Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (66 page)

She tried to relax and sink into sleep, but although her body was tired her brain was still active; she had crowded too many experiences into a single short day. And she had met such interesting people, too. Some of the young astronomers – many of them straight from college – had been really very charming and they had
all
offered to show her round the Observatory tomorrow. It was going to be difficult to make a choice …

Yet Daphne’s last thoughts, when sleep finally came, were not concerned with this underground colony or the people who lived, worked and played here. She saw instead the silent, empty plain that lay burning above her head, blasted by the noon-day sun, although down here the clocks told her it was 12.30 p.m., Greenwich time.

Close to the sun would be the great thin crescent of the New Earth, which would slowly wax until a fortnight later it would be a blinding white disc, flooding all this strange land with its midnight radiance. And scattered all across the black velvet of the sky, shining steadfastly by day and night, would be the countless legions of the stars.

Among them now was a new-comer, slowly fading yet still one of the brightest stars in the sky. Nova Taurus, Daddy had called it – and he had called it a near star, too. Yet that gigantic explosion had occurred when Elizabeth the First was on the throne, and the light had only just reached Earth, travelling at almost a million miles every five seconds.

Daphne shivered a little at the thought of this unimaginable abyss, besides which the distance between Earth and Moon was scarcely a hair’s breadth.

‘Here are your dark glasses,’ said Norman. ‘Put them on as soon as the rockets start firing.’

Daphne accepted them absentmindedly, never taking her eyes from the shining monster that stood out there on the plain two miles away. From the summit of the low ridge on which the observation post was built, she could see almost the whole of the great launching site from which the rockets left the Moon on their outward journey. It was strange to think that although she had travelled in a space-ship herself, she had never before seen one taking off.

The ship standing poised on the sun-baked lava was much bigger than the rocket that had brought her from Earth, and it had very much further to travel. In a few seconds it would be climbing away from the Moon – away even from the Earth and Sun – on its long journey to Mars, now almost a hundred million miles distant.

There was not the slightest sound when those blazing, incandescent jets suddenly erupted from the ship. Almost at once the vessel was veiled by clouds of dust blasted up from the plain, clouds which formed a kind of shimmering mist within which burned an incredibly brilliant sun. With breathtaking slowness, the space-ship rose from the ground and began to climb towards the star-filled sky.

Now it was free from its dust cloud, and Daphne understood why she had been given dark glasses to wear. She could easily believe, as someone had told her, that those rocket jets were hotter and brighter than the sun.

Through the glasses she could follow the slow ascent of the ship and could dimly see the lunar landscape beneath, lit by the reflected glare. Now the rocket was gaining speed; about a minute had passed and it was more than twenty miles high. Daphne took off the glasses and watched the ship dwindle against the stars until, quite abruptly, it vanished. The motors had been cut off; they had done their work, and the great rocket would now coast as silently and effortlessly as a flying arrow on its months’-long journey to Mars.

‘Quite a sight, isn’t it?’ said Norman softly. ‘I think the fact that you can’t hear a sound makes it all the more impressive.’

That was perfectly true. Daphne had now been on the Moon for three days, and she was still not used to the idea of living, as it were, on the frontier of a world totally different from anything she had ever known before.

Inside the rabbit-warren of the Observatory there was air, constant temperature – and sound. Apart from the lessened gravity, one might have been on Earth. But she had only to climb one of the stairways leading to the look-out rooms on the surface – and then there was no doubt that she was on another world.

Between her and the hostile lunar landscape was nothing more than a few inches of perspex, and the absolute silence of the Moon lay all around her like an almost palpable blanket. She was an alien here, an intruder in a world to which she did not belong. She felt as a water-spider must do when it ventures into a strange and treacherous element protected by its little bubble of air.

Yet, whenever she could, Daphne liked to spend an hour here, simply looking out across the plain or trying to draw the mountains whose peaks were just visible in the west. Those distant summits, higher than almost any range on Earth, were now ablaze beneath the mid-afternoon sun, although above them the stars were shining brilliantly in the jet-black sky.

Daphne had met Norman Phillips on the night of the dance, and had found him very useful as a guide. He was a young geologist (or selenologist, if one wanted to be accurate) who was not normally stationed at the Observatory but was on leave at the moment from the second lunar base, on the other side of the Moon. The fact that he was off duty gave him a considerable advantage over the other scientists, many of whom would have been quite willing to show Daphne round.

Professor Martin approved of this arrangement, but had been inconsiderate enough to suggest that Michael be included in the party. This proposal had not been received by Norman with any great enthusiasm, especially when he found that Michael did all the talking and wanted to be shown how everything worked.

As a result, the first few trips had been rather slow affairs and Daphne had become bored with technicalities. Fortunately, they had been able to jettison Michael at the Central Control Room, where he had attached himself to the Chief Engineer and since then had been seen only at mealtimes.

Daphne had now sorted out her original chaotic impressions and had acquired a fairly clear picture of the Observatory. At any rate, she no longer got lost when she was alone. For almost twenty years men had been tunnelling and excavating here beneath the floor of the great crater, only a few miles from the spot where the first rocket had landed on the Moon.

In the early days, the colonists had devoted all their efforts to the sheer problem of keeping alive. To avoid the fierce temperature changes between night and day, they had gone underground, leaving only their instruments on the surface. The setting up of the lunar base had been an achievement almost as great as the crossing of space itself. Air, water, food – everything had, in the early days, to be carried across the quarter-million-mile gulf from Earth.

Soon, however, the Moon had started to yield its treasures as the survey parties uncovered its mineral resources. Now the colony could make its own air and for some years had been able to grow almost all its food supplies. Daphne had seen the strange underground ‘farms’ where acres of plants grew with incredible swiftness in a hot, humid atmosphere, beneath the glare of enormous lights.

One day, Norman told her, it might be possible to develop plants which could be cultivated out on the airless surface of the Moon, and then the green carpet of life would begin to spread across the empty plains, changing the face of a world.

Now that the early pioneering days were over, existence in the colony was a little less austere, although by the standards of Earth it was spartan enough. There were quite extensive games and recreation rooms, and although the living quarters were very small they were also extremely comfortable.

What Daphne liked most, however, were the people themselves. They seemed much more friendly and helpful than on Earth, and she didn’t think that was merely because she was the Director’s daughter. Somehow she got the impression that they all felt part of one big family – they knew they had to work together in order to survive at all.

‘Well,’ said Norman with a grin, ‘what are you thinking about now?’

Daphne woke from her day dreams with a start. ‘I was just wondering,’ she said, ‘what it really feels like to live here for a long time. Don’t you ever miss the Earth? Surely you must get fed up with all these bare rocks and that sky full of stars! I know they’re wonderfully – well, dramatic – but they never change. Don’t you sometimes wish you had clouds, or green fields, or the sea? I think I should miss the sea most of all.’

Norman smiled, although a little wistfully. ‘Yes, we miss them sometimes, but usually we’re too busy to brood over it. You see, when you’ve got a big, exciting job to do, nothing else really matters. Besides, we go on Earth-leave every two years, and then I guess we appreciate what the old planet’s got to offer a lot more than you stay-at-homes!’

He gave a little laugh. ‘It isn’t as if we can’t see Earth whenever we want to. After all, it’s there all the time, hanging up in the sky. From this side of the Moon, you can always see your own home town – at least, when it isn’t covered with clouds. Oh, that reminds me – I’ve been able to grab one of the smaller telescopes for you. Let’s go along and see if it’s ready.’

It seemed a little odd that it had taken three days to arrange this. The trouble was that the telescopes were in almost continual use on various research programmes, and there was no time for casual star-gazing. Moreover, the really big instruments were permanently fitted up for photographic work, so it was impossible to look through them even when they were free.

The room to which Norman led Daphne was only just below the Moon’s surface, as they had to climb a flight of steps from the main Observatory level to reach it. It was quite small, and crowded with apparatus in a state of extreme disorder – at least, so this seemed to Daphne. An elderly man with a very worried expression was doing something with a soldering iron to the inside of what looked like a complicated television set. He did not seem too pleased at the interruption.

‘I can give you only thirty minutes,’ he said. ‘I’ve promised Professor Martin to get this spectrum analyser fixed by eighteen hours. What do you want to look at?’

‘What have you got to offer?’

‘Let’s see – ten planets, about fifty satellites, a few million nebulae and several billion stars. Take your choice.’

‘We can’t see many of them in thirty minutes, so let’s start with – oh, say the Andromeda nebula.’

The astronomer looked at the clock, did some mental calculations, and pressed several buttons. There was a faint whirring of electric motors and the lights began to dim.

‘What do I look through?’ asked Daphne, who had seen nothing at all that looked like any part of a telescope.

‘Sit at this desk and use this eyepiece. Focus with the knob on the right – that’s the idea. Got it?’

She was peering into a circle of intense, blackness, across which the stars were moving so quickly that they looked like thin lines of light. Overhead, the great telescope was swinging across the sky, seeking for its incredibly distant target. Suddenly the image steadied, the stars became tiny, needle-sharp points, and among them floated something that was not a star at all.

It was hard to describe, hard even for the eye to grasp. An oval of fiery mist, its edges fading so imperceptibly into the surrounding blackness that no one could tell where it ended, the Great Nebula glimmered like a ghost beyond the veil of the stars.

‘Our neighbours,’ said Norman quietly. ‘The very next universe to our own – yet it’s so far away that the light you’re seeing now began its journey before Man existed on the Earth.’

‘But what
is
it?’ whispered Daphne.

‘Well, I suppose you know that all the stars are gathered in great disc-shaped clusters – island universes, someone called them – each containing thousands of millions of suns. We’re right inside one of them – the Milky Way. And that’s the next nearest, floating out there. It’s too far away for you to see the separate stars, though you can in the bigger telescopes. Beyond it are millions of other universes, as far as we can see.’

‘With worlds like our Earth in them?’

‘Who knows? At that distance you couldn’t see the Sun, let alone the Earth! But I expect there must be any number of planets out there, and on many of them there’ll probably be life of some kind. I wonder if we’ll ever find out? But let’s come a bit nearer home – we haven’t much time.’

To Daphne, the next half hour was a revelation. Overhead, out on the dusty, silent plain, the great telescope ranged across the sky, gathering in the wonders of the heavens and presenting them to her gaze. Beautiful groups of coloured stars, like jewels gleaming with all the hues of the rainbow – clouds of incandescent mist, twisted into strange shapes by unimaginable forces – Jupiter and his family of moons – and, perhaps most wonderful of all, Saturn floating serenely in his circle of rings, like some intricate work of art rather than a world eight times the size of Earth …

And now she understood the magic that had lured the astronomers up into the clear mountain skies, and at last out across space to the Moon.

Slowly the outer doors of the great underground garage slid apart, and the bus began to climb the steep ramp that led to the surface of the Moon. It still seemed strange to Daphne that the only means of transport on the Moon was something as old-fashioned as a motor-bus, but like many of the peculiar things she had met here it was reasonable enough when explained. Rockets were much too expensive for journeys of only a few hundred miles, and as there was no atmosphere air transport was, of course, impossible.