Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke

by C. , Clarke, Arthur

  What nonsense. He expected it would all get easier when the divorce came through, and he could let this odd jealousy the Wire inspired in him fade away.

  But that’s all for tomorrow, old lad, he told himself. First you need to get through today with your hide intact …

  For in just eight minutes, Henry Forbes, fifty years old, would be a thousand miles high – in orbit around the Earth itself.

  Two seconds before launch, six main engines ignited. There was a flare of brilliant white light. Smoke, white, but tinged with red Australian dust, billowed out to left and right of the triple spacecraft. Forbes heard a deep, throaty roar, far beneath him, like a door slamming in hell—

  And, just for a second, he was transported back across more than twenty years, to that raid on the V2 launch site at Haagsche Bosch, when one of the birds had actually taken off in front of him, a cool pillar of flame rising up among the contrails of the warring kites …

  And then the vibration rose up to engulf him.

  1977: Procellarum Base

  From the cabin of Endeavour, Forbes was staring down at a disc-shaped piece of the Moon, no more than ten feet below him. The low light of the lunar morning picked out craters of all sizes, from a few yards across down to pinpricks.

  Buzz Aldrin, first man to walk on the Moon, stood at the foot of the rope ladder, foreshortened from Forbes’s vantage. Aldrin turned around, stiff as a mannequin, his Haldane suit glowing white in the sunlight. ‘Beautiful view,’ he said. ‘Magnificent desolation.’

  ‘Endeavour, Stevenage. That’s a nice phrase, Buzz.’

  ‘I have my moments,’ said Aldrin drily, and he bounded away across the surface, testing out his locomotion, moving out of Forbes’s sight.

  Forbes appreciated his co-pilot’s lack of portentousness about his big scene. After all, the identity of the man to take the first actual footstep up here hardly mattered; the three crew – a Brit, a Yank and a Russkie – had landed on the Moon at precisely the same instant, at the climax of this cooperative programme.

  Now it was Forbes’s turn. He took a moment to check the plastic carnation pinned to his white oversuit. Then, with the help of Alexei Leonov, Forbes lowered himself through the hatch and clung to the plastic rope ladder. He was stiff inside his balloon-like inflated Haldane suit, but he was an old crock of sixty and stiff as a board most of the time anyhow; being encased in a Moon cocoon hardly made a difference.

  He dropped quickly, the shadows of Endeavour’s landing legs shifting around him, until – after a final, heart-thumping moment of hesitation – his feet crunched into the surface. The dust rose up slowly in neat little arcs, settling back on his legs.

  He moved out from beneath the lander. Every time he took a step he could feel rock flour crackle under his weight. The light was oddly reversed, like a photographic negative: the pocked ground was a bright grey-brown under a sky as black as a cloudy night in Cleethorpes. The horizon was close, sharp, and it curved: the Moon really was very small, just a little rocky ball, and Forbes was stuck to its outside.

  ‘Endeavour, Stevenage. Good to see you, Henry. How do you feel?’

  ‘Ruddy peculiar,’ said Henry Forbes.

  ‘It would,’ said Leonov drily, ‘be ruddy peculiar indeed if you lent us a hand, Commander.’

  Forbes turned, and saw that Aldrin and Leonov were half-way through the main task of the expedition, which was erecting the Wire transceiver. This first affair was a rough-and-ready Heath Robinson lash-up, assembled by pulling on lanyards fixed to the base of the Endeavour and letting the thing fold down. It didn’t matter as long as it worked; the engineers who would follow would bring components for much more permanent establishments.

  He bounced forward to join in the work.

  … The Earth was a round blue ball, much fatter than a full Moon, so high in the black sky he had to tilt back to see it. It was, he saw, morning in Europe; he could make out the continent clearly under a light dusting of cloud, though England was obscured. The air in general had got a lot clearer in recent years, although of course it was no longterm solution to Wire-dump industrial pollutants at the bottom of the oceans – eventually the noxious gases would escape to the atmosphere anyway – and in fact one proposed use of the Moon was as a global waste dump. Of course, as Max never tired of explaining to him, the quantum translation process at the heart of the Wire relied on having an inert mass to transform at the receiver end. It would, he thought, be a nice puzzle for future archaeologists to find, at the heart of decommissioned nuclear power stations, lumps of irradiated Moon dust …

  He hadn’t spoken to Max for months. Perhaps even now she was watching some BBC broadcast of the Moonwalk, commentated by James Burke, Patrick Moore and Isaac Asimov.

  Or perhaps not. The new developments being opened up by the billions of sterling dollars poured by the Wire corporations into quantum studies – there was talk of quantum computers, even of some kind of Dan Dare starship motor – more than absorbed Max’s attention now. Forbes found it all baffling, and rather spooky. The quantum computers, for instance, were supposed to attain huge speeds by carrying out computations simultaneously in parallel universes …

  When the transceiver was erected, it was time for the flags. The Union Flag and the Hammer and Sickle were allowed to drape with a courtroom grace, but Aldrin, embarrassed, had to put up a Stars and Stripes stiffened with wire, to ‘wave’ on the airless Moon. And now came the gravity pendulum, a simple affair knocked up by the London Science Museum to demonstrate to the TV audience that they really were up here, embedded in the Moon’s weaker pull.

  The three of them saluted, each in their own way, and took each other’s photographs.

  ‘Endeavour, Stevenage. Okay, gentlemen, the show’s over; we’ll see you back home in a couple of minutes …’

  So soon? Forbes thought wistfully.

  But already Leonov and Aldrin were filing obediently towards the Wire transceiver. They disappeared in the characteristic blue flashes of radio-transport, and were replaced by polythene sacks of water.

  For a moment, Forbes was alone on the Moon. His breath was loud in his helmet, and he thought of the Puffing Billies, the foul-smelling oxygen economiser bellows they’d been forced to use in the high altitude Spits …

  In just a few minutes, the engineers would start coming through, and a whole squad of journalists and lunar surface scientists, even some scholars from the Science Museum to start the instant preservation of the Endeavour. He looked around at the untrodden plains of the Sea of Storms and wondered how it would look here in a few weeks or months, as humans spread out from this beachhead, building busily.

  The Endeavour stood proudly behind the flags, fifty feet tall, the blunt curve of the ceramic heat shield at her hemispherical nose swathed in shimmering Kevlar insulation blankets. There was raying, streaks in the dust, under the gaping nozzle of the high-performance Rolls Royce liquid rocket engine which had, Forbes thought with some pride, performed like a dream.

  But Endeavour was the first and last of her kind. A new generation of complex, intelligent unmanned craft, with names like Voyager and Mariner and Venera, were already sailing out from Earth, taking Wire platforms to Mars and Venus and the moons of Jupiter. Buzz Aldrin had been lucky; the first man or woman on Mars would almost certainly be a politician, not a pilot …

  Once again, thanks to the inexorable advance of technology, Forbes’s usefulness was over.

  Of course when he got home, this lunar flight would be regarded as the peak of his career. He would be expected to retire: to pass on the torch, to the rather peculiar set of young people who were growing up with the Wire …

  But he wasn’t ready for his carpet slippers just yet, no matter what the calendar told him. He knew what Max would say to that – it was all of a piece with their eventual failure to have children, a part of his refusal to accept his own ageing – and similar modern psychobabble nonsense. But he had a private medical report which indicated that retiring to t
he cottage in the country might not be a sensible option anyway …

  He closed his eyes, and stepped through the transceiver’s sketchy portal. There was a stab of pain as the electron-beam scanners swept over him.

  For two seconds, as an S-band signal leapt from Moon to Earth, he did not, presumably, exist.

  Suddenly weight descended on him, six times as much as on the Moon, and he staggered under the bulk of his suit. But there were hands on his arms to support him, noise all around him.

  He opened his eyes. Beyond the walls of the quarantine facility, the sky of England was grey and enclosing.

  1987: Brunel Dock, Low Earth Orbit

  He awoke when the slow thermal roll of the dock brought bright water-blue Earthlight slanting into his cabin.

  He floated out of his sleeping bag. He ran his fingers through what was left of his hair, and made himself tea. This consisted of pumping a polythene bag full of hot water and sucking the resulting pale brown mush through a nipple. Revolting; even the strongest brew never masked the taste of plastic. And of course with the low pressure up here the Rosie Lee was never properly hot …

  Still, he lingered. Although he had some suspicion that his work here, as a consultant on Discovery’s control systems, was something of a sinecure, his days were busy enough; at seventy, he had learned to give himself time to wake up.

  Of course, the view was always a terrific distraction.

  Today, in bright noon sunlight, under smog-free air, England glittered with scattered homes. Even from up here, Forbes could see how the great old cities had shrunk – even London – with those huge misty-grey scars of suburbs eaten into by the new green reforestation swathes. Commuting, by train or car anyway, was a thing of the past; the capital’s workers flickered directly into the heart of the city, popping out of Wire transceivers in the old Tube stations. The M1 motorway, in fact, had been turned into a singularly long race-track … There were even, he had read, people who maintained ‘distributed careers’ with desks in a dozen capital cities around the world, jumping from morning to night. It would never have suited Forbes.

  There were costs, of course. Even from up here Forbes could see the blue sparkle of swimming pools, sprinkled across the mountains and valleys of Scotland and Wales and Northumberland … The people of Britain had scattered across their tiny islands in search of illusory wilderness, but there was just no ruddy room. There had been some attempt to preserve the more beautiful areas. In the Lake District, for instance, tourists were Wired into great glass viewing boxes, peering out at Wordsworth’s beloved landscape like so many goldfish from a bowl …

  And some Wire-related costs were not visible from orbit. He remembered the panic when rabies had swept over England soon after the opening-up of the first French links. And there had been some rather more serious plagues, such as the explosion in AIDS cases in the early 1980s. Some commentators said that the various viruses and bacteria which feasted on man were enjoying an unprecedented explosion in evolutionary growth, such was the expansion of possible infection vectors. Others said that on a Wired planet, man must evolve in response, or perish.

  Some of the lingering anti-Wire hysteria was absurd, of course, even to a crusty old sceptic like himself. Since 1963, a year after the Wire’s opening, there had been no serious accidents with the system itself – such as the loss or corruption of a human pattern in transit – and it had been quite irresponsible for Twentieth-Century Fox to remake The Fly, in such gruesome detail …

  The Wire could be a force for good, its fans argued. It was being used to defuse the Cold War, with teams of UN inspectors Wiring back and forth between the nuclear silos held by each side, and rushing peacekeepers to any potential trouble spot. And the Wire had averted so many possible catastrophes – getting the American hostages out of Iran in ’81, averting a war between the Atlantic Union and the Argentine over the Falklands in ’82, distributing aid to those wretched famine victims in Ethiopia in ’84 – that it was, it seemed, in danger of provoking an outbreak of Utopianism, all across the planet.

  So Max had said anyhow, the last time he’d seen her. But they’d argued.

  They had been like ambassadors from two alien species, stiff and made suddenly old. She’d been more interested in lecturing him about the work she was doing with Feynman and Deutsch on quantum computers than asking about him. It was strange that two people whose lives had been so shaped by a communications technology should find themselves so incapable of communication themselves, and Forbes couldn’t help but wonder if a child – grown by now! – might have served to link them better.

  But in a sense Max did have children. Sometimes he envied her the easy bond she seemed to form with the new generation, her own students and colleagues and others. There are no boundaries for the young now, she’d said, only access. War, she said, is inconceivable for these people … The Wire is transforming them, Henry.

  And so on. Of course it hardly mattered to Forbes whether she was right or not, since he wasn’t allowed home any more.

  Over the years, he had been rather a silly ass about the length of time he had spent in zero gravity. And he never had been very conscientious about physical jerks … The quacks had explained how his skeletal and cardiac muscles were deeply atrophied, and he had piddled away so much of his bone calcium that the inner spongy bone had vanished altogether, without hope of regeneration.

  On Earth, he would be wheelchair-bound and a nuisance to everybody. Better here, working on the construction of star clipper Discovery, even if he suspected the youngsters up here tolerated rather than valued him.

  He took one last, lingering look at sunlit Britain, remembering the exhilaration of hauling a Spit in a battle climb up into the blue skies of June, 1940, with the clatter of the prop loud in his ears, the stink of engine oil and leather in his nostrils … Ruddy peculiar. Here he was in orbit. He’d even been to the Moon. But somehow nothing ever compared to those vivid moments of his youth.

  The slow roll of the dock removed Britain from his view, and replaced it with the sleek, streamlined form of Discovery, the future appropriately replacing the past.

  Forbes finished his tea and, with a sigh, prepared for the daily ordeal of the zero-gravity toilet. The Americans were wonderful people, but they couldn’t design plumbing for toffee …

  1997: Discovery, Martian Orbit

  The launch of humanity’s first starship struck Forbes as a remarkably low-key event, compared to the thrilling take-offs he remembered aboard Endeavour and Congreve, not to mention all those exhausting scrambles at wartime airfields. After all, there was drama: even now, hydrogen was circulating in the nozzle of the huge NERVA 4 nuclear fission rocket, cooling it before passing on to the core to be superheated and expelled, and so driving the great ship forward.

  Surely even Captain Cook had made a little more fuss about his departure for the Pacific, in an earlier Discovery. And after all, this was the first journey to the stars …

  But there wasn’t even a countdown. Forbes had simply to sit in his frame couch with the rest of the crew, a few rows behind the commander and his co-pilot – both women, incidentally – and listen to their brisk young voices working through checks with the ground crew at Port Lowell.

  Even the setting was mundane, like the interior of a small aircraft, with fold-out equipment racks and miniaturised galleys and lavatories and zero-gravity up-down visual cues. Only the creased orange skin of Mars, visible through the windows, made for an element of the extraordinary, the ancient landscape now mottled by the green domes of the colonies which had provisioned Discovery after its shakedown interplanetary hop.

  Humanity’s first starship was shaped something like a huge arrow. The habitable compartment – its interior, designed by Cunard, frankly luxurious – made a streamlined arrowhead, separated for safety from the NERVA 4 by the arrow’s ‘shaft’: a hundred yards of open scaffolding, crammed with shielding, antennae and liquid-hydrogen fuel tanks.

  The streamlining amus
ed Forbes, for it made the habitable compartment look like nothing so much as the V2-shaped spaceships that had rattled their way through the beloved Saturday morning specials of his youth – a shape which had become derided in the 1960s and 1970s, as insectile ships such as the Endeavour, adapted to airless space, had taken shape on the drafting boards.

  But it turned out that the experts, not for the first time, were wrong. Interstellar space was not empty. There was gas and dust – desperately thin, only fifty or sixty bacterium-sized specks per cubic mile – but that was enough to give a respectable battering to the prow of any starship unwise enough to approach a decent fraction of the speed of light, as Discovery intended to achieve. So the ship was streamlined, and coated with a thick impact shield, and even mounted with a rather powerful dust-busting shortwave radiation generator in her nose.

  A decent fraction of the speed of light … Such velocities would be far beyond the capacity even of the NERVA 4 – a huge, over-engineered American monstrosity, originally intended to take much smaller spacecraft no further than Mars – if not for the HRP effect.

  HRP: for Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff, as Max had explained to him, the physicists who had made the crucial quantum vacuum breakthrough. The ‘empty’ vacuum was not empty at all, it seemed, but a wash of seething energy, with ‘virtual’ particles popping in and out of existence constantly. This so-called ‘zero point field’ created an electromagnetic drag on any object which passed through it … and it was that drag which created the effect of mass and inertia, the reason it took so much effort to start anything moving.

  The big Wire operators – immensely rich, with forty years’ expertise in quantum effects – had seized on the HRP results immediately. And Discovery was the result, rendered virtually massless by its inertial suppressors, and so capable of being driven to enormous velocities by a modest engine indeed …

  And now, low-key or not, the pilots’ preparations were reaching a climax.