The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars (38 page)

“Look!” said Alvin suddenly. “This is what I wanted to show you. Do you understand what it means?”

The ship was now above the Pole, and the planet beneath them was a perfect hemisphere. Looking down upon the belt of twilight, Jeserac and Hilvar could see at one instant both sunrise and sunset on opposite sides of the world. The symbolism was so perfect, and so striking, that they were to remember this moment all their lives.

In this universe the night was falling; the shadows were lengthening toward an east that would not know another dawn. But elsewhere the stars were still young and the light of morning lingered; and along the path he once had followed, Man would one day go again.

THE SANDS OF MARS

INTRODUCTION

I
n 2001— where have I seen that date before?— it will be exactly half a century since this novel was published. Or to put it in perhaps better perspective: It is already more than halfway back in time, dear reader, between you and the Wright Brothers’ first flight…

Though I have not opened it for decades, I have a special fondness for
Sands,
as it was my first full-length novel. When I wrote it, we knew practically nothing about Mars— and what we did “know” was completely wrong. The mirage of Percival Lowell’s canals was beginning to fade, though it would not vanish completely until our space probes began arriving in the late 1970s. It was still generally believed that Mars had a thin but useful atmosphere, and that vegetation flourished— at least in the equatorial regions where the temperature often rose above the freezing point. And where there was vegetation, of course, there might be more interesting forms of life— though nothing remotely human. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian princesses had joined the canals in mythology.

When I tapped out “The End” on my Remington Noiseless (ha!) Portable in 1951, I could never have imagined that exactly twenty years later I should be sitting on a panel with Ray Bradbury and Carl Sagan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, waiting for the first news of the real Mars to arrive from the Mariner space probes. (See
Mars and the Mind of Man,
Harper & Row, 1973.) But that was only the first trickle of a flood of information: During the next two decades, the
Viking
s were to give stunning images of the gigantic Mariner Valley and, most awe-inspiring of all, Olympus Mons— an extinct volcano more than twice the height of Everest. (Pause for embarrassed cough. Somewhere herein you’ll find “There are no mountains on Mars!” Well, that’s what even the best observers, straining their eyes to make sense of the tiny disc dancing in the field of their telescopes, believed in the 1950s.)

Soon after maps of the real Mars became available, I received a generous gift from computer genius John Hinkley— his Vistapro image-processing system. This prompted me to do some desktop terraforming (a word, incidentally, invented by science fiction’s Grandest of Grand Masters, Jack Williamson.) I must confess that in
The Snows of Olympus: A Garden on Mars
(Norton, 1995) I frequently allowed artistic considerations to override scientific ones. Thus I couldn’t resist putting a lake in the caldera of Mount Olympus, unlikely though it is that the most strenuous efforts of future colonists will produce an atmosphere dense enough to permit liquid water at such an altitude.

My next encounter with Mars involved a most ambitious but, alas, unsuccessful space project— the Russian MARS96 mission. Besides all its scientific equipment, the payload carried a CD/ROM disc full of sounds and images, including the whole of the famous Orson Welles “War of the Worlds” broadcast. (I have a recording of the only encounter between H.G. and Orson, made soon after this historic demonstration of the power of the new medium. Listening to the friendly banter between two of the great magicians of our age is like stepping into a time machine.)

It was intended that all these “Visions of Mars” would, some day in the 21st century, serve as greetings to the pioneers of the next New World. I was privileged to send a video recording, made in the garden of my Colombo home. Here is what I said:

Message to Mars

My name is Arthur Clarke, and I am speaking to you from the island of Sri Lanka, once known as Ceylon, in the Indian Ocean, Planet Earth. It is early spring in the year 1993, but this message is intended for the future.

I am addressing men and women— perhaps some of you already born— who will listen to these words when they are living on Mars.

As we approach the new millennium, there is great interest in the planet that may be the first real home for mankind beyond the mother world. During my lifetime, I have been lucky enough to see our knowledge of Mars advance from almost complete ignorance— worse than that, misleading fantasy— to a real understanding of its geography and climate. Certainly we are still very ignorant in many areas, and lack knowledge that you take for granted. But now we have accurate maps of your wonderful world, and can imagine how it might be modified— terraformed— to make it nearer to the heart’s desire. Perhaps you are already engaged upon that centuries-long process.

There is a link between Mars and my present home, which I used in what will probably be my last novel,
The Hammer of God.
At the beginning of this century, an amateur astronomer named Percy Molesworth was living here in Ceylon. He spent much time observing Mars, and now there is a huge crater, 175 kilometers wide, named after him in your southern hemisphere.

In my book I’ve imagined how a New Martian astronomer might one day look back at his ancestral world, to try and see the little island from which Molesworth— and I— often gazed up at your planet.

There was a time, soon after the first landing on the Moon in 1969, when we were optimistic enough to imagine that we might have reached Mars by the 1990s. In another of my stories, I described a survivor of the first ill-fated expedition, watching the Earth in transit across the face of the Sun on May 11, 1984!

Well, there was no one on Mars then to watch that event— but it will happen again on November 10, 2084. By that time I hope that many eyes will be looking back towards the Earth as it slowly crosses the solar disc, looking like a tiny, perfectly circular sunspot. And I’ve suggested that we should signal to you then with powerful lasers, so that you will see a star beaming a message to you from the very face of the Sun.

I too salute you across the gulfs of space— as I send my greetings and good wishes from the closing decade of the century in which mankind first became a space-faring species, and set forth on a journey that can never end, so long as the universe endures.

Alas, owing to a failure of the launch vehicle, MARS96 ended up at the bottom of the Pacific. But I hope— and fully expect— that one day our descendants on the red planet will be chuckling over this CD/ROM— which is a delightful combination of science, art, and fantasy. (It is still available from the Planetary Society, 65 N. Catalina Ave., Pasadena, Ca. 91106.)

On July 4, 1997, with a little help from the World Wide Web, Mars was news again.
Pathfinder
had made a bumpy landing in the Ares Vallis region and disgorged the tiny but sophisticated rover,
Sojourner,
whose cautious exploration of the surrounding rockscape was watched by millions on Earth. This was the moment when, for most people, Mars ceased to be a distant place in the sky and became a real world.

Shortly afterwards, Donna Shirley— the engineer who had run the program— sent me her autobiography,
Managing Martians
(Broadway Books, 1998), with a dedication: “To Arthur Clarke, who inspired my summer vacation on Mars.” Reading further, I was delighted to discover how this happened: “At age twelve and searching for my own place in the world, I’d read
The Sands of Mars,
a book that pointed me towards the sky.”

Colombo, Sri Lanka

January 2001

CHAPTER

1

S
o this is the first time you’ve been upstairs?” said the pilot, leaning back idly in his seat so that it rocked to and fro in the gimbals. He clasped his hands behind his neck in a nonchalant manner that did nothing to reassure his passenger.

“Yes,” said Martin Gibson, never taking his eyes from the chronometer as it ticked away the seconds.

“I thought so. You never got it quite right in your stories— all that nonsense about fainting under the acceleration. Why must people write such stuff? It’s bad for business.”

“I’m sorry,” Gibson replied. “But I think you must be referring to my earlier stories. Space-travel hadn’t got started then, and I had to use my imagination.”

“Maybe,” said the pilot grudgingly. (He wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the instruments, and take-off was only two minutes away.) “It must be funny, I suppose, for this to be happening to you, after writing about it so often.”

The adjective, thought Gibson, was hardly the one he would have used himself, but he saw the other’s point of view. Dozens of his heroes— and villains— had gazed hypnotized by remorseless second-hands, waiting for the rockets to hurl them into infinity. And now— as it always did if one waited long enough— the reality had caught up with the fiction. The same moment lay only ninety seconds in his own future. Yes, it
was
funny, a beautiful case of poetic justice.

The pilot glanced at him, reading his feelings, and grinned cheerfully.

“Don’t let your own stories scare you. Why, I once took off standing up, just for a bet, though it was a damn silly thing to do.”

“I’m not scared,” Gibson replied with unnecessary emphasis.

“Hmmm,” said the pilot, condescending to glance at the clock. The second-hand had one more circuit to go. “Then I shouldn’t hold on to the seat like that. It’s only beryl-manganese; you might bend it.”

Sheepishly, Gibson relaxed. He knew that he was building up synthetic responses to the situation, but they seemed none the less real for all that.

“Of course,” said the pilot, still at ease but now, Gibson noticed, keeping his eyes fixed on the instrument panel, “it wouldn’t be very comfortable if it lasted more than a few minutes— ah, there go the fuel pumps. Don’t worry when the vertical starts doing funny things, but let the seat swing where it likes. Shut your eyes if that helps at all. (Hear the igniter jets start then?) We take about ten seconds to build up to full thrust— there’s really nothing to it, apart from the noise. You just have to put up with that. I SAID, YOU JUST HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THAT!”

But Martin Gibson was doing nothing of the sort. He had already slipped gracefully into unconsciousness at an acceleration that had not yet exceeded that of a high-speed elevator.

He revived a few minutes and a thousand kilometers
*
later, feeling quite ashamed of himself. A beam of sunlight was shining full on his face, and he realized that the protective shutter on the outer hull must have slid aside. Although brilliant, the light was not as intolerably fierce as he would have expected; then he saw that only a fraction of the full intensity was filtering through the deeply tinted glass.