Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (191 page)

With any luck, thought Captain Singh, this is my last broadcast to Earth. I’m tired of being a hero, and a slightly premature one at that. Many things could still go wrong, as indeed they already have …

‘This is Captain Singh, space tug
Goliath
. First of all, let me say how glad we are that the Elders of Chrislam have identified the saboteurs and handed them over to ASTROPOL.

‘We are now 50 days from Earth, and we have a slight problem. This one, I hasten to add, will not affect our new attempt to deflect Kali into a safe orbit. I note that the news media are calling this deflection Operation Deliverance. We like the name, and hope to live up to it, but we still cannot be absolutely certain of success. David, who appreciates all the goodwill messages he has received, estimates that the probability of Kali impacting Earth is still 100% …

‘We had intended to keep just enough propellant reserve to leave Kali shortly before encounter and go into a safer orbit, where our sister ship
Titan
could rendezvous with us. But that option is now closed. While
Goliath
was pushing against Kali at maximum drive, we broke through a weak point in the crust. The ship wasn’t damaged, but we’re stuck! All attempts to break away have failed.

‘We’re not worried, and it may even be a blessing in disguise. Now we’ll use the
whole
of our remaining propellant to give one final nudge. Perhaps that will be the last drop that’s needed to do the job.

‘So we’ll ride Kali past Earth, and wave to you from a comfortable distance, in just 50 days.’

It would be the longest 50 days in the history of the world.

Now the huge crescent of the Moon spanned the sky, the jagged mountain peaks along the terminator burning with the fierce light of the lunar dawn. But the dusty plains still untouched by the sun were not completely dark; they were glowing faintly in the light reflected from Earth’s clouds and continents. And scattered here and there across that once dead landscape were the glowing fireflies that marked the first permanent settlements humankind had built beyond the home planet. Captain Singh could easily locate Clavius Base, Port Armstrong, Plato City. He could even see the necklace of faint lights along the Translunar Railroad, bringing its precious cargo of water from the ice mines at the South Pole.

Earth was now only five hours away.

Kali entered Earth’s atmosphere soon after local midnight, 200 km above Hawaii. Instantly, the gigantic fireball brought a false dawn to the Pacific, awakening the wildlife on its myriad islands. But few humans had been asleep this night of nights, except those who had sought the oblivion of drugs.

Over New Zealand, the heat of the orbiting furnace ignited forests and melted the snow on mountaintops, triggering avalanches into the valleys beneath. But the human race had been very, very lucky: the main thermal impact as Kali passed the Earth was on the Antarctic, the continent that could best absorb it. Even Kali could not strip away all the kilometres of polar ice, but it set in motion the Great Thaw that would change coastlines all around the world.

No one who survived hearing it could ever describe the sound of Kali’s passage; none of the recordings were more than feeble echoes. The video coverage, of course, was superb, and would be watched in awe for generations to come. But nothing could ever compare with the fearsome reality.

Two minutes after it had sliced into the atmosphere, Kali re-entered space. Its closest approach to Earth had been 60 km. In that two minutes, it took 100,000 lives and did $1 trillion worth of damage.

Goliath
had been protected from the fireball by the massive shield of Kali itself; the sheets of incandescent plasma streamed harmlessly overhead. But when the asteroid smashed into Earth’s blanket of air at more than 100 times the speed of sound, the colossal drag forces mounted swiftly to five, 10, 20 gravities – and peaked at a level far beyond anything that machines or flesh could withstand.

Now indeed Kali’s orbit had been drastically changed; never again would it come near Earth. On its next return to the inner solar system, the swifter spacecraft of a later age would visit the crumpled wreckage of
Goliath
and bear reverently homeward the bodies of those who had saved the world.

Until the next encounter.

The Wire Continuum

Martian Times
, December 1997

First published in
Playboy
, January 1998 by

Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke

This is my first collaboration with Stephen Baxter – I contributed little more than one of the basic ideas, which had been gestating for more than fifty years – see ‘Travel by Wire’.

1947: Hatfield, North London, England

The engineers gave Henry Forbes a thumbs-up, and he let the Vampire roll down the runway. The roaring jets gave him that familiar smooth push in the back, and when he pulled on his stick the Vampire tipped up and threw him into the sky.

It was a cloudless June morning. The English sky was a powder-blue, uncluttered dome above him, and the duck-egg-green hull of the Vampire shone in the sunlight. He pulled the kite through a couple of circuits over London. The capital was a grey-brown, cluttered mass beneath him, with smoke columns threading up through a thin haze of smog. Beautiful sight, of course. He could still make out some of the bigger bomb sites, in the East End and the docks, discs of rubble like craters on the Moon.

He remembered Hatfield at the height of the show: dirty, patched-up Spits and Hurricanes and B24 bombers, taxiing between piles of rubble, kites bogged in the mud on days so foul even the sparrows were walking, flight-crew in overalls and silk scarves cranking engines, their faces drawn with exhaustion …

That was then. Now, the planes were like visitors from the future, gleaming metal monocoque jets with names like Vampire, Meteor, Canberra, Hunter, Lightning. And Henry Forbes, aged thirty, was no longer a Squadron Leader in blue RAF braid with a career spanning the Fall of France, the Battle of Britain and D-Day; now he was nothing more exotic than a test pilot for de Havilland, and not even the most senior at that.

Still, there were compensations. He was testing an engine for the new M52, which should be capable of flying at 1000 m.p.h., thereby knocking the socks off the Americans in California with their X-1 …

Forbes settled in his cockpit. The single-seater fighter was a tight squeeze, like the Spits used to be, even if today he was wearing no more than a battered sports suit, a Mae West, and a carnation in his buttonhole. Cocooned in his cockpit, alone in the empty sky, he felt an extraordinary peace. He wished Max could be up here with him – or, at least, that he could communicate to her some of what he felt about this business of flying. But he never could. And besides, she was much too busy with her own projects.

Susan Maxton was a couple of years younger than Forbes. When he’d met her during the war she’d been an intense young Oxford graduate, drafted into the Royal Signals, making rather hazardous trips to V2 impact sites across the scarred countryside of southern England. She had been seeking surviving bits of the sophisticated guidance systems that had delivered Hitler’s missiles – advanced far beyond anything the Allies had, she said – and since the war she’d travelled to Germany, to Peenemunde and the Ruhr and elsewhere, delving into more Nazi secrets.

It was all supposed to be classified, of course. He didn’t believe half of what she hinted to him so excitedly, all that lurid stuff of secret Nazi labs which had come within a hair of developing an A-bomb for Hitler – or even a way of transporting people by telephone wires, so Hitler could have mounted a new electronic
Blitzkrieg
even from the heart of his collapsing Reich!

After the war, they had agreed, Forbes and Max were going to marry. But it hadn’t happened yet. Like so many women during the war, Max had developed what Forbes had been brought up to regard as an altogether unhealthy liking for her work …

No doubt it would all pan out. And in the meantime, as his ground crew at Hatfield pointedly reminded him by radio, it was time to stop wool-gathering and get on with his day’s work.

He took a couple of plugs of cotton wool and stuffed them in his ears. Then he tipped up the nose of the Vampire once more and, pouring on the coals, launched the kite at the pale sky.

The blue was marvellous, and it deepened as he rose.

He throttled back on the jet as the air grew thinner. The Vampire arced towards the top of its climb, sixty thousand feet up.

The Earth itself was spread out beneath him, curving gently, landscape painted over it green and brown and grey, and the sky above was so deep blue it was almost black. From an English suburb to the edge of space, in a few minutes. Ruddy peculiar.

Of course the hairy stuff was still to come, as he went into a high-speed compressibility dive on the way home. He’d expect to lose control around twenty-four thou, saying a few prayers as per, until he reached the denser air at fifteen thou or so and his controls came back.

Still, if he did the right things, he would be home in time for lunch.

He stuffed the nose down and began his long fall back into the atmosphere.

1957: Preston, England

Susan Maxton Forbes watched, amused, as her husband made his slow ceremonial walk through the English Electric design offices. Even as the electrifying countdown to the latest Blue Streak launch played over a crackling radio line from Woomera, the young aerodynamicists clustered around Henry. She had to admit he carried it off well.

‘Impressive place,’ he said for the fifth time.

‘Well, you should have seen us just after the war,’ said one grizzled old-timer (aged perhaps thirty-four). ‘All we had was a disused garage over in Corporation Street. But it was there we hatched the Canberra.’

‘Ah! I tested her, you know. “The plane that makes time stand still”—’

‘Yes,’ said a breathy young thing. ‘It must have been exciting.’

‘Not really. Journalists can get jolly good stories out of test pilots. But the work is methodical, progressive, technical.’

‘Will you feel like that when you take up our Mustard, Henry?’

‘I should ruddy hope so, or I won’t get paid!’

There was general laughter. They walked on to another part of the office, and Max took the chance to slip an arm through her husband’s and steer him away from the breathy young thing.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t enjoy all this attention,’ she whispered to him.

‘Of course I do. You know me. All this bushy-tailed enthusiasm makes me feel a bit less of an old duffer—’

They exchanged a glance, and he shut up. It was just such exchanges about age that usually led into their gloomy arguments about whether they should have a sprog, and if so when, or even if they should have already …

She squeezed his arm. ‘I just wish people got so excited about my work,’ she said.

He grunted. ‘There was enough bally-hoo when you sent through that wooden cube. Nothing else in the
Daily Mirror
for weeks, it seemed; even forced Suez off the front page—’

‘But it didn’t work. The cube came through in little spheres, and—’

‘But they put it in the ruddy Science Museum even so! What more do you want? Not to mention that poor hamster that died of shock, that you had stuffed.’

She giggled. ‘I suppose it was all a little cruel. But I don’t mean that, the stunts for the press. It’s the intellectual adventure …’

He pulled a face, and sniffed the flower in his buttonhole. ‘Ah.
Intellectual
.’

‘The way we’re settling the problems that baffled the Germans – how to get around the wretched Uncertainty Principle …’

She tried to explain the latest progress at the Plessey labs in their research into the principles of radio-transportation. In fact matter wouldn’t be transported, but rather the information which encoded, say, a human being. It had been thought radio-transporters were impossible, because you’d need to map the position and velocity of every particle of a person, and that would violate the Uncertainty Principle.

But there was a loophole.

It had been a real drama: the struggles, the dead ends, the race with the Americans at Bell Labs to be first … before the researchers realised that an unknown quantum state could be disassembled into, then later reconstructed from, purely classical information using measurements called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations, and that said classical information could be sent down a wire as easily as a telegraph message …

That was the nub of it, although there was the devil in the detail of bandwidth and sampling requirements and storage capacity.

‘Of course you can’t copy quantum information,’ she said. ‘You have to
destroy
the object you’re going to radio-transport. And it’s just as well, or our machine would work as a copier – imagine a hundred Hitlers roaming the planet, each with an equally valid claim to being the original!’