Prelude to Space

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Shock diffusers,” he explained. “It’s quite impossible to get one kind of air-intake to operate over the whole speed range from five hundred miles an hour at sea level to eighteen thousand miles an hour at the top of the stratosphere. Those gadgets are adjustable and can be moved in and out. Even so the whole thing’s shockingly inefficient and only the fact that we’ve unlimited power makes it possible at all. Let’s see if we can get aboard.”

  Her stubby undercarriage made it easy to enter the machine through the airlock door in her side. The rear of the ship, Dirk noticed, had been carefully fenced off with great movable barriers so that no one could approach it. He commented on this to Collins.

  “That part of ‘Beta,’” said the aerodynamicist grimly, “is Strictly Out of Bounds until the year 2000 or so.”

  Dirk looked at him blankly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. Once the atomic drive’s started to operate, and the piles get radioactive, nothing can ever go near them again. They won’t be safe to touch for years.”

  Even Dirk, who was certainly no engineer, began to realize the practical difficulties this must involve.

  “Then how the devil do you inspect the motors, or put things right when they’ve gone wrong? Don’t tell me that your designs are so perfect that there aren’t any breakdowns!”

  Collins smiled.

  “That’s the biggest headache of atomic engineering. You’ll have a chance to see how it’s done later.”

  There was surprisingly little to see aboard “Beta,” since most of the ship consisted of fuel tanks and motors, invisible and unapproachable behind their barriers of shielding. The long, thin cabin at the nose might have been the control room of any airliner, but was more elaborately appointed since the crew of pilot and maintenance engineer would be living aboard her for nearly three weeks. They would have a very boring time, and Dirk was not surprised to see that the ship’s equipment included a microfilm library and projector. It would be unfortunate, to say the least, if the two men had incompatible personalities: but no doubt the psychologists had checked this point with meticulous care.

  Partly because he understood so little of what he saw, and partly because he was more anxious to go aboard “Alpha,” Dirk soon grew tired of examining the control room. He walked to the tiny, thick windows and looked at the view ahead.

  “Beta” was pointing out across the desert, almost parallel with the launching track over which she would be racing in a few days’ time. It was” easy to imagine that, even now, she was waiting to leap into the sky and to climb towards the stratosphere with her precious burden…

  The floor suddenly trembled as the ship began to move. Dirk felt a cold hand clutch at his heart and he almost overbalanced, only saving himself by grabbing at a rail in front of him. Not until then did he see the little tractor fussing around the ship and realize he had made a fool of himself. He hoped that Ray hadn’t noticed his behavior, for he must certainly have turned pretty green.

  “O.K.,” said Collins at last, having finished his careful inspection. “Now let’s look at ‘Alpha.’ “

  They climbed out of the machine, which had now been pushed farther back into its surrounding barriers.

  “I guess they’re doing something to the motors,” said Collins. “They’ve made—let’s see—fifteen runs now without any trouble. Which is quite a feather in Prof. Maxton’s cap.”

  Dirk was still wondering how “they” were doing anything at all to those terrifying inaccessible engines, but another query had crossed his mind.

  “Listen,” he said, “there’s one thing I’ve been meaning to have out with you for some time. What sex is the ‘Prometheus’? Everyone seems to use he, she or it quite impartially. I don’t expect scientists to understand grammar, but still—”

  Collins chuckled.

  “That’s just the kind of point we are particular about,” he said. “It’s been laid down officially somewhere. Although ‘Prometheus’ is, of course, ‘he,’ we call the entire ship, ‘she’ as in nautical practice. ‘Beta’ is also ‘she,’ but ‘Alpha,’ the spaceship, is an ‘it.’ What could be simpler?”

  “Quite a lot of things. However, I suppose it’s O.K. as long as you’re consistent. I’ll jump on you when you aren’t.”

  “Alpha” was an even more compact mass of motors and fuel tanks than the bigger ship. It had, of course, no fins or aerofoils of any kind, but there were signs that many oddly-shaped devices had been retracted into the hull. Dirk asked his friend about these.

  “Those will be the radio antennae, periscopes, and outriggers for the steering jets,” explained Collins. “Back at the rear you’ll see where the big shock absorbers for the lunar landing have been retracted. When ‘Alpha’s’ out in space they can all be extended and the crew can check ‘em over to see if they’re working properly. They can then stay out for good, since there’s no air resistance for the rest of the voyage.”

  There was radiation screening around “Alpha’s.” rocket units, so it was impossible to get a complete view of the spaceship. It reminded Dirk of the fuselage of an old-fashioned airliner which had lost its wings or was yet to acquire them. In some ways “Alpha” strongly resembled a giant artillery shell, with an unexpected circlet of portholes near the nose. The cabin for the crew occupied less than a fifth of the rocket’s length. Behind it were the multitudinous machines and controls which would be needed on the half-million-mile journey.

  Collins roughly indicated the different sections of the machine.

  “Just behind the cabin,” he said, “we’ve put the airlock and the main controls which may have to be adjusted in flight. Then come the fuel tanks—six of them—and the refrigeration plant to keep the methane liquid. Next we have the pumps and turbines, and then the motor itself which extends halfway along the ship. There’s a great wad of shielding around it, and the whole of the cabin is in the radiation shadow so that the crew gets the maximum protection. But the rest of the ship’s ‘hot,’ though the fuel itself helps a good deal with the shielding.”

  The tiny airlock was just large enough to hold two people, and Collins went ahead to reconnoiter. He warned Dirk in advance that the cabin would probably be too full to admit visitors, but a moment later he emerged again and signaled for him to enter.

  “Everyone except Jimmy Richards and Digger Clinton has gone over to the workshops,” he said. “We’re in luck—there’s bags of room.”

  That, Dirk soon discovered, was a remarkable exaggeration. The cabin had been designed for three people living under zero gravity, when walls and floor were freely interchangeable and its whole volume could be used for any purpose. Now that the machine was lying horizontally on Earth, conditions were decidedly cramped.

  Clinton, the Australian electronics specialist, was half buried in a vast wiring diagram which he had been forced to wrap around himself in order to get it into the cabin. He looked, Dirk thought, rather like a caterpillar spinning its cocoon. Richards seemed to be running through some tests on the controls.

  “Don’t look alarmed,” he said as Dirk watched him anxiously. “We won’t take off—there’s nothing in the fuel tanks!”

  “I’m getting rather a complex about this,” Dirk confessed. “Next time I come aboard, I’d like to make sure that we’re tied down to a nice, fat anchor.”

  “As some anchors go,” laughed Richards, “it needn’t be such a big one. ‘Alpha’ hasn’t much thrust—about a hundred tons. But it can keep it up for a long time!”

  “Only a hundred tons thrust? But she weighs three times that!”

  Collins coughed delicately in the background.

  ‘“It, I thought we decided,” he remarked. However, Richards seemed willing to adopt the new gender.

  “Yes, but she’s in free space when she starts, and when she takes off from the Moon her effective weight will be only about thirty-five tons. So everything’s under control.”

  The layout of “Alpha’s” cabin seem
ed to be the result of a pitched battle between science and surrealism. The design had been determined by the fact that for eight days the occupants would have no gravity at all, and would know nothing of “up” or “down”; while for a somewhat longer period, when the ship was standing on the Moon, there would be a low gravitational field along the axis of the machine. As at the moment the center-line was horizontal, Dirk had a feeling that he should really be walking on the walls or roof.

  Yet it was a moment he would remember all his life, this visit to the first of all spaceships. The little portholes through which he was now looking would, in a few days’ time, be staring out across the lonely lunar plains; the sky above would not be blue, but black and studded with stars. If he closed his eyes, he could almost imagine he was on the Moon already, and that if he looked through the upper portholes he would see the Earth hanging in the heavens. Though he went over the ship several times again, Dirk was never able to recapture the emotions of this first visit.

  There was a sudden scrambling noise in the airlock and Collins said hastily:

  “We’d better get out before the rush starts and someone gets trampled to death. The boys are coming back.”

  He managed to hold off the boarding party long enough for them to make good their escape. Dirk saw that Hassell, Leduc, Taine and three other men were all preparing to enter the ship—several with large pieces of equipment—and his mind boggled as he tried to picture conditions within. He hoped that nothing or nobody got broken.

  Down on the concrete apron he relaxed and stretched himself again. He glanced up at one of the portholes to see what was happening in the ship, but was hardly surprised to find his view effectively blocked. Someone was sitting on the window.

  “Well,” said Collins, offering him a welcome cigarette. “What do you think of our little toys?”

  “I can see where all the money’s gone,” Dirk answered. “It seems an awful lot of machinery to take three men just across the road, as you put it.”

  “There’s some more to see yet. Let’s go over to the launcher.”

  The launching track was impressive by its very simplicity. Two sets of rails began in the concrete apron—and went straight out to disappear over the horizon. It was the finest example of perspective that Dirk had ever seen.

  The catapult shuttle was a huge metal carriage with arms that would grasp the “Prometheus” until the ship had gained flying speed. It would be just too bad, Dirk thought, if they failed to release at the right time.

  “Launching five hundred tons at as many m.p.h. must take quite a generating plant,” he said to Collins. “Why doesn’t the ‘Prometheus’ take off under her own power?”

  “Because with that initial loading she stalls at four-fifty, and the ramjets don’t operate until just above that. So we have to get up speed first. The energy for the launch comes from the main power station over there; that smaller building beside it houses a battery of flywheels which are brought up to speed just before the take-off. Then they’re coupled directly to the generators.”

  “I see,” said Dirk. “You wind up the elastic, and away she goes.”

  “That’s the idea,” Collins replied “When ‘Alpha’s’ launched, ‘Beta’ isn’t overloaded any more, and can be brought in to land at a reasonable speed—less than two-hundred and fifty miles an hour; which is easy to anyone who makes a hobby of flying two-hundred-ton gliders!”

  3

  The milling crowd in the little hangar became suddenly quiet as the Director-General climbed up on to the dais. He had spurned amplifiers, and his voice rang strongly between the metal walls. As he spoke, hundreds of stylos began to race over hundreds of pads.

  “I’d like,” Sir Robert began, “to have a few words with you now that everyone’s here. We’re particularly anxious to assist you in your job, and to give you every opportunity of reporting the take-off, which as you know is in five days’ time.

  “First of all, you’ll realize that it’s physically impossible to let everyone look over the ship. We’ve admitted as many as we could in the last week, but after tomorrow we can accept no more visitors aboard. The engineers will be making their final adjustments then—and I might also say that we’ve already had one or two cases of—ahem!—souvenir hunting.

  “You’ve all had a chance of selecting observation sites along the launching track. There should be plenty of room for everyone in the first four kilometers. But remember—no one must go past the red barrier at five kilometers. That’s where the jets start firing, and it’s still slightly radioactive from previous launchings. When the blast opens up, it will spray fission products over a wide area. We’ll give the all-clear as soon as it’s safe for you to collect the automatic cameras you have mounted out there.

  “A number of people have asked when the radiation shields are being taken away from the ships so that they can be seen properly. We’ll be doing this tomorrow afternoon and you can come and watch then. Bring binoculars or telescopes if you want to look at the jet units—you won’t be allowed closer than a hundred yards. And if anyone thinks this is a lot of nonsense, there are two people in hospital here who sneaked up to have a good look and now wish they hadn’t.

  “If for any reason there’s a last-minute hold-up, launching will be delayed twelve hours, twenty-four hours, or, at the most, thirty-six hours. After that we’ll have to wait for the next lunation—that is, for four weeks. It makes very little difference when we go to the Moon, as far as the ship is concerned, but we’re anxious to land in daylight in the region we know best.

  “The two components will separate about an hour after take-off. It should be possible to see ‘Alpha’s’ blast if the rocket is above the horizon when it begins its powered orbit. We will be relaying any broadcast messages over the camp speaker system, and on our local wave-length.

  ” ‘Alpha’ should be on its way to the Moon, in free fall, about ninety minutes after take-off. We expect the first broadcast about then. After that, there will be nothing much happening for three days, when the braking maneuvers begin, about thirty thousand miles from the Moon. If for any reason the fuel consumption has been too high, there will be no landing. The ship will be turned into an orbit around the Moon, at a height of a few hundred kilometers, and will circle it until the time for the precomputed return flight.

  “Now, are there any questions?”

  There was silence for a minute. Then someone from the back of the crowd called out:

  “When do we know who’s going to be in the crew, sir?”

  The Director-General gave a worried little smile.

  “Probably tomorrow. But please remember—this thing is much too big for personalities. It doesn’t matter a damn who actually goes on the first flight. The journey itself is what counts.”

  “Can we talk to the crew when the ship’s in space?”

  “Yes, there will be limited opportunities for doing that. We hope to arrange a general broadcast once a day. And, of course, we’ll be exchanging fixes and technical information continuously, so the ship will always be in contact with ground stations somewhere on Earth.”

  “What about the actual landing on the Moon—how’s that being broadcast?”

  “The crew will be much too busy to give running commentaries for our benefits. But the microphones will be live, so we’ll have a good idea of what’s happening. Also the observatories will be able to see the jet when it’s firing. It will probably create quite a disturbance when it hits the Moon.”

  “What’s the program after the landing, sir?”

  “The crew will decide it in the light of circumstances. Before they leave the ship, they’ll broadcast a description of everything they see, and the television camera will be set panning. So we should have some really good pictures—it’s a full color system, by the way.

  “That will take about an hour, and will give time for any dust and radiation products to disperse. Then two members of the crew will put on spacesuits and start exploring. They will radio
back their impressions to the ship, and these will be relayed directly to Earth.

  “We hope it will be possible to make a fair survey of a region about ten kilometers across, but we’re taking no risks at all. Thanks to the television link, anything that’s discovered can be shown immediately to us back on Earth. What we’re particularly anxious to find, of course, are mineral deposits from which we can manufacture fuel on the Moon. We’ll naturally be looking for signs of life as well, but no one will be more surprised than us if we find any.”

  “If you catch a Selenite,” said someone facetiously, “will you bring him back for the zoo?”

  “Certainly not!” said Sir Robert firmly, but with a twinkle in his eye. “If we start that sort of thing, we’re likely to end up in zoos ourselves.”

  “When will the ship be coming back?” asked another voice.

  “It will land in the early morning, and take off again in the late afternoon, lunar time. That means a stay of about eight of our days. The return trip lasts four and a half days, so the total absence will be sixteen to seventeen days.

  “No more questions? Right, then I’ll leave it at that. But there’s one other thing. To make sure that everyone has a clear idea of the technical background, we’ve arranged three talks in the next few days. They’ll be given by Taine,

  Richards and Clinton, and each will cover his special line of territory—but in non-technical language.

  I strongly advise you not to miss them. Thank you!”

  The ending of the address could not have been more perfectly timed. As the Director-General stepped down from the dais, a sudden, tremendous thunder came rolling up across the desert, setting the steel hangar reverberating like a drum.

  Three miles away, “Alpha” was testing its motors at perhaps a tenth of their full power. It was a sound that tore at the ear drums and set the teeth on edge; what it would be like at full thrust was beyond imagination.

  Beyond imagination, and beyond knowledge, for no one would ever hear it. When “Alpha’s” rockets fired again, the ship would be in the eternal silence between the worlds, where the explosion of an atomic bomb is as soundless as the clash of snowflakes beneath a winter moon.