon was seeking its new outlet to the sea.
History Lesson
First published in Startling Stories, May 1949
Collected in Expedition to Earth as ‘Expedition to Earth’
The second of two stories derived from an earlier one, now lost, ‘History Lesson’ is also the first of two stories in which glaciers return to cover the world. In the preface to Expedition to Earth, Clarke notes his discovery of a literally chilling phrase in Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilisation: ‘Civilisation is an interlude between Ice Ages’, and observes ‘the next one is already overdue; perhaps global warming has arrived just in time to save us.’
No one could remember when the tribe had begun its long journey: the land of great rolling plains that had been its first home was now no more than a half-forgotten dream. For many years Shann and his people had been fleeing through a country of low hills and sparkling lakes, and now the mountains lay ahead. This summer they must cross them to the southern lands, and there was little time to lose.
The white terror that had come down from the poles, grinding continents to dust and freezing the very air before it, was less than a day’s march behind. Shann wondered if the glaciers could climb the mountains ahead, and within his heart he dared to kindle a little flame of hope. They might prove a barrier against which even the remorseless ice would batter in vain. In the southern lands of which the legends spoke, his people might find refuge at last.
It took many weeks to discover a pass through which the tribe and its animals could travel. When midsummer came, they had camped in a lonely valley where the air was thin and the stars shone with a brilliance none had ever seen before. The summer was waning when Shann took his two sons and went ahead to explore the way. For three days they climbed, and for three nights slept as best they could on the freezing rocks. And on the fourth morning there was nothing ahead but a gentle rise to a cairn of grey stones built by other travellers, centuries ago.
Shann felt himself trembling, and not with cold, as they walked towards the little pyramid of stones. His sons had fallen behind; no one spoke, for too much was at stake. In a little while they would know if all their hopes had been betrayed.
To east and west, the wall of mountains curved away as if embracing the land beneath. Below lay endless miles of undulating plain, with a great river swinging across it in tremendous loops. It was fertile land; one in which the tribe could raise its crops knowing that there would be no need to flee before the harvest came.
Then Shann lifted his eyes to the south, and saw the doom of all his hopes. For there, at the edge of the world, glimmered that deadly light he had seen so often to the north – the glint of ice below the horizon.
There was no way forward. Through all the years of flight, the glaciers from the south had been advancing to meet them. Soon they would be crushed beneath the moving walls of ice—
The southern glaciers did not reach the mountains until a generation later. In that last summer, the sons of Shann carried the sacred treasures of the tribe to the lonely cairn overlooking the plain. The ice that had once gleamed below the horizon was now almost at their feet; by the spring it would be splintering against the mountain walls.
No one understood the treasures, now: they were from a past too distant for the understanding of any man alive. Their origins were lost in the mists that surrounded the Golden Age, and how they had come at last into the posses
sion of this wandering tribe was a story that now never would be told. For it was the story of a civilisation that had passed beyond recall.
Once, all these pitiful relics had been treasured for some good reason and now they had become sacred, though their meaning had long been lost. The print in the old books had faded centuries ago, though much of the lettering was still readable – if there had been any to read it. But many generations had passed since anyone had had a use for a set of seven-figure logarithms, an atlas of the world, and the score of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony printed, according to the flyleaf, by H. K. Chu & Sons at the City of Pekin in the year AD 2021.
The old books were placed reverently in the little crypt that had been made to receive them. There followed a motley collection of fragments: gold and platinum coins, a broken telephoto lens, a watch, a cold-light lamp, a microphone, the cutter from an electric shaver, some midget radio valves – the flotsam that had been left behind when the great tide of civilisation ebbed for ever. All these were carefully stowed away in their resting-place. Then came three more relics, the most sacred of all because the least understood.
The first was a strangely shaped piece of metal, showing the coloration of intense heat. It was, in its way, the most pathetic of all these symbols from the past, for it told of Man’s greatest achievement and of the future he might have known. The mahogany stand on which it was mounted bore a silver plate with the inscription:
Auxiliary igniter from starboard jet of spaceship
Morning Star, Earth – Moon, AD 1985
Next followed another miracle of the ancient science: a sphere of transparent plastic with oddly shaped pieces of metal embedded in it. At its centre was a tiny capsule of synthetic radio-element, surrounded by the converting screens that shifted its radiation far down the spectrum. As long as the material remained active, the sphere would be a tiny radio transmitter broadcasting power in all directions. Only a few of these spheres had ever been made; they had been designed as perpetual beacons to mark the orbits of the Asteroids. But Man had never reached the Asteroids, and the beacons had never been used.
Last of all was a flat circular tin, very wide in comparison to its depth. It was heavily sealed, and rattled when it was shaken. The tribal lore predicted that disaster would follow if it were ever opened, and no one knew that it held one of the great works of art of nearly a thousand years before.
The work was finished. The two men rolled the stones back into place and slowly began to descend the mountainside. Even at the last, Man had given some thought to the future and had tried to preserve something for posterity.
That winter, the great waves of ice began their first assault on the mountains, attacking from north and south. The foothills were overwhelmed in the first onslaught, and the glaciers ground them into dust. But the mountains stood firm, and when the summer came the ice retreated for a while.
So, winter after winter, the battle continued, and the roar of the avalanches, the grinding of rock and the explosions of splintered ice filled the air with tumult. No war of Man’s had been fiercer nor had engulfed the globe more completely than this. Until at last the tidal waves of ice began to subside and to creep slowly down the flanks of the mountains they had never quite subdued; though the valleys and passes were still firmly in their grip. It was stalemate: the glaciers had met their match.
But their defeat was too late to be of any use to Man.
So the centuries passed; and presently there happened something that must occur once at least in the history of every world in the Universe, no matter how remote and lonely it may be—
The ship from Venus came five thousand years too late, but its crew knew nothing of this. While still many millions of miles away, the telescopes had seen the great shroud of ice that made Earth the most brilliant object in the sky next to the Sun itself. Here and there the dazzling sheet was marred by black specks that revealed the presence of almost buried mountains. That was all. The rolling oceans, the plains and forests, the deserts and lakes – all that had been the world of Man was sealed beneath the ice, perhaps for ever.
The ship closed into Earth and established an orbit less than a thousand miles distant. For five days it circled the planet while cameras recorded all that was left to view and a hundred instruments gathered information that would give the Venusian scientists many years of work. An actual landing was not intended; there seemed little purpose in it. But on the sixth day the picture changed. A panoramic monitor, driven to the limit of its amplification, detected the dying radiation of the five-thousand-years-old beacon. Through all the centuries it had been sending out its signals, with ever-failing strength as its radioactive heart steadily weakened.
The monitor locked on the beacon frequency. In the control-room, a bell clamoured for attention. A little later, the Venusian ship broke free from its orbit and slanted down towards Earth – towards a range of mountains that still towered proudly above the ice, and to a cairn of grey stones that the years had scarcely touched.
The great disc of the Sun blazed fiercely in a sky no longer veiled with mist, for the clouds that had once hidden Venus had now completely gone. Whatever force had caused the change in the Sun’s radiation had doomed one civilisation but given birth to another. Less than five thousand years before, the half-savage people of Venus had seen Sun and stars for the first time. Just as the science of Earth had begun with astronomy, so had that of Venus, and on the warm, rich world that Man had never seen, progress had been incredibly rapid.
Perhaps the Venusians had been lucky. They never knew the Dark Age that held Man enchained for a thousand years; they missed the long detour into chemistry and mechanics, but came at once to the more fundamental laws of radiation physics. In the time that Man had taken to progress from the Pyramids to the rocket-propelled spaceship, the Venusians had passed from the discovery of agriculture to antigravity itself – the ultimate secret that Man had never learned.
The warm ocean that still bore most of the young planet’s life rolled its breakers languidly against the sandy shore. So new was this continent that the very sands were coarse and gritty: there had not yet been time enough for the sea to wear them smooth. The scientists lay half in the water, their beautiful reptilian bodies gleaming in the sunlight. The greatest minds of Venus had gathered on this shore from all the islands of the planet. What they were going to hear they did not yet know, except that it concerned the Third World and the mysterious race that had peopled it before the coming of the ice.
The Historian was standing on the land, for the instruments he wished to use had no love of water. By his side was a large machine which attracted many curious glances from his colleagues. It was clearly concerned with optics, for a lens system projected from it towards a screen of white material a dozen yards away.
The Historian began to speak. Briefly he recapitulated what little had been discovered concerning the Third Planet and its people. He mentioned the centuries of fruitless research that had failed to interpret a single word of the writings of Earth. The planet had been inhabited by a race of great technical ability; that at least was proved by the few pieces of machinery that had been found in the cairn upon the mountain.
‘We do not know why so advanced a civilisation came to an end. Almost certainly, it had sufficient knowledge to survive an Ice Age. There must have been some other factor of which we know nothing. Possibly disease or racial degeneration may have been responsible. It has even been suggested that the tribal conflicts endemic to our own species in prehistoric times may have continued on the Third Planet after the coming of technology. Some philosophers maintain that knowledge of machinery does not necessarily imply a high degree of civilisation, and it is theoretically possible to have wars in a society possessing mechanical power, flight, and even radio. Such a conception is very alien to our thoughts, but we must admit its possibility. It would certainly account for the downfall of the lost race.
‘It has always been assumed that we should never know anythi
ng of the physical form of the creatures who lived on Planet Three. For centuries our artists have been depicting scenes from the history of the dead world, peopling it with all manner of fantastic beings. Most of these creations have resembled us more or less closely though it has often been pointed out that because we are reptiles it does not follow that all intelligent life must necessarily be reptilian. We now know the answer to one of the most baffling problems of history. At last, after five hundred years of research, we have discovered the exact form and nature of the ruling life on the Third Planet.’
There was a murmur of astonishment from the assembled scientists. Some were so taken aback that they disappeared for a while into the comfort of the ocean, as all Venusians were apt to do in moments of stress. The Historian waited until his colleagues re-emerged into the element they so disliked. He himself was quite comfortable, thanks to tiny sprays that were continually playing over his body. With their help he could live on land for many hours before having to return to the ocean.
The excitement slowly subsided, and the lecturer continued.
‘One of the most puzzling of the objects found on Planet Three was a flat metal container holding a great length of transparent plastic material, perforated at the edges and wound tightly into a spool. This transparent tape at first seemed quite featureless, but an examination with the new sub-electronic microscope has shown that this is not the case. Along the surface of the material, invisible to our eyes but perfectly clear under the correct radiation, are literally thousands of tiny pictures. It is believed that they were imprinted on the material by some chemical means, and have faded with the passage of time.
‘These pictures apparently form a record of life as it was on the Third Planet at the height of its civilisation. They are not independent; consecutive pictures are almost identical, differing only in the detail of movement. The purpose of such a record is obvious: it is only necessary to project the scenes in rapid succession to give an illusion of continuous movement. We have made a machine to do this, and I have here an exact reproduction of the picture sequence.
Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke Page 14