Prelude to Space

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The book was the same—but where, now, was the music of the singing words that once had set his heart on fire? He was too wise and too old; the tricks of alliteration and repetition could not deceive him now, and the emptiness of thought was all too clear. Yet ever and again there would come a faint echo from the past, and for a moment the blood would rush to his cheeks as it had done those forty years ago. Sometimes a single phrase would be enough:

  “O Love’s lute heard about the lands of Death!”

  Sometimes a couplet:

  “Until God loosen over land and sea

  The thunder of the trumpets of the night”

  The Director-General stared into space. He himself was loosening such a thunder as the world had never heard before. Upon the Indian Ocean the sailors would look up from their ships as those roaring motors stormed across the sky; the tea-planters of Ceylon would hear them, now faint and thin, going westwards into Africa. The Arabian oil-fields would catch the last reverberations as they filtered down from the fringe of space.

  Sir Robert turned the pages idly, halting wherever the flying words caught his mind.

  “It is not much that a man can save

  On the sands of life, in the straits of time,

  Who swims in sight of the third great wave,

  That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.”

  What had he saved from Time? Far more, he knew, than most men. Yet he had been almost forty before he had found any aim in life. His love for mathematics had always been with him, but for long it had been a purposeless passion. Even now, it seemed that chance had made him what he was.

  “There lived a singer in France of old

  By the tideless dolorous midland sea.

  In a land of sand and ruin and gold

  There shone one woman, and none but she.”

  The magic failed and faded. His mind went back to the war years; when he had fought in that silent battle of the laboratories. While men were dying on land and sea and air, he had been tracing the paths of electrons through interlocking magnetic fields. Nothing could have been more remotely academic; yet from the work in which he had shared had come the greatest tactical weapon of the war.

  It had been a small step from radar to celestial mechanics, from electron orbits to the paths of planets round the sun. The techniques he had applied in the little world of the magnetron could be used again on the cosmic scale. Perhaps he had been lucky; after only ten years of work he had made his reputation through his attack on the three-body problem. Ten years later, somewhat to everyone’s surprise—including his own—he had been Astronomer Royal.

  “The pulse of war and passion of wonder,

  The heavens that murmur, the sounds that shine,

  The stars that sing and the loves that thunder,

  The music burning at heart like wine…”

  He might have held that post efficiently and with success for the remainder of his life, but the Zeitgeist of astronautics had been too strong for him. His mind had told him that the crossing of space was about to come, but how near it was he had not at first recognized. When that knowledge had finally dawned, he had known at last the purpose of his life, and the long years of toil had reaped their harvest.

  “Ah, had I not taken my life up and given

  All that life gives and the years let go,

  The wine and honey the balm and leaven,

  The dreams reared high and the hopes brought low?”

  He flicked the yellowing pages a dozen at a time, until his eyes caught the narrow columns of print for which he had been searching. Here at least the magic lingered; here nothing had altered, and the words still beat against his brain with the old, insistent rhythm. There had been a time when the verses, head to tail in an endless chain, had threaded their way through his mind for hour upon hour until the very words had lost their meaning:

  “Then star nor sun shall waken,

  Nor any change of light:

  Nor sound of waters shaken,

  Nor any sound or sight:

  Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,

  Nor days nor things diurnal;

  Only the sleep eternal

  In an eternal night.”

  The eternal night would come, and too soon for Man’s liking. But at least before they guttered and died, he would have known the stars; before it faded like a dream, the Universe would have yielded up its secrets to his mind. Or if not to his, then to the minds that would come after and would finish what he had now begun.

  Sir Robert closed the slim volume and placed it back upon the shelf. His voyage into the past had ended in the future, and it was time to return.

  Beside his bed, the telephone began to call for attention in angry, urgent bursts.

  No one ever learned a great deal about Jefferson Wilkes, simply because there was very little indeed to know about him. He had been a junior accountant in a Pittsburgh factory for almost thirty years, during which time he had been promoted once. He did his work with a laborious thoroughness that was the despair of his employers. Like millions of his contemporaries, he had practically no understanding of the civilization in which he found himself. Twenty-five years ago he had married, and no one was surprised to discover that his wife had left him in a matter of months.

  Not even his friends—though there was no evidence that he had ever possessed any—would have maintained that Jefferson Wilkes was a profound thinker. Yet there was one matter to which, after his fashion, he had given very serious thought.

  The world would never know what had first turned the pathetic little mind of Jefferson Wilkes outwards towards the stars. It was more than probable that the motive had been a desire to escape from the drab reality of his everyday life. Whatever the reason, he had studied the writings of those who predicted the conquest of space. And he had decided that, at all costs, it must be stopped.

  As far as could be gathered, Jefferson Wilkes believed that the attempt to enter space would bring down upon humanity some stupendous metaphysical doom. There was even evidence that he considered the Moon to be Hell, or at least Purgatory. Any premature arrival by mankind in those infernal regions would obviously have incalculable and—to say the least—unfortunate consequences.

  To gain support for his ideas, Jefferson Wilkes did what thousands before him had done. He sought to convert others to his beliefs by forming an organization to which he gave the declamatory title: “The Rockets Must Not Rise!” Since any doctrine, however fantastic, will gain some adherents, Wilkes eventually acquired a few score supporters among the obscurer religious sects that flourish exotically in the western United States. Very swiftly, however, the microscopic movement was rent by schism and counter-schism. At the end of it all, the Founder was left with shattered nerves and depleted finances. If one wishes to draw so fine a distinction, it may be said that he then became insane.

  When the “Prometheus” was built, Wilkes decided that her departure could only be prevented by his own efforts. A few weeks before the take-off, he liquidated his meager assets and withdrew his remaining money from the bank. He found that he would still need one hundred and fifty-five dollars to take him to Australia.

  The disappearance of Jefferson Wilkes surprised and pained his employers, but after a hasty inspection of his books they made no efforts to trace him. One does not call in the police when, after thirty years of faithful service, a member of the staff steals one hundred and fifty-five dollars from a safe containing several thousand.

  Wilkes had no difficulty in reaching Luna City, and when he was there no one took any notice of him. Interplanetary’s staff probably thought he was one of the hundreds of reporters around the base, while the reporters took him for a member of the staff. He was, in any case, the sort of man who could have walked straight into Buckingham Palace without attracting the slightest attention—and the sentries would have sworn that no one had entered.

  What thoughts passed through the narrow gateway of Jefferson Wilkes’s mind when he saw the “Prom
etheus” lying on her launching cradle, no one will ever know. Perhaps until that moment he had not realized the magnitude of the task he had set himself. He could have done great damage with a bomb—but though bombs may be come by in Pittsburgh as in all great cities, the ways of acquiring them are not common knowledge—particularly among respectable accountants.

  From the rope barriers, whose purpose he could not fully comprehend, he had watched the stores being loaded and the engineers making their final tests. He had noticed that, when night came, the great ship was left unattended beneath the floodlights, and that even these were switched off in the small hours of the morning.

  Would it not be far better, he thought, to let the ship leave Earth but to ensure that it would never return? A damaged ship could be repaired; one that vanished without explanation would be a far more effective deterrent—a warning that might be heeded.

  Jefferson Wilkes’s mind was innocent of science, but he knew that a spaceship must carry its own air-supply, and he knew that air was kept in cylinders. What would be simpler than to empty them so that the loss would not be discovered until too late? He did not wish to harm the crew, and was sincerely sorry that they would come to such an end, but he saw no alternative.

  It would be tedious to enumerate the defects in Jefferson Wilkes’s brilliant plan. The air supply of the “Prometheus” was not even carried in cylinders, and had Wilkes managed to empty the liquid oxygen tanks he would have had some unpleasantly frigid surprises. The routine instrument check would, in any case, have told the crew exactly what had happened before take-off, and even without an oxygen reserve the air-conditioning plant could have maintained a breathable atmosphere for many hours. There would have been time to enter one of the emergency return orbits which could be quickly computed for just such a calamity.

  Last, and far from least, Wilkes had to get aboard the ship. He did not doubt that this could be done, for the gantry was left in position every night, and he had studied it so carefully that he could climb it even in the dark. When the crowd had been surging around the head of the ship, he had mingled with it and had seen no sign of locks on that curious, inward-opening door.

  He waited in an empty hangar at the edge of the field until the thin moon had set. It was very cold, and he had not been prepared for this since it was summertime in Pennsylvania. But his mission had made him resolute and when at last the blazing floodlights died he had started to cross that empty sea of concrete towards the black wings spread beneath the stars.

  10

  The rope barrier halted him and he ducked under it. A few minutes later his groping hands felt a metal framework in the darkness before him, and he made his way around the base of the gantry. He paused at the foot of the metal steps, listening into the night. The world was utterly silent; on the horizon he could see the glow of such lights as were still burning in Luna City. A few hundred yards away he could just make out the dim silhouettes of buildings and hangars, but they were dark and deserted. He began to climb the steps.

  He paused again, listening, at the first platform twenty feet from the ground, and again he was reassured. His electric torch and the tools he thought he might need were heavy in his pockets; he felt a little proud of his foresight and the smoothness with which he had carried out his plan.

  That was the last step: he was on the upper platform. He gripped his torch with one hand, and a moment later the walls of the spaceship were smooth and cold beneath his fingers.

  Into the building of the “Prometheus” had gone millions of pounds and more millions still of dollars.

  The scientists who had obtained such sums from governments and great industrial undertakings were not exactly fools. To most men—though not to Jefferson Wilkes—it would have seemed improbable that the fruit of all their labors should be left unguarded and unprotected in the night.

  Many years ago the planning staff had foreseen the possibility of sabotage by religious fanatics, and one of Interplanetary’s most cherished files contained the threatening letters which these people had been illogical enough to write. All reasonable precautions had therefore been taken—and taken by experts, some of whom had themselves spent years during the War sabotaging Axis or Allied equipment.

  Tonight the watchman in the concrete bunker at the edge of the macadam was a law student named Achmet Singh, who was earning a little money during his vacation in a way that suited him very well. He had only to be at his post eight hours a day, and the job gave him ample time for study. When Jefferson Wilkes came to the first rope barrier, Achmet Singh was fast asleep—as, surprisingly enough, he was quite expected to be. But five seconds later, he was wide awake.

  Singh punched the alarm cut-off button, and moved swiftly across to the control panel, cursing fluently in three languages and four religions. This was the second time this had happened on his watch: before, a stray dog belonging to one of the staff had set off the alarms. The same thing had probably happened again.

  He switched on the image converter, waiting impatiently for the few seconds it took the tubes to warm up. Then he grasped the projector controls and started to survey the ship.

  To Achmet Singh, it seemed that a purple searchlight was shining across the concrete towards the launching platform. Through the beam of the searchlight, utterly unconscious of its presence, a man was cautiously feeling his way towards the “Prometheus.” It was impossible not to laugh at his movements as he groped blindly along while all around him was bathed with light. Achmet Singh followed him steadily with the beam of the infra-red projector until he came to the gantry. The secondary alarms went into action then, and again Singh switched them off. He would not act, he decided, until he had learned the midnight prowler’s motives.

  When Jefferson Wilkes paused with some satisfaction on the first platform, Achmet Singh secured an excellent photograph which would be conclusive evidence in any court of law. He waited until Wilkes had reached the airlock itself; then he decided to act.

  The blast of light which pinned Wilkes against the walls of the spaceship blinded him as effectively as the darkness through which he had been feeling his way. For a moment the shock was so paralyzing that he could not move. Then a great voice roared at him out of the night.

  “What are you doing there? Come down at once!”

  Automatically he began to stumble down the steps. He had reached the lower platform before his mind lost its paralysis and he looked desperately around for a means of escape. By shielding his eyes, he could now see a little; the fatal ring of floodlights around the “Prometheus” was only a hundred yards across and beyond it lay darkness and, perhaps, safety.

  The voice called again from beyond the pool of light.

  “Hurry up! Come this way—we’ve got you covered!”

  The “we” was pure invention on the part of Singh, though it was true that reinforcements in the form of two annoyed and sleepy police sergeants were on the way.

  Jefferson Wilkes finished his slow descent, and stood trembling with reaction on the concrete, steadying himself against the gantry. He remained almost motionless for half a minute: then, as Achmet Singh had anticipated, he suddenly bolted around the ship and disappeared. He would be running towards the desert, and could be rounded up easily enough, but it would save time if he could be scared back again. The watchman knocked down another loudspeaker switch.

  When that same voice roared at him again out of the darkness ahead, where he had thought to find safety, the terrified little spirit of Jefferson Wilkes finally despaired. In unreasoning fear, like some wild animal, he ran back to the ship and tried to hide himself in its shadow. Yet even now the impulse that had brought him round the world still drove him blindly on, though he was scarcely aware of his motives or his actions. He began to work his way along the base of the ship, always keeping in the shadows.

  The great hollow shaft only a few feet above his head seemed to offer a second way into the machine—or, at least, a chance of hiding until he could escape. In ordinary
times, he could never have made that climb over the smooth metal walls, but fear and determination gave him strength. Achmet Singh, looking into his television screen a hundred yards away, became suddenly ashen. He began to speak, quickly and urgently, into his microphone.

  Jefferson Wilkes did not hear him; he scarcely noticed that the great voice from the night was no longer peremptory, but pleading. It meant nothing to him now; he was conscious only of the dark tunnel ahead. Holding his torch in one hand, he began to crawl along it.

  The walls were made of some gray, rock-like material that was hard yet oddly warm to the touch. It seemed to Wilkes as if he was entering a cave with perfectly circular walls; after a few yards it widened and he could almost walk if he bent double. Around him now was a meaningless mosaic of metal bars and that strange gray rock—the most refractory of all ceramics—over which he had been crawling.

  He could go no farther; the cave had suddenly divided into a series of branching passages too small for him to enter. Shining his torch along them he could see that the walls were pierced with jets and nozzles. He might have done some damage here, but they were all beyond his reach.

  Jefferson Wilkes slumped down on the hard, unyielding floor. The torch fell from his nerveless fingers and the darkness enfolded him again. He was too exhausted for disappointment or regret. He did not notice, nor could he have understood, the faint unwavering glow that was burning in the walls around him.

  A long time later, some noise in the external world drew his mind back from wherever it had fled. He sat up and stared around him, not knowing where he was or how he had come here. Far away he could see a faint circle of light, the mouth of this mysterious cavern. Beyond that opening were voices and the sounds of machines moving to and fro. He knew that they were hostile and that he must remain here where they could not find him.