Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (160 page)

There was a bitter irony in the knowledge that he was heading straight toward that lovely, gleaming apparition. Another seven hundred miles an hour and he would have made it. Seven hundred miles an hour – that was all. He might as well ask for seven million.

The sight of the rising Earth brought home to him, with irresistible force, the duty he feared but could postpone no longer.

‘Launch Control,’ he said, holding his voice steady with a great effort, ‘please give me a circuit to Earth.’

This was one of the strangest things he had ever done in his life: to sit here above the Moon and listen to the telephone ring in his own home, a quarter of a million miles away. It must be near midnight down there in Africa, and it would be some time before there would be any answer. Myra would stir sleepily; then, because she was a spaceman’s wife, always alert for disaster, she would be instantly awake. But they had both hated to have a phone in the bedroom, and it would be at least fifteen seconds before she could switch on the light, close the nursery door to avoid disturbing the baby, get down the stairs, and …

Her voice came clear and sweet across the emptiness of space. He would recognise it anywhere in the universe, and he detected at once the undertone of anxiety.

‘Mrs Leyland?’ said the Earthside operator. ‘I have a call from your husband. Please remember the two-second time lag.’

Cliff wondered how many people were listening to this call, on either the Moon, the Earth, or the relay satellites. It was hard to talk for the last time to your loved ones when you didn’t know how many eavesdroppers there might be. But as soon as he began to speak, no one else existed but Myra and himself.

‘Darling,’ he began, ‘this is Cliff. I’m afraid I won’t be coming home, as I promised. There’s been a … a technical slip. I’m quite all right at the moment, but I’m in big trouble.’

He swallowed, trying to overcome the dryness in his mouth, then went on quickly before she could interrupt. As briefly as he could, he explained the situation. For his own sake as well as hers, he did not abandon all hope.

‘Everyone’s doing their best,’ he said. ‘Maybe they can get a ship up to me in time. But in case they can’t … well, I wanted to speak to you and the children.’

She took it well, as he had known that she would. He felt pride as well as love when her answer came back from the dark side of Earth.

‘Don’t worry, Cliff. I’m sure they’ll get you out, and we’ll have our holiday after all, exactly the way we planned.’

‘I think so, too,’ he lied. ‘But just in case, would you wake the children? Don’t tell them that anything’s wrong.’

It was an endless half-minute before he heard their sleepy, yet excited, voices. Cliff would willingly have given these last few hours of his life to have seen their faces once again, but the capsule was not equipped with such luxuries as vision. Perhaps it was just as well, for he could not have hidden the truth had he looked into their eyes. They would know it soon enough, but not from him. He wanted to give them only happiness in these last moments together.

Yet it was hard to answer their questions, to tell them that he would soon be seeing them, to make promises that he could not keep. It needed all his self-control when Brian reminded him of the moondust he had forgotten once before – but had remembered this time.

‘I’ve got it, Brian; it’s in a jar right beside me. Soon you’ll be able to show it to your friends.’ (No: soon it will be back on the world from which it came.) ‘And Susie – be a good girl and do everything that Mummy tells you. Your last school report wasn’t too good, you know, especially those remarks about behaviour…. Yes, Brian, I have those photographs, and the piece of rock from Aristarchus….’

It was hard to die at thirty-five; but it was hard, too, for a boy to lose his father at ten. How would Brian remember him in the years ahead? Perhaps as no more than a fading voice from space, for he had spent so little time on Earth. In the last few minutes, as he swung outward and then back to the Moon, there was little enough that he could do except project his love and his hopes across the emptiness that he would never span again. The rest was up to Myra.

When the children had gone, happy but puzzled, there was work to do. Now was the time to keep one’s head, to be businesslike and practical. Myra must face the future without him, but at least he could make the transition easier. Whatever happens to the individual, life goes on; and to modern man life involves mortgages and instalments due, insurance policies and joint bank accounts. Almost impersonally, as if they concerned someone else – which would soon be true enough – Cliff began to talk about these things. There was a time for the heart and a time for the brain. The heart would have its final say three hours from now, when he began his last approach to the surface of the Moon.

No one interrupted them. There must have been silent monitors maintaining the link between two worlds, but the two of them might have been the only people alive. Sometimes while he was speaking Cliff’s eyes would stray to the periscope, and be dazzled by the glare of Earth – now more than halfway up the sky. It was impossible to believe that it was home for seven billion souls. Only three mattered to him now.

It should have been four, but with the best will in the world he could not put the baby on the same footing as the others. He had never seen his younger son; and now he never would.

At last he could think of no more to say. For some things, a lifetime was not enough – but an hour could be too much. He felt physically and emotionally exhausted, and the strain on Myra must have been equally great. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts and with the stars, to compose his mind and to make his peace with the universe.

‘I’d like to sign off for an hour or so, darling,’ he said. There was no need for explanations; they understood each other too well. ‘I’ll call you back in – in plenty of time. Goodbye for now.’

He waited the two and a half seconds for the answering goodbye from Earth; then he cut the circuit and stared blankly at the tiny control desk. Quite unexpectedly, without desire or volition, tears sprang from his eyes, and suddenly he was weeping like a child.

He wept for his family, and for himself. He wept for the future that might have been, and the hopes that would soon be incandescent vapour, drifting between the stars. And he wept because there was nothing else to do.

After a while he felt much better. Indeed, he realised that he was extremely hungry. There was no point in dying on an empty stomach, and he began to rummage among the space rations in the closet-sized galley. While he was squeezing a tube of chicken-and-ham paste into his mouth, Launch Control called.

There was a new voice at the end of the line – a slow, steady, and immensely competent voice that sounded as if it would brook no nonsense from inanimate machinery.

‘This is Van Kessel, Chief of Maintenance, Space Vehicles Division. Listen carefully, Leyland. We think we’ve found a way out. It’s a long shot – but it’s the only chance you have.’

Alternations of hope and despair are hard on the nervous system. Cliff felt a sudden dizziness; he might have fallen had there been any direction in which to fall.

‘Go ahead,’ he said faintly, when he had recovered, Then he listened to Van Kessel with an eagerness that slowly changed to incredulity.

‘I don’t believe it!’ he said at last. ‘It just doesn’t make sense!’

‘You can’t argue with the computers,’ answered Van Kessel. ‘They’ve checked the figures about twenty different ways. And it makes sense, all right. You won’t be moving so fast at apogee, and it doesn’t need much of a kick then to change your orbit. I suppose you’ve never been in a deep-space rig before?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Pity – but never mind. If you follow instructions, you can’t go wrong. You’ll find the suit in the locker at the end of the cabin. Break the seals and haul it out.’

Cliff floated the full six feet from the control desk to the rear of the cabin and pulled on the lever marked EMERGENCY ONLY – TYPE 17 DEEP-SPACE SUIT. The door opened, and the shining silver fabric hung flaccid before him.

‘Strip down to your underclothes and wriggle into it,’ said Van Kessel. ‘Don’t bother about the biopack – you clamp that on later.’

‘I’m in.’ said Cliff presently. ‘What do I do now?’

‘You wait twenty minutes – and then we’ll give you the signal to open the air lock and jump.’

The implications of that word ‘jump’ suddenly penetrated. Cliff looked around the now familiar, comforting little cabin, and then thought of the lonely emptiness between the stars – the unreverberant abyss through which a man could fall until the end of time.

He had never been in free space; there was no reason why he should. He was just a farmer’s boy with a master’s degree in agronomy, seconded from the Sahara Reclamation Project and trying to grow crops on the Moon. Space was not for him; he belonged to the worlds of soil and rock, of moondust and vacuum-formed pumice.

‘I can’t do it,’ he whispered. ‘Isn’t there any other way?’

‘There’s not,’ snapped Van Kessel. ‘We’re doing our damnedest to save you, and this is no time to get neurotic. Dozens of men have been in far worse situations – badly injured, trapped in wreckage a million miles from help. But you’re not even scratched, and already you’re squealing! Pull yourself together – or we’ll sign off and leave you to stew in your own juice.’

Cliff turned slowly red, and it was several seconds before he answered.

‘I’m all right,’ he said at last. ‘Let’s go through those instructions again.’

‘That’s better,’ said Van Kessel approvingly. ‘Twenty minutes from now, when you’re at apogee, you’ll go into the air lock. From that point, we’ll lose communication; your suit radio has only a ten-mile range. But we’ll be tracking you on radar and we’ll be able to speak to you when you pass over us again. Now, about the controls on your suit …’

The twenty minutes went quickly enough. At the end of that time, Cliff knew exactly what he had to do. He had even come to believe that it might work.

‘Time to bail out,’ said Van Kessel. ‘The capsule’s correctly oriented – the air lock points the way you want to go. But direction isn’t critical.
Speed
is what matters. Put everything you’ve got into that jump – and good luck!’

‘Thanks,’ said Cliff inadequately. ‘Sorry that I …’

‘Forget it,’ interrupted Van Kessel. ‘Now get moving!’

For the last time, Cliff looked around the tiny cabin, wondering if there was anything that he had forgotten. All his personal belongings would have to be abandoned, but they could be replaced easily enough. Then he remembered the little jar of moondust he had promised Brian; this time, he would not let the boy down. The minute mass of the sample – only a few ounces – would make no difference to his fate. He tied a piece of string around the neck of the jar and attached it to the harness of his suit.

The air lock was so small that there was literally no room to move; he stood sandwiched between inner and outer doors until the automatic pumping sequence was finished. Then the rail slowly opened away from him, and he was facing the stars.

With his clumsy gloved fingers, he hauled himself out of the air lock and stood upright on the steeply curving hull, bracing himself tightly against it with the safety line. The splendour of the scene held him almost paralysed. He forgot all his fears of vertigo and insecurity as he gazed around him, no longer constrained by the narrow field of vision of the periscope.

The Moon was a gigantic crescent, the dividing line between night and day a jagged arch sweeping across a quarter of the sky. Down there the sun was setting, at the beginning of the long lunar night, but the summits of isolated peaks were still blazing with the last light of day, defying the darkness that had already encircled them.

That darkness was not complete. Though the sun had gone from the land below, the almost full Earth flooded it with glory. Cliff could see, faint but clear in the glimmering earthlight, the outlines of seas and highlands, the dim stars of mountain peaks, the dark circles of craters. He was flying above a ghostly, sleeping land – a land that was trying to drag him to his death. For now he was poised at the highest point of his orbit, exactly on the line between Moon and Earth. It was time to go.

He bent his legs, crouching against the hull. Then, with all his force, he launched himself toward the stars, letting the safety line run out behind him.

The capsule receded with surprising speed, and as it did so, he felt a most unexpected sensation. He had anticipated terror or vertigo, but not this unmistakable, haunting sense of familiarity. All this had happened before; not to him, of course, but to someone else. He could not pinpoint the memory, and there was no time to hunt for it now.

He flashed a quick glance at Earth, Moon, and receding spacecraft, and made his decision without conscious thought. The line whipped away as he snapped the quick-release. Now he was alone, two thousand miles above the Moon, a quarter of a million miles from Earth. He could do nothing but wait; it would be two and a half hours before he would know if he could live – and if his own muscles had performed the task that the rockets had failed to do.

And as the stars slowly revolved around him, he suddenly knew the origin of that haunting memory. It was many years since he had read Poe’s short stories, but who could ever forget them?