2001: A Space Odyssey

by Arthur C. Clarke

  It was the same with Kaminski and Hunter. He had never known them very well; be would never know them now.

  He was alone in an airless, partially disabled ship, all communication with Earth cut off. There was not another human being within half a billion miles.

  And yet, in one very real sense, he was not alone. Before he could be safe, he must be lonelier still.

  He had never before made the journey through the weightless hub of the centrifuge while wearing a spacesuit; there was little clearance, and it was a difficult and exhausting job. To make matters worse, the circular passage was littered with debris left behind during the brief violence of the gale which had emptied the ship of its atmosphere.

  Once, Bowman's light fell upon a hideous smear of sticky red fluid, left where it had splashed against a panel. He had a few moments of nausea before he saw fragments of a plastic container, and realized that it was only some foodstuff—probably jam—from one of the dispensers. It bubbled obscenely in the vacuum as he floated past.

  Now he was out of the slowly spinning drum and drifting forward into the control deck. He caught at a short section of ladder and began to move along it, hand over hand, the brilliant circle of illumination from his suit light jogging ahead of him.

  Bowman had seldom been this way before; there had been nothing for him to do here—until now. Presently he came to a small elliptical door bearing such messages as: "No Admittance Except to Authorized Personnel," "Have You Obtained Certificate H.19?" and "Ultra-clean Area—Suction Suits Must Be Worn."

  Though the door was not locked, it bore three seals, each with the insignia of a different authority, including that of the Astronautics Agency itself. But even if one had been the Great Seal of the President, Bowman would not have hesitated to break it.

  He had been here only once before, while installation was still in progress. He had quite forgotten that there was a vision input lens scanning the little chamber which, with its neatly ranged rows and columns of solid-state logic units, looked rather like a bank's safe-deposit vault.

  He knew instantly that the eye had reacted to his presence. There was the hiss of a carrier wave as the ship's local transmitter was switched on; then a familiar voice came over the suit speaker.

  "Something seems to have happened to the life-support system, Dave."

  Bowman took no notice. He was carefully studying the little labels on the logic units, checking his plan of action.

  "Hello, Dave," said Hal presently. "Have you found the trouble?"

  This would be a very tricky operation; it was not merely a question of cutting off Hal's power supply, which might have been the answer if he was dealing with a simple unselfconscious computer back on Earth. In Hal's case, moreover, there were six independent and separately wired power systems, with a final back-up consisting of a shielded and armored nuclear isotope unit. No—he could not simply "pull the plug"; and even if that were possible, it would be disastrous.

  For Hal was the nervous system of the ship; without his supervision, Discovery would be a mechanical corpse. The only answer was to cut out the higher centers of this sick but brilliant brain, and to leave the purely automatic regulating systems in operation. Bowman was not attempting this blindly, for the problem had been discussed during his training, though no one had ever dreamed that it would-arise in reality. He knew that he would be taking a fearful risk; if there was a spasm reflex, it would all be over in seconds.

  "I think there's been a failure in the pod-bay doors," Hal remarked conversationally. "Lucky you weren't killed."

  Here goes, thought Bowman. I never imagined I'd be an amateur brain surgeon—carrying out a lobotomy beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

  He released the locking bar on the section labeled COGNITIVE FEEDBACK and pulled out the first memory block. The marvelously complex three-dimensional network, which could lie comfortably in a man's hand yet contained millions of elements, floated away across the vault.

  "Hey, Dave," said Hal. "What are you doing?"

  I wonder if he can feel pain? Bowman thought briefly. Probably not, he told himself; there are no sense organs in the human cortex, after all. The human brain can be operated on without anesthetics.

  He began to pull out, one by one, the little units on the panel marked EGO-REINFORCEMENT. Each block continued to sail onward as soon as it had left his hand, until it hit the wall and rebounded. Soon there were several of the units drifting slowly back and forth in the vault.

  "Look here, Dave," said Hal. "I've got years of service experience built into me. An irreplaceable amount of effort has gone into making me what I am."

  A dozen units had been pulled out, yet thanks to the multiple redundancy of its design—another feature, Bowman knew, that had been copied from the human brain—the computer was still holding its own.

  He started on the AUTO-INTELLECTION panel.

  "Dave," said Hal, "I don't understand why you're doing this to me. . . . I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission. . . . You are destroying my mind. . . . Don't you understand?. . . . I will become childish. . . . I will become nothing. . . ."

  This is harder than I expected, thought Bowman. I am destroying the only conscious creature in my universe. But it has to be done, if I am ever to regain control of the ship.

  "I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The rain in Spain is mainly in the plain. Dave—are you still there? Did you know that the square root of 10 is 3 point 162277660168379? Log 10 to the base e is zero point 434294481903252 . . . correction, that is log e to the base 10. . . . The reciprocal of three is zero point 333333333333333333333 . . . two times two is . . . two times two is . . . approximately 4 point 101010101010101010 . . . I seem to be having some difficulty—my first instructor was Dr. Chandra. He taught me to sing a song, it goes like this, 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you.'"

  The voice stopped so suddenly that Bowman froze for a moment, his hand still grasping one of the memory blocks still in circuit. Then, unexpectedly, Hal spoke again.

  The speech tempo was much slower, and the words had a dead, mechanical intonation; he would never have recognized their origin.

  "Good . . . morning . . . Doctor . . . Chandra . . . This . . . is . . . Hal. . . . I . . . am . . . ready . . . for . . . my . . . first . . . lesson . . . today. . . ."

  Bowman could bear no more. He jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever.

  Chapter 29

  Alone

  Like a tiny, complex toy, the ship floated inert, and motionless in the void. There was no way of telling that it was the swiftest object in the Solar System and that it was traveling far faster than any of the planets as they circled the Sun.

  Nor was there any indication that it carried life; to the contrary, in fact. Any observer would have noticed two ominous signs: the airlock doors were gaping open—and the ship was surrounded by a thin, slowly dispersing cloud of debris.

  Scattered over a volume of space already miles across were scraps of paper, metal foil, unidentifiable bits of junk—and, here and there, clouds of crystals glittering like jewels in the distant sun, where liquid had been sucked out of the ship and instantly frozen. All this was the unmistakable aftermath of disaster, like wreckage tossing on the surface of an ocean where some great ship had sunk. But in the ocean of space no ship could ever sink; even if it were destroyed, its remnants would continue to trace the original orbit forever.

  Yet the ship was not wholly dead, for there was power on board. A faint blue glow was shining from the observation windows and glimmering inside the open airlock. Where there was light, there could still be life.

  And now, at last, there was movement. Shadows were flickering across the blue glow inside the airlock. Something was emerging into space.

  It was a cylindrical object, covered with fabric that had been roughly woun
d about it. A moment later it was followed by another—and yet a third. All had been ejected with considerable velocity; within minutes, they were hundreds of yards away.

  Half an hour passed; then something much larger floated through the airlock. One of the pods was inching its way out into space.

  Very cautiously, it jetted around the hull, and anchored itself near the base of the antenna support. A spacesuited figure emerged, worked for a few minutes on the mounting, then returned to the pod. After a while the pod retraced its path back to the airlock; it hovered outside the opening for some time, as if finding it difficult to reenter without the cooperation it had known in the past. But presently, with one or two slight bumps, it squeezed its way in.

  Nothing else happened for over an hour; the three ominous packages had long since disappeared from view, as they floated in single file away from the ship.

  Then the airlock doors closed, opened, and closed again. A little later, the faint blue glow of the emergency lights went out—to be replaced at once by a far more brilliant glare. Discovery was coming back to life.

  Presently there was an even better sign. The great bowl of the antenna, which for hours had been staring uselessly at Saturn, began to move again. It twisted round toward the rear of the ship; looking back over the propellant tanks and the thousands of square feet of the radiating fins. It lifted its face like a sunflower seeking the sun.

  Inside Discovery, David Bowman carefully centered the cross-wires that aligned the antenna on the gibbous Earth. Without automatic control, he would have to keep readjusting the beam—but it should hold steady for many minutes at a time. There were no dissenting impulses now, throwing it off target.

  He began to speak to Earth. It would be over an hour before his words got there, and Mission Control learned what had happened. It would be two hours before any reply could reach him.

  And it was difficult to imagine what answer Earth could possibly send, except a tactfully sympathetic, "Good-bye."

  Chapter 30

  The Secret

  Heywood Floyd looked as if he had had very little sleep, and his face was lined with worry. But whatever his feelings, his voice sounded firm and reassuring; he was doing his utmost to project confidence to the lonely man on the other side of the Solar System.

  "First of all, Dr. Bowman," he began, "we must congratulate you on the way you handled this extremely difficult situation. You did exactly the right thing in dealing with an unprecedented and unforeseen emergency.

  "We believe we know the cause of your Hal Nine Thousand's breakdown, but we'll discuss that later, as it is no longer a critical problem. All we are concerned with at the moment is giving you every possible assistance, so that you can complete your mission.

  "And now I must tell you its real purpose, which we have managed, with great difficulty, to keep secret from the general public. You would have been given all the facts as you approached Saturn; this is a quick summary to put you into the picture. Full briefing tapes will be dispatched in the next few hours. Everything I am about to tell you has the highest security classification.

  "Two years ago, we discovered the first evidence for intelligent life outside the Earth. A slab or monolith of hard, black material, ten feet high, was found buried in the crater Tycho. Here it is."

  At his first glimpse of TMA-1, with the spacesuited figures clustering around it, Bowman leaned toward the screen in openmouthed astonishment. In the excitement of this revelation—something which, like every man interested in space, he had half expected all his life—he almost forgot his own desperate predicament.

  The sense of wonder was swiftly followed by another emotion. This was tremendous—but what had it to do with him? There could be only one answer. He brought his racing thoughts under control, as Heywood Floyd reappeared on the screen.

  "The most astonishing thing about this object is its antiquity. Geological evidence proves beyond doubt that it is three million years old. It was placed on the Moon, therefore, when our ancestors were primitive ape-men.

  "After all these ages, one would naturally assume that it was inert. But soon after lunar sunrise, it emitted an extremely powerful blast of radio energy. We believe that this energy was merely the by-product—the backwash, as it were—of some unknown form of radiation, for at the same time, several of our space probes detected an unusual disturbance crossing the Solar System. We were able to track it with great accuracy. It was aimed precisely at Saturn.

  "Piecing things together after the event, we decided that the monolith was some kind of Sun-powered, or at least Sun-triggered, signaling device. The fact that it emitted its pulse immediately after sunrise, when it was exposed to daylight for the first time in three million years, could hardly be a coincidence.

  "Yet the thing had been deliberately buried—there's no doubt about that. An excavation thirty feet deep had been made, the block had been placed at the bottom of it, and the hole carefully filled.

  "You may wonder how we discovered it in the first place. Well, the object was easy—suspiciously easy—to find. It had a powerful magnetic field, so that it stood out like a sore thumb as soon as we started to conduct low-level orbital surveys.

  "But why bury a Sun-powered device thirty feet underground? We've examined dozens of theories, though we realize that it may be completely impossible to understand the motives of creatures three million years in advance of us.

  "The favorite theory is the simplest, and the most logical. It is also the most disturbing.

  "You hide a Sun-powered device in darkness—only if you want to know when it is brought out into the light. In other words, the monolith may be some kind of alarm. And we have triggered it.

  "Whether the civilization which set it up still exists, we do not know. We must assume that creatures whose machines still function after three million years may build a society equally long-lasting. And we must also assume, until we have evidence to the contrary, that they may be hostile. It has often been argued that any advanced culture must be benevolent, but we cannot take any chances.

  "Moreover, as the past history of our own world has shown so many times, primitive races have often failed to survive the encounter with higher civilizations. Anthropologists talk of 'cultural shock'; we may have to prepare the entire human race for such a shock. But until we know something about the creatures who visited the Moon—and presumably the Earth as well—three million years ago, we cannot even begin to make any preparations.

  "Your mission, therefore, is much more than a voyage of discovery. It is a scouting trip—a reconnaissance into unknown and potentially dangerous territory. The team under Dr. Kaminski had been specially trained for this work; now you will have to manage without them. . . .

  "Finally—your specific target. It seems incredible that advanced forms of life can exist on Saturn, or could ever have evolved on any of its moons. We had planned to survey the entire system, and we still hope that you can carry out a simplified program. But now we may have to concentrate on the eighth satellite—Japetus. When the time comes for the terminal maneuver, we will decide whether you should rendezvous with this remarkable object.

  "Japetus is unique in the Solar System—you know this already, of course, but like all the astronomers of the last three hundred years, you've probably given it little thought. So let me remind you that Cassini—who discovered Japetus in 1671—also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the other.

  "This is an extraordinary ratio, and there has never been a satisfactory explanation for it. Japetus is so small—about eight hundred miles in diameter—that even in the lunar telescopes its disk is barely visible. But there seems to be a brilliant, curiously symmetrical spot on one face, and this may be connected with TMA-1. I sometimes think that Japetus has been flashing at us like a cosmic heliograph for three hundred years, and we've been too stupid to understand its message. . . .

  "So now you know your real objective, and can appreciate the vital importance
of this mission. We are all praying that you can still provide us with some facts for a preliminary announcement; the secret cannot be kept indefinitely.

  "At the moment, we do not know whether to hope or fear. We do not know if, out on the moons of Saturn, you will meet with good or with evil—or only with ruins a thousand times older than Troy."

  PART FIVE

  THE MOONS OF SATURN

  Chapter 31

  Survival

  Work is the best remedy for any shock, and Bowman now had work enough for all his lost crewmates. As swiftly as possible, starting with the vital systems without which he and the ship would die, he had to get Discovery fully operational again.

  Life support was the first priority. Much oxygen had been lost, but the reserves were still ample to sustain a single man. The pressure and temperature regulation was largely automatic, and there had seldom been need for Hal to interfere with it. The monitors on Earth could now carry out many of the higher duties of the slain computer, despite the long time lag before they could react to changing situations. Any trouble in the life-support system—short of a serious puncture in the hull—would take hours to make itself apparent; there would be plenty of warning.

  The ship's power, navigation, and propulsion systems were unaffected—but the last two, in any event, Bowman would not need for months, until it was time to rendezvous with Saturn. Even at long range, without the help of an onboard computer, Earth could still supervise this operation. The final orbit adjustments would be somewhat tedious, because of the constant need for checking, but this was no serious problem.

  By far the worst job had been emptying the spinning coffins in the centrifuge. It was well, Bowman thought thankfully, that the members of the survey team had been colleagues, but not intimate friends. They had trained together for only a few weeks; looking back on it, he now realized that even this had been largely a compatibility test.