Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (149 page)

‘And what was that?’ I asked. By now I’d become reconciled to sharing breakfast; my companion seemed a harmless-enough character, and there was something quite endearing about his obvious enthusiasm.

‘I found that any fool could make a high-powered astronomical telescope in his own kitchen, for a few dollars and a couple of weeks’ work. It was a revelation; like thousands of other kids, I borrowed a copy of Ingalls’
Amateur Telescope Making
from the public library, and went ahead. Tell me – have
you
ever built a telescope of your own?’

‘No: I’m an engineer, not an astronomer. I wouldn’t know how to begin the job.’

‘It’s incredibly simple, if you follow the rules. You start with two discs of glass, about an inch thick. I got mine for fifty cents from a ship chandler’s; they were porthole glasses that were no use because they’d been chipped around the edges. Then you cement one disc to some flat, firm surface – I used an old barrel, standing on end.

‘Next you have to buy several grades of emery powder, starting from coarse, gritty stuff and working down to the finest that’s made. You lay a pinch of the coarsest powder between the two discs, and start rubbing the upper one back and forth with regular strokes. As you do so, you slowly circle around the job.

‘You see what happens? The upper disc gets hollowed out by the cutting action of the emery powder, and as you walk around, it shapes itself into a concave, spherical surface. From time to time you have to change to a finer grade of powder, and make some simple optical tests to check that your curve’s right.

‘Later still, you drop the emery and switch to rouge, until at last you have a smooth, polished surface that you can hardly credit you’ve made yourself. There’s only one more step, though that’s a little tricky. You still have to silver the mirror, and turn it into a good reflector. This means getting some chemicals made up at the drugstore, and doing exactly what the book says.

‘I can still remember the kick I got when the silver film began to spread like magic across the face of my little mirror. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough, and I wouldn’t have swapped it for anything on Mount Palomar.

‘I fixed it at one end of a wooden plank: there was no need to bother about a telescope tube, though I put a couple of feet of cardboard round the mirror to cut out stray light. For an eyepiece I used a small magnifying lens I’d picked up in a junk store for a few cents. Altogether, I don’t suppose the telescope cost more than five dollars – though that was a lot of money to me when I was a kid.

‘We were living then in a run-down hotel my family owned on Third Avenue. When I’d assembled the telescope I went up on the roof and tried it out, among the jungle of TV antennas that covered every building in those days. It took me a while to get the mirror and eyepiece lined up, but I hadn’t made any mistakes and the thing worked. As an optical instrument it was probably lousy – after all, it was my first attempt – but it magnified at least fifty times and I could hardly wait until nightfall to try it on the stars.

‘I’d checked with the almanac, and knew that Saturn was high in the east after sunset. As soon as it was dark I was up on the roof again, with my crazy contraption of wood and glass propped between two chimneys. It was late fall, but I never noticed the cold, for the sky was full of stars – and they were all mine.

‘I took my time setting the focus as accurately as possible, using the first star that came in to the field. Then I started hunting for Saturn, and soon discovered how hard it was to locate anything in a reflecting telescope that wasn’t properly mounted. But presently the planet shot across the field of view. I nudged the instrument a few inches this way and that – and there it was.

‘It was tiny, but it was perfect. I don’t think I breathed for a minute; I could hardly believe my eyes. After all the pictures, here was the reality. It looked like a toy hanging there in space, with the rings slightly open and tilted toward me. Even now, forty years later, I can remember thinking “It looks so
artificial
– like something from a Christmas tree!” There was a single bright star to the left of it, and I knew that was Titan.’

He paused, and for a moment we must have shared the same thoughts. For to both of us Titan was no longer merely the largest moon of Saturn – a point of light known only to astronomers. It was the fiercely hostile world upon which
Endeavour
had landed, and where three of my crew-mates lay in lonely graves, farther from their homes than any of Mankind’s dead had ever rested before.

‘I don’t know how long I stared, straining my eyes and moving the telescope across the sky in jerky steps as Saturn rose above the city. I was a billion miles from New York; but presently New York caught up with me.

‘I told you about our hotel; it belonged to my mother, but my father ran it – not very well. It had been losing money for years, and all through my boyhood there had been continuous financial crises. So I don’t want to blame my father for drinking; he must have been half crazy with worry most of the time. And I had quite forgotten that I was supposed to be helping the clerk at the reception desk …

‘So Dad came looking for me, full of his own cares and knowing nothing about my dreams. He found me stargazing on the roof.

‘He wasn’t a cruel man – he couldn’t have understood the study and patience and care that had gone into my little telescope, or the wonders it had shown me during the short time I had used it. I don’t hate him any more, but I’ll remember all my life the splintering crack of my first and last mirror as it smashed against the brickwork.’

There was nothing I could say. My initial resentment at this interruption had long since changed to curiosity. Already I sensed that there was much more to this story than I’d heard so far, and I’d noticed something else. The waitress was treating us with an exaggerated deference – only a little of which was directed at me.

My companion toyed with the sugar bowl while I waited in silent sympathy. By this time I felt there was some bond between us, though I did not know exactly what it was.

‘I never built another telescope,’ he said. ‘Something else broke, besides that mirror – something in my heart. Anyway, I was much too busy. Two things happened that turned my life upside down. Dad walked out on us, leaving me the head of the family. And then they pulled down the Third Avenue El.’

He must have seen my puzzled look, for he grinned across the table at me.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t know about that. But when I was a kid, there was an elevated railroad down the middle of Third. It made the whole area dirty and noisy; the Avenue was a slum district of bars, pawnshops and cheap hotels – like ours. All that changed when the El went; land values shot up, and we were suddenly prosperous. Dad came back quickly enough, but it was too late; I was running the business. Before long I started moving across town – then across country. I wasn’t an absent-minded stargazer any more, and I gave Dad one of my smaller hotels, where he couldn’t do much harm.

‘It’s forty years since I looked at Saturn, but I’ve never forgotten that one glimpse, and last night your photographs brought it all back. I just wanted to say how grateful I am.’

He fumbled in his wallet and pulled out a card.

‘I hope you’ll look me up when you’re in town again; you can be sure I’ll be there if you give any more lectures. Good luck – and I’m sorry to have taken so much of your time.’

Then he was gone, almost before I could say a word. I glanced at the card, put it away in my pocket, and finished my breakfast, rather thoughtfully.

When I signed my check on the way out of the coffee shop I asked: ‘Who was that gentleman at my table? The boss?’

The cashier looked at me as if I were mentally retarded.

‘I suppose you
could
call him that, sir,’ she answered. ‘Of course he owns this hotel, but we’ve never seen him here before. He always stays at the Ambassador, when he’s in Chicago.’

‘And does he own
that
?’ I said, without too much irony, for I’d already suspected the answer.

‘Why, yes. As well as—’ and she rattled off a whole string of others, including the two biggest hotels in New York.

I was impressed, and also rather amused, for it was now obvious that Mr Perlman had come here with the deliberate intention of meeting me. It seemed a roundabout way of doing it; I knew nothing, then, of his notorious shyness and secretiveness. From the first, he was never shy with me.

Then I forgot about him for five years. (Oh, I should mention that when I asked for my bill, I was told I didn’t have one.) During that five years, I made my second trip.

We knew what to expect this time, and weren’t going completely into the unknown. There were no more worries about fuel, because all we could ever use was waiting for us on Titan; we just had to pump its methane atmosphere into our tanks, and we’d made our plans accordingly. One after another, we visited all the nine moons; and then we went into the rings …

There was little danger, yet it was a nerve-racking experience. The ring system is very thin, you know – only about twenty miles in thickness. We descended into it slowly and cautiously, after having matched its spin so that we were moving at exactly the same speed. It was like stepping onto a carousel a hundred and seventy thousand miles across …

But a ghostly kind of carousel, because the rings aren’t solid and you can look right through them. Close up, in fact, they’re almost invisible; the billions of separate particles that make them up are so widely spaced that all you see in your immediate neighbourhood are occasional small chunks, drifting very slowly past. It’s only when you look into the distance that the countless fragments merge into a continuous sheet, like a hailstorm that sweeps around Saturn forever.

That’s not
my
phrase, but it’s a good one. For when we brought our first piece of genuine Saturnian ring into the air lock, it melted down in a few minutes into a pool of muddy water. Some people think it spoils the magic to know that the rings – or ninety per cent of them – are made of ordinary ice. But that’s a stupid attitude; they would be just as wonderful, and just as beautiful, if they were made of diamond.

When I got back to Earth, in the first year of the new century, I started off on another lecture tour – only a short one, for now I had a family and wanted to see as much of it as possible. This time I ran into Mr Perlman in New York, when I was speaking at Columbia and showing our movie, ‘Exploring Saturn.’ (A misleading title, that, since the nearest we’d been to the planet itself was about twenty thousand miles. No one dreamed, in those days, that men would ever go down into the turbulent slush which is the closest thing Saturn has to a surface.)

Mr Perlman was waiting for me after the lecture. I didn’t recognise him, for I’d met about a million people since our last encounter. But when he gave his name, it all came back, so clearly that I realised he must have made a deep impression on my mind.

Somehow he got me away from the crowd; though he disliked meeting people in the mass, he had an extraordinary knack of dominating any group when he found it necessary – and then clearing out before his victims knew what had happened. Though I saw him in action scores of times, I never knew exactly how he did it.

At any rate, half an hour later we were having a superb dinner in an exclusive restaurant (his, of course). It was a wonderful meal, especially after the chicken and ice cream of the lecture circuit, but he made me pay for it. Metaphorically, I mean.

Now all the facts and photos gathered by the two expeditions to Saturn were available to everyone, in hundreds of reports and books and popular articles. Mr Perlman seemed to have read all the material that wasn’t too technical; what he wanted from me was something different. Even then, I put his interest down to that of a lonely, aging man, trying to recapture a dream that had been lost in youth. I was right; but that was only a fraction of the whole picture.

He was after something that all the reports and articles failed to give. What did it
feel
like, he wanted to know, to wake up in the morning and see that great, golden globe with its scudding cloud belts dominating the sky? And the rings themselves – what did they do to your mind when they were so close that they filled the heavens from end to end?

You want a poet, I said – not an engineer. But I’ll tell you this; however long you look at Saturn, and fly in and out among its moons, you can never quite believe it. Every so often you find yourself thinking: ‘It’s all a dream – a thing like that
can’t
be real.’ And you go to the nearest view-port – and there it is, taking your breath away.

You must remember that, altogether apart from our nearness, we were able to look at the rings from angles and vantage points that are quite impossible from Earth, where you always see them turned toward the sun. We could fly into their shadow, and then they would no longer gleam like silver – they would be a faint haze, a bridge of smoke across the stars.

And most of the time we could see the shadow of Saturn lying across the full width of the rings, eclipsing them so completely that it seemed as if a great bite had been taken out of them. It worked the other way, too; on the day side of the planet, there would always be the shadow of the rings running like a dusky band parallel to the Equator and not far from it.