Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (13 page)

There were three ingredients in the miracle:
it is hard to say if one was more important than another. The first was the
accident of position. A flask of water, when sunlight falls upon it, can act as
a crude lens, concentrating the light into a small area. On an immeasurably
larger scale, the dense core of the Earth was coverging the waves that came
from Thaar. In the ordinary way, the radiations of thought are unaffected by
matter – they pass through it as effortlessly as light through glass. But there
is rather a lot of matter in a planet, and the whole Earth was acting as a
gigantic lens. As it turned, it was carrying Bill through its focus, where the
feeble thought impulses from Thaar were concentrated a hundredfold.

Yet millions of other men were equally well
placed: they received no message. But they were not rocket engineers: they had
not spent years thinking and dreaming of space until it had become part of
their very being.

And they were not, as Bill was, blind drunk,
teetering on the last knife-edge of consciousness, trying to escape from
reality into the world of dreams, where there were no disappointments and
setbacks.

Of course, he could see the Army’s point of
view. ‘You are paid, Dr Cross,’ General Potter had pointed out with unnecessary
emphasis, ‘to design missiles,
not
– ah – spaceships. What you do in
your spare time is your own concern, but I must ask you not to use the
facilities of the establishment for your hobby. From now on, all projects for
the computing section will have to be cleared by me. That is all.’

They couldn’t sack him, of course: he was
too important. But he was not sure that he wanted to stay. He was not really
sure of anything except that the job had backfired on him, and that Brenda had
finally gone off with Johnny Gardner – putting events in their order of
importance.

Wavering slightly, Bill cupped his chin in
his hands and stared at the whitewashed brick wall on the other side of the
table. The only attempt at ornamentation was a calendar from Lockheed and a
glossy six-by-eight from Aerojet showing L’il Abner Mark I making a boosted
take-off. Bill gazed morosely at the spot midway between the two pictures, and
emptied his mind of thought. The barriers went down….

At that moment, the massed intellects of
Thaar gave a soundless cry of triumph, and the wall in front of Bill slowly
dissolved into a swirling mist. He appeared to be looking down a tunnel that
stretched to infinity. As a matter of fact, he was.

Bill studied the phenomenon with mild
interest. It had a certain novelty, but was not up to the standard of previous
hallucinations. And when the voice started to speak in his mind, he let it
ramble on for some time before he did anything about it. Even when drunk, he
had an old-fashioned prejudice against starting conversations with himself.

‘Bill,’ the voice began, ‘listen carefully.
We have had great difficulty in contacting you, and this is extremely
important.’

Bill doubted this on general principles.
Nothing
was important any more.

‘We are speaking to you from a very distant
planet,’ continued the voice in a tone of urgent friendliness. ‘You are the
only human being we have been able to contact, so you
must
understand
what we are saying.’

Bill felt mildly worried, though in an
impersonal sort of way, since it was now rather hard to focus on his own
problems. How serious was it, he wondered, when you started to hear voices?
Well, it was best not to get excited. You can take it or leave it, Dr Cross, he
told himself. Let’s take it until it gets to be a nuisance.

‘OK,’ he answered with bored indifference.
‘Go right ahead and talk to me. I won’t mind as long as it’s interesting.’

There was a pause. Then the voice continued,
in a slightly worried fashion.

‘We don’t quite understand. Our message
isn’t merely
interesting
. It’s vital to your entire race, and you must
notify your government immediately.’

‘I’m waiting,’ said Bill. ‘It helps to pass
the time.’

Five hundred light-years away, the Thaarns
conferred hastily among themselves. Something seemed to be wrong, but they
could not decide precisely what. There was no doubt that they had established
contact, yet this was not the sort of reaction they had expected. Well, they
could only proceed and hope for the best.

‘Listen, Bill,’ they continued. ‘Our
scientists have just discovered that your sun is about to explode. It will
happen three days from now – seventy-four hours, to be exact. Nothing can stop
it. But there’s no need to be alarmed. We can save you, if you’ll do what we
say.’

‘Go on,’ said Bill. This hallucination was
ingenious.

‘We can create what we call a bridge – it’s
a kind of tunnel through space, like the one you’re looking into now. The
theory is far too complicated to explain, even to one of your mathematicians.’

‘Hold on a minute!’ protested Bill. ‘I
am
a mathematician, and a darn good one, even when I’m sober. And I’ve read all
about this kind of thing in the science fiction magazines. I presume you’re
talking about some kind of short cut through a higher dimension of space.
That’s old stuff – pre-Einstein.’

A sensation of distinct surprise seeped into
Bill’s mind.

‘We had no idea you were so advanced
scientifically,’ said the Thaarns. ‘But we haven’t time to talk about the
theory. All that matters is this – if you were to step into that opening in
front of you, you’d find yourself instantly on another planet. It’s a short
cut, as you said – in this case through the thirty-seventh dimension.’

‘And it leads to your world?’

‘Oh no – you couldn’t live here. But there
are plenty of planets like Earth in the universe, and we’ve found one that will
suit you. We’ll establish bridgeheads like this all over Earth, so your people
will only have to walk through them to be saved. Of course, they’ll have to
start building up civilisation again when they reach their new homes, but it’s
their only hope. You have to pass on this message, and tell them what to do.’

‘I can just see them listening to me,’ said
Bill. ‘Why don’t you go and talk to the president?’

‘Because yours was the only mind we were
able to contact. Others seemed closed to us: we don’t understand why.’

‘I could tell you,’ said Bill, looking at
the nearly empty bottle in front of him. He was certainly getting his money’s
worth. What a remarkable thing the human mind was! Of course, there was nothing
at all original in this dialogue: it was easy to see where the ideas came from.
Only last week he’d been reading a story about the end of the world, and all
this wishful thinking about bridges and tunnels through space was pretty
obvious compensation for anyone who’d spent five years wrestling with
recalcitrant rockets.

‘If the sun does blow up,’ Bill asked
abruptly – trying to catch his hallucination unawares – ‘what would happen?’

‘Why, your planet would be melted instantly.
All the planets, in fact, right out to Jupiter.’

Bill had to admit that this was quite a
grandiose conception. He let his mind play with the thought, and the more he
considered it, the more he liked it.

‘My dear hallucination,’ he remarked
pityingly, ‘if I believed you, d’you know what I’d say?’

‘But you
must
believe us!’ came the
despairing cry across the light-years.

Bill ignored it. He was warming to his
theme.

‘I’d tell you this.
It would be the best
thing that could possibly happen
. Yes, it would save a whole lot of misery.
No one would have to worry about the Russians and the atom bomb and the high
cost of living. Oh, it would be wonderful! It’s just what everybody really
wants. Nice of you to come along and tell us, but just you go back home and
pull your old bridges after you.’

There was consternation on Thaar. The
Supreme Scientist’s brain, floating like a great mass of coral in its tank of
nutrient solution, turned slightly yellow about the edges – something it had
not done since the Xantil invasion, five thousand years ago. At least fifteen
psychologists had nervous breakdowns and were never the same again. The main
computer in the College of Cosmophysics started dividing every number in its
memory circuits by zero, and promptly blew all its fuses.

And on Earth, Bill Cross was really hitting
his stride.

‘Look at
me
,’ he said, pointing a
wavering finger at his chest. ‘I’ve spent years trying to make rockets do
something useful, and they tell me I’m only allowed to build guided missiles,
so that we can all blow each other up. The sun will make a neater job of it,
and if you did give us another planet we’d only start the whole damn thing all
over again.’

He paused sadly, marshalling his morbid
thoughts.

‘And now Brenda heads out of town without
even leaving a note. So you’ll pardon my lack of enthusiasm for your Boy Scout
act.’

He couldn’t have said ‘enthusiasm’ aloud,
Bill realised. But he could still think it, which was an interesting scientific
discovery. As he got drunker and drunker, would his cogitation – whoops,
that
nearly threw him! – finally drop down to words of one syllable?

In a final despairing exertion, the Thaarns
sent their thoughts along the tunnel between the stars.

‘You can’t really mean it, Bill! Are
all
human beings like you?’

Now that was an interesting philosophical
question! Bill considered it carefully – or as carefully as he could in view of
the warm, rosy glow that was now beginning to envelop him. After all, things
might be worse. He could get another job, if only for the pleasure of telling
General Porter what he could do with his three stars. And as for Brenda – well,
women were like streetcars; there’d always be another along in a minute.

Best of all, there was a second bottle of
whisky in the Top Secret file. Oh, frabjous day! He rose unsteadily to his feet
and wavered across the room.

For the last time, Thaar spoke to Earth.

‘Bill!’ it repeated desperately. ‘Surely all
human beings can’t be like you!’

Bill turned and looked into the swirling
tunnel. Strange – it seemed to be lighted with flecks of starlight, and was
really rather pretty. He felt proud of himself: not many people could imagine
that
.

‘Like me?’ he said. ‘No, they’re not.’ He
smiled smugly across the light-years, as the rising tide of euphoria lifted him
out of his despondency. ‘Come to think of it,’ he added, ‘there are a lot of
people much worse off than me. Yes, I guess I must be one of the lucky ones,
after all.’

He blinked in mild surprise, for the tunnel
had suddenly collapsed upon itself and the whitewashed wall was there again,
exactly as it had always been. Thaar knew when it was beaten.

‘So much for
that
hallucination,’
thought Bill. ‘I was getting tired of it, anyway. Let’s see what the next one’s
like.’

As it happened, there wasn’t a next one, for
five seconds later he passed out cold, just as he was getting the combination
of the file cabinet.

The next two days were rather vague and
bloodshot, and he forgot all about the interview.

On the third day something was nagging at
the back of his mind: he might have remembered if Brenda hadn’t turned up again
and kept him busy being forgiving.

And there wasn’t a fourth day, of course.

First published in the
London Evening Standard
, 1956

Collected in
The Other Side of the Sky

‘Venture to the Moon’ was originally written as a series of six
independent but linked stories for the
London Evening Standard
, in 1956.
When the commission was first proposed I turned it down. It appeared impossible
to write stories in only 1,500 words which would be understandable to a mass
readership despite being set in a totally alien environment, but on second
thought this seemed such an interesting challenge that I decided to tackle it.
The resulting series was successful enough to demand a second …

The story of the first lunar expedition has
been written so many times that some people will doubt if there is anything
fresh to be said about it. Yet all the official reports and eyewitness
accounts, the on-the-spot recordings and broadcasts never, in my opinion, gave
the full picture. They said a great deal about the discoveries that were made –
but very little about the men who made them.

As captain of the
Endeavour
and thus
commander of the British party, I was able to observe a good many things you
will not find in the history books, and some – though not all – of them can now
be told. One day, I hope, my opposite numbers on the
Goddard
and the
Ziolkovski
will give their points of view. But as Commander Vandenburg is still on Mars
and Commander Krasnin is somewhere inside the orbit of Venus, it looks as if we
will have to wait a few more years for
their
memoirs.