Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (65 page)

The Moon was now only a few hundred miles away, and so enormous that it seemed to fill the sky. It was, indeed, no longer a globe hanging in space but a jagged landscape spread out far below. Michael had got hold of a map from somewhere and was trying to identify the chief features in the tremendous panorama towards which they were falling.

‘That’s the Sea of Rains – I think,’ he said doubtfully, pointing to a great plain flanked on two sides by mountains. ‘Yes, you can see those three big craters there in the middle. I wish they didn’t use such funny names – I can’t pronounce them. That biggest one’s Archie – Archimedes.’

Daphne looked critically at the map, then at the landscape below.

‘
That
isn’t the sea!’ she protested. ‘It’s just a big dry desert. You can see hills and ridges in it – and look at those canyons. Gosh! I hope we don’t fall into one of those!’

‘Well, the map
calls
it a sea,’ said Michael stubbornly. He turned to the pilot for an explanation.

‘The Moon’s dark areas were all christened “Seas”, hundreds of years ago – before the telescope was invented and we found what they really were,’ came the reply. ‘The names have just stuck and no one has bothered to change them. Besides, some of them are rather pretty. If you look at the map you’ll find a Sea of Serenity, a Bay of Rainbows, a Marsh of Sleep, and many others. But no more questions for a while – I’m busy! Check your safety straps – we’re going to use the rockets in a minute.’

They were now falling directly towards the Moon at several thousand miles an hour and, Daphne knew, the only way they could check their descent was to fire the rockets ahead of them to slow the space-ship down.

The Moon seemed terribly close when, with a roar that was doubly impressive after the long hours of silence, the great motors thundered into life. There was a sudden feeling of returning weight, and Daphne felt herself being pushed down into the padded seat. But the strain was nothing like as great as it had been at the take-off, and she soon grew used to it.

Through the observation window she could glimpse the white-hot pillar of flame which was checking their headlong fall against the Moon, still many miles below. The space-ship was dropping towards the heart of a great ring of mountains: when, presently, the roar of the rockets ceased, some of the taller peaks seemed already to be towering above the ship.

Below was a flat, barren plain, and suddenly Daphne caught sight of a group of tiny, circular buildings. Then the rockets flared out once more, and the scene below vanished in fire and clouds of dust blasted up by the jets. A moment later there was the gentlest of impacts, then silence.

They were on the Moon.

Daphne peered down at the rocky surface beneath. There seemed no one about, but that was understandable, for it would be dangerous to remain above ground while the rockets were in action, and the ground-crew would only now be emerging from shelter. And where were the great mountains she had seen during the descent? Apart from some low hills, the plain on which the rocket was standing was flat right out to the horizon.

Then Daphne realised how close that horizon was; the Moon was a little world (only a quarter the size of Earth, wasn’t it?) and so its surface curved very steeply. The mountain walls of the crater were out of sight below the edge of the plain.

Some strange-looking vehicles were approaching from behind a low range of hills about a mile away. They drew up to the base of the rocket and presently Daphne heard loud clankings and bangings. Then there was a slight hiss of air, and the cabin door opened slowly.

‘Just step through,’ said the pilot. ‘It’s exactly like going down in an Underground lift.’

He was quite right. The Martins found themselves in a small, circular box, a mechanical voice advised them to stand clear of the doors, and they felt themselves dropping down to the ground. When the doors opened again they stepped out – much to their surprise – into the interior of a large motor bus, entirely roofed with thick sheets of transparent plastic.

It was such a remarkable transformation that Daphne wondered how it was done. Then she saw the little lift chamber rising through space again, climbing up the side of the great rocket on an extending arm rather like a fire escape ladder. A moment later it brought down the pilot and navigator, and the bus then set off briskly across the crater floor. It was all very businesslike and methodical, and not in the least romantic.

‘I wonder where Daddy is?’ queried Michael.

‘We’ll be meeting him in the Observatory,’ said his mother, hoping that the luggage was going to catch up with them safely. ‘Look – there it is!’

They had rounded the hills and were driving over an almost level plain, from which great spidery metal frameworks reared into the sky. Daphne would never have guessed that they were telescopes, for there was no sign of the silver domes which were the trademark of observatories on Earth. Of course, it had been silly to expect them; here on the Moon there were no winds or rains, and the most delicate scientific equipment could be left out in the open for ever without the slightest danger of it coming to harm.

The astronomers themselves, however, lived in a brightly lit, underground world fifty feet below the surface of the Moon. To reach it, the bus drove down into a deep cutting, which ended in wide metal doors that opened slowly as they approached.

They found themselves in a chamber just large enough to hold their vehicle, the doors closed behind them, and there was a hiss of air. Then the doors ahead opened, and the bus slid forward into a large underground garage. There was air around them again; Daphne could tell that by the sudden return of sound from the outside world.

‘There’s Daddy!’ shouted Michael excitedly, pointing through the window of the bus.

Professor Martin was waving back at them from the middle of a small reception committee waiting in the corner of the garage. A moment later he had come aboard and there was much kissing and hugging as he greeted his family.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘did you have a nice trip? Nobody space-sick?’

There was a chorus of indignant denials from the seasoned travellers.

‘I’m glad to hear it. Now, come along to my rooms. I expect you can do with a rest and something to eat.’

For the next five minutes Daphne was learning to walk again. The Moon’s low gravity gave her only a sixth of her normal weight, and every step took her a yard into the air. But there was a cure for this – the visitors were all given wide belts to which were attached heavy lead weights. Even with these, they were still abnormally light, but walking was a good deal easier. Daphne no longer felt that the first draught would blow her away.

‘When you get used to it here,’ said Professor Martin, ‘you can leave off the weights; you’ll notice that none of us wears them. It’s simply a matter of practice, just learning not to move too quickly. But when we want to, we can jump all right!’

Without any apparent effort, he shot up to the ceiling, a good twenty feet above, and came falling gently back a few seconds later.

‘But don’t try this sort of thing yourselves,’ he warned, ‘until you’re quite used to it here – or you may land on your head! Now come along and meet my staff.’

Daphne had always assumed – although she couldn’t have said why – that astronomers were usually old men with beards and far-away expressions, caused through too many hours of looking through telescopes. (Daddy, of course, was an exception – he always was.)

She soon found, however, that none of the Observatory staff fitted this description at all. Most of them were in the twenties or thirties, and almost half of them were women. And the expressions of some of the younger men were not at all far-away; quite the reverse, in fact.

After these introductions they followed Professor Martin through a series of wide passages that branched into numerous intersections, bearing such signs as
Central Air, Administration III, Medical, Dormitory Block
, or intriguingly,
Danger! Keep Out!
They might, Daphne thought, have been inside some large building on Earth. Only that curious feeling of lightness, which in a few days she would no longer notice, told her that she was now on another world.

Professor Martin’s private suite consisted of four large rooms in the residential section of the colony. They were light and airy, despite the fact that they were so far underground. Mrs Martin took one look at the decorations and decided that something would have to be done about them.

As soon as they had settled down in the flimsy but very comfortable chairs, Professor Martin lit his pipe again and began to blow clouds of smoke at the ceiling, where the pumps of the air-conditioning plant quickly sucked it away.

‘Well,’ he began, ‘it’s nice to see you all here. I’m sorry about the twins, but I couldn’t possibly wangle shipping space for them – and anyway they’re much too young.’

‘You haven’t told us, darling,’ said his wife (and there was an ominous look in her eye), ‘just why you couldn’t come down to Earth.’

Professor Martin coughed nervously. ‘It’s really a most extraordinary coincidence. Two days before I was coming home something I’ve been waiting for all my life happened. We caught a supernova on the rise.’

‘That sounds awfully impressive. Exactly
what
does it mean?’

‘A supernova is a star that blows up in such a colossal explosion that it suddenly becomes hundreds of millions of times brighter. In fact, for a few days it shines with as much light as a whole universe. We don’t know what causes it – it’s one of the great unsolved problems of astronomy.

‘Anyway, this has just happened to a fairly near star, and by a terrific stroke of luck we spotted it in the early stages, before the explosion reached its peak. So we’ve got a wonderful series of observations, but we’ve all been working flat out for the last few days.

‘I’ve got things organised now, although it will be some weeks before we’ve finished. The nova is slowly dying down and we want to watch what happens as it returns to normal. At its brightest, by the way, it was so brilliant that even down on Earth you could see it in the middle of the day. I expect you heard about that on the radio.’

‘I do remember something,’ said Mrs Martin vaguely, ‘but I didn’t take much notice.’

Profession Martin threw up his hands in mock despair. ‘Something that hasn’t happened for five hundred years – and you don’t notice! A whole sun, perhaps with all its planets, blows up in the most gigantic explosion ever recorded – and it hasn’t had the slightest effect on you!’

‘It certainly has,’ his wife retorted. ‘It’s upset all my holiday arrangements and made me go to the Moon instead of Majorca. But I don’t
really
mind, dear,’ she continued with a smile. ‘This certainly is a change.’

Daphne had been listening to this conversation with a kind of fascinated horror. The picture of the exploding star – a whole sun, perhaps with inhabited worlds circling round it – was one she could not get out of her mind.

‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘could this happen here?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, could
our
sun become – what did you call it? – a supernova? And if it did, what would happen to us? I suppose the Earth would melt.’

‘Melt! My goodness, it wouldn’t have time! There’d just be a puff of gas, and it would be gone! But don’t worry – the chances against it happening are millions and millions to one. Let’s talk about something more cheerful. We’ve got a dance on here tonight and I’d like you all to come to it.’

‘A dance? Here on the Moon?’

‘Why ever not? We try to live normal lives, with all the recreation we can get. We’ve a cinema, our own little orchestra, a very good drama group, sports clubs, and many other things to keep us happy when we’re off-duty. And we have a dance twice a day – at noon and midnight.’

‘
Twice
a day?’ gasped Daphne. ‘How do you ever manage to do any work?’

Professor Martin’s eyes twinkled. ‘I mean twice every
lunar
day,’ he replied. ‘Don’t forget that’s nearly a month of Earth time. It’s just before noon now, and the Sun won’t set for another seven days. But our clocks and calendars keep Earth-time, because human beings can’t sleep for two weeks and then work for another two without a break! It’s a bit confusing at first, but you soon get used to it.’

He glanced at the clock set high in the opposite wall – a very complicated clock with several dials and three pairs of hands.

‘That reminds me,’ he said. ‘Time we went to the “Ritz” – that’s what we call our canteen. Lunch is served.’

Very late that evening a tired but contented Daphne crept wearily to bed. The dance had been quite a success – once she had learned how to coordinate her movements and avoid soaring, dragging her partner with her.

She had been reminded very vividly of an old film she had once seen in which there had been some ball-room sequences in slow-motion. It had been exactly like that – the same graceful, easy movements. After this, she felt it would never be much fun dancing on Earth again. There was the additional advantage, too, that her feet weren’t aching in the slightest. After all, she weighed about twenty pounds here!