The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (5 page)

‘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!

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 spaceship 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 spaceship 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.