Expedition to Earth

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “The parachute compartment couldn’t be opened from the outside, but I’d taken the emergency axe from the pilot’s cabin. It didn’t take long to get through the magnesium skin: once it had been punctured I could almost tear it apart with my hands. A few seconds later I’d released the ’chute. The silk floated aimlessly around me: I had expected some trace of air-resistance at this speed but there wasn’t a sign of it. The canopy simply stayed where it was put. I could only hope that when we reentered atmosphere it would spread itself without fouling the rocket.

  “I thought I had a fairly good chance of getting away with it. The additional weight of David would increase the loading of the parachute by less than twenty per cent, but there was always the chance that the shrouds would chafe against the broken metal and be worn through before I could reach Earth. In addition the canopy would be distorted when it did open, owing to the unequal lengths of the cords. There was nothing I could do about that.

  “When I’d finished, I looked about me for the first time. I couldn’t see very well, for perspiration had misted over the glass of my suit. (Someone had better look into that: it can be dangerous.) I was still rising, though very slowly now. To the northeast I could see the whole of Sicily and some of the Italian mainland: farther south I could follow the Libyan coast as far as Bengasi. Spread out beneath me was all the land over which Alexander and Montgomery and Rommel had fought when I was a boy. It seemed rather surprising that anyone had ever made such a fuss about it.

  “I didn’t stay long: in three minutes I would be entering the atmosphere. I took a last look at the flaccid parachute, straightened some of the shrouds, and climbed back into the cabin. Then I jettisoned David’s fuel—first the oxygen, and then, as soon as it had had time to disperse, the alcohol.

  “That three minutes seemed an awfully long time. I was just over twenty-five kilometers high when I heard the first sound. It was a very high-pitched whistle, so faint that I could scarcely hear it. Glancing through the portholes, I saw that the parachute shrouds were becoming taut and the canopy was beginning to billow above me. At the same time I felt weight returning and knew that the rocket was beginning to decelerate.

  “The calculation wasn’t very encouraging. I’d fallen free for over two hundred kilometers and if I was to stop in time I’d need an average deceleration of ten gravities. The peaks might be twice that, but I’d stood fifteen g before now in a lesser cause. So I gave myself a double shot of dynocaine and uncaged the gimbals of my seat. I remember wondering whether I should let out David’s little wings, and decided that it wouldn’t help. Then I must have blacked out.

  “When I came round again it was very hot, and I had normal weight. I felt very stiff and sore, and to make matters worse the cabin was oscillating violently. I struggled to the port and saw that the desert was uncomfortably close. The big parachute had done its work, but I thought that the impact was going to be rather too violent for comfort. So I jumped.

  “From what you tell me I’d have done better to have stayed in the ship. But I don’t suppose I can grumble.”

  We sat in silence for a while. Then Jimmy remarked casually:

  “The accelerometer shows that you touched twenty-one gravities on the way down. Only for three seconds, though. Most of the time it was between twelve and fifteen.”

  David didn’t seem to hear and presently I said:

  “Well, we can’t hold the reporters off much longer. Do you feel like seeing them?”

  David hesitated.

  “No,” he answered. “Not now.”

  He read our faces and shook his head violently.

  “No,” he said with emphasis, “it’s not that at all. I’d be willing to take off again right now. But I want to sit and think things over for a while.”

  His voice sank, and when he spoke again it was to show the real David behind the perpetual mask of extraversion.

  “You think I haven’t any nerves,” he said, “and that I take risks without bothering about the consequences. Well, that isn’t quite true and I’d like you to know why. I’ve never told anyone this, not even Mavis.

  “You know I’m not superstitious,” he began, a little apologetically, “but most materialists have some secret reservations, even if they won’t admit them.

  “Many years ago I had a peculiarly vivid dream. By itself, it wouldn’t have meant much, but later I discovered that two other men had put almost identical experiences on record. One you’ve probably read, for the man was J. W. Dunne.

  “In his first book, An Experiment with Time, Dunne tells how he once dreamed that he was sitting at the controls of a curious flying machine with swept-back wings, and years later the whole experience came true when he was testing his inherent-stability aeroplane. Remembering my own dream, which I’d had before reading Dunne’s book, this made a considerable impression on me. But the second incident I found even more striking.

  “You’ve heard of Igor Sikorsky: he designed some of the first commercial long-distance flying-boats—‘Clippers,’ they were called. In his autobiography, The Story of the Winged-S, he tells us how he had a dream very similar to Dunne’s.

  “He was walking along a corridor with doors opening on either side and electric lights glowing overhead. There was a slight vibration underfoot and somehow he knew that he was in a flying machine. Yet at that time there were no aeroplanes in the world, and few people believed there ever would be.

  “Sikorsky’s dream, like Dunne’s, came true many years later. He was on the maiden flight of his first Clipper when he found himself walking along that familiar corridor.”

  David laughed, a little self-consciously.

  “You’ve probably guessed what my dream was about,” he continued. “Remember, it would have made no permanent impression if I hadn’t come across these parallel cases.

  “I was in a small, bare room with no windows. There were two other men with me, and we were all wearing what I thought at the time were diving-suits. I had a curious control panel in front of me, with a circular screen built into it. There was a picture on the screen, but it didn’t mean anything to me and I can’t recall it now, though I’ve tried many times since. All I remember is turning to the other two men and saying: ‘Five minutes to go, boys’—though I’m not sure if those were the exact words. And then, of course, I woke up.

  “That dream has haunted me ever since I became a test pilot. No—haunted isn’t the right word. It’s given me confidence that in the long run everything would be all right—at least until I’m in that cabin with those other two men. What happens after that I don’t know. But now you understand why I felt quite safe when I brought down the A.20, and when I crash-landed the A.15 off Pantelleria.

  “So now you know. You can laugh if you please: I sometimes do myself. But even if there’s nothing in it, that dream’s given my subconscious a boost that’s been pretty useful.”

  We didn’t laugh, and presently Jimmy said:

  “Those other men—did you recognize them?”

  David looked doubtful.

  “I’ve never made up my mind,” he answered. “Remember, they were wearing space-suits and I didn’t see their faces clearly. But one of them looked rather like you, though he seemed a good deal older than you are now. I’m afraid you weren’t there, Arthur. Sorry.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “As I’ve told you before, I’ll have to stay behind to explain what went wrong. I’m quite content to wait until the passenger service starts.”

  Jimmy rose to his feet.

  “O.K., David,” he said, “I’ll deal with the gang outside. Get some sleep now—with or without dreams. And by the way, the A.20 will be ready again in a week. I think she’ll be the last of the chemical rockets: they say the atomic drive’s nearly ready for us.”

  We never spoke of David’s dream again, but I think it was often in our minds. Three months later he took the A.20 up to six hundred and eighty kilometers, a record which will never be broken by a machine of th
is type, because no one will ever build a chemical rocket again. David’s uneventful landing in the Nile Valley marked the end of an epoch.

  It was three years before the A.21 was ready. She looked very small compared with her giant predecessors, and it was hard to believe that she was the nearest thing to a spaceship man had yet built. This time the takeoff was from sea level, and the Atlas Mountains which had witnessed the start of our earlier shots were now merely the distant background to the scene.

  By now both Jimmy and I had come to share David’s belief in his own destiny. I remember Jimmy’s parting words as the airlock closed.

  “It won’t be long now, David, before we build that three-man ship.”

  And I knew he was only half joking.

  We saw the A.21 climb slowly into the sky in great, widening circles, unlike any rocket the world had ever known before. There was no need to worry about gravitational loss now that we had a built-in fuel supply, and David wasn’t in a hurry. The machine was still traveling quite slowly when I lost sight of it and went into the plotting room.

  When I got there the signal was just fading from the screen, and the detonation reached me a little later. And that was the end of David and his dreams.

  The next I recall of that period is flying down the Conway Valley in Jimmy’s ’copter, with Snowdon gleaming far away on our right. We had never been to David’s home before and were not looking forward to this visit. But it was the least that we could do.

  As the mountains drifted beneath us we talked about the suddenly darkened future and wondered what the next step would be. Apart from the shock of personal loss, we were beginning to realize how much of David’s confidence we had come to share ourselves. And now that confidence had been shattered.

  We wondered what Mavis would do, and discussed the boy’s future. He must be fifteen now, though I hadn’t seen him for several years and Jimmy had never met him at all. According to his father he was going to be an architect and already showed considerable promise.

  Mavis was quite calm and collected, though she seemed much older than when I had last met her. For a while we talked about business matters and the disposal of David’s estate. I’d never been an executor before, but tried to pretend that I knew all about it.

  We had just started to discuss the boy when we heard the front door open and he came into the house. Mavis called to him and his footsteps came slowly along the passage. We could tell that he didn’t want to meet us, and his eyes were still red when he entered the room.

  I had forgotten how much like his father he was, and I heard a little gasp from Jimmy.

  “Hello, David,” I said.

  But he didn’t look at me. He was staring at Jimmy, with that puzzled expression of a man who has seen someone before but can’t remember where.

  And quite suddenly I knew that young David would never be an architect.

  The Sentinel

  The next time you see the full moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain, one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium—the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

  Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisium is very flat. There are none of the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking us wherever we wished to go.

  I was geologist—or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic—in charge of the group exploring the southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating down the flanks of those stupendous cliffs, retreating into the empty heart of the Moon. Over the land which we were crossing, the tideless ocean had once been half a mile deep, and now the only trace of moisture was the hoarfrost one could sometimes find in caves which the searing sunlight never penetrated.

  We had begun our journey early in the slow lunar dawn, and still had almost a week of Earth-time before nightfall. Half a dozen times a day we would leave our vehicle and go outside in the space-suits to hunt for interesting minerals, or to place markers for the guidance of future travelers. It was an uneventful routine. There is nothing hazardous or even particularly exciting about lunar exploration. We could live comfortably for a month in our pressurized tractors, and if we ran into trouble we could always radio for help and sit tight until one of the spaceships came to our rescue.

  I said just now that there was nothing exciting about lunar exploration, but of course that isn’t true. One could never grow tired of those incredible mountains, so much more rugged than the gentle hills of Earth. We never knew, as we rounded the capes and promontories of that vanished sea, what new splendors would be revealed to us. The whole southern curve of the Mare Crisium is a vast delta where a score of rivers once found their way into the ocean, fed perhaps by the torrential rains that must have lashed the mountains in the brief volcanic age when the Moon was young. Each of these ancient valleys was an invitation, challenging us to climb into the unknown uplands beyond. But we had a hundred miles still to cover, and could only look longingly at the heights which others must scale.

  We kept Earth-time aboard the tractor, and precisely at 22.00 hours the final radio message would be sent out to Base and we would close down for the day. Outside, the rocks would still be burning beneath the almost vertical sun, but to us it was night until we awoke again eight hours later. Then one of us would prepare breakfast, there would be a great buzzing of electric razors, and someone would switch on the short-wave radio from Earth. Indeed, when the smell of frying sausages began to fill the cabin, it was sometimes hard to believe that we were not back on our own world—everything was so normal and homely, apart from the feeling of decreased weight and the unnatural slowness with which objects fell.

  It was my turn to prepare breakfast in the corner of the main cabin that served as a galley. I can remember that moment quite vividly after all these years, for the radio had just played one of my favorite melodies, the old Welsh air, “David of the White Rock.” Our driver was already outside in his space-suit, inspecting our caterpillar treads. My assistant, Louis Garnett, was up forward in the control position, making some belated entries in yesterday’s log.

  As I stood by the frying pan waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let my gaze wander idly over the mountain walls which covered the whole of the southern horizon, marching out of sight to east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course, there is no loss of detail with distance—none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and sometimes transfigures all far-off things on Earth.

  Those mountains were ten thousand feet high, and they climbed steeply out of the plain as if ages ago some subterranean eruption had smashed them skyward through the molten crust. The base of even the nearest was hidden from sight by the steeply curving surface of the plain, for the Moon is a very little world, and from where I was standing the horizon was only two miles away.

  I lifted my eyes toward the peaks which no man had ever climbed, the peaks which, before the coming of terrestrial life, had watched the retreating oceans sink sullen
ly into their graves, taking with them the hope and the morning promise of a world. The sunlight was beating against those ramparts with a glare that hurt the eyes, yet only a little way above them the stars were shining steadily in a sky blacker than a winter midnight on Earth.

  I was turning away when my eye caught a metallic glitter high on the ridge of a great promontory thrusting out into the sea thirty miles to the west. It was a dimensionless point of light, as if a star had been clawed from the sky by one of those cruel peaks, and I imagined that some smooth rock surface was catching the sunlight and heliographing it straight into my eyes. Such things were not uncommon. When the Moon is in her second quarter, observers on Earth can sometimes see the great ranges in the Oceanus Procellarum burning with a blue-white iridescence as the sunlight flashes from their slopes and leaps again from world to world. But I was curious to know what kind of rock could be shining so brightly up there, and I climbed into the observation turret and swung our four-inch telescope round to the west.

  I could see just enough to tantalize me. Clear and sharp in the field of vision, the mountain peaks seemed only half a mile away, but whatever was catching the sunlight was still too small to be resolved. Yet it seemed to have an elusive symmetry, and the summit upon which it rested was curiously flat. I stared for a long time at that glittering enigma, straining my eyes into space, until presently a smell of burning from the galley told me that our breakfast sausages had made their quarter-million mile journey in vain.

  All that morning we argued our way across the Mare Crisium while the western mountains reared higher in the sky. Even when we were out prospecting in the space-suits, the discussion would continue over the radio. It was absolutely certain, my companions argued, that there had never been any form of intelligent life on the Moon. The only living things that had ever existed there were a few primitive plants and their slightly less degenerate ancestors. I knew that as well as anyone, but there are times when a scientist must not be afraid to make a fool of himself.