2061: Odyssey Three o-3
Page 20
The light of Lucifer gleamed not only on the black glass of the ancient building, but also upon the narrow, silvery rainbow spanning the southern sky. Other lights moved along and around it, very slowly, as the commerce of the Solar System came and went between all the worlds of both its suns.
And if one looked very carefully, it was just possible to make out the thin thread of the Panama Tower, one of the six umbilical cords of diamond linking Earth and its scattered children, soaring twenty-six thousand kilometres up from the equator to meet the Ring around the World.
Suddenly, almost as swiftly as if it had been born, Lucifer began to fade. The night that men had not known for thirty generations flooded back into the sky. The banished stars returned.
And for the second time in four million years, the Monolith awoke.
Acknowledgements
My special thanks to Larry Sessions and Gerry Snyder for providing me with the positions of Halley's Comet on its next appearance. They are not responsible for any major orbital perturbations I have introduced.
I am particularly grateful to Marvin Ross of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, not only for his stunning concept of diamond-core planets, but also for copies of his (I hope) historic paper on the subject.
I trust that my old friend Dr Luis Alvarez will enjoy my wild extrapolation of his researches, and thank him for much help and inspiration over the past thirty-five years.
Special thanks to NASA's Gentry Lee – my coauthor on Cradle – for hand-carrying from Los Angeles to Colombo the Kaypro 2000 lap-portable which allowed me to write this book in various exotic and – even more important – secluded locations.
Chapters 5, 58 and 59 are partly based on material adapted from 2010: Odyssey Two. (If an author cannot plagiarize himself, who can he plagiarize?)
Finally, I hope that Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov has now forgiven me for linking him with Dr Andrei Sakharov (still exiled in Gorky when 2010 was jointly dedicated to them). And I express my sincere regrets to my genial Moscow host and editor Vasili Zharchenko for getting him into deep trouble by borrowing the names of various dissidents – most of them, I am happy to say, no longer imprisoned. One day, I hope, the subscribers to Tekhnika Molodezhy can read the instalments of 2010 which so mysteriously disappeared.
Colombo, Sri Lanka
25 April 1987 ( 1 )
1.Something strange has happened: I was under the impression that I was writing fiction, but I may have been wrong. For consider the following sequence of events:
(<< back)
1. In 2010: Odyssey Two the spaceship Leonov was powered by the Sakharov Drive.
2. Now, half a century later (Chapter 8), spaceships are powered by the muon-catalysed, 'cold fusion' reaction discovered by Luis Alvarez et al in the l950s. (See the autobiography Alvarez: Basic Books, NY, 1987.)
3. According to the London Times, 17 August 1987, Dr Sakharov is now working on nuclear power production 'based on... muon-catalysed, or "cold" fusion, which exploits the properties of an exotic, short-lived elementary particle related to the electron... Advocates of "cold fusion" point out that all the key reactions work best at just 900 degrees centigrade...'
I now await, with great interest, comments from Nobel Laureates Sakharov and Alvarez on the roles I have given them.
Arthur C. Clarke, 30 September 1987
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