2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke Collection: The Odyssey)

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Fifty years ago, he would have been considered a specialist in applied astronomy, cybernetics, and space propulsion systems—yet he was prone to deny, with genuine indignation, that he was a specialist at all. Bowman had never found it possible to focus his interest exclusively on any subject; despite the dark warnings of his instructors, he had insisted on taking his Master’s degree in General Astronautics—a course with a vague and woolly syllabus, designed for those whose IQs were in the low 130s and who would never reach the top ranks of their profession.

  His decision had been right; that very refusal to specialize had made him uniquely qualified for his present task. In much the same way Frank Poole—who sometimes disparagingly called himself “General Practitioner in space biology”—had been an ideal choice as his deputy. The two of them, with, if necessary, help from Hal’s vast stores of information, could cope with any problems likely to arise during the voyage—as long as they kept their minds alert and receptive, and continually reen-graved old patterns of memory.

  So for two hours, from 1000 to 1200, Bowman would engage in a dialogue with an electronic tutor, checking his general knowledge or absorbing material specific to this mission. He would prowl endlessly over ship’s plans, circuit diagrams, and voyage profiles, or would try to assimilate all that was known about Jupiter, Saturn, and their far-ranging families of moons.

  At midday, he would retire to the galley and leave the ship to Hal while he prepared his lunch. Even here he was still fully in touch with events, for the tiny lounge-cum-dining room contained a duplicate of the Situation Display Panel, and Hal could call him at a moment’s notice. Poole would join him for this meal, before retiring for his six-hour sleep period, and usually they would watch one of the regular TV programs beamed to them from Earth.

  Their menus had been planned with as much care as any part of the mission. The food, most of it freeze-dried, was uniformly excellent, and had been chosen for the minimum of trouble. Packets had merely to be opened and popped into the tiny auto-galley, which beeped for attention when the job was done. They could enjoy what tasted like—and, equally important, looked like—orange juice, eggs (any style), steaks, chops, roasts, fresh vegetables, assorted fruits, ice cream, and even freshly baked bread.

  After lunch, from 1300 to 1600 Bowman would make a slow and careful tour of the ship—or such part of it as was accessible. Discovery measured almost four hundred feet from end to end, but the little universe occupied by her crew lay entirely inside the forty-foot sphere of the pressure hull.

  Here were all the life-support systems, and the Control Deck which was the operational heart of the ship. Below this was a small “space-garage” fitted with three airlocks, through which powered capsules, just large enough to hold a man, could sail out into the void if the need arose for extravehicular activity.

  The equatorial region of the pressure sphere—the slice, as it were, from Capricorn to Cancer—enclosed a slowly rotating drum, thirty-five feet in diameter. As it made one revolution every ten seconds, this carrousel or centrifuge produced an artificial gravity equal to that of the Moon. This was enough to prevent the physical atrophy which would result from the complete absence of weight, and it also allowed the routine functions of living to be carried out under normal—or nearly normal—conditions.

  The carrousel therefore contained the kitchen, dining, washing, and toilet facilities. Only here was it safe to prepare and handle hot drinks—quite dangerous in weightless conditions, where one can be badly scalded by floating globules of boiling water. The problem of shaving was also solved; there would be no weightless bristles drifting around to endanger electrical equipment and produce a health hazard.

  Around the rim of the carrousel were five tiny cubicles, fitted out by each astronaut according to taste and containing his personal belongings. Only Bowman’s and Poole’s were now in use, while the future occupants of the other three cabins reposed in their electronic sarcophagi next door.

  The spin of the carrousel could be stopped if necessary; when this happened, its angular momentum had to be stored in a flywheel, and switched back again when rotation was restarted. But normally it was left running at constant speed, for it was easy enough to enter the big, slowly turning drum by going hand-over-hand along a pole through the zero-gee region at its center. Transferring to the moving section was as easy and automatic, after a little experience, as stepping onto a moving escalator.

  The spherical pressure hull formed the head of a flimsy, arrow-shaped structure more than a hundred yards long. Discovery, like all vehicles intended for deep space penetration, was too fragile and unstreamlined ever to enter an atmosphere, or to defy the full gravitational field of any planet. She had been assembled in orbit around the Earth, tested on a translunar maiden flight, and finally checked out in orbit above the Moon. She was a creature of pure space—and she looked it.

  Immediately behind the pressure hull was grouped a cluster of four large liquid hydrogen tanks—and beyond them, forming a long, slender V, were the radiating fins that dissipated the waste heat of the nuclear reactor. Veined with a delicate tracery of pipes for the cooling fluid, they looked like the wings of some vast dragonfly, and from certain angles gave Discovery a fleeting resemblance to an old-time sailing ship.

  At the very end of the V, three hundred feet from the crew-compartment, was the shielded inferno of the reactor, and the complex of focusing electrodes through which emerged the incandescent star-stuff of the plasma drive. This had done its work weeks ago, forcing Discovery out of her parking orbit round the Moon. Now the reactor was merely ticking over as it generated electrical power for the ship’s service, and the great radiating fins, that would glow cherry red when Discovery was accelerating under maximum thrust, were dark and cool.

  Although it would require an excursion out into space to examine this region of the ship, there were instruments and remote TV cameras which gave a full report on conditions here. Bowman now felt that he knew intimately every square foot of the radiator, panels, and every piece of plumbing associated with them.

  By 1600, he would have finished his inspection, and would make a detailed verbal report to Mission Control, talking until the acknowledgment started to come in. Then he would switch off his own transmitter, listen to what Earth had to say, and send back his reply to any queries. At 1800 hours, Poole would awaken, and he would hand over command.

  He would have six off-duty hours, to use as he pleased. Sometimes he would continue his studies, or listen to music, or look at movies. Much of the time he would wander at will through the ship’s inexhaustible electronic library. He had become fascinated by the great explorations of the past—understandably enough, in the circumstances. Sometimes he would cruise with Pytheas out through the Pillars of Hercules, along the coast of a Europe barely emerging from the Stone Age, and venture almost to the chill mists of the Arctic. Or, two thousand years later, he would pursue the Manila galleons with Anson, sail with Cook along the unknown hazards of the Great Barrier Reef, achieve with Magellan the first circumnavigation of the world. And he began to read the Odyssey, which of all books spoke to him most vividly across the gulfs of time.

  For relaxation he could always engage Hal in a large number of semimathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this.

  The last hours of Bowman’s day were devoted to general cleaning up and odd jobs, followed by dinner at 2000—again with Poole. Then there would be an hour during which he would make or receive any personal call from Earth.

  Like all his colleagues, Bowman was unmarried; it was not fair to send family men on a mission of such duration. Though numerous ladies had promised to wait until the expedition returned, no one had really believed this. At first, both Poole and Bowman had been making rather intimate personal calls once a week, though the k
nowledge that many ears must be listening at the Earth end of the circuit tended to inhibit them. Yet already, though the voyage was scarcely started, the warmth and frequency of the conversations with their girls on Earth had begun to diminish. They had expected this; it was one of the penalties of an astronaut’s way of life, as it had once been of a mariner’s.

  It was true—indeed, notorious—that seamen had compensations at other ports; unfortunately there were no tropical islands full of dusky maids beyond the orbit of Earth. The space medics, of course, had tackled this problem with their usual enthusiasm; the ship’s pharmacopoeia provided adequate, though hardly glamorous, substitutes.

  Just before he signed off, Bowman would make his final report, and check that Hal had transmitted all the instrumentation tapes for the day’s run. Then, if he felt like it, he would spend a couple of hours either reading or looking at a movie; and at midnight he would go to sleep—usually without any help from electronarcosis.

  Poole’s program was a mirror image of his own and the two schedules dovetailed together without friction. Both men were fully occupied, they were too intelligent and well-adjusted to quarrel, and the voyage had settled down to a comfortable, utterly uneventful routine, the passage of time marked only by the changing numbers on the digital clocks.

  The greatest hope of Discovery’s little crew was that nothing would mar this peaceful monotony in the weeks and months that lay ahead.

  CHAPTER 18

  Through the Asteroids

  Week after week, running like a streetcar along the tracks of her utterly predetermined orbit, Discovery swept past the orbit of Mars and on toward Jupiter. Unlike all the vessels traversing the skies or seas of Earth, she required not even the most minute touch on the controls. Her course was fixed by the laws of gravitation; there were no uncharted shoals, no dangerous reefs on which she would run aground. Nor was there the slightest danger of collision with another ship; for there was no vessel—at least of Man’s making—anywhere between her and the infinitely distant stars.

  Yet the space which she was now entering was far from empty. Ahead lay a no-man’s-land threaded by the paths of more than a million asteroids—less than ten thousand of which had ever had their orbits precisely determined by astronomers. Only four were over a hundred miles in diameter; the vast majority were merely giant boulders, trundling aimlessly through space.

  There was nothing that could be done about them; though even the smallest could completely destroy the ship if it slammed into it at tens of thousands of miles an hour, the chance of this happening was negligible. On the average, there was only one asteroid in a volume a million miles on a side; that Discovery should also happen to occupy this same point, and at the same time, was the very least of her crew’s worries.

  On Day 86 they were due to make their closest approach to any known asteroid. It had no name—merely the number 7794—and was a fifty-yard-diameter rock that had been detected by the Lunar Observatory in 1997 and immediately forgotten except by the patient computers of the Minor Planet Bureau.

  When Bowman came on duty, Hal promptly reminded him of the forthcoming encounter—not that he was likely to have forgotten the only scheduled in-flight event on the entire voyage. The track of the asteroid against the stars, and its coordinates at the moment of closest approach, had already been printed out on the display screens. Listed also were the observations to be made or attempted; they were going to be very busy when 7794 flashed past them only nine hundred miles away, at a relative speed of eighty thousand miles an hour.

  When Bowman asked Hal for the telescopic display, a sparsely sprinkled star field flashed onto the screen. There was nothing that looked like an asteroid; all the images, even under the highest magnification, were dimensionless points of light.

  “Give me the target reticule,” asked Bowman. Immediately four faint, narrow lines appeared, bracketing a tiny and undistinguished star. He stared at it for many minutes, wondering if Hal could possibly be mistaken; then he saw that the pinpoint of light was moving, with barely perceptible slowness, against the background of the stars. It might still be half a million miles away—but its movement proved that, as cosmic distances went, it was almost near enough to touch.

  When Poole joined him on the control deck six hours later, 7794 was hundreds of times more brilliant, and was moving so swiftly against its background that there was no question of its identity. And it was no longer a point of light; it had begun to show a clearly visible disk.

  They stared at that passing pebble in the sky with the emotions of sailors on a long sea voyage, skirting a coast on which they cannot land. Though they were perfectly well aware that 7794 was only a lifeless, airless chunk of rock, this knowledge scarcely affected their feelings. It was the only solid matter they would meet this side of Jupiter—still two hundred million miles away.

  Through the high-powered telescope, they could see that the asteroid was very irregular, and turning slowly end over end. Sometimes it looked like a flattened sphere, sometimes it resembled a roughly shaped brick; its rotation period was just over two minutes. There were mottled patches of light and shade distributed apparently at random over its surface, and often it sparkled like a distant window as planes or outcroppings of crystalline material flashed in the sun.

  It was racing past them at almost thirty miles a second; they had only a few frantic minutes in which to observe it closely. The automatic cameras took dozens of photographs, the navigation radar’s returning echoes were carefully recorded for future analysis—and there was just time for a single impact probe.

  The probe carried no instruments; none could survive a collision at such cosmic speeds. It was merely a small slug of metal, shot out from Discovery on a course which should intersect that of the asteroid.

  As the seconds before impact ticked away, Poole and Bowman waited with mounting tension. The experiment, simple though it was in principle, taxed the accuracy of their equipment to the limits. They were aiming at a hundred-foot-diameter target, from a distance of thousands of miles….

  Against the darkened portion of the asteroid there was a sudden, dazzling explosion of light. The tiny slug had impacted at meteoric speed; in a fraction of a second all its energy had been transformed into heat. A puff of incandescent gas had erupted briefly into space; aboard Discovery, the cameras were recording the rapidly fading spectral lines. Back on Earth, experts would analyze them, looking for the telltale signatures of glowing atoms. And so, for the first time, the composition of an asteroid’s crust would be determined.

  Within an hour, 7794 was a dwindling star, showing no trace of a disk. When Bowman next came on watch it had vanished completely.

  They were alone again; they would remain alone, until the outermost of Jupiter’s moons came swimming up toward them, three months from now.

  CHAPTER 19

  Transit of Jupiter

  Even from twenty million miles away, Jupiter was already the most conspicuous object in the sky ahead. The planet was now a pale, salmon-hued disk, about half the size of the Moon as seen from Earth, with the dark, parallel bands of its cloud belts clearly visible. Shuttling back and forth in the equatorial plane were the brilliant stars of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—worlds that elsewhere would have counted as planets in their own right, but which here were merely satellites of a giant master.

  Through the telescope, Jupiter was a glorious sight—a mottled, multicolored globe that seemed to fill the sky. It was impossible to grasp its real size; Bowman kept reminding himself that it was eleven times the diameter of Earth, but for a long time this was a statistic with no real meaning.

  Then, while he was briefing himself from the tapes in Hal’s memory units, he found something that suddenly brought the appalling scale of the planet into focus. It was an illustration that showed the Earth’s entire surface peeled off and then pegged, like the skin of an animal, on the disk of Jupiter. Against this background, all the continents and oceans of Earth appeared no larger th
an India on the terrestrial globe.

  When Bowman used the highest magnification of Discovery’s telescopes, he appeared to be hanging above a slightly flattened globe, looking down upon a vista of racing clouds that had been smeared into bands by the giant world’s swift rotation. Sometimes those bands congealed into wisps and knots and continent-size masses of colored vapor; sometimes they were linked by transient bridges thousands of miles in length. Hidden beneath those clouds was enough material to outweigh all the other planets in the Solar System. And what else, Bowman wondered, was also hidden there?

  Over this shifting, turbulent roof of clouds, forever hiding the real surface of the planet, circular patterns of darkness sometimes glided. One of the inner moons was transiting the distant sun, its shadow marching beneath it over the restless Jovian cloudscape.

  There were other, and far smaller, moons even out here—twenty million miles from Jupiter. But they were only flying mountains, a few dozen miles in diameter, and the ship would pass nowhere near any of them. Every few minutes the radar transmitter would gather its strength and send out a silent thunderclap of power; no echoes of new satellites came pulsing back from the emptiness.

  What did come, with ever growing intensity, was the roar of Jupiter’s own radio voice. In 1955, just before the dawn of the space age, astronomers had been astonished to find that Jupiter was blasting out millions of horsepower on the ten-meter band. It was merely raw noise, associated with haloes of charged particles circling the planet like the Van Allen belts of Earth, but on a far greater scale.

  Sometimes, during lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and as meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon.