Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (26 page)

He had looked at her once already, but his
gaze had swept on without faltering. Now it came back, as if prompted by
memory, and for the first time he became conscious of Lora, as all along she
had been aware of him. Their eyes locked, bridging gulfs of time and space and
experience. The anxious furrows faded from Leon’s brow, the tense lines slowly
relaxed; and presently he smiled.

It was dusk when the speeches, the banquets,
the receptions, the interviews were over. Leon was very tired, but his mind was
far too active to allow him to sleep. After the strain of the last few weeks,
when he had awakened to the shrill clamour of alarms and fought with his
colleagues to save the wounded ship, it was hard to realise that they had
reached safety at last. What incredible good fortune that this inhabited planet
had been so close. Even if they could not repair the ship and complete the two
centuries of flight that still lay before them, here at least they could remain
among friends. No ship-wrecked mariners, of sea or space, could hope for more
than that.

The night was cool and calm and ablaze with
unfamiliar stars. Yet there were still some old friends, even though the ancient
patterns of the constellations were hopelessly lost. There was mighty Rigel, no
fainter for all the added light-years that its rays must now cross before they
reached his eyes. And that must be giant Canopus, almost in line with their
destination, but so much more remote that even when they reached their new
home, it would seem no brighter than in the skies of Earth.

Leon shook his head, as if to clear the
stupefying, hypnotic image of immensity from his mind. Forget the stars, he
told himself; you will face them again soon enough. Cling to this little world
while you are upon it, even though it may be a grain of dust on the road
between the Earth you will never see again and the goal that waits for you at
journey’s end, two hundred years from now.

His friends were already sleeping, tired and
content, as they had a right to be. Soon he would join them – when his restless
spirit would allow him to. But first he would see something of this world to
which chance had brought him, this oasis peopled by his own kinsmen in the
deserts of space.

He left the long, single-storeyed guesthouse
that had been prepared for them in such obvious haste, and walked out into the
single street of Palm Bay. There was no one about, though sleepy music came
from a few houses. It seemed that the villagers believed in going to bed early
– or perhaps they, too, were exhausted by the excitement and hospitality of the
day. That suited Leon, who wanted only to be left alone until his racing
thoughts had slowed to rest.

Out of the quiet night around him he became
aware of the murmuring sea, and the sound drew his footsteps away from the
empty street. It was dark among the palms, when the lights of the village had
faded behind him, but the smaller of Thalassa’s two moons was high in the south
and its curious yellow glow gave him all the guidance he required. Presently he
was through the narrow belt of trees, and there at the end of the steeply
shelving beach lay the ocean that covered almost all of this world.

A line of fishing boats was drawn up at the
water’s edge, and Leon walked slowly toward them, curious to see how the
craftsmen of Thalassa had solved one of man’s oldest problems. He looked
approvingly at the trim plastic hulls, the narrow outrigger float, the
power-operated winch for raising the nets, the compact little motor, the radio
with its direction-finding loop. This almost primitive, yet completely
adequate, simplicity had a profound appeal to him; it was hard to think of a
greater contrast with the labyrinthine complexities of the mighty ship hanging
up there above his head. For a moment he amused himself with fantasy; how
pleasant to jettison all his years of training and study, and to exchange the
life of a starship propulsion engineer for the peaceful, undemanding existence
of a fisherman! They must need someone to keep their boats in order, and
perhaps he could think of a few improvements …

He shrugged away the rosy dream, without
bothering to marshal all its obvious fallacies, and began to walk along the
shifting line of foam where the waves had spent their last strength against the
land. Underfoot was the debris of this young ocean’s newborn life – empty
shells and carapaces that might have littered the coasts of Earth a billion
years ago. Here, for instance, was a tightly wound spiral of limestone which he
had surely seen before in some museum. It might well be; any design that had
once served her purpose, Nature repeated endlessly on world after world.

A faint yellow glow was spreading swiftly
across the eastern sky; even as Leon watched, Selene, the inner moon, edged
itself above the horizon. With astonishing speed, the entire gibbous disc
climbed out of the sea, flooding the beach with sudden light.

And in that burst of brilliance, Leon saw
that he was not alone.

The girl was sitting on one of the boats,
about fifty yards farther along the beach. Her back was turned toward him and
she was staring out to sea, apparently unaware of his presence. Leon hesitated,
not wishing to invade her solitude, and also being uncertain of the local mores
in these matters. It seemed highly likely, at such a time and place, that she
was waiting for someone; it might be safest, and most tactful, to turn quietly
back to the village.

He had decided too late. As if startled by
the flood of new light along the beach, the girl looked up and at once caught
sight of him. She rose to her feet with an unhurried grace, showing no signs of
alarm or annoyance. Indeed, if
Leon
could have seen her face clearly in the
moonlight, he would have been surprised at the quiet satisfaction it expressed.

Only twelve hours ago, Lora would have been
indignant had anyone suggested that she would meet a complete stranger here on
this lonely beach when the rest of her world was slumbering. Even now, she
might have tried to rationalise her behaviour, to argue that she felt restless
and could not sleep, and had therefore decided to go for a walk. But she knew
in her heart that this was not the truth; all day long she had been haunted by
the image of that young engineer, whose name and position she had managed to
discover without, she hoped, arousing too much curiosity among her friends.

It was not even luck that she had seen him
leave the guesthouse; she had been watching most of the evening from the porch
of her father’s residence, on the other side of the street. And it was
certainly not luck, but deliberate and careful planning, that had taken her to
this point on the beach as soon as she was sure of the direction
Leon
was heading.

He came to a halt a dozen feet away. (Did he
recognise her? Did he guess that this was no accident? For a moment her courage
almost failed her, but it was too late now to retreat.) Then he gave a curious,
twisted smile that seemed to light up his whole face and made him look even
younger than he was.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I never expected to meet
anyone at this time of night. I hope I haven’t disturbed you.’

‘Of course not,’ Lora answered, trying to
keep her voice as steady and emotionless as she could.

‘I’m from the ship, you know. I thought I’d
have a look at Thalassa while I’m here.’

At those last words, a sudden change of
expression crossed Lora’s face; the sadness he saw there puzzled
Leon
, for it could have no cause. And then, with
an instantaneous shock of recognition, he knew that he had seen this girl
before, and understood what she was doing here. This was the girl who had
smiled at him when he came out of the ship – no, that was not right;
he
had been the one who smiled …

There seemed nothing to say. They stared at
each other across the wrinkled sand, each wondering at the miracle that had
brought them together out of the immensity of time and space. Then, as if in
unconscious agreement, they sat facing each other on the gunwale of the boat,
still without a word.

This is folly,
Leon
told himself. What am I doing here? What
right have I, a wanderer passing through this world, to touch the lives of its
people? I should make my apologies and leave this girl to the beach and the sea
that are her birthright, not mine.

Yet he did not leave. The bright disc of
Selene had risen a full hand’s breadth above the sea when he said at last:
‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m Lora,’ she answered, in the soft,
lilting accent of the islanders, which was so attractive, but not always easy
to understand.

‘And I’m Leon Carrell, Assistant Propulsion
Engineer, Starship
Magellan
.’

She gave a little smile as he introduced
himself, and at that moment
Leon
was certain that she already knew his name.
At the same time a completely irrelevant and whimsical thought struck him;
until a few minutes ago he had been dead-tired, just about to turn back for his
overdue sleep. Yet now he was fully awake and alert – poised, as it were, on
the brink of a new and unpredictable adventure.

But Lora’s next remark was predictable
enough: ‘How do you like Thalassa?’

‘Give me time,’
Leon
countered. ‘I’ve only seen
Palm Bay
, and not much of that.’

‘Will you be here – very long?’

The pause was barely perceptible, but his
ear detected it.
This
was the question that really mattered.

‘I’m not sure,’ he replied, truthfully
enough. ‘It depends on how long the repairs take.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Oh, we ran into something too big for our
meteor screen to absorb. And – bang! – that was the end of the screen. So we’ve
got to make a new one.’

‘And you think you can do that here?’

‘We hope so. The main problem will be
lifting about a million tons of water up to the
Magellan
. Luckily, I
think Thalassa can spare it.’

‘Water? I don’t understand.’

‘Well, you know that a starship travels at
almost the speed of light; even then it takes years to get anywhere, so that we
have to go into suspended animation and let the automatic controls run the
ship.’

Lora nodded. ‘Of course – that’s how our
ancestors got here.’

‘Well, the speed would be no problem if
space was really empty – but it isn’t. A starship sweeps up thousands of atoms
of hydrogen, particles of dust, and sometimes larger fragments, every second of
its flight. At nearly the speed of light, these bits of cosmic junk have
enormous energy, and could soon burn up the ship. So we carry a shield about a
mile ahead of us, and let
that
get burned up instead. Do you have
umbrellas on this world?’

‘Why – yes,’ Lora replied, obviously baffled
by the incongruous question.

‘Then you can compare a starship to a man
moving head down through a rainstorm behind the cover of an umbrella. The rain
is the cosmic dust between the stars, and our ship was unlucky enough to lose
its umbrella.’

‘And you can make a new one of
water
?’

‘Yes; it’s the cheapest building material in
the universe. We freeze it into an iceberg which travels ahead of us. What
could be simpler than that?’

Lora did not answer; her thoughts seemed to
have veered onto a new track. Presently she said, her voice so low and wistful
that Leon had to bend forward to hear it against the rolling of the surf: ‘And
you left Earth a hundred years ago.’

‘A hundred and four. Of course, it seems
only a few weeks, since we were deep-sleeping until the autopilot revived us.
All the colonists are still in suspended animation; they don’t know that
anything’s happened.’

‘And presently you’ll join them again, and
sleep your way on to the stars.’

Leon nodded, avoiding her eye. ‘That’s
right. Planet-fall will be a few months late, but what does that matter on a
trip that takes three hundred years?’

Lora pointed to the island behind them, and
then to the shoreless sea at whose edge they stood.

‘It’s strange to think that your sleeping
friends up there will never know anything of all this. I feel sorry for them.’

‘Yes, only we fifty or so engineers will
have any memories of Thalassa. To everyone else in the ship, our stop here will
be nothing more than a hundred-year-old entry in the logbook.’

He glanced at Lora’s face, and saw again
that sadness in her eyes.

‘Why does that make you unhappy?’

She shook her head, unable to answer. How
could one express the sense of loneliness that Leon’s words had brought to her?
The lives of men, and all their hopes and fears, were so little against the
inconceivable immensities that they had dared to challenge. The thought of that
three-hundred-year journey, not yet half completed, was something from which
her mind recoiled in horror. And yet – in her own veins was the blood of those
earlier pioneers who had followed the same path to Thalassa, centuries ago.