Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (193 page)

‘
Endeavour
, Stevenage. Okay, gentlemen, the show’s over; we’ll see you back home in a couple of minutes …’

So soon? Forbes thought wistfully.

But already Leonov and Aldrin were filing obediently towards the Wire transceiver. They disappeared in the characteristic blue flashes of radio-transport, and were replaced by polythene sacks of water.

For a moment, Forbes was alone on the Moon. His breath was loud in his helmet, and he thought of the Puffing Billies, the foul-smelling oxygen economiser bellows they’d been forced to use in the high altitude Spits …

In just a few minutes, the engineers would start coming through, and a whole squad of journalists and lunar surface scientists, even some scholars from the Science Museum to start the instant preservation of the
Endeavour
. He looked around at the untrodden plains of the Sea of Storms and wondered how it would look here in a few weeks or months, as humans spread out from this beachhead, building busily.

The
Endeavour
stood proudly behind the flags, fifty feet tall, the blunt curve of the ceramic heat shield at her hemispherical nose swathed in shimmering Kevlar insulation blankets. There was raying, streaks in the dust, under the gaping nozzle of the high-performance Rolls Royce liquid rocket engine which had, Forbes thought with some pride, performed like a dream.

But
Endeavour
was the first and last of her kind. A new generation of complex, intelligent unmanned craft, with names like
Voyager
and
Mariner
and
Venera
, were already sailing out from Earth, taking Wire platforms to Mars and Venus and the moons of Jupiter. Buzz Aldrin had been lucky; the first man or woman on Mars would almost certainly be a politician, not a pilot …

Once again, thanks to the inexorable advance of technology, Forbes’s usefulness was over.

Of course when he got home, this lunar flight would be regarded as the peak of his career. He would be expected to retire: to pass on the torch, to the rather peculiar set of young people who were growing up with the Wire …

But he wasn’t ready for his carpet slippers just yet, no matter what the calendar told him. He knew what Max would say to
that
– it was all of a piece with their eventual failure to have children, a part of his refusal to accept his own ageing – and similar modern psychobabble nonsense. But he had a private medical report which indicated that retiring to the cottage in the country might not be a sensible option anyway …

He closed his eyes, and stepped through the transceiver’s sketchy portal. There was a stab of pain as the electron-beam scanners swept over him.

For two seconds, as an S-band signal leapt from Moon to Earth, he did not, presumably, exist.

Suddenly weight descended on him, six times as much as on the Moon, and he staggered under the bulk of his suit. But there were hands on his arms to support him, noise all around him.

He opened his eyes. Beyond the walls of the quarantine facility, the sky of England was grey and enclosing.

1987: Brunel Dock, Low Earth Orbit

He awoke when the slow thermal roll of the dock brought bright water-blue Earthlight slanting into his cabin.

He floated out of his sleeping bag. He ran his fingers through what was left of his hair, and made himself tea. This consisted of pumping a polythene bag full of hot water and sucking the resulting pale brown mush through a nipple. Revolting; even the strongest brew never masked the taste of plastic. And of course with the low pressure up here the Rosie Lee was never properly
hot
…

Still, he lingered. Although he had some suspicion that his work here, as a consultant on
Discovery
’s control systems, was something of a sinecure, his days were busy enough; at seventy, he had learned to give himself time to wake up.

Of course, the view was always a terrific distraction.

Today, in bright noon sunlight, under smog-free air, England glittered with scattered homes. Even from up here, Forbes could see how the great old cities had shrunk – even London – with those huge misty-grey scars of suburbs eaten into by the new green reforestation swathes. Commuting, by train or car anyway, was a thing of the past; the capital’s workers flickered directly into the heart of the city, popping out of Wire transceivers in the old Tube stations. The M1 motorway, in fact, had been turned into a singularly long race-track … There were even, he had read, people who maintained ‘distributed careers’ with desks in a dozen capital cities around the world, jumping from morning to night. It would never have suited Forbes.

There were costs, of course. Even from up here Forbes could see the blue sparkle of swimming pools, sprinkled across the mountains and valleys of Scotland and Wales and Northumberland … The people of Britain had scattered across their tiny islands in search of illusory wilderness, but there was just no ruddy room. There had been some attempt to preserve the more beautiful areas. In the Lake District, for instance, tourists were Wired into great glass viewing boxes, peering out at Wordsworth’s beloved landscape like so many goldfish from a bowl …

And some Wire-related costs were not visible from orbit. He remembered the panic when rabies had swept over England soon after the opening-up of the first French links. And there had been some rather more serious plagues, such as the explosion in AIDS cases in the early 1980s. Some commentators said that the various viruses and bacteria which feasted on man were enjoying an unprecedented explosion in evolutionary growth, such was the expansion of possible infection vectors. Others said that on a Wired planet, man must evolve in response, or perish.

Some of the lingering anti-Wire hysteria was absurd, of course, even to a crusty old sceptic like himself. Since 1963, a year after the Wire’s opening, there had been no serious accidents with the system itself – such as the loss or corruption of a human pattern in transit – and it had been quite irresponsible for Twentieth-Century Fox to remake
The Fly
, in such gruesome detail …

The Wire could be a force for good, its fans argued. It was being used to defuse the Cold War, with teams of UN inspectors Wiring back and forth between the nuclear silos held by each side, and rushing peacekeepers to any potential trouble spot. And the Wire had averted so many possible catastrophes – getting the American hostages out of Iran in ’81, averting a war between the Atlantic Union and the Argentine over the Falklands in ’82, distributing aid to those wretched famine victims in Ethiopia in ’84 – that it was, it seemed, in danger of provoking an outbreak of Utopianism, all across the planet.

So Max had said anyhow, the last time he’d seen her. But they’d argued.

They had been like ambassadors from two alien species, stiff and made suddenly old. She’d been more interested in lecturing him about the work she was doing with Feynman and Deutsch on quantum computers than asking about
him
. It was strange that two people whose lives had been so shaped by a communications technology should find themselves so incapable of communication themselves, and Forbes couldn’t help but wonder if a child – grown by now! – might have served to link them better.

But in a sense Max
did
have children. Sometimes he envied her the easy bond she seemed to form with the new generation, her own students and colleagues and others.
There are no boundaries for the young now
, she’d said,
only access. War
, she said,
is inconceivable for these people … The Wire is transforming them, Henry
.

And so on. Of course it hardly mattered to Forbes whether she was right or not, since he wasn’t allowed home any more.

Over the years, he had been rather a silly ass about the length of time he had spent in zero gravity. And he never had been very conscientious about physical jerks … The quacks had explained how his skeletal and cardiac muscles were deeply atrophied, and he had piddled away so much of his bone calcium that the inner spongy bone had vanished altogether, without hope of regeneration.

On Earth, he would be wheelchair-bound and a nuisance to everybody. Better here, working on the construction of star clipper
Discovery
, even if he suspected the youngsters up here tolerated rather than valued him.

He took one last, lingering look at sunlit Britain, remembering the exhilaration of hauling a Spit in a battle climb up into the blue skies of June, 1940, with the clatter of the prop loud in his ears, the stink of engine oil and leather in his nostrils … Ruddy peculiar. Here he was in orbit. He’d even been to the Moon. But somehow nothing ever compared to those vivid moments of his youth.

The slow roll of the dock removed Britain from his view, and replaced it with the sleek, streamlined form of
Discovery
, the future appropriately replacing the past.

Forbes finished his tea and, with a sigh, prepared for the daily ordeal of the zero-gravity toilet. The Americans were wonderful people, but they couldn’t design plumbing for toffee …

1997: Discovery, Martian Orbit

The launch of humanity’s first starship struck Forbes as a remarkably low-key event, compared to the thrilling take-offs he remembered aboard
Endeavour
and
Congreve
, not to mention all those exhausting scrambles at wartime airfields. After all, there was drama: even now, hydrogen was circulating in the nozzle of the huge NERVA 4 nuclear fission rocket, cooling it before passing on to the core to be superheated and expelled, and so driving the great ship forward.

Surely even Captain Cook had made a little more fuss about his departure for the Pacific, in an earlier
Discovery
. And after all, this was the first journey to the stars …

But there wasn’t even a countdown. Forbes had simply to sit in his frame couch with the rest of the crew, a few rows behind the commander and his co-pilot – both women, incidentally – and listen to their brisk young voices working through checks with the ground crew at Port Lowell.

Even the setting was mundane, like the interior of a small aircraft, with fold-out equipment racks and miniaturised galleys and lavatories and zero-gravity up-down visual cues. Only the creased orange skin of Mars, visible through the windows, made for an element of the extraordinary, the ancient landscape now mottled by the green domes of the colonies which had provisioned
Discovery
after its shakedown interplanetary hop.

Humanity’s first starship was shaped something like a huge arrow. The habitable compartment – its interior, designed by Cunard, frankly luxurious – made a streamlined arrowhead, separated for safety from the NERVA 4 by the arrow’s ‘shaft’: a hundred yards of open scaffolding, crammed with shielding, antennae and liquid-hydrogen fuel tanks.

The streamlining amused Forbes, for it made the habitable compartment look like nothing so much as the V2-shaped spaceships that had rattled their way through the beloved Saturday morning specials of his youth – a shape which had become derided in the 1960s and 1970s, as insectile ships such as the
Endeavour
, adapted to airless space, had taken shape on the drafting boards.

But it turned out that the experts, not for the first time, were wrong. Interstellar space was not empty. There
was
gas and dust – desperately thin, only fifty or sixty bacterium-sized specks per cubic mile – but that was enough to give a respectable battering to the prow of any starship unwise enough to approach a decent fraction of the speed of light, as
Discovery
intended to achieve. So the ship was streamlined, and coated with a thick impact shield, and even mounted with a rather powerful dust-busting shortwave radiation generator in her nose.

A decent fraction of the speed of light …
Such velocities would be far beyond the capacity even of the NERVA 4 – a huge, over-engineered American monstrosity, originally intended to take much smaller spacecraft no further than Mars – if not for the HRP effect.

HRP:
for Haisch, Rueda and Puthoff, as Max had explained to him, the physicists who had made the crucial quantum vacuum breakthrough. The ‘empty’ vacuum was not empty at all, it seemed, but a wash of seething energy, with ‘virtual’ particles popping in and out of existence constantly. This so-called ‘zero point field’ created an electromagnetic drag on any object which passed through it … and it was that drag which
created
the effect of mass and inertia, the reason it took so much effort to start anything moving.

The big Wire operators – immensely rich, with forty years’ expertise in quantum effects – had seized on the HRP results immediately. And
Discovery
was the result, rendered virtually massless by its inertial suppressors, and so capable of being driven to enormous velocities by a modest engine indeed …