The Space Trilogy

by Arthur C. Clarke

  We had now made one complete circuit of the Earth, and had shed more than half our speed. It was much longer, this time, before the Brazilian jungles came into view, and they passed more slowly now. Above the mouth of the Amazon the storm was still raging, only a little way beneath us, as we started out on our last crossing of the South Atlantic.

  Then night came once more, and there again was the redly glowing wing in the darkness around the ship. It seemed even hotter now, but perhaps I had grown used to it for the sight no longer worried me. We were nearly home—on the last lap of the journey. By now we must have lost so much speed that we were probably travelling no faster than many normal aircraft.

  A cluster of lights along the coast of East Africa told us that we were heading out over the Indian Ocean again. I wished I could be up there in the control cabin, watching the preparations for the final approach to the space-port. By now, the pilot would have picked up the guiding radio beacons, and would be coming down the beam, still at a great speed but according to a carefully prearranged programme. When we reached New Guinea, our velocity would be almost completely spent. Our ship would be nothing more than a great glider, flying through the night sky on the last dregs of its momentum.

  The loud-speaker broke into my thoughts.

  'Pilot to passengers. We shall be landing in twenty minutes.'

  Even without this warning, I could tell that the flight was nearing its end. The scream of the wind outside our hull had dropped in pitch, and there had been a just perceptible change of direction as the ship slanted downwards. And, most striking sign of all, the red glow outside the window was rapidly fading. Presently there were only a few dull patches left, near the leading edge of the wing. A few minutes later, even these had gone.

  It was still night as we passed over Sumatra and Borneo. From time to time the lights of ships and cities winked into view and went astern—very slowly now, it seemed, after the headlong rush of our first circuit. At frequent intervals the loud-speaker called out our speed and position. We were travelling at less than a thousand miles an hour when we passed over the deeper darkness that was the New Guinea coastline.

  There it is!' I whispered to John. The ship had banked slightly, and beneath the wing was a great constellation of lights. A signal flare rose up in a slow, graceful arc and exploded into crimson fire. In the momentary glare, I caught a glimpse of the white mountain peaks surrounding the space-port, and I wondered just how much margin of height we had. It would be very ironic to meet with disaster in the last few miles after travelling all this distance.

  I never knew the actual moment when we touched down, the landing was so perfect. At one instant we were still airborne, at the next the lights of the runway were rolling past as the ship slowly came to rest. I sat quite still in my seat, trying to realize that I was back on Earth again. Then I looked at John. Judging from his expression, he could hardly believe it either.

  The steward came round helping people release their seat straps and giving last-minute advice. As I looked at the slightly harassed visitors, I could not help a mild feeling of superiority. I knew my way about on Earth, but all this must be very strange to them. They must be realizing, also, that they were now in the full grip of Earth's gravity—and there was nothing they could do about it until they were out in space again.

  As we had been the first to enter the ship, we were the last to leave it. I helped John with some of his personal luggage, as he was obviously not very happy and wanted at least one hand free to grab any convenient support.

  'Cheer up!' I said. 'You'll soon be jumping around just as much as you did on Mars!'

  'I hope you're right,' he answered gloomily. 'At the moment I feel like a cripple who's lost his crutch.'

  Mr and Mrs Moore, I noticed, had expressions of grim determination on their faces as they walked cautiously to the air-lock. But if they wished they were back on Mars, they kept their feelings to themselves. So did the girls, who for some reason seemed less worried by gravity than any of us.

  We emerged under the shadow of the great wing, the thin mountain air blowing against our faces. It was quite warm—surprisingly so, in fact, for night at such a high altitude. Then I realized that the wing above us was still hot—probably too hot to touch, even though it was no longer visibly glowing.

  We moved slowly away from the ship, towards the waiting transport vehicles. Before I stepped into the bus that would take us across to the Port buildings, I looked up once more at the starlit sky which had been my home for a little while—and which, I was resolved, would be my home again. Up there in the shadow of the Earth, speeding the traffic that moved from world to world, were Commander Doyle, Tim Benton, Ronnie Jordan, Norman Powell, and all the other friends I'd made on my visit to the Inner Station. I remembered Commander Doyle's promise, and wondered how soon I would remind him of it…

  John Moore was waiting patiently behind me, clutching the door-handle of the bus. He saw me looking up into the sky and followed my gaze.

  'You won't be able to see the Station,' I said. 'It's in eclipse.'

  John didn't answer, and then I saw that he was staring into the east, where the first hint of dawn glowed along the horizon. High against these unfamiliar southern stars was something that I did recognize—a brilliant ruby beacon, the brightest object in the sky.

  'My home,' said John, in a faint, sad voice.

  I started into that beckoning light, and remembered the pictures John had shown me and the stories he had told. Up there were the great coloured deserts, the old sea-beds that man was bringing once more to life, the little Martians who might, or might not, belong to a race that was more ancient than ours.

  And I knew that, after all, I was going to disappoint Commander Doyle. The space-stations were too near home to satisfy me now—my imagination had been captured by that little red world, glowing bravely against the stars. When I went into space again, the Inner Station would only be the first milestone on my outward road from Earth.

  THE SANDS OF MARS

  Arthur C. Clarke's introduction to

  THE SANDS OF MARS

  In 2001—where have I seen that date before?—it will be exactly half a century since this novel was published. Or to put it in perhaps better perspective: it is already more than half way back in time, dear reader, between you and the Wright Brothers' first flight…

  Though I have not opened it for decades, I have a special fondness for Sands, as it was my first full-length novel. When I wrote it, we knew practically nothing about Mars—and what we did 'know' was completely wrong. The mirage of Percival Lowell's canals was beginning to fade, though it would not vanish completely until our space probes began arriving in the late seventies. It was still generally believed that Mars had a thin but useful atmosphere, and that vegetation flourished—at least in the equatorial regions where the temperature often rose above freezing point. And where there was vegetation, of course, there might be more interesting forms of life—though nothing remotely human. Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian princesses have joined the canals in mythology.

  When I tapped out 'The End' on my Remington Noiseless (ha!) Portable in 1951 I could never have imagined that exactly twenty years later I should be sitting on a panel with Ray Bradbury and Carl Sagan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, waiting for the first real Mars to arrive from the Mariner space probes. (See Mars and the Mind of Man, Harper & Row, 1973). But that was only the first trickle of a flood of information: during the next two decades, the Vikings were to give stunning images of the gigantic Mariner Valley and, most awe-inspiring of all, Olympus Mons—an extinct volcano more than twice the height of Everest. (Pause for embarrassed cough. Somewhere herein you'll find 'There are no mountains on Mars!' Well, that's what even the best observers, straining their eyes to make sense of the tiny disk dancing in the field of their telescope, believed in the 1950s.

  Soon after maps of the real Mars became available, I received a generous gift from computer genius John Hinkley of his Vistapro im
age processing system. This prompted me to do some desk-top terraforming (a word, incidentally, invented by science fiction's Grandest of Grand Masters, Jack Williamson). I must confess that in The Snows of Olympus: a Garden on Mars (Gollancz, 1994) I frequently allowed artistic considerations to override scientific ones. Thus I couldn't resist putting a lake in the caldera of Mount Olympus, unlikely though it is that the most strenuous efforts of future colonists will produce an atmosphere dense enough to permit liquid water at such an altitude.

  My next encounter with Mars involved a most ambitious but, alas, unsuccessful space project—the Russian MARS 96 mission. Besides all its scientific equipment, the payload carried a CD/Rom disk full of sounds and images, including the whole of the famous Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast. (I have a recording of the only encounter between H.G. and Orson, made soon after this historic demonstration of the power of the new medium. Listening to the friendly banter between two of the greatest magicians of our age is like stepping into a time machine.)

  It was intended that all these 'Visions of Mars' would, some day in the 21st century, serve as greetings to the pioneers of the next New World. I was privileged to send a video recording, made in the garden of my Colombo home: here is what I said:

  MESSAGE TO MARS

  My name is Arthur C. Clarke, and I am speaking to you from the island of Sri Lanka, once known as Ceylon, in the Indian Ocean, Planet Earth. It is early spring in the year 1993 but this message is intended for the future.

  I am addressing men and woman—perhaps some of you already born—who will listen to these words when they are living on Mars.

  As we approach the new millennium, there is a great interest in the planet which may be the first real home for mankind beyond the mother world. During my lifetime, I have been lucky enough to see our knowledge of Mars advance from almost complete ignorance—worse than that, misleading fantasy—to a real understanding of its geography and climate. Certainly we are still very ignorant in many areas, and lack knowledge which you take for granted. But now we have accurate maps of your wonderful world, and can imagine how it might be modified—terraformed—to make it nearer to the heart's desire. Perhaps you are already engaged upon that centuries-long process.

  There is a link between Mars and my present home, which I used in what will probably be my last novel, The Hammer of God. At the beginning of this century, an amateur astronomer named Percy Molesworth was living here in Ceylon. He spent much time observing Mars, and now there is a huge crater, 175 kilometres wide, named after him in your southern hemisphere.

  In my book I've imagined how. a New Martian astronomer might one day look at his ancestral world, to try and see the little island from which Molesworth—and I—often gazed up at your planet.

  There was a time, soon after the first landing on the moon in 1969, when we were optimistic enough to imagine that we might have reached Mars by the 1990s. In another of my stories, I described a survivor of the first ill-fated expedition, watching the earth in transit across the face of the sun on May 11—1984!

  Well, there was no one on Mars then to watch the event—but it will happen again on November 10, 2084. By that time I hope that many eyes will be looking back towards the earth as it slowly crosses the solar disk, looking like a tiny, perfectly circular sunspot. And I've suggested that we should signal to you then with powerful lasers, so that you will see a star beaming a message to you from the very face of the sun.

  I too salute to you across the gulfs of space—as I send my greetings and good wishes from the closing decade of the century in which mankind first became a space faring species, and set forth on a journey that can never end, so long as the universe endures.

  Alas, owing to a failure of the launch vehicle, MARS 96 ended up at the bottom of the Pacific. But I hope—and fully expect—that one day our descendants on the red planet will be chuckling over this CD/Rom—which is a delightful combination of science, art and fantasy. (It is still available from the Planetary Society, 65, N. Catalina Ave., Pasadena, Ca, 91106, USA.)

  On 4 July 1997, with a little help from the World Wide Web, Mars was news again. Pathfinder had made a bumpy landing in the Ares Vallis region and disgorged the tiny but sophisticated rover, Sojourner, whose cautious exploration of a distant place in the sky became a real world.

  Shortly afterwards, to my surprised delight, the engineer who had run the program sent me her autobiography Managing Martians (Broadway Books, 1998) with a dedication 'To Arthur Clarke, who inspired my summer vacation on Mars'. Reading further, I was even more pleased to see that it opened with a quotation from The Sands of Mars… But let Donna Shirley tell you the story in her words…

  Foreword

  I was about 12 years old when I first read The Sands of Mars. I read it feverishly, completely entranced by the concept of a group of people actually living and working on Mars. I had already decided to be an aeronautical engineer and build aeroplanes when I grew up, but now the idea of building spaceships to go to Mars began to nibble at the edges of my mind.

  Forty-five years later, on July 4, 1997, I achieved my dream of landing on Mars—at least virtually—when Pathfinder delivered the microwave oven-sized Sojourner Rover to the surface of the red planet. From 1992 to 1994 I had been the manager of the team that built the rover and in 1997 I was managing the United States' entire robotic Mars Exploration Program.

  A year later I published an autobiography, Managing Martians, in which the Pathfinder project figured largely. I could think of nothing more appropriate than to include quotes from my first inspiration, The Sands of Mars, in my book. In fact, I found an appropriate quote for every chapter (although the publisher only chose to use one at the beginning and end). Sir Arthur Clarke graciously allowed me to use the quotes.

  Rereading Sands as I wrote my book brought back the sense of wonder and adventure that it inspired in my childhood. I found it astounding how fresh and relevant the story remains. The characters are much like the people I worked with at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 32 years—brilliant and hard-working, but also funny and human. The way that humans would live on Mars (for example, domes and pressurised rovers) are still the concepts being used by NASA planners. Some of the details of the Mars environment unfortunately turned out to be optimistic. The little Martian 'Squeak' and the plants he fed on could not survive on the bleach-sterilised surface that we first discovered with the Viking landers. Some primitive life might have existed on Mars sometime in the past, or may even be surviving deep underground, but the butterscotch-coloured surface is dead.

  And humans will not reach Mars for a few more years. Sadly, humanity's progress has lagged Arthur Clarke's vision of exploring Mars—no commercial liners yet ply the interplanetary space lanes. But commercial space ventures are beginning. People are making money from communication satellites and are paying to be flown to the Russian Mir Space Station. Private launch vehicle companies are springing up. And an international fleet of robotic spacecraft continue the exploration of the skies and sands of Mars.

  There is a growing interest in Mars exploration, with organisations like the Planetary Society and the Mars Society providing a focus for the personal dreams of private citizens. An international educational project called the Mars Millennium Project, for which I was the official spokesperson in 1999-2000, used a vision of a human colony of 100 people on Mars in the year 2030 (see www.mars2030.net) to inspire children to think about how communities work and prosper. Hundreds of thousands of children designed colonies which often looked very much like the colony portrayed in The Sands of Mars. I hope its republication will inspire this same generation of children to keep the dream of human exploration of Mars alive.

  Donna Shirley

  Assistant Dean of Engineering

  University of Oklahoma

  One

  So this is the first time you’ve been upstairs?” said the pilot, leaning back idly in his seat so that it rocked to and fro in the gimbals. He clasped his hands behind
his neck in a nonchalant manner that did nothing to reassure his passenger.

  “Yes,” said Martin Gibson, never taking his eyes from the chronometer as it ticked away the seconds.

  “I thought so. You never got it quite right in your stories—all that nonsense about fainting under the acceleration. Why must people write such stuff? It’s bad for business.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gibson replied. “But I think you must be referring to my earlier stories. Space-travel hadn’t got started then, and I had to use my imagination.”

  “Maybe,” said the pilot grudgingly. (He wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the instruments, and take-off was only two minutes away.) “It must be funny, I suppose, for this to be happening to you, after writing about it so often.”

  The adjective, thought Gibson, was hardly the one he would have used himself, but he saw the other’s point of view. Dozens of his heroes—and villains—had gazed hypnotized by remorseless second-hands, waiting for the rockets to hurl them into infinity. And now—as it always did if one waited long enough—the reality had caught up with the fiction. The same moment lay only ninety seconds in his own future. Yes, it was funny, a beautiful case of poetic justice.

  The pilot glanced at him, reading his feelings, and grinned cheerfully.

  “Don’t let your own stories scare you. Why, I once took off standing up, just for a bet, though it was a damn silly thing to do.”

  “I’m not scared,” Gibson replied with unnecessary emphasis.

  “Hmmm,” said the pilot, condescending to glance at the clock. The second-hand had one more circuit to go. “Then I shouldn’t hold on to the seat like that. It’s only beryl-manganese; you might bend it.”