The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (17 page)

‘I’ve tried a dozen theories, but in the end I keep returning to one. We know that the pressure down there must be eight or nine thousand atmospheres, and the temperature must be high enough to melt rock. But normal matter is still almost empty space. Suppose that there is life down there—not organic life, of course, but life based on partially condensed matter, matter in which the electron shells are few or altogether missing. Do you see what I mean? To such creatures, even the rock fifteen miles down would offer no more resistance than water—and we and all our world would be as tenuous as ghosts.’

‘Then that thing we can see—’

‘Is a city, or its equivalent. You’ve seen its size, so you can judge for yourself the civilisation that must have built it. All the world we know—our oceans and continents and mountains—is nothing more than a film of mist surrounding something beyond our comprehension.’

Neither of us said anything for a while. I remember feeling a foolish surprise at being one of the first men in the world to learn the appalling truth; for somehow I never doubted that it was the truth. And I wondered how the rest of humanity would react when the revelation came.

Presently I broke into the silence. ‘If you’re right,’ I said, ‘why have they—whatever they are—never made contact with us?’

The Professor looked at me rather pityingly. ‘We think we’re good engineers,’ he said, ‘but how could
we
reach
them
? Besides, I’m not at all sure that there haven’t been contacts. Think of all the underground creatures and the mythology—trolls and cobalds and the rest. No, it’s quite impossible—I take it back. Still the idea
is
rather suggestive.’

All the while the pattern on the screen had never changed: the dim network still glowed there, challenging our sanity. I tried to imagine streets and buildings and the creatures going among them, creatures who could make their way through the incandescent rock as a fish swims through water. It was fantastic… and then I remembered the incredibly narrow range of temperature and pressures under which the human race exists.
We
, not they, were the freaks, for almost all the matter in the universe is at temperatures of thousands or even millions of degrees.

‘Well,’ I said lamely, ‘what do we do now?’

The Professor leaned forward eagerly. ‘First we must learn a great deal more, and we must keep this an absolute secret until we are sure of the facts. Can you imagine the panic there would be if this information leaked out? Of course, the truth’s inevitable sooner or later, but we may be able to break it slowly.

‘You’ll realise that the geological surveying side of my work is now utterly unimportant. The first thing we have to do is to build a chain of stations to find the extent of the structure. I visualise them at ten-mile intervals towards the north, but I’d like to build the first one somewhere in South London to see how extensive the thing is. The whole job will have to be kept as secret as the building of the first radar chain in the late thirties.

‘At the same time, I’m going to push up my transmitter power again. I hope to be able to beam the output much more narrowly, and so greatly increase the energy concentration. But this will involve all sorts of mechanical difficulties, and I’ll need more assistance.’

I promised to do my utmost to get further aid, and the Professor hopes that you will soon be able to visit his laboratory yourself. In the meantime I am attaching a photograph of the vision screen, which although not as clear as the original will, I hope, prove beyond doubt that our observations are not mistaken.

I am well aware that our grant to the Interplanetary Society has brought us dangerously near the total estimate for the year, but surely even the crossing of space is less important than the immediate investigation of this discovery which may have the most profound effects on the philosophy and the future of the whole human race.

I sat back and looked at Karn. There was much in the document I had not understood, but the main outlines were clear enough.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘this is it! Where’s that photograph?’

He handed it over. The quality was poor, for it had been copied many times before reaching us. But the pattern was unmistakable and I recognised it at once.

‘They were good scientists,’ I said admiringly. ‘That’s Callastheon, all right. So we’ve found the truth at last, even if it has taken us three hundred years to do it.’

‘Is that surprising,’ asked Karn, ‘when you consider the mountain of stuff we’ve had to translate and the difficulty of copying it before it evaporates?’

I sat in silence for a while, thinking of the strange race whose relics we were examining. Only once—never again!—had I gone up the great vent our engineers had opened into the Shadow World. It had been a frightening and unforgettable experience. The multiple layers of my pressure suit had made movement very difficult, and despite their insulation I could sense the unbelievable cold that was all around me.

‘What a pity it was,’ I mused, ‘that our emergence destroyed them so completely. They were a clever race, and we might have learned a lot from them.’

‘I don’t think we can be blamed,’ said Karn. ‘We never really believed that anything could exist under those awful conditions of near-vacuum, and almost absolute zero. It couldn’t be helped.’

I did not agree. ‘I think it proves that they were the more intelligent race. After all,
they
discovered us first. Everyone laughed at my grandfather when he said that the radiation he’d detected from the Shadow World must be artificial.’

Karn ran one of his tentacles over the manuscript.

‘We’ve certainly discovered the cause of that radiation,’ he said. ‘Notice the date—it’s just a year before your grandfather’s discovery. The Professor must have got his grant all right!’ He laughed unpleasantly. ‘It must have given him a shock when he saw us coming up to the surface, right underneath him.’

I scarcely heard his words, for a most uncomfortable feeling had suddenly come over me. I thought of the thousands of miles of rock lying below the great city of Callastheon, growing hotter and denser all the way to the Earth’s unknown core. And so I turned to Karn.

‘That isn’t very funny,’ I said quietly. ‘It may be our turn next.’

Inheritance

First published in
New Worlds
, no.3, 1947, as by ‘Charles Willis’

Collected in
Expedition to Earth

As David said, when one falls on Africa from a height of two hundred and fifty kilometres, a broken ankle may be an anti-climax but is none the less painful. But what hurt him most, he pretended, was the way we had all rushed out into the desert to see what had happened to the A.20 and had not come near him until hours later.

‘Be logical, David,’ Jimmy Langford had protested. ‘We knew that you were OK because the base ‘copter radioed when it picked you up. But the A.20 might have been a complete write-off.’

‘There’s only one A.20,’ I said, trying to be helpful, ‘but rocket test-pilots are—well, if not two a penny, at any rate seven for sixpence.’

David glared back at us from beneath his bushy eyebrows and said something in Welsh.

‘The Druid’s curse,’ Jimmy remarked to me. ‘Any moment now you’ll turn into a leek or a perspex model of Stonehenge.’

You see, we were still pretty lightheaded and it would not do to be serious for a while. Even David’s iron nerve must have taken a terrific beating, yet somehow he seemed the calmest of us all. I could not understand it—then.

The A.20 had come down fifty kilometres from her launching-point. We had followed her by radar for the whole trajectory, so we knew her position to within a few metres—though we did not know at the time that David had landed ten kilometres farther east.

The first warning of disaster had come seventy seconds after take-off. The A.20 had reached fifty kilometres and was following the correct trajectory to within a few per cent. As far as the eye could tell, the luminous track on the radar screen had scarcely deviated from the pre-computed path. David was doing two kilometres a second: not much, but the fastest any man had ever travelled up to then. And ‘Goliath’ was just about to be jettisoned.

The A.20 was a two-step rocket. It had to be, for it was using chemical fuels. The upper component, with its tiny cabin, its folded aerofoils and flaps, weighed just under twenty tons when fully fuelled. It was to be lifted by a lower two-hundred-ton booster which would take it up to fifty kilometres, after which it could carry on quite happily under its own power. The big fellow would then drop back to Earth by parachute: it would not weigh much when its fuel was burnt. Meanwhile the upper step would have built up enough speed to reach the six-hundred-kilometre level before falling back and going into a glide that would take David half-way round the world if he wished.

I do not remember who called the two rockets ‘David’ and ‘Goliath’ but the names caught on at once. Having two Davids around caused a lot of confusion, not all of it accidental.

Well, that was the theory, but as we watched the tiny green spot on the screen fall away from its calculated course, we knew that something had gone wrong. And we guessed what it was.

At fifty kilometres the spot should have divided in two. The brighter echo should have continued to rise as a free projectile, and then fallen back to Earth. But the other should have gone on, still accelerating, drawing swiftly away from the discarded booster.

There had been no separation. The empty ‘Goliath’ had refused to come free and was dragging ‘David’ back to Earth—helplessly, for ‘David’s’ motors could not be used. Their exhausts were blocked by the machine beneath.

We saw all this in about ten seconds. We waited just long enough to calculate the new trajectory, and then we climbed into the ‘copters and set off for the target area.

All we expected to find, of course, was a heap of magnesium looking as if a bulldozer had gone over it. We knew that ‘Goliath’ could not eject his parachute while ‘David’ was sitting on top of him, any more than ‘David’ could use his motors while ‘Goliath’ was clinging beneath. I remember wondering who was going to break the news to Mavis, and then realising that she would be listening to the radio and would know all about it as soon as anyone.

We could scarcely believe our eyes when we found the two rockets still coupled together, lying almost undamaged beneath the big parachute. There was no sign of David, but a few minutes later Base called to say that he had been found. The plotters at Number Two Station had picked up the tiny echo from his parachute and sent a ‘copter to collect him. He was in hospital twenty minutes later, but we stayed out in the desert for several hours checking over the machines and making arrangements to retrieve them.

When at last we got back to Base, we were pleased to see our best-hated science-reporters among the mob being held at bay. We waved aside their protests and sailed on into the ward.

The shock and the subsequent relief had left us all feeling rather irresponsible and perhaps childish. Only David seemed unaffected: the fact that he had just had one of the most miraculous escapes in human history had not made him turn a hair. He sat there in the bed pretending to be annoyed at our jibes until we had calmed down.

‘Well,’ said Jimmy at last, ‘what went wrong?’

‘That’s for you to discover,’ David replied. ‘“Goliath” went like a dream until fuel cut-off point. I waited then for the five-second pause before the explosive bolts detonated and the springs threw him clear, but nothing happened. So I punched the emergency release. The lights dimmed, but the kick I’d expected never came. I tried a couple more times but somehow I knew it was useless. I guessed that something had shorted in the detonator circuit and was earthing the power supply.

‘Well, I did some rather rapid calculations from the flight charts and abacs in the cabin. At my present speed I’d continue to rise for another two hundred kilometres and would reach the peak of my trajectory in about three minutes. Then I’d start the two-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre fall and should make a nice hole in the desert four minutes later. All told, I seemed to have a good seven minutes of life left—ignoring air resistance, to use your favourite phrase. That might add a couple of minutes to my expectation of life.

‘I knew that I couldn’t get the big parachute out, and “David’s” wings would be useless with the forty-ton mass of “Goliath” on its tail. I’d used up two of my seven minutes before I decided what to do.

‘It’s a good job I made you widen that airlock. Even so, it was a squeeze to get through it in my spacesuit. I tied the end of the safety rope to a locking lever and crawled along the hull until I reached the junction of the two steps.

‘The parachute compartment couldn’t be opened from the outside, but I’d taken the emergency axe from the pilot’s cabin. It didn’t take long to get through the magnesium skin: once it had been punctured I could almost tear it apart with my hands. A few seconds later I’d released the ‘chute. The silk floated aimlessly around me: I had expected some trace of air resistance at this speed but there wasn’t a sign of it. The canopy simply stayed where it was put. I could only hope that when we re-entered atmosphere it would spread itself without fouling the rocket.

‘I thought I had a fairly good chance of getting away with it. The additional weight of “David” would increase the loading of the parachute by less than twenty per cent but there was always the chance that the shrouds would chafe against the broken metal and be worn through before I could reach Earth. In addition the canopy would be distorted when it did open, owing to the unequal lengths of the cords. There was nothing I could do about that.

‘When I’d finished, I looked about me for the first time. I couldn’t see very well, for perspiration had misted over the glass of my suit. (Someone had better look into that: it can be dangerous.) I was still rising, though very slowly now. To the north-east I could see the whole of Sicily and some of the Italian mainland: farther south I could follow the Libyan coast as far as Benghazi. Spread out beneath me was all the land over which Alexander and Montgomery and Rommel had fought when I was a boy. It seemed rather surprising that anyone had ever made such a fuss about it.