Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (179 page)

During those last few seconds, I think we all forgot our own predicament; we were up there aboard
Olympus
, willing the thrust to build up smoothly and lift the ship out of the tiny gravitational field of Phobos, and then away from Mars for the long fall sunward. We heard Commander Richmond say ‘Ignition’, there was a brief burst of interference, and the patch of light began to move in the field of the telescope.

That was all. There was no blazing column of fire, because, of course, there’s really no ignition when a nuclear rocket lights up. ‘Lights up’ indeed! That’s another hangover from the old chemical technology. But a hot hydrogen blast is completely invisible; it seems a pity that we’ll never again see anything so spectacular as a Saturn or a Korolov blast-off.

Just before the end of the burn,
Olympus
left the shadow of Mars and burst out into sunlight again, reappearing almost instantly as a brilliant, swiftly moving star. The blaze of light must have startled them aboard the ship, because we heard someone call out: ‘Cover that window!’ Then, a few seconds later, Richmond announced: ‘Engine cutoff.’ Whatever happened,
Olympus
was now irrevocably headed back to Earth.

A voice I didn’t recognise – though it must have been the Commander’s – said ‘Goodbye,
Pegasus
’, and the radio transmission switched off. There was, of course, no point in saying ‘Good luck’.
That
had all been settled weeks ago.

I’ve just played this back. Talking of luck, there’s been one compensation, though not for us. With a crew of only ten,
Olympus
has been able to dump a third of her expendables and lighten herself by several tons. So now she’ll get home a month ahead of schedule.

Plenty of things could have gone wrong in that month; we may yet have saved the expedition. Of course, we’ll never know – but it’s a nice thought.

I’ve been playing a lot of music, full blast – now that there’s no one else to be disturbed. Even if there were any Martians, I don’t suppose this ghost of an atmosphere can carry the sound more than a few yards.

We have a fine collection, but I have to choose carefully. Nothing downbeat and nothing that demands too much concentration. Above all, nothing with human voices. So I restrict myself to the lighter orchestral classics; the ‘New World’ symphony and Grieg’s piano concerto fill the bill perfectly. At the moment I’m listening to Rachmaninoff’s ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’, but now I must switch off and get down to work.

There are only five minutes to go. All the equipment is in perfect condition. The telescope is tracking the Sun, the video recorder is standing by, the precision timer is running.

These observations will be as accurate as I can make them. I owe it to my lost comrades, whom I’ll soon be joining. They gave me their oxygen, so that I can still be alive at this moment. I hope you remember that, a hundred or a thousand years from now, whenever you crank these figures into the computers….

Only a minute to go; getting down to business. For the record: year, 1984; month, May; day, II, coming up to four hours thirty minutes Ephemeris Time …
now
.

Half a minute to contact. Switching recorder and timer to high speed. Just rechecked position angle to make sure I’m looking at the right spot on the Sun’s limb. Using power of five hundred – image perfectly steady even at this low elevation.

Four thirty-two. Any moment now …

There it is … there it is! I can hardly believe it! A tiny black dent in the edge of the Sun … growing, growing, growing …

Hello, Earth. Look up at me, the brightest star in your sky, straight overhead at midnight….

Recorder back to slow.

Four thirty-five. It’s as if a thumb is pushing into the Sun’s edge, deeper and deeper…. Fascinating to watch …

Four forty-one. Exactly halfway. The Earth’s a perfect black semicircle – a clean bite out of the Sun. As if some disease is eating it away …

Four forty-eight. Ingress three-quarters complete.

Four hours forty-nine minutes thirty seconds. Recorder on high speed again.

The line of contact with the Sun’s edge is shrinking fast. Now it’s a barely visible black thread. In a few seconds, the whole Earth will be superimposed on the Sun.

Now I can see the effects of the atmosphere. There’s a thin halo of light surrounding that black hole in the Sun. Strange to think that I’m seeing the glow of all the sunsets – and all the sunrises – that are taking place around the whole Earth at this very moment….

Ingress complete – four hours fifty minutes five seconds. The whole world has moved onto the face of the Sun. A perfectly circular black disc silhouetted against that inferno ninety million miles below. It looks bigger than I expected; one could easily mistake it for a fair-sized sunspot.

Nothing more to see now for six hours, when the Moon appears, trailing Earth by half the Sun’s width. I’ll beam the recorder data back to Lunacom, then try to get some sleep.

My very last sleep. Wonder if I’ll need drugs. It seems a pity to waste these last few hours, but I want to conserve my strength – and my oxygen.

I think it was Dr Johnson who said that nothing settles a man’s mind so wonderfully as the knowledge that he’ll be hanged in the morning. How the hell did
he
know?

Ten hours thirty minutes Ephemeris Time. Dr Johnson was right. I had only one pill, and don’t remember any dreams.

The condemned man also ate a hearty breakfast. Cut that out …

Back at the telescope. Now the Earth’s halfway across the disc, passing well north of centre. In ten minutes, I should see the Moon.

I’ve just switched to the highest power of the telescope – two thousand. The image is slightly fuzzy, but still fairly good; atmospheric halo very distinct. I’m hoping to see the cities on the dark side of Earth….

No luck. Probably too many clouds. A pity; it’s theoretically possible, but we never succeeded. I wish … never mind.

Ten hours forty minutes. Recorder on slow speed. Hope I’m looking at the right spot.

Fifteen seconds to go. Recorder fast.

Damn – missed it. Doesn’t matter – the recorder will have caught the exact moment. There’s a little black notch already in the side of the Sun. First contact must have been about ten hours forty-one minutes twenty seconds ET.

What a long way it is between Earth and Moon; there’s half the width of the Sun between them. You wouldn’t think the two bodies had anything to do with each other. Makes you realise just how big the Sun really is….

Ten hours forty-four minutes. The Moon’s exactly halfway over the edge. A very small, very clear-cut semicircular bite out of the edge of the Sun.

Ten hours forty-seven minutes five seconds. Internal contact. The Moon’s clear of the edge, entirely inside the Sun. Don’t suppose I can see anything on the night side, but I’ll increase the power.

That’s funny.

Well, well. Someone must be trying to talk to me; there’s a tiny light pulsing away there on the darkened face of the moon. Probably the laser at Imbrium Base.

Sorry, everyone. I’ve said all my goodbyes, and don’t want to go through that again. Nothing can be important now.

Still, it’s almost hypnotic – that flickering point of light, coming out of the face of the Sun itself. Hard to believe that, even after it’s travelled all this distance, the beam is only a hundred miles wide. Lunacom’s going to all this trouble to aim it exactly at me, and I suppose I should feel guilty at ignoring it. But I don’t. I’ve nearly finished my work, and the things of Earth are no longer any concern of mine.

Ten hours fifty minutes. Recorder off. That’s it – until the end of Earth transit, two hours from now.

I’ve had a snack and am taking my last look at the view from the observation bubble. The Sun’s still high, so there’s not much contrast, but the light brings out all the colours vividly – the countless varieties of red and pink and crimson, so startling against the deep blue of the sky. How different from the Moon – though that, too, has its own beauty.

It’s strange how surprising the obvious can be. Everyone knew that Mars was red. But we didn’t really expect the red of rust, the red of blood. Like the Painted Desert of Arizona; after a while, the eye longs for green.

To the north, there is one welcome change of colour; the cap of carbon-dioxide snow on Mount Burroughs is a dazzling white pyramid. That’s another surprise. Burroughs is twenty-five thousand feet above Mean Datum; when I was a boy, there weren’t supposed to be any mountains on Mars….

The nearest sand dune is a quarter of a mile away, and it, too, has patches of frost on its shaded slope. During the last storm, we thought it moved a few feet, but we couldn’t be sure. Certainly the dunes
are
moving, like those on Earth. One day, I suppose, this base will be covered – only to reappear again in a thousand years. Or ten thousand.

That strange group of rocks – the Elephant, the Capitol, the Bishop – still holds its secrets, and teases me with the memory of our first big disappointment. We could have sworn that they were sedimentary; how eagerly we rushed out to look for fossils! Even now, we don’t know what formed that outcropping. The geology of Mars is still a mass of contradictions and enigmas….

We have passed on enough problems to the future, and those who come after us will find many more. But there’s one mystery we never reported to Earth, or even entered in the log….

The first night after we landed, we took turns keeping watch. Brennan was on duty, and woke me up soon after midnight. I was annoyed – it was ahead of time – and then he told me that he’d seen a light moving around the base of the Capitol.

We watched for at least an hour, until it was my turn to take over. But we saw nothing; whatever that light was, it never reappeared.

Now Brennan was as levelheaded and unimaginative as they come; if he said he saw a light, then he saw one. Maybe it was some kind of electric discharge, or the reflection of Phobos on a piece of sand-polished rock. Anyway, we decided not to mention it to Lunacom, unless we saw it again.

Since I’ve been alone, I’ve often awakened in the night and looked out toward the rocks. In the feeble illumination of Phobos and Deimos, they remind me of the skyline of a darkened city. And it has always remained darkened. No lights have ever appeared for me….

*

Twelve hours forty-nine minutes Ephemeris Time. The last act’s about to begin. Earth has nearly reached the edge of the Sun. The two narrow horns of light that still embrace it are barely touching….

Recorder on fast.

Contact! Twelve hours fifty minutes sixteen seconds. The crescents of light no longer meet. A tiny black spot has appeared at the edge of the Sun, as the Earth begins to cross it. It’s growing longer, longer….

Recorder on slow. Eighteen minutes to wait before Earth finally clears the face of the Sun.

The Moon still has more than halfway to go; it’s not yet reached the midpoint of its transit. It looks like a little round blob of ink, only a quarter the size of Earth. And there’s no light flickering there any more. Lunacom must have given up.

Well, I have just a quarter of an hour left, here in my last home. Time seems to be accelerating the way it does in the final minutes before a lift-off. No matter; I have everything worked out now. I can even relax.

Already, I feel part of history. I am one with Captain Cook, back in Tahiti in 1769, watching the transit of Venus. Except for that image of the Moon trailing along behind, it must have looked just like this….

What would Cook have thought, over two hundred years ago, if he’d known that one day a man would observe the whole Earth in transit from an outer world? I’m sure he would have been astonished – and then delighted….

But I feel a closer identity with a man not yet born. I hope you hear these words, whoever you may be. Perhaps you will be standing on this very spot, a hundred years from now, when the next transit occurs.

Greetings to 2084, November 10! I wish you better luck than we had. I suppose you will have come here on a luxury liner. Or you may have been born on Mars, and be a stranger to Earth. You will know things that I cannot imagine. Yet somehow I don’t envy you. I would not even change places with you if I could.

For you will remember my name, and know that I was the first of all mankind ever to see a transit of Earth. And no one will see another for a hundred years….

Twelve hours fifty-nine minutes. Exactly halfway through egress. The Earth is a perfect semicircle – a black shadow on the face of the Sun. I still can’t escape from the impression that something has taken a big bite out of that golden disc. In nine minutes it will be gone, and the Sun will be whole again.

Thirteen hours seven minutes. Recorder on fast.

Earth has almost gone. There’s just a shallow black dimple at the edge of the Sun. You could easily mistake it for a small spot, going over the limb.

Thirteen hours eight.

Goodbye, beautiful Earth.