Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke

by C. , Clarke, Arthur

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I can speak frankly with you both, for I know your interests are identical.’ (His mild irony, he saw, did not escape them.) ‘I appreciate your help and the trouble you have taken; I am sorry it has been wasted. No – don’t protest; this isn’t a sudden, quixotic decision on my part. If I was ten years younger, it might be different. Now I feel that this opportunity should be given to someone else – especially in view of my record.’ He glanced at Dr Harkness, who gave an embarrassed smile. ‘I also have other, personal reasons, and there’s no chance that I will change my mind. Please don’t think me rude or ungrateful, but I don’t wish to discuss the matter any further. Thank you again, and goodbye.’

  He broke the circuit; and as the image of the two astonished scientists faded, peace came flooding back into his soul.

  Imperceptibly, spring merged into summer. The eagerly awaited Bicentenary celebrations came and went; for the first time in years, he was able to enjoy Independence Day as a private citizen. Now he could sit back and watch the others perform – or he could ignore them if he wished.

  Because the ties of a lifetime were too strong to break, and it would be his last opportunity to see many old friends, he spent hours looking in on both conventions and listening to the commentators. Now that he saw the whole world beneath the light of Eternity, his emotions were no longer involved; he understood the issues, and appreciated the arguments, but already he was as detached as an observer from another planet. The tiny, shouting figures on the screen were amusing marionettes, acting out roles in a play that was entertaining, but no longer important – at least, to him.

  But it was important to his grandchildren, who would one day move out onto this same stage. He had not forgotten that; they were his share of the future, whatever strange form it might take. And to understand the future, it was necessary to know the past.

  He was taking them into that past, as the car swept along Memorial Drive. Diana was at the wheel, with Irene beside her, while he sat with the children, pointing out the familiar sights along the highway. Familiar to him, but not to them; even if they were not old enough to understand all that they were seeing, he hoped they would remember.

  Past the marble stillness of Arlington (he thought again of Martin, sleeping on the other side of the world) and up into the hills the car wound its effortless way. Behind them, like a city seen through a mirage, Washington danced and trembled in the summer haze, until the curve of the road hid it from view.

  It was quiet at Mount Vernon; there were few visitors so early in the week. As they left the car and walked toward the house, Steelman wondered what the first President of the United States would have thought could he have seen his home as it was today. He could never have dreamed that it would enter its second century still perfectly preserved, a changeless island in the hurrying river of time.

  They walked slowly through the beautifully proportioned rooms, doing their best to answer the children’s endless questions, trying to assimilate the flavour of an infinitely simpler, infinitely more leisurely mode of life. (But had it seemed simple or leisurely to those who lived it?) It was so hard to imagine a world without electricity, without radio, without any power save that of muscle, wind, and water. A world where nothing moved faster than a running horse, and most men died within a few miles of the place where they were born.

  The heat, the walking and the incessant questions proved more tiring than Steelman had expected. When they had reached the Music Room, he decided to rest. There were some attractive benches out on the porch, where he could sit in the fresh air and feast his eyes upon the green grass of the lawn.

  ‘Meet me outside,’ he explained to Diana, ‘when you’ve done the kitchen and the stables. I’d like to sit down for a while.’

  ‘You’re sure you’re quite all right?’ she said anxiously.

  ‘I never felt better, but I don’t want to overdo it. Besides, the kids have drained me dry – I can’t think of any more answers. You’ll have to invent some; the kitchen’s your department, anyway.’

  Diana smiled.

  ‘I was never much good in it, was I? But I’ll do my best – I don’t suppose we’ll be more than thirty minutes.’

  When they had left him, he walked slowly out onto the lawn. Here Washington must have stood, two centuries ago, watching the Potomac wind its way to the sea, thinking of past wars and future problems. And here Martin Steelman, thirty-eighth President of the United States, might have stood a few months hence, had the fates ruled otherwise.

  He coud not pretend that he had no regrets, but they were very few. Some men could achieve both power and happiness, but that gift was not for him. Sooner or later, his ambition would have consumed him. In the last few weeks he had known contentment, and for that no price was too great.

  He was still marvelling at the narrowness of his escape when his time ran out and Death fell softly from the summer sky.

  Before Eden

  First published in Amazing, June 1961

  Collected in Tales of Ten Worlds

  ‘I guess,’ said Jerry Garfield, cutting the engines, ‘that this is the end of the line.’ With a gentle sigh, the underjets faded out; deprived of its air cushion, the scout car Rambling Wreck settled down upon the twisted rocks of the Hesperian Plateau.

  There was no way forward; neither on its jets nor its tractors could S.5 – to give the Wreck its official name – scale the escarpment that lay ahead. The South Pole of Venus was only thirty miles away, but it might have been on another planet. They would have to turn back, and retrace their four-hundred-mile journey through this nightmare landscape.

  The weather was fantastically clear, with visibiliy of almost a thousand yards. There was no need of radar to show the cliffs ahead; for once, the naked eye was good enough. The green auroral light, filtering down through clouds that had rolled unbroken for a million years, gave the scene an underwater appearance, and the way in which all distant objects blurred into the haze added to the impression. Sometimes it was easy to believe that they were driving across a shallow sea bed, and more than once Jerry had imagined that he had seen fish floating overhead.

  ‘Shall I call the ship, and say we’re turning back?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Dr Hutchins. ‘I want to think.’

  Jerry shot an appealing glance at the third member of the crew, but found no moral support there. Coleman was just as bad; although the two men argued furiously half the time, they were both scientists and therefore, in the opinion of a hardheaded engineer-navigator, not wholly responsible citizens. If Cole and Hutch had bright ideas about going forward, there was nothing he could do except register a protest.

  Hutchins was pacing back and forth in the tiny cabin, studying charts and instruments. Presently he swung the car’s searchlight toward the cliffs, and began to examine them carefully with binoculars. Surely, thought Jerry, he doesn’t expect me to drive up there! S.5 was a hover-track, not a mountain goat …

  Abruptly, Hutchins found something. He released his breath in a sudden explosive gasp, then turned to Coleman.

  ‘Look!’ he said, his voice full of excitement. ‘Just to the left of that black mark! Tell me what you see.’

  He handed over the glasses, and it was Coleman’s turn to stare.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ he said at length. ‘You were right. There are rivers on Venus. That’s a dried-up waterfall.’

  ‘So you owe me one dinner at the Bel Gourmet when we get back to Cambridge. With champagne.’

  ‘No need to remind me. Anyway, it’s cheap at the price. But this still leaves your other theories strictly on the crackpot level.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ interjected Jerry. ‘What’s all this about rivers and waterfalls? Everyone knows they can’t exist on Venus. It never gets cold enough on this steam bath of a planet for the clouds to condense.’

  ‘Have you looked at the thermometer lately?’ asked Hutchins with deceptive mildness.

  ‘I’ve been sli
ghtly too busy driving.’

  ‘Then I’ve news for you. It’s down to two hundred and thirty, and still falling. Don’t forget – we’re almost at the Pole, it’s wintertime, and we’re sixty thousand feet above the lowlands. All this adds up to a distinct nip in the air. If the temperature drops a few more degrees, we’ll have rain. The water will be boiling, of course – but it will be water. And though George won’t admit it yet, this puts Venus in a completely different light.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jerry, though he had already guessed.

  ‘Where there’s water, there may be life. We’ve been in too much of a hurry to assume that Venus is sterile, merely because the average temperature’s over five hundred degrees. It’s a lot colder here, and that’s why I’ve been so anxious to get to the Pole. There are lakes up here in the highlands, and I want to look at them.’

  ‘But boiling water!’ protested Coleman. ‘Nothing could live in that!’

  ‘There are algae that manage it on Earth. And if we’ve learned one thing since we started exploring the planets, it’s this: wherever life has the slightest chance of surviving, you’ll find it. This is the only chance it’s ever had on Venus.’

  ‘I wish we could test your theory. But you can see for yourself – we can’t go up that cliff.’

  ‘Perhaps not in the car. But it won’t be too difficult to climb those rocks, even wearing thermosuits. All we need do is walk a few miles toward the Pole; according to the radar maps, it’s fairly level once you’re over the rim. We could manage in – oh, twelve hours at the most. Each of us has been out for longer than that, in much worse conditions.’

  That was perfectly true. Protective clothing that had been designed to keep men alive in the Venusian lowlands would have an easy job here, where it was only a hundred degrees hotter than Death Valley in midsummer.

  ‘Well,’ said Coleman, ‘you know the regulations. You can’t go by yourself, and someone has to stay here to keep contact with the ship. How do we settle it this time – chess or cards?’

  ‘Chess takes too long,’ said Hutchins, ‘especially when you two play it. He reached into the chart table and produced a well-worn pack. ‘Cut them, Jerry.’

  ‘Ten of spades. Hope you can beat it, George.’

  ‘So do I. Damn – only five of clubs. Well, give my regards to the Venusians.’

  Despite Hutchins’ assurance, it was hard work climbing the escarpment. The slope was not too steep, but the weight of oxygen gear, refrigerated thermosuit, and scientific equipment came to more than a hundred pounds per man. The lower gravity – thirteen per cent weaker than Earth’s – gave a little help, but not much, as they toiled up screes, rested on ledges to regain breath, and then clambered on again through the submarine twilight. The emerald glow that washed around them was brighter than that of the full moon on Earth. A moon would have been wasted on Venus, Jerry told himself; it could never have been seen from the surface, there were no oceans for it to rule – and the incessant aurora was a far more constant source of light.

  They had climbed more than two thousand feet before the ground levelled out into a gentle slope, scarred here and there by channels that had clearly been cut by running water. After a little searching, they came across a gulley wide and deep enough to merit the name of river bed, and started to walk along it.

  ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ said Jerry after they had travelled a few hundred yards. ‘Suppose there’s a storm up ahead of us? I don’t feel like facing a tidal wave of boiling water.’

  ‘If there’s a storm,’ replied Hutchins a little impatiently, ‘we’ll hear it. There’ll be plenty of time to reach high ground.’

  He was undoubtedly right, but Jerry felt no happier as they continued to climb the gently shelving watercourse. His uneasiness had been growing ever since they had passed over the brow of the cliff and had lost radio contact with the scout car. In this day and age, to be out of touch with one’s fellow men was a unique and unsettling experience. It had never happened to Jerry before in all his life; even aboard the Morning Star, when they were a hundred million miles from Earth, he could always send a message to his family and get a reply back within minutes. But now, a few yards of rock had cut him off from the rest of mankind; if anything happened to them here, no one would ever know, unless some later expedition found their bodies. George would wait for the agreed number of hours; then he would head back to the ship – alone. I guess I’m not really the pioneering type, Jerry told himself. I like running complicated machines, and that’s how I got involved in space flight. But I never stopped to think where it would lead, and now it’s too late to change my mind …

  They had travelled perhaps three miles toward the Pole, following the meanders of the river bed, when Hutchins stopped to make observations and collect specimens. ‘Still getting colder!’ he said. ‘The temperature’s down to one hundred and ninety-nine. That’s far and away the lowest ever recorded on Venus. I wish we could call George and let him know.’

  Jerry tried all the wave bands; he even attempted to raise the ship – the unpredictable ups and downs of the planet’s ionosphere sometimes made such long-distance reception possible – but there was not a whisper of a carrier wave above the roar and crackle of the Venusian thunderstorms.

  ‘This is even better,’ said Hutchins, and now there was real excitement in his voice. ‘The oxygen concentration’s way up – fifteen parts in a million. It was only five back at the car, and down in the lowlands you can scarcely detect it.’

  ‘But fifteen in a million!’ protested Jerry. ‘Nothing could breathe that!’

  ‘You’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick,’ Hutchins explained. ‘Nothing does breathe it. Something makes it. Where do you think Earth’s oxygen comes from? It’s all produced by life – by growing plants. Before there were plants on Earth, our atmosphere was just like this one – a mess of carbon dioxide and ammonia and methane. Then vegetation evolved, and slowly converted the atmosphere into something that animals could breathe.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jerry, ‘and you think that the same process has just started here?’

  ‘It looks like it. Something not far from here is producing oxygen – and plant life is the simplest explanation.’

  ‘And where there are plants,’ mused Jerry, ‘I suppose you’ll have animals, sooner or later.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hutchins, packing his gear and starting up the gulley, ‘though it takes a few hundred million years. We may be too soon – but I hope not.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Jerry answered. ‘But suppose we meet something that doesn’t like us? We’ve no weapons.’

  Hutchins gave a snort of disgust.

  ‘And we don’t need them. Have you stopped to think what we look like? Any animal would run a mile at the sight of us.’

  There was some truth in that. The reflecting metal foil of their thermosuits covered them from head to foot like flexible, glittering armour. No insects had more elaborate antennas than those mounted on their helmets and back packs, and the wide lenses through which they stared out at the world looked like blank yet monstrous eyes. Yes, there were few animals on Earth that would stop to argue with such apparitions; but any Venusians might have different ideas.

  Jerry was still mulling this over when they came upon the lake. Even at that first glimpse, it made him think not of the life they were seeking, but of death. Like a black mirror, it lay amid a fold of the hills; its far edge was hidden in the eternal mist, and ghostly columns of vapour swirled and danced upon its surface. All it needed, Jerry told himself, was Charon’s ferry waiting to take them to the other side – or the Swan of Tuonela swimming majestically back and forth as it guarded the entrance to the Underworld …

  Yet for all this, it was a miracle – the first free water that men had ever found on Venus. Hutchins was already on his knees, almost in an attitude of prayer. But he was only collecting drops of the precious liquid to examine through his pocket microscope.

  �
�Anything there?’ asked Jerry anxiously.

  Hutchins shook his head.

  ‘If there is, it’s too small to see with this instrument. I’ll tell you more when we’re back at the ship.’ He sealed a test tube and placed it in his collecting bag, as tenderly as any prospector who had just found a nugget laced with gold. It might be – it probably was – nothing more than plain water. But it might also be a universe of unknown, living creatures on the first stage of their billion-year journey to intelligence.

  Hutchins had walked no more than a dozen yards along the edge of the lake when he stopped again, so suddenly that Garfield nearly collided with him.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Jerry asked. ‘Seen something?’

  ‘That dark patch of rock over there. I noticed it before we stopped at the lake.’

  ‘What about it? It looks ordinary enough to me.’

  ‘I think it’s grown bigger.’

  All his life, Jerry was to remember this moment. Somehow he never doubted Hutchins’ statement; by this time he could believe anything, even that rocks could grow. The sense of isolation and mystery, the presence of that dark and brooding lake, the never-ceasing rumble of distant storms and the green flickering of the aurora – all these had done something to his mind, had prepared it to face the incredible. Yet he felt no fear; that would come later.

  He looked at the rock. It was about five hundred feet away, as far as he could estimate. In this dim, emerald light it was hard to judge distances or dimensions. The rock – or whatever it was – seemed to be a horizontal slab of almost black material, lying near the crest of a low ridge. There was a second, much smaller, patch of similar material near it; Jerry tried to measure and memorise the gap between them, so that he would have some yardstick to detect any change.

  Even when he saw that the gap was slowly shrinking, he still felt no alarm – only a puzzled excitement. Not until it had vanished completely, and he realised how his eyes had tricked him, did that awful helpless terror strike into his heart.