Tales From Planet Earth

by Arthur C. Clarke

  But Dr. Elwin was determined to do it this way, and he had the best of reasons, though he never discussed them. The presence of one of the world’s most famous scientists—and certainly the world’s most famous cripple—at Hotel Everest during the height of the tourist season had already aroused a good deal of polite surprise. Harper had allayed some of the curiosity by hinting that they were engaged in gravity measurements, which was at least part of the truth. But a part of the truth that, by this time, was vanishingly small.

  Anyone looking at Jules Elwin now, as he forged steadily toward the twenty-nine-thousand-foot level with fifty pounds of equipment on his shoulders, would never have guessed that his legs were almost useless. He had been born a victim of the 1961 thalidomide disaster, which had left more than ten thousand partially deformed children scattered over the face of the world. Elwin was one of the lucky ones. His arms were quite normal, and had been strengthened by exercise until they were considerably more powerful than most men’s. His legs, however, were mere wisps of flesh and bone. With the aid of braces, he could stand and even totter a few uncertain steps, but he could never really walk.

  Yet now he was two hundred feet from the top of Everest . . .

  A travel poster had stated it all, more than three years ago. As a junior computer programer in the Applied Physics Division, George Harper knew Dr. Elwin only by sight and by reputation. Even to those working directly under him, Astrotech’s brilliant Director of Research was a slightly remote personality, cut off from the ordinary run of men both by his body and by his mind. He was neither liked nor disliked, and, though he was admired and pitied, he was certainly not envied.

  Harper, only a few months out of college, doubted if the Doctor even knew of his existence, except as a name on an organization chart. There were ten other programers in the division, all senior to him, and most of them had never exchanged more than a dozen words with their research director. When Harper was co-opted as messenger boy to carry one of the classified files into Dr. Elwin’s office, he expected to be in and out with nothing more than a few polite formalities.

  That was almost what happened. But just as he was leaving, he was stopped dead by the magnificent panorama of Himalayan peaks covering half of one wall. It had been placed where Dr. Elwin could see it whenever he looked up from his desk, and it showed a scene that Harper knew very well indeed, for he had photographed it himself, as an awed and slightly breathless tourist standing on the trampled snow at the crown of Everest.

  There was the white ridge of Kanchenjunga, rearing through the clouds almost a hundred miles away. Nearly in line with it, but much nearer, were the twin peaks of Makalu; and closer still, dominating the foreground, was the immense bulk of Lhotse, Everest’s neighbor and rival. Farther around to the west, flowing down valleys so huge that the eye could not appreciate their scale, were the jumbled ice rivers of the Khumbu and Rongbuk glaciers. From this height, their frozen wrinkles looked no larger than the furrows in a plowed field; but those ruts and scars of iron-hard ice were hundreds of feet deep.

  Harper was still taking in that spectacular view, reliving old memories, when he heard Dr. Elwin’ s voice behind him.

  “You seem interested. Have you ever been there?”

  “Yes, Doctor. My folks took me after I graduated from high school. We stayed at the hotel for a week, and thought we’d have to go home before the weather cleared. But on the last day the wind stopped blowing, and about twenty of us made it to the summit. We were there for an hour, taking pictures of each other.”

  Dr. Elwin seemed to digest this information for rather a long time. Then he said, in a voice that had lost its previous remoteness and now held a definite undercurrent of excitement: “Sit down, Mr.—ah—Harper, I’d like to hear more.”

  As he walked back to the chair facing the Director’s big uncluttered desk, George Harper found himself somewhat puzzled. What he had done was not in the least unusual; every year thousands of people went to the Hotel Everest, and about a quarter of them reached the mountain’s summit. Only last year, in fact, there had been a much-publicized presentation to the ten-thousandth tourist to stand on the top of the world. Some cynics had commented on the extraordinary coincidence that Number 10,000 had just happened to be a rather well-known video starlet.

  There was nothing that Harper could tell Dr. Elwin that he couldn’t discover just as easily from a dozen other sources—the tourist brochures, for example. However no young and ambitious scientist would miss this opportunity to impress a man who could do so much to help his career. Harper was neither coldly calculating nor inclined to dabble in office politics, but he knew a good chance when he saw one.

  “Well, Doctor,” he began, speaking slowly at first as he tried to put his thoughts and memories in order, “the jets land you at a little town called Namchi, about twenty miles from the mountain. Then the bus takes you along a spectacular road up to the hotel, which overlooks the Khumbu Glacier. It’s at an altitude of eighteen thousand feet, and there are pressurized rooms for anyone who finds it hard to breathe. Of course, there’s a medical staff in attendance, and the management won’t accept guests who aren’t physically fit. You have to stay at the hotel for at least two days, on a special diet, before you’re allowed to go higher.

  “From the hotel you can’t actually see the summit, because you’re too close to the mountain, and it seems to loom right above you. But the view is fantastic. You can see Lhotse and half a dozen other peaks. And it can be scary, too—especially at night. The wind is usually howling somewhere high overhead, and there are weird noises from the moving ice. It’s easy to imagine that there are monsters prowling around up in the mountain. . . .

  “There’s not much to do at the hotel, except to relax and watch the scenery, and to wait until the doctors give you the go-ahead. In the old days it used to take weeks to acclimatize to the thin air; now they can make your blood count shoot up to the right level in forty-eight hours. Even so, about half the visitors—mostly the older ones—decide that this is quite high enough for them.

  “What happens next depends on how experienced you are, and how much you’re willing to pay. A few expert climbers hire guides and make their own way to the top, using standard mountaineering equipment. That isn’t too difficult nowadays, and there are shelters at various strategic spots. Most of these groups make it. But the weather is always a gamble, and every year a few people get killed.

  “The average tourist does it the easier way. No aircraft are allowed to land on Everest itself, except in emergencies, but there’s a lodge near the crest of Nuptse and a helicopter service to it from the hotel. From the lodge it’s only three miles to the summit, via the South Col—an easy climb for anyone in good condition, with a little mountaineering experience. Some people do it without oxygen, though that’s not recommended. I kept my mask on until I reached the top; then I took it off and found I could breathe without much difficulty.”

  “Did you use filters or gas cylinders?”

  “Oh, molecular filters—they’re quite reliable now, and increase the oxygen concentration over a hundred per cent. They’ve simplified high-altitude climbing enormously. No one carries compressed gas any more.”

  “How long did the climb take?”

  “A full day. We left just before dawn and were back at nightfall. That would have surprised the old-timers. But of course we were starting fresh and traveling light. There are no real problems on the route from the lodge, and steps have been cut at all the tricky places. As I said, it’s easy for anyone in good condition.”

  The instant he repeated those words, Harper wished that he had bitten off his tongue. It seemed incredible that he could have forgotten who he was talking to, but the wonder and excitement of that climb to the top of the world had come back so vividly that for a moment he was once more on that lonely, wind-swept peak. The one spot on Earth where Dr. Elwin could never stand . . .

  But the scientist did not appear to have noticed—or else he was s
o used to such unthinking tactlessness that it no longer bothered him. Why, wondered Harper, was he so interested in Everest? Probably because of that very inaccessibility; it stood for all that had been denied to him by the accident of birth.

  Yet now, only three years later, George Harper paused a bare hundred feet from the summit and drew in the nylon rope as the Doctor caught up with him. Though nothing had ever been said about it, he knew that the scientist wished to be the first to the top. He deserved the honor, and the younger man would do nothing to rob him of it.

  “Everything O.K.?” he asked as Dr. Elwin drew abreast of him. The question was quite unnecessary, but Harper felt an urgent need to challenge the great loneliness that now surrounded them. They might have been the only men in all the world; nowhere amid this white wilderness of peaks was there any sign that the human race existed.

  Elwin did not answer, but gave an absent-minded nod as he went past, his shining eyes fixed upon the summit. He was walking with a curiously stiff-legged gait, and his feet made remarkably little impression in the snow. And as he walked, there came a faint but unmistakable whine from the bulky backpack he was carrying on his shoulders.

  That pack, indeed, was carrying him—or three-quarters of him. As he forged steadily along the last few feet to his once-impossible goal, Dr. Elwin and all his equipment weighed only fifty pounds. And if that was still too much, he had only to turn a dial and he would weigh nothing at all.

  Here amid the Moon-washed Himalayas was the greatest secret of the twenty-first century. In all the world, there were only five of these experimental Elwin Levitators, and two of them were here on Everest.

  Even though he had known about them for two years, and understood something of their basic theory, the “Levvies”—as they had soon been christened at the lab—still seemed like magic to Harper. Their power-packs stored enough electrical energy to lift a two-hundred-and-fifty pound weight through a vertical distance of ten miles, which gave an ample safety factor for this mission. The lift-and-descend cycle could be repeated almost indefinitely as the units reacted against the Earth’s gravitational field. On the way up, the battery discharged; on the way down, it was charged again. Since no mechanical process is completely efficient, there was a slight loss of energy on each cycle, but it could be repeated at least a hundred times before the units were exhausted.

  Climbing the mountain with most of their weight neutralized had been an exhilarating experience. The vertical tug of the harness made it feel that they were hanging from invisible balloons, whose buoyancy could be adjusted at will. They needed a certain amount of weight in order to get traction on the ground, and after some experimenting had settled on twenty-five per cent. With this, it was as easy to ascend a one-in-one slope as to walk normally on the level.

  Several times they had cut their weight almost to zero to rise hand over hand up vertical rock faces. This had been the strangest experience of all, demanding complete faith in their equipment. To hang suspended in mid-air, apparently supported by nothing but a box of gently humming electronic gear, required a considerable effort of will. But after a few minutes, the sense of power and freedom overcame all fear; for here indeed was the realization of one of man’s oldest dreams.

  A few weeks ago one of the library staff had found a line from an early twentieth-century poem that described their achievement perfectly: ‘To ride secure the cruel sky.” Not even birds had ever possessed such freedom of the third dimension; this was the real conquest of space. The Levitator would open up the mountains and the high places of the world, as a lifetime ago the aqualung had opened up the sea. Once these units had passed their tests and were mass-produced cheaply, every aspect of human civilization would be changed. Transport would be revolutionized. Space travel would be no more expensive than ordinary flying; all mankind would take to the air. What had happened a hundred years earlier with the invention of the automobile was only a mild foretaste of the staggering social and political changes that must now come.

  But Dr. Elwin, Harper felt sure, was thinking of none of these in his lonely moment of triumph. Later, he would receive the world’s applause (and perhaps its curses), yet it would not mean as much to him as standing here on Earth’s highest point. This was truly a victory of mind over matter, of sheer intelligence over a frail and crippled body. All the rest would be anticlimax.

  When Harper joined the scientist on the flattened, snow-covered pyramids, they shook hands with rather formal stiffness, because that seemed the right thing to do. But they said nothing; the wonder of their achievement, and the panorama of peaks that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction, had robbed them of words.

  Harper relaxed in the buoyant support of his harness and slowly scanned the circle of the sky. As he recognized them, he mentally called off the names of the surrounding giants: Makalu, Lhotse, Baruntse, Cho Oyu, Kanchenjunga . . . Even now scores of these peaks had never been climbed. Well, the Levvies would soon change that.

  There were many, of course, who would disapprove. But back in the twentieth century there had also been mountaineers who thought it was “cheating” to use oxygen. It was hard to believe that, even after weeks of acclimatization, men had once attempted to reach these heights with no artificial aids at all. Harper remembered Mallory and Irvine, whose bodies still lay undiscovered perhaps within a mile of this very spot.

  Behind him, Dr. Elwin cleared his throat.

  “Let’s go, George,” he said quietly, his voice muffled by the oxygen filter. “We must get back before they start looking for us.”

  With a silent farewell to all those who had stood here before them, they turned away from the summit and started down the gentle slope. The night, which had been brilliantly clear until now, was becoming darker; some high clouds were slipping across the face of the Moon so rapidly that its light switched on and off in a manner that sometimes made it hard to see the route. Harper did not like the look of the weather and began mentally to rearrange their plans. Perhaps it would be better to aim for the shelter on the South Col, rather than attempt to reach the lodge. But he said nothing to Dr. Elwin, not wishing to raise any false alarms.

  Now they were moving along a knife edge of rock, with utter darkness on one side and a faintly glimmering snowscape on the other. This would be a terrible place, Harper could not help thinking, to be caught by a storm.

  He had barely shaped the thought when the gale was upon them. From out of nowhere, it seemed, came a shrieking blast of air, as if the mountain had been husbanding its strength for this moment. There was no time to do anything; even had they possessed normal weight, they would have been swept off their feet. In seconds, the wind had tossed them out over shadowed, empty blackness.

  It was impossible to judge the depths beneath them; when Harper forced himself to glance down, he could see nothing. Though the wind seemed to be carrying him almost horizontally, he knew that he must be falling. His residual weight would be taking him downward at a quarter of the normal speed. But that would be ample; if they fell four thousand feet, it would be poor consolation to know that it would seem only one thousand.

  He had not yet had time for fear—that would come later, if he survived—and his main worry, absurdly enough, was that the expensive Levitator might be damaged. He had completely forgotten his partner, for in such a crisis the mind can hold only one idea at a time. The sudden jerk on the nylon rope filled him with puzzled alarm. Then he saw Dr. Elwin slowly revolving around him at the end of the line, like a planet circling a sun.

  The sight snapped him back to reality, and to a consciousness of what must be done. His paralysis had probably lasted only a fraction of a second. He shouted across the wind: “Doctor! Use emergency lift!”

  As he spoke, he fumbled for the seal on his control unit, tore it open, and pressed the button.

  At once, the pack began to hum like a hive of angry bees. He felt the harness tugging at his body as it tried to drag him up into the sky, away from the invisible
death below. The simple arithmetic of the Earth’s gravitational field blazed in his mind, as if written in letters of fire. One kilowatt could lift a hundred kilograms through a meter every second, and the packs could convert energy at a maximum rate of ten kilowatts—though they could not keep this up for more than a minute. So allowing for his initial weight reduction, he should lift at well over a hundred feet a second.

  There was a violent jerk on the rope as the slack between them was taken up. Dr. Elwin had been slow to punch the emergency button, but at last he, too, was ascending. It would be a race between the lifting power of their units and the wind that was sweeping them toward the icy face of Lhotse, now scarcely a thousand feet away.

  That wall of snow-streaked rock loomed above them in the moonlight, a frozen wave of stone. It was impossible to judge their speed accurately, but they could hardly be moving at less than fifty miles an hour. Even if they survived the impact, they could not expect to escape serious injury; and injury here would be as good as death.

  Then, just when it seemed that a collision was unavoidable, the current of air suddenly shot skyward, dragging them with it. They cleared the ridge of rock with a comfortable fifty feet to spare. It seemed like a miracle, but after a dizzying moment of relief, Harper realized that what had saved them was only simple aerodynamics. The wind had to rise in order to clear the mountain; on the other side, it would descend again. But that no longer mattered, for the sky ahead was empty.

  Now they were moving quietly beneath the broken clouds. Though their speed had not slackened, the roar of the wind had suddenly died away, for they were traveling with it through emptiness. They could even converse comfortably, across the thirty feet of space that still separated them.

  “Dr. Elwin,” Harper called, “are you O.K.?”