In quiet, conversational tones the loud-speakers along the track were saying: “Instrument check completed: launching generators running at half speed: one hour to go.
The words came rolling back across the desert, muffled by distance, from the further speakers: “One hour to go—hour to go—go—go—go.” until they had died away into the northwest.
“I think we’d better get into position,” said Professor Maxton. “It’s going to take us some time to drive through this crowd. Take a good look at ‘Alpha’—it’s the last opportunity you’ll have.”
The announcer was speaking again, but this time his words were not intended for them. Dirk realized that he was overhearing part of a world-wide sequence of instructions.
“All sounding stations should be ready to fire. Sumatra, India, Iran—let us have your readings within the next fifteen minutes.”
Many miles away in the desert, something went screaming up into the sky, leaving behind it a pure white vapor trail that might have been drawn with a ruler. While Dirk watched, the long milky column began to writhe and twist as the winds of the stratosphere dispersed it.
“Met rocket,” said Collins, answering his unspoken question. “We’ve got a chain of them along the flight path, so we’ll know pressures and temperatures all the way up to the top of the atmosphere. Just before the take-off, the pilot of ‘Beta’ will be warned if there’s anything unusual ahead of him. That’s one worry that Leduc won’t have. There’s no weather out in space!”
Across Asia, the slim rockets with their fifty kilograms of instruments were climbing through the stratosphere on their way to space. Their fuel had been exhausted in the first few seconds of flight, but their speed was great enough to carry them a hundred kilometers from the Earth. As they rose—some in sunlight, others still in darkness—they sent back to the ground a continual stream of radio impulses, which would be caught and translated and passed on to Australia. Presently they would fall back to Earth, their parachutes would blossom, and most of them would be found and used again. Others, not so fortunate, would fall into the sea or, perhaps, end their days as tribal gods in the jungles of Borneo.
The three-mile drive along the crowded and very primitive road took them nearly twenty minutes, and more than once Professor Maxton had to make a detour into the no-man’s-land which he himself had put out of bounds. The concentration of cars and spectators was greatest when they came to the five kilometer mark-—and ended abruptly at a barrier of red-painted poles.
A small platform had been erected here from old packing cases, and this improvised stand was already occupied by Sir Robert Derwent and several of his staff. Also present, Dirk noticed with interest, were Hassell and Clinton. He wondered what thoughts were passing through their minds.
From time to time the Director-General made comments into a microphone, and there were one or two portable transmitters around. Dirk, who had vaguely expected to see batteries of instruments, was a little disappointed. He realized that all the technical operations were being carried out elsewhere, and this was merely an observation post.
“Twenty-five minutes to go,” said the loud-speakers. “Launching generators will now run up to full operating speed. All radar-tracking stations and observatories in the main network should be standing by.”
From the low platform, almost the whole of the launching track could be seen. To the right were the massed crowds and beyond them the low buildings of the airport. The “Prometheus” was clearly visible on the horizon, and from time to time the sunlight caught her sides so that they glittered like mirrors.
“Fifteen minutes to go.”
Leduc and his companions would be lying in those curious seats, waiting for them to tilt under the first surge of acceleration. Yet it was strange to think that they would have nothing to do for almost an hour, when the separation of the ships would take place high above the Earth. All the initial responsibility lay upon the pilot of “Beta,” who would get very little credit for his share in the proceedings—though in any case he was merely repeating what he had done a dozen times before.
“Ten minutes to go. All aircraft are reminded of their safety instructions.”
The minutes were ticking past: an age was dying and a new one was being born. And suddenly the impersonal voice from the loud-speakers recalled to Dirk that morning, thirty-three years ago, when another group of scientists had stood waiting in another desert, preparing to unleash the energies that power the suns.
“Five minutes to go. All heavy electrical loads must be shed. Domestic circuits will be cut immediately.”
A great silence had come over the crowd; all eyes were fixed upon those shining wings along the skyline. Somewhere close at hand a child, frightened by the stillness, began to cry.
“One minute to go. Warning rockets away.”
There was a great “Swoosh!” from the empty desert over on the left, and a ragged line of crimson flares began to drift slowly down the sky. Some helicopters which had been edging forward minute by minute went hastily into reverse.
“Automatic take-off controller now in operation. Synchronized timing signal—Now!”
There was a “click” as the circuit was changed, and the faint rushing of long-distant static came from the speakers. Then there boomed over the desert a sound which, through its very familiarity, could not have been more unexpected.
In Westminster, half way round the world, Big Ben was preparing to strike the hour.
Dirk glanced at Professor Maxton, and saw that he too was completely taken aback. But there was a faint smile on the Director-General’s lips, and Dirk remembered that for a half a century Englishmen all over the world had waited beside their radios for that sound from the land which they might never see again. He had a sudden vision of other exiles, in the near or far future, listening upon strange planets to those same bells ringing out across the deeps of space.
A booming silence seemed to fill the desert as the chimes of the last quarter died away, echoing in the distance from one loud-speaker to the next. Then the first stroke of the hour thundered over the desert, and over the waiting world. The speaker circuit was suddenly cut.
Yet nothing had changed: the “Prometheus” still lay brooding on the horizon like a great metal moth. Then Dirk saw that the space between her wings and the skyline was a little less than it had been, and a moment later he could tell quite clearly that the ship was expanding as it moved towards him. Faster and faster, in an absolute and uncanny silence, the “Prometheus” came racing down the track. It seemed only a moment before it was abreast of him, and for the very last time he could see “Alpha,” smooth and pointed and glittering upon its back. As the ship rushed past to the left out into the empty desert, he could just hear the “swish!” of the air split by its passage. Even that was very faint, and the electric catapult made no sound at all. Then the “Prometheus” was shrinking silently into the distance.
Seconds later, that silence was shattered by a roar as of a thousand waterfalls plunging down the face of mile-high cliffs. The sky seemed to shake and tremble around them; the “Prometheus” itself had vanished from sight behind a cloud of whirling dust. In the heart of that cloud something was burning with an intolerable brilliance that the eye could not have borne for a moment without the intervening haze.
The dust cloud thinned, and the thunder of the jets was softened by distance. Then Dirk could see that the fragment of sun he had been watching through half-shut eyes no longer followed the surface of the Earth, but was lifting, steadily and strongly, up from the horizon. The “Prometheus” was free from her launching cradle, was climbing on the world-wide circuit that would lead her into space.
The fierce white flare dwindled and shrank to nothingness against the empty sky. For a while the mutter of the departing jets rumbled around the heavens until it too was lost, drowned by the noise of circling aircraft.
Dirk scarcely noticed the shouting of the crowds as life returned to the desert behind him. Once ag
ain there had come into his mind the picture he was never wholly to forget—that image of the lonely island lost in a boundless and untraveled sea.
Boundless it was, infinite it might be—but it was untraveled no longer. Beyond the lagoon, past the friendly shelter of the coral reef, the first frail ship was sailing into the unknown perils and wonders of the open sea.
Epilogue
Dirk alexson, sometime Professor of Social History at the University of Chicago, opened the bulky package on his desk with fingers that trembled slightly. For some minutes he struggled with the elaborate wrappings; then the book lay before him, clean and bright as it had left the printers three days ago.
He looked at it silently for a few moments, running his fingers over the binding. His eyes strayed to the shelf where its five companions rested. They had waited years, most of them, to be joined by this last volume.
Professor Alexson rose to his feet and walked over to the bookshelf, carrying the new arrival with him. A careful observer might have noticed something very odd about his walk: it had a curious springiness that one would not have expected from a man who was nearing sixty. He placed the book beside its five companions, and stood for a long time, completely motionless, staring at the little row of volumes.
The binding and lettering were well matched—he had been very particular about that—and the set was pleasing to the eye. Into those books had gone the greater part of his working life, and now that the task was ended he was well content. Yet it brought a great emptiness of spirit to realize that his work was done.
He took down the sixth volume again and walked back to his desk. He had not the heart to begin at once the search for the misprints, the infelicities which he knew must exist. In any case, they would be brought to his notice soon enough.
The binding protested stiffly as he opened the volume and glanced down the chapter headings, wincing slightly as he came to “Errata—Vols. I-V.” Yet he had made few avoidable mistakes—and above all, he had made no enemies. At times in the last decade that had been none too easy. Some of the hundreds of men whose names were in the final index had not been flattered by his words, but no one had ever accused him of undue partiality. He did not believe that anyone could have guessed which of the men in the long and intricate story had been his personal friends.
He turned to the frontispiece—and his mind went back through more than twenty years. There lay the “Prometheus,” waiting for the moment of her destiny. Somewhere in that crowd away to the left he himself was standing, a young man with his life’s work still before him. And a young man, though he did not know it then, under sentence of death.
Professor Alexson walked over to the window of his study and stared out into the night. The view, as yet, was little obstructed by buildings, and he hoped it would remain that way, so that he could always watch the slow sunrise on the mountains fifteen miles beyond the city.
It was midnight, but the steady white radiance spilling down those tremendous slopes made the scene almost as bright as day. Above the mountains, the stars were shining with that unwavering light that still seemed strange to him. And higher still…
Professor Alexson threw back his head and stared through half-closed eyelids at the blinding white world on which he could never walk again. It was very brilliant tonight, for almost all the northern hemisphere was wreathed in dazzling clouds. Only Africa and the Mediterranean regions were unobscured. He remembered that it was winter beneath those clouds; though they looked so beautiful and so brilliant across a quarter of a million miles of space, they would seem a dull and somber gray to the sunless lands they covered.
Winter, summer, autumn, spring—they meant nothing here. He had taken leave of them all when he made his bargain. It was a hard bargain, but a fair one. He had parted from waves and clouds, from winds and rainbows, from blue skies and the long twilight of summer evenings. In exchange, he had received an indefinite stay of execution.
He remembered, across the years, those endless arguments with Maxton, Collins and the rest about the value of space flight to the human race. Some of their predictions had come true, others had not—but as far as he was concerned, they had proved their case up to the hilt. Matthews had been speaking the truth when he said, long ago, that the greatest benefits which the crossing of space would bring were those which could never have been guessed beforehand.
More than a decade ago the heart specialists had given him three years to live, but the great medical discoveries made at the lunar base had come just in time to save him. Under a sixth of a gravity, where a man weighed less than thirty pounds, a heart which would have failed on Earth could still beat strongly for years. There was even a possibility—almost terrifying in its social implications—that the span of human life might be greater on the Moon than upon the Earth.
Far sooner than anyone had dared to hope, astronautics had paid its greatest and most unexpected dividend. Here within the curve of the Apennines, in the first of all cities ever to be built outside the Earth, five thousand exiles were living useful and happy lives, safe from the deadly gravity of their own world. In time they would rebuild all that they had left behind them; even now the avenue of cedars along Main Street was a brave symbol of the beauty that would be born in the years to come. Professor Alexson hoped he would live to see the building of the Park when the second and much larger Dome was constructed three miles away to the north.
All over the Moon, life was stirring again. It had flickered once, and died, a thousand million years ago; this time it would not fail, for it was part of a rising flood that in a few centuries would have surged to the outermost planets.
Professor Alexson ran his fingers, as he had so often done before, over the piece of Martian sandstone that Victor Hassell had given, him years ago. One day, if he wished, he might go to that strange little world; there would soon be ships that could make the crossing in three weeks when the planet was at its nearest. He had changed worlds once; he might do so a second time if he ever became obsessed by the sight of the unattainable Earth.
Beneath its turban of cloud, Earth was taking leave of the twentieth century. In the shining cities, as midnight moved around the world, the crowds would be waiting for the first stroke of the hour which would sunder them forever from the old year and the old century.
Such a hundred years had never been before, and could scarcely come again. One by one the dams had burst, the last frontiers of the mind had been swept away. When the century dawned, Man had been preparing for the conquest of the air; when it died, he was gathering his strength upon Mars for the leap to the outer planets. Only Venus still held him at bay, for no ship had yet been built which could descend through the convection gales raging perpetually between the sunlit hemisphere and the darkness of the Night Side. From only five hundred miles away, the radar screens had shown the pattern of continents and seas beneath those racing clouds—and Venus, not Mars, had become the great enigma of the solar system.
As he saluted the dying century, Professor Alexson felt no regrets: the future was too full of wonder and promise. Once more the proud ships were sailing for unknown lands, bearing the seeds of new civilizations which in the ages to come would surpass the old. The rush to the new worlds would destroy the suffocating restraints which had poisoned almost half the century. The barriers had been broken, and men could turn their energies outwards to the stars instead of striving among themselves.
Out of the fears and miseries of the Second Dark Age, drawing free—oh, might it be forever!—from the shadows of Belsen and Hiroshima, the world was moving towards its most splendid sunrise. After five hundred years, the Renaissance had come again. The dawn that would burst above the Apennines at the end of the long lunar night would be no more brilliant than the age that had now been born.
About Arthur C. Clarke
In a recent issue, Holiday magazine acclaimed Arthur G. Clarke as “the colossus of science fiction”—and with good reason. Still in his early thirties, he has already comple
ted a body of works, both in fiction and nonfiction, which has clearly established his reputation as a careful scientist and a superbly gifted writer of imaginative literature. The Exploration of Space, his nonfiction book on the coming age of interplanetary flight, was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice. The Atlantic Monthly praised it as “an exceptionally lucid job of scientific exposition for the layman.” His latest novel is Childhood’s End, a breathtaking speculation on the future evolution of man, which The New York Times has called “a first rate tour de force that is well worth the attention of every thoughtful citizen in this age of anxiety.” Most recently he published Expedition to Earth, a representative collection of his short stories described by the New York Herald Tribune as “easily the year’s best book of science fiction short stories.”
A fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society since 1949, Arthur C. Clarke brings the discipline and the intellectual horizons of science to the service of a truly original and powerful imagination. The result is fiction of the future with an unusual relevance for our times. (His story “Superiority,” for example, is required reading at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)
Mr. Clarke’s interest in science began early. “When I was less than ten years old,” he writes “my father gave me a cigarette card (one of the pleasures the modern generation has never known!) from a series depicting prehistoric animals. So for a while I avidly collected fossils, and still have a mammoth’s molar somewhere around the house. However, I soon switched from paleontology to astronomy, built a small telescope from a cardboard tube and a couple of lenses, and spent many of my nights mapping the moon, until I knew my way around it a good deal better than around my native Somerset.
Prelude to Space Page 17
