Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (192 page)

He grunted, looking at drafting tables and jigs. ‘If you ask me, a hundred Bill Haleys would be worse.’

She knew he wasn’t really listening.

Now they were buttonholed by the manager here, a portly young man with thinning hair who wanted to lecture them about the Mustard.

‘… “Mustard” for Multi-Unit Space Transport and Recovery Device, you see … We know the Americans are going for the dustbin theory, a virtually uncontrollable capsule. But the practical way forward in space has to be a recoverable vehicle, if only the Aviation Ministry will back us …’

Max listened sourly. What was a spaceship, after all, but plumbing? And all these glamorous spaceship projects were only coming about because of anticipation of the potential of radio-transport, and the international race to launch the first extraterrestrial relays into stationary orbit around the Earth.

And meanwhile in her field, all but ignored, such exciting developments were going on, right at the fringe of human understanding! Even now she had a letter in her purse from Eugene Wigner at Princeton, about his ideas on using quantum tunnelling effects to get around the light-speed barrier …

If only Henry could see it, they were actually on the same team – in fact, they were mutually dependent! But his suspicion of an expertise he didn’t share, and of her own growing reputation, seemed only to be deepening the gap between them.

Now, in remote Woomera, the Blue Streak countdown was nearing its climax.
Ten, nine, eight
… The two of them gathered with the English Electric staff under a loudspeaker. ‘To think,’ said the portly manager, ‘that once Prospero is up there, we’ll be able to watch the next launch on our televisions!’

Or, Max thought, simply step to Australia in person …

Maybe, she thought, we should have had children after all. But is the desire to solve our own problems any good motive for wanting a child? If only I could answer such simple questions as well as I can master the paradoxes of quantum mechanics …

Three, two, one
.

1967: Woomera, South Australia

In the upended cockpit, lying on his back with his legs in the air, Forbes listened to the voices relayed from the Operations Room, cultured British and crisp Australian. Everything was going well, and he was content to let his co-pilot – a bright young chap even if he was a Yorkshireman – field the various instructions and requests, and press whichever tit was appropriate.

Anyway, Forbes was relaxed. The G forces he would have to endure during the
Congreve
’s flight would be easier than those he’d tolerated during dogfights with 109s, when he’d hauled Spits through turns so tight he’d actually blacked out. And besides, nobody could get through as many hours on readiness – preparing for more trade with the Hun, and nothing to distract him but shove-ha’penny in the Dispersal Hut – as
he
had without learning to take it easy …

Forbes leaned forward and peered through his periscope. The red-brown Australian desert spread for miles around him, lifeless save for salt bushes and clumps of spiny grass. He peered down the flank of the Mustard, and lox vapour swirled across his vision.

The
Congreve
, ready for launch, looked like three Comet aircraft stood on end, belly to belly, with a crew of two in each nose. Fuelled by hydrogen and oxygen, the three units would take off together, the boosters feeding fuel to the central core; and then, at two hundred thou a hundred and fifty seconds after launch, the boosters would break away for their turbojet landings and allow the core, under Forbes’s command, to carry on to orbit. Since the three aircraft were reusable and of a single design, the boffins claimed Mustards could be twenty or thirty times cheaper per pound of payload than the converted missiles the Americans and Russians used: so cheap, in fact, that the imminence of this first flight had caused the Americans to close down their own rather vainglorious ballistic-capsule manned programme, including the planned Apollo Moon missions.

… But now the bally thing has to work, Forbes thought gloomily. The new space outposts, to be reached by the Wire platforms nestling in the kite’s belly, depended on the Mustard’s heavy-lift capacity. The Herschel Space Telescope, for instance, was already being assembled at the Pilkington glass factory in Lancashire …

The launch complex stood on an escarpment overlooking a dry lake, isolated save for the gleaming shells of lox tanks. The launch stand was not much more than a metal platform, in fact, with a single gaunt gantry rising alongside the ship itself.

The Woomera facilities were rather crude compared to Cape Canaveral, where he’d done a little training with the Americans. The Atlantic Union had smoothed his path there, although he was sure the Americans would have been generous enough to help anyhow. Unlike, for example, the French, although he knew he was being an old bigot to frame such a thought. He’d been delighted when the government had finally given up its attempts to persuade the European Common Market to let in Britain. A union with America made much more sense, in terms of a common culture and language – especially now the Wire had made distances on the Earth’s surface irrelevant.

Since May 1962, when Harold Macmillan had launched the first Wire link to Paris with a silly Union Jack stunt, the Wire and its possibilities had exploded across the world. Trade and travel had been transformed.

The Americans had been particularly inventive, as you might expect. There had been that awful Kennedy business in Dallas – the first flash crowd, they called it now – and the transporting of wounded GIs home from Vietnam to their parents’ arms within minutes of their injury – and LBJ’s campaign to enforce desegregation laws by putting Wire platforms in every school yard …

And on it went, the Wonder of the Second Elizabethan Age, and, because Max at Plessey had won her race with the Americans, it was British, by God. Sometimes it seemed you couldn’t open a newspaper without having those silly slogans thrust in your face – ‘Travel By Phone!’ ‘It’s Quicker By Wire!’. The young, particularly, seemed to be flourishing in this new distance-free world, if sometimes in rather peculiar ways. Even today, those caterwauling ninnies the Beatles were Wiring their way around the world singing ‘All You Need is Love’ live before two hundred million people.

The Wire had touched them all. Max had actually got rich, by investing in companies developing the new digital computers required to run the spreading Wire networks.

… If only she could have been here to see this, his apotheosis! But, as ever, she was too busy.

The Wire had turned his own life into something of a paradox, however. Only one flight-ready Mustard had been built; only a handful of flights would be required to haul up the orbital receiver platforms, and after that the Wire could take over, hauling freight and passengers up to orbit much more cheaply than any rocket ever could.

And what then? The Americans were talking of a new international programme to push on to the Moon. Forbes, despite his age, was considered a leading candidate to work on that. To the ruddy Moon! But it would mean another decade or more of intensive training and testing. And of course Max would just say he was running away again. Chasing a youth he’d already lost …

What nonsense. He expected it would all get easier when the divorce came through, and he could let this odd jealousy the Wire inspired in him fade away.

But that’s all for tomorrow, old lad, he told himself. First you need to get through today with your hide intact …

For in just eight minutes, Henry Forbes, fifty years old, would be a thousand miles high – in orbit around the Earth itself.

Two seconds before launch, six main engines ignited. There was a flare of brilliant white light. Smoke, white, but tinged with red Australian dust, billowed out to left and right of the triple spacecraft. Forbes heard a deep, throaty roar, far beneath him, like a door slamming in hell—

And, just for a second, he was transported back across more than twenty years, to that raid on the V2 launch site at Haagsche Bosch, when one of the birds had actually taken off in front of him, a cool pillar of flame rising up among the contrails of the warring kites …

And then the vibration rose up to engulf him.

1977: Procellarum Base

From the cabin of
Endeavour
, Forbes was staring down at a disc-shaped piece of the Moon, no more than ten feet below him. The low light of the lunar morning picked out craters of all sizes, from a few yards across down to pinpricks.

Buzz Aldrin, first man to walk on the Moon, stood at the foot of the rope ladder, foreshortened from Forbes’s vantage. Aldrin turned around, stiff as a mannequin, his Haldane suit glowing white in the sunlight. ‘Beautiful view,’ he said. ‘Magnificent desolation.’

‘
Endeavour
, Stevenage. That’s a nice phrase, Buzz.’

‘I have my moments,’ said Aldrin drily, and he bounded away across the surface, testing out his locomotion, moving out of Forbes’s sight.

Forbes appreciated his co-pilot’s lack of portentousness about his big scene. After all, the identity of the man to take the first actual footstep up here hardly mattered; the three crew – a Brit, a Yank and a Russkie – had landed on the Moon at precisely the same instant, at the climax of this cooperative programme.

Now it was Forbes’s turn. He took a moment to check the plastic carnation pinned to his white oversuit. Then, with the help of Alexei Leonov, Forbes lowered himself through the hatch and clung to the plastic rope ladder. He was stiff inside his balloon-like inflated Haldane suit, but he was an old crock of sixty and stiff as a board most of the time anyhow; being encased in a Moon cocoon hardly made a difference.

He dropped quickly, the shadows of
Endeavour
’s landing legs shifting around him, until – after a final, heart-thumping moment of hesitation – his feet crunched into the surface. The dust rose up slowly in neat little arcs, settling back on his legs.

He moved out from beneath the lander. Every time he took a step he could feel rock flour crackle under his weight. The light was oddly reversed, like a photographic negative: the pocked ground was a bright grey-brown under a sky as black as a cloudy night in Cleethorpes. The horizon was close, sharp, and it
curved
: the Moon really was very small, just a little rocky ball, and Forbes was stuck to its outside.

‘
Endeavour
, Stevenage. Good to see you, Henry. How do you feel?’

‘Ruddy peculiar,’ said Henry Forbes.

‘It would,’ said Leonov drily, ‘be ruddy peculiar indeed if you lent us a hand, Commander.’

Forbes turned, and saw that Aldrin and Leonov were half-way through the main task of the expedition, which was erecting the Wire transceiver. This first affair was a rough-and-ready Heath Robinson lash-up, assembled by pulling on lanyards fixed to the base of the
Endeavour
and letting the thing fold down. It didn’t matter as long as it worked; the engineers who would follow would bring components for much more permanent establishments.

He bounced forward to join in the work.

… The Earth was a round blue ball, much fatter than a full Moon, so high in the black sky he had to tilt back to see it. It was, he saw, morning in Europe; he could make out the continent clearly under a light dusting of cloud, though England was obscured. The air in general had got a lot clearer in recent years, although of course it was no longterm solution to Wire-dump industrial pollutants at the bottom of the oceans – eventually the noxious gases would escape to the atmosphere anyway – and in fact one proposed use of the Moon was as a global waste dump. Of course, as Max never tired of explaining to him, the quantum translation process at the heart of the Wire relied on having an inert mass to transform at the receiver end. It would, he thought, be a nice puzzle for future archaeologists to find, at the heart of decommissioned nuclear power stations, lumps of irradiated Moon dust …

He hadn’t spoken to Max for months. Perhaps even now she was watching some BBC broadcast of the Moonwalk, commentated by James Burke, Patrick Moore and Isaac Asimov.

Or perhaps not. The new developments being opened up by the billions of sterling dollars poured by the Wire corporations into quantum studies – there was talk of quantum computers, even of some kind of Dan Dare starship motor – more than absorbed Max’s attention now. Forbes found it all baffling, and rather spooky. The quantum computers, for instance, were supposed to attain huge speeds by carrying out computations simultaneously
in parallel universes
…

When the transceiver was erected, it was time for the flags. The Union Flag and the Hammer and Sickle were allowed to drape with a courtroom grace, but Aldrin, embarrassed, had to put up a Stars and Stripes stiffened with wire, to ‘wave’ on the airless Moon. And now came the gravity pendulum, a simple affair knocked up by the London Science Museum to demonstrate to the TV audience that they really were up here, embedded in the Moon’s weaker pull.

The three of them saluted, each in their own way, and took each other’s photographs.