Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (19 page)

Jimmy rose to his feet.

‘OK, David,’ he said, ‘I’ll deal with the gang outside. Get some sleep now – with or without dreams. And by the way, the A.20 will be ready again in a week. I think she’ll be the last of the chemical rockets: they say the atomic drive’s nearly ready for us.’

We never spoke of David’s dream again, but I think it was often in our minds. Three months later he took the A.20 up to six hundred and eighty kilometres, a record which will never be broken by a machine of this type, because no one will ever build a chemical rocket again. David’s uneventful landing in the Nile Valley marked the end of an epoch.

It was three years before the A.21 was ready. She looked very small compared with her giant predecessors, and it was hard to believe that she was the nearest thing to a spaceship man had yet built. This time the takeoff was from sea-level, and the Atlas Mountains which had witnessed the start of our earlier shots were now merely the distant background to the scene.

By now both Jimmy and I had come to share David’s belief in his own destiny. I remember Jimmy’s parting words as the airlock closed.

‘It won’t be long now, David, before we build that three-man ship.’

And I knew he was only half joking.

We saw the A.21 climb slowly into the sky in great, widening circles, unlike any rocket the world had ever known before. There was no need to worry about gravitational loss now that we had a built-in fuel supply, and David was not in a hurry. The machine was still travelling quite slowly when I lost sight of it and went into the plotting-room.

When I got there the signal was just fading from the screen, and the detonation reached me a little later. And that was the end of David and his dreams.

The next I recall of that period is flying down the Conway Valley in Jimmy’s ’copter, with Snowdon gleaming far away on our right. We had never been to David’s home before and were not looking forward to this visit. But it was the least we could do.

As the mountains drifted beneath us we talked about the suddenly darkened future and wondered what the next step would be. Apart from the shock of personal loss, we were beginning to realise how much of David’s confidence we had come to share ourselves. And now that confidence had been shattered.

We wondered what Mavis would do, and discussed the boy’s future. He must be fifteen now, though I had not seen him for several years and Jimmy had never met him at all. According to his father he was going to be an architect and already showed considerable promise.

Mavis was quite calm and collected, though she seemed much older than when I had last met her. For a while we talked about business matters and the disposal of David’s estate. I had never been an executor before, but tried to pretend that I knew all about it.

We had just started to discuss the boy when we heard the front door open and he came into the house. Mavis called to him and his footsteps came slowly along the passage. We could tell that he did not want to meet us, and his eyes were still red when he entered the room.

I had forgotten how much like his father he was, and I heard a little gasp from Jimmy.

‘Hello, David,’ I said.

But he did not look at me. He was staring at Jimmy, with that puzzled expression of a man who had seen someone before but cannot remember where.

And quite suddenly I knew that young David would never be an architect.

Nightfall

First published
King’s College Review
, 1947

Collected in
Reach for Tomorrow
as ‘The Curse’

‘Nightfall’, also known as ‘The Curse’, was inspired by a visit to Shakespeare’s grave at a time when I was stationed near Stratford-upon-Avon, training RAF radar mechanics,
living
what would have been sf only a decade earlier, a juxtaposition which makes this story all the more poignant.

For three hundred years, while its fame spread across the world, the little town had stood here at the river’s bend. Time and change had touched it lightly; it had heard from afar both the coming of the Armada and the fall of the Third Reich, and all Man’s wars had passed it by.

Now it was gone, as though it had never been. In a moment of time the toil and treasure of centuries had been swept away. The vanished streets could still be traced as faint marks in the vitrified ground, but of the houses, nothing remained. Steel and concrete, plaster and ancient oak – it had mattered little at the end. In the moment of death they had stood together, transfixed by the glare of the detonating bomb. Then, even before they could flash into fire, the blast waves had reached them and they had ceased to be. Mile upon mile the ravening hemisphere of flame had expanded over the level farmlands, and from its heart had risen the twisting totem-pole that had haunted the minds of men for so long, and to such little purpose.

The rocket had been a stray, one of the last ever to be fired. It was hard to say for what target it had been intended. Certainly not London, for London was no longer a military objective. London, indeed, was no longer anything at all. Long ago the men whose duty it was had calculated that three of the hydrogen bombs would be sufficient for that rather small target. In sending twenty, they had been perhaps a little overzealous.

This was not one of the twenty that had done their work so well. Both its destination and its origin were unknown: whether it had come across the lonely Arctic wastes or far above the waters of the Atlantic, no one could tell and there were few now who cared. Once there had been men who had known such things, who had watched from afar the flight of the great projectiles and had sent their own missiles to meet them. Often that appointment had been kept, high above the Earth where the sky was black and sun and stars shared the heavens together. Then there had bloomed for a moment that indescribable flame, sending out into space a message that in centuries to come other eyes than Man’s would see and understand.

But that had been days ago, at the beginning of the War. The defenders had long since been brushed aside, as they had known they must be. They had held on to life long enough to discharge their duty; too late, the enemy had learned his mistake. He would launch no further rockets; those still falling he had dispatched hours ago on secret trajectories that had taken them far out into space. They were returning now unguided and inert, waiting in vain for the signals that should lead them to their destinies. One by one they were falling at random upon a world which they could harm no more.

The river had already overflowed its banks; somewhere down its course the land had twisted beneath that colossal hammer-blow and the way to the sea was no longer open. Dust was still falling in a fine rain, as it would do for days as Man’s cities and treasures returned to the world that had given them birth. But the sky was no longer wholly darkened, and in the west the sun was settling through banks of angry cloud.

A church had stood here by the river’s edge, and though no trace of the building remained, the gravestones that the years had gathered round it still marked its place. Now the stone slabs lay in parallel rows, snapped off at their bases and pointing mutely along the line of the blast. Some were half flattened into the ground, others had been cracked and blistered by terrific heat, but many still bore the messages they had carried down the centuries in vain.

The light died in the west and the unnatural crimson faded from the sky. Yet still the graven words could be clearly read, lit by a steady, unwavering radiance, too faint to be seen by day but strong enough to banish night. The land was burning: for miles the glow of its radioactivity was reflected from the clouds. Through the glimmering landscape wound the dark ribbon of the steadily widening river, and as the waters submerged the land that deadly glow continued unchanging in the depths. In a generation, perhaps, it would have faded from sight, but a hundred years might pass before life could safely come this way again.

Timidly the waters touched the worn gravestone that for more than three hundred years had lain before the vanished altar. The church that had sheltered it so long had given it some protection at the last, and only a slight discolouration of the rock told of the fires that had passed this way. In the corpse-light of the dying land, the archaic words could still be traced as the water rose around them, breaking at last in tiny ripples across the stone. Line by line the epitaph upon which so many millions had gazed slipped beneath the conquering waters. For a little while the letters could still be faintly seen; then they were gone forever.

Good frend for Iesvs sake forbeare,

To digg the dvst encloased heare

Blest be ye man yt spares thes stones,

And cvrst be he yt moves my bones.

Undisturbed through all eternity the poet could sleep in safety now: in the silence and darkness above his head, the Avon was seeking its new outlet to the sea.

History Lesson

First published in
Startling Stories
, May 1949

Collected in
Expedition to Earth
as ‘Expedition to Earth’

The second of two stories derived from an earlier one, now lost, ‘History Lesson’ is also the first of two stories in which glaciers return to cover the world. In the preface to
Expedition to Earth
, Clarke notes his discovery of a literally chilling phrase in Will and Ariel Durant’s
Story of Civilisation
: ‘Civilisation is an interlude between Ice Ages’, and observes ‘the next one is already overdue; perhaps global warming has arrived just in time to save us.’

No one could remember when the tribe had begun its long journey: the land of great rolling plains that had been its first home was now no more than a half-forgotten dream. For many years Shann and his people had been fleeing through a country of low hills and sparkling lakes, and now the mountains lay ahead. This summer they must cross them to the southern lands, and there was little time to lose.

The white terror that had come down from the poles, grinding continents to dust and freezing the very air before it, was less than a day’s march behind. Shann wondered if the glaciers could climb the mountains ahead, and within his heart he dared to kindle a little flame of hope. They might prove a barrier against which even the remorseless ice would batter in vain. In the southern lands of which the legends spoke, his people might find refuge at last.

It took many weeks to discover a pass through which the tribe and its animals could travel. When midsummer came, they had camped in a lonely valley where the air was thin and the stars shone with a brilliance none had ever seen before. The summer was waning when Shann took his two sons and went ahead to explore the way. For three days they climbed, and for three nights slept as best they could on the freezing rocks. And on the fourth morning there was nothing ahead but a gentle rise to a cairn of grey stones built by other travellers, centuries ago.

Shann felt himself trembling, and not with cold, as they walked towards the little pyramid of stones. His sons had fallen behind; no one spoke, for too much was at stake. In a little while they would know if all their hopes had been betrayed.

To east and west, the wall of mountains curved away as if embracing the land beneath. Below lay endless miles of undulating plain, with a great river swinging across it in tremendous loops. It was fertile land; one in which the tribe could raise its crops knowing that there would be no need to flee before the harvest came.

Then Shann lifted his eyes to the south, and saw the doom of all his hopes. For there, at the edge of the world, glimmered that deadly light he had seen so often to the north – the glint of ice below the horizon.

There was no way forward. Through all the years of flight, the glaciers from the south had been advancing to meet them. Soon they would be crushed beneath the moving walls of ice—

The southern glaciers did not reach the mountains until a generation later. In that last summer, the sons of Shann carried the sacred treasures of the tribe to the lonely cairn overlooking the plain. The ice that had once gleamed below the horizon was now almost at their feet; by the spring it would be splintering against the mountain walls.

No one understood the treasures, now: they were from a past too distant for the understanding of any man alive. Their origins were lost in the mists that surrounded the Golden Age, and how they had come at last into the possession of this wandering tribe was a story that now never would be told. For it was the story of a civilisation that had passed beyond recall.

Once, all these pitiful relics had been treasured for some good reason and now they had become sacred, though their meaning had long been lost. The print in the old books had faded centuries ago, though much of the lettering was still readable – if there had been any to read it. But many generations had passed since anyone had had a use for a set of seven-figure logarithms, an atlas of the world, and the score of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony printed, according to the flyleaf, by H. K. Chu & Sons at the City of Pekin in the year AD 2021.