Tales From Planet Earth

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “You see what happens? The upper disk gets hollowed out by the cutting action of the emery powder, and as you walk around, it shapes itself into a concave, spherical surface. From time to time you have to change to a finer grade of powder, and make some simple optical tests to check that your curve’s right.

  “Later still, you drop the emery and switch to rouge, until at last you have a smooth, polished surface that you can hardly credit you’ve made yourself. There’s only one more step, though that’s a little tricky. You still have to silver the mirror, and turn it into a good reflector. This means getting some chemicals made up at the drugstore, and doing exactly what the book says.

  “I can still remember the kick I got when the silver film began to spread like magic across the face of my little mirror. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough, and I wouldn’t have swapped it for anything on Mount Palomar.

  “I fixed it at one end of a wooden plank: there was no need to bother about a telescope tube, though I put a couple of feet of cardboard round the mirror to cut out stray light. For an eyepiece I used a small magnifying lens I’d picked up in a junk store for a few cents. Altogether, I don’t suppose the telescope cost more than five dollars—though that was a lot of money to me when I was a kid.

  “We were living then in a run-down hotel my family owned on Third Avenue. When I’d assembled the telescope I went up on the roof and tried it out, among the jungle of TV antennas that covered every building in those days. It took me a while to get the mirror and eyepiece lined up, but I hadn’t made any mistakes and the thing worked. As an optical instrument it was probably lousy—after all, it was my first attempt—but it magnified at least fifty times and I could hardly wait until nightfall to try it on the stars.

  “I’d checked with the almanac, and knew that Saturn was high in the east after sunset. As soon as it was dark I was up on the roof again, with my crazy contraption of wood and glass propped between two chimneys. It was late fall, but I never noticed the cold, for the sky was full of stars—and they were all mine.

  “I took my time setting the focus as accurately as possible, using the first star that came into the field. Then I started hunting for Saturn, and soon discovered how hard it was to locate anything in a reflecting telescope that wasn’t properly mounted. But presently the planet shot across the field of view, I nudged the instrument a few inches this way and that—and there it was.

  “It was tiny, but it was perfect. I don’t think I breathed for a minute; I could hardly believe my eyes. After all the pictures, here was the reality. It looked like a toy hanging there in space, with the rings slightly open and tilted toward me. Even now, forty years later, I can remember thinking ‘It looks so artificial—like something from a Christmas tree!’ There was a single bright star to the left of it, and I knew that was Titan.”

  He paused, and for a moment we must have shared the same thoughts. For to both of us Titan was no longer merely the largest moon of Saturn—a point of light known only to astronomers. It was the fiercely hostile world upon which Endeavour had landed, and where three of my crewmates lay in lonely graves, farther from their homes than any of Mankind’s dead had ever rested before.

  “I don’t know how long I stared, straining my eyes and moving the telescope across the sky in jerky steps as Saturn rose above the city. I was a billion miles from New York: but presently New York caught up with me.

  “I told you about our hotel; it belonged to my mother, but my father ran it—not very well. It had been losing money for years, and all through my boyhood there had been continuous financial crises. So I don’t want to blame my father for drinking; he must have been half crazy with worry most of the time. And I had quite forgotten that I was supposed to be helping the clerk at the reception desk . . .

  “So Dad came looking for me, full of his own cares and knowing nothing about my dreams. He found me stargazing on the roof.

  “He wasn’t a cruel man—he couldn’t have understood the study and patience and care that had gone into my little telescope, or the wonders it had shown me during the short time I had used it. I don’t hate him any more, but I’ll remember all my life the splintering crack of my first and last mirror as it smashed against the brickwork.”

  There was nothing I could say. My initial resentment at this interruption had long since changed to curiosity. Already I sensed that there was much more to this story than I’d heard so far, and I’d noticed something else. The waitress was treating us with an exaggerated deference—only a little of which was directed at me.

  My companion toyed with the sugar bowl while I waited in silent sympathy. By this time I felt there was some bond between us, though I did not know exactly what it was.

  “I never built another telescope,” he said. “Something else broke, besides that mirror—something in my heart. Anyway, I was much too busy. Two things happened that turned my life upside down. Dad walked out on us, leaving me the head of the family. And then they pulled down the Third Avenue El.”

  He must have seen my puzzled look, for he grinned across the table at me.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t know about that. But when I was a kid, there was an elevated railroad down the middle of Third. It made the whole area dirty and noisy; the Avenue was a slum district of bars, pawn-shops and cheap hotels—like ours. All that changed when the El went; land values shot up, and we were suddenly prosperous. Dad came back quickly enough but it was too late; I was running the business. Before long I started moving across town—then across country. I wasn’t an absent-minded stargazer any more, and I gave Dad one of my smaller hotels, where he couldn’t do much harm.

  “It’s forty years since I looked at Saturn, but I’ve never forgotten that one glimpse, and last night your photographs brought it all back. I just wanted to say how grateful I am.”

  He fumbled in his wallet and pulled out a card.

  “I hope you’ll look me up when you’re in town again; you can be sure I’ll be there if you give any more lectures. Good luck—and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time.”

  Then he was gone, almost before I could say a word. I glanced at the card, put it away in my pocket, and finished my breakfast, rather thoughtfully.

  When I signed my check on the way out of the coffee shop I asked: “Who was that gentleman at my table? The boss?”

  The cashier looked at me as if I were mentally retarded.

  “I suppose you could call him that, sir,” she answered. “Of course he owns this hotel, but we’ve never seen him here before. He always stays at the Ambassador, when he’s in Chicago.”

  “And does he own that?” I said, without too much irony, for I’d already suspected the answer.

  “Why, yes. As well as—” and she rattled off a whole string of others, including the two biggest hotels in New York.

  I was impressed, and also rather amused, for it was now obvious that Mr. Perlman had come here with the deliberate intention of meeting me. It seemed a roundabout way of doing it; I knew nothing then, of his notorious shyness and secretiveness. From the first, he was never shy with me.

  Then I forgot about him for five years. (Oh, I should mention that when I asked for my bill, I was told I didn’t have one.) During that five years, I made my second trip.

  We knew what to expect this time, and weren’t going completely into the unknown. There were no more worries about fuel, because all we could ever use was waiting for us on Titan; we just had to pump its methane atmosphere into our tanks, and we’d made our plans accordingly. One after another, we visited all the nine moons; and then we went into the rings . . .

  There was little danger, yet it was a nerve-racking experience. The ring system is very thin, you know—only about twenty miles in thickness. We descended into it slowly and cautiously, after having matched its spin so that we were moving at exactly the same speed. It was like stepping onto a carrousel a hundred and seventy thousand miles across . . .

  But a ghostly kind of carrousel, because the rin
gs aren’t solid and you can look right through them. Close up, in fact, they’re almost invisible; the billions of separate particles that make them up are so widely spaced that all you see in your immediate neighborhood are occasional small chunks, drifting very slowly past. It’s only when you look into the distance that the countless fragments merge into a continuous sheet, like a hailstorm that sweeps around Saturn forever.

  That’s not my phrase, but it’s a good one. For when we brought our first piece of genuine Saturnian ring into the air lock, it melted down in a few minutes into a pool of muddy water. Some people think it spoils the magic to know that the rings—or ninety percent of them—are made of ordinary ice. But that’s a stupid attitude; they would be just as wonderful, and just as beautiful, if they were made of diamond.

  When I got back to Earth, in the first year of the new century, I started off on another lecture tour—only a short one, for now I had a family and wanted to see as much of it as possible. This time I ran into Mr. Perlman in New York, when I was speaking at Columbia and showing our movie, “Exploring Saturn.” (A misleading title, that, since the nearest we’d been to the planet itself was about twenty thousand miles. No one dreamed, in those days, that men would ever go down into the turbulent slush which is the closest thing Saturn has to a surface.)

  Mr. Perlman was waiting for me after the lecture. I didn’t recognize him, for I’d met about a million people since our last encounter. But when he gave his name, it all came back, so clearly that I realized he must have made a deep impression on my mind.

  Somehow he got me away from the crowd: though he disliked meeting people in the mass, he had an extraordinary knack of dominating any group when he found it necessary—and then clearing out before his victims knew what had happened. Though I saw him in action scores of times, I never knew exactly how he did it.

  At any rate, half an hour later we were having a superb dinner in an exclusive restaurant (his, of course). It was a wonderful meal, especially after the chicken and ice cream of the lecture circuit, but he made me pay for it. Metaphorically, I mean.

  Now all the facts and photos gathered by the two expeditions to Saturn were available to everyone, in hundreds of reports and books and popular articles. Mr. Perlman seemed to have read all the material that wasn’t too technical; what he wanted from me was something different. Even then, I put his interest down to that of a lonely, aging man, trying to recapture a dream that had been lost in youth. I was right; but that was only a fraction of the whole picture.

  He was after something that all the reports and articles failed to give. What did it feel like, he wanted to know, to wake up in the morning and see that great, golden globe with its scudding cloud belts dominating the sky? And the rings themselves—what did they do to your mind when they were so close that they filled the heavens from end to end?

  You want a poet, I said—not an engineer. But I’ll tell you this; however long you look at Saturn, and fly in and out among its moons, you can never quite believe it. Every so often you find yourself thinking: “It’s all a dream—a thing like that can’t be real.” And you go to the nearest view-port—and there it is taking your breath away.

  You must remember that, altogether apart from our nearness, we were able to look at the rings from angles and vantage points that are quite impossible from Earth, where you always see them turned toward the sun. We could fly into their shadow, and then they would no longer gleam like silver—they would be a faint haze, a bridge of smoke across the stars.

  And most of the time we could see the shadow of Saturn lying across the full width of the rings, eclipsing them so completely that it seemed as if a great bite had been taken out of them. It worked the other way too; on the day side of the planet, there would always be the shadow of the rings running like a dusky band parallel to the Equator and not far from it.

  Above all—though we did this only a few times—we could rise high above either pole of the planet and look down upon the whole stupendous system, so that it was spread out in plan beneath us. Then we could see that instead of the four visible from Earth, there were at least a dozen separate rings, merging one onto the other. When we saw this, our skipper made a remark that I’ve never forgotten. “This,” he said—and there wasn’t a trace of flippancy in the words—“is where the angels have parked their halos.”

  All this, and a lot more, I told Mr. Perlman in that little but oh-so-expensive restaurant just south of Central Park. When I’d finished, he seemed very pleased though he was silent for several minutes. Then he said, about as casually as you might ask the time of the next train at your local station: “Which would be the best satellite for a tourist resort?”

  When the words got through to me, I nearly choked on my hundred-year-old brandy. Then I said, very patiently and politely (for after all, I’d had a wonderful dinner): “Listen, Mr. Perlman. You know as well as I do that Saturn is nearly a billion miles from Earth—more than that, in fact, when we’re on opposite sides of the sun. Someone worked out that our round-trip tickets averaged seven and a half million dollars apiece—and, believe me, there was no first-class accommodation on Endeavour I or II. Anyway, no matter how much money he had, no one could book a passage to Saturn. Only scientists and space crews will be going there, for as far ahead as anyone can imagine.”

  I could see that my words had absolutely no effect: he merely smiled, as if he knew some secret hidden from me.

  “What you say is true enough now,” he answered, “but I’ve studied history. And I understand people—that’s my business. Let me remind you of a few facts.

  “Two or three centuries ago, almost all the world’s great tourist centers and beauty spots were as far away from civilization as Saturn is today. What did—oh Napoleon, let’s say—know about the Grand Canyon, Victoria Falls, Hawaii, Mount Everest? And look at the South Pole; it was reached for the first time when my father was a boy—but there’s been a hotel there for the whole of your lifetime.

  “Now it’s starting all over again. You can appreciate only the problems and difficulties, because you’re too close to them. Whatever they are, men will overcome them, as they’ve always done in the past.

  “For wherever there’s something strange or beautiful or novel, people will want to see it. The rings of Saturn are the greatest spectacle in the known universe: I’ve always guessed so, and now you’ve convinced me. Today it takes a fortune to reach them and the men who go there must risk their lives. So did the first men who flew—but now there are a million passengers in the air every second of the day and night.

  “The same thing is going to happen in space. It won’t happen in ten years, maybe not in twenty. But twenty-five is all it took, remember, before the first commercial flights started to the moon. I don’t think it will be as long for Saturn . . .

  “I won’t be around to see it—but when it happens, I want people to remember me. So—where should we build?”

  I still thought he was crazy, but at last I was beginning to understand what made him tick. And there was no harm in humoring him, so I gave the matter careful thought.

  “Mimas is too close,” I said, “and so are Encelades and Tethys.” (I don’t mind telling you, those names were tough after all that brandy.) “Saturn just fills the sky, and you think it’s falling on top of you. Besides, they aren’t solid enough—they’re nothing but overgrown snowballs. Dione and Rhea are better—you get a magnificent view from both of them. But all these inner moons are so tiny: even Rhea is only eight hundred miles across, and the others are much smaller.

  “I don’t think there’s any real argument; it will have to be Titan. That’s a man-sized satellite—it’s a lot bigger than our moon, and very nearly as large as Mars. There’s a reasonable gravity too—about a fifth of Earth’s—so your guests won’t be floating all over the place. And it will always be a major refueling point because of its methane atmosphere, which should be an important factor in your calculations. Every ship that goes out to Saturn will to
uch down there.”

  “And the outer moons?”

  “Oh, Hyperion, Japetus, and Phoebe are much too far away. You have to look hard to see the rings at all from Phoebe! Forget about them. Stick to good old Titan. Even if the temperature is two hundred below zero, and ammonia snow isn’t the sort of stuff you’d want to ski on.”

  He listened to me very carefully, and if he thought I was making fun of his impractical, unscientific notions he gave no sign of it. We parted soon afterward—I don’t remember anything more of that dinner—and then it must have been fifteen years before we met again. He had no further use for me in all that time; but when he wanted me, he called.

  I see now what he had been waiting for; his vision had been clearer than mine. He couldn’t have guessed, of course, that the rocket would go the way of the steam engine within less than a century—but he knew something better would come along, and I think he chanced Saunderson’s early work on the Paragravity Drive. But it was not until they started building fusion plants that could warm up a hundred square miles of a world as cold as Pluto that he got in contact with me again.

  He was a very old man, and dying. They told me how rich he was, and I could hardly believe it. Not until he showed me the elaborate plans and the beautiful models his experts had prepared with such remarkable lack of publicity.

  He sat in his wheel chair like a wrinkled mummy, watching my face as I studied the models and blueprints. Then he said: “Captain, I have a job for you . . .”

  So here I am. It’s just like running a spaceship, of course—many of the technical problems are identical. And by this time I’d be too old to command a ship, so I’m very grateful to Mr. Perlman.

  There goes the gong. If the ladies are ready, I suggest we walk down to dinner through the Observation Lounge.

  Even after all these years, I still like to watch Saturn rising—and tonight it’s almost full.

  The Man Who Ploughed the Sea