The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (4 page)

It seemed a long way up to the cabin at the nose of the rocket. Daphne paused once on the little gangway leading into the spaceship, and looked down at the ground below and the people standing around, their upturned faces white blobs far beneath. She felt rather giddy, then pulled herself together as she realised she had travelled only the first hundred feet or so of her 240,000-mile journey.

The pilot and navigator were already waiting for them in the little cabin with its mass of complicated machinery and its thickly padded couches. These were wonderfully comfortable and Michael began to bounce up and down on his until reprimanded.

‘Just lie down flat,’ said the pilot. ‘Swallow this pill—you won’t taste it—and take things easy. You’ll feel very heavy when we start, but it won’t hurt and doesn’t last long. One other thing—don’t try to get up until I tell you. Now, we’ve got just ten minutes before we start, so relax.’

It wasn’t as easy as all that, Daphne found. That ten minutes seemed to last for ever. She explored the little cabin with her eyes, wondering how anyone could
ever
learn what all those gadgets and controls were for. Just suppose the pilot made a mistake and pressed the wrong button…

Mother smiled at her reassuringly from the next couch, while Michael was obviously so intrigued by all the machinery that he hated having to lie down at all.

Daphne gave a jump when suddenly an electric motor started to whirr very close at hand. Then things began to happen all over the place. Switches clicked, powerful pumps began to whine, and valves snapped open down in the heart of the great rocket.

Each time she thought, ‘This is it!’, but still they didn’t move. When the voyage finally began, she wasn’t prepared for it.

A long way off, it seemed, there was a noise like a thousand waterfalls, or a thunderstorm in which the crashes followed each other so quickly that there was no moment of silence between them. The rockets had started, but were not yet delivering enough power to lift the ship.

Quickly the roar mounted, the cabin began to vibrate, and the
Centaurus
began to ascend from the desert, spraying the sands with flame for a hundred yards around. To Daphne, it seemed that something was pushing her down, quite gently, into the thick padding of the couch. It wasn’t at all uncomfortable, but the pressure mounted until her limbs seemed to be made of lead and it needed a deliberate effort to keep breathing.

She tried to lift her hand, and the effort to move it even a few inches was so tiring that she let it drop back on the couch. After that, she just lay limp and relaxed, waiting to see what would happen next. She wasn’t really frightened—it was too exciting for that, this feeling of infinite power sweeping her up into the sky.

There was a sudden fall in the thunder of the rockets, the feeling of immense weight ebbed away, and she could breathe more easily. Power was being reduced: they had almost escaped the Earth’s grip. A moment later silence came flooding back as the last of the motors was cut out, and all feeling of weight vanished completely.

For several minutes the pilot conferred with his navigator, checking instruments and figures. Then he swung round in his seat, smiled at the passengers and said, ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it? We’ve reached escape velocity now—25,000 miles an hour—and you won’t feel any weight again until we’re nearly at the Moon and we start the rockets to slow down.’

He rose from his seat, still holding on to it with one hand, and Daphne saw that both his feet were clear of the floor. Releasing his grip, he floated towards them like something in a slow-motion film. Daphne knew that this sort of thing happened in space, but it was weird to see it before her own eyes. And it was weirder still when it began to happen to
her
.

It was a long time before she got used to the idea that ‘up’ and ‘down’ simply didn’t have any meaning, and got the knack of gliding across the cabin without hitting the other side too hard, or colliding head-first with the walls. But it was such great fun that several minutes had passed before Daphne suddenly remembered what she must be missing, and dived towards the nearest of the little circular windows set in the wall of the ship.

She had expected to see Earth as a great globe hanging in space, with the seas and continents clearly visible—just like those globes you see in map-sellers’ windows.

What she saw, however, was totally unexpected and so wonderful that it took away her breath. Almost filling the sky was a tremendous, blinding crescent, the shape of a new moon, but hundreds of times bigger. The rocket must have passed over the night side of Earth, and the greater part of the planet was in darkness.

But presently, as she stared at that great shadowy circle eclipsing the stars, she could see here and there upon its face tiny patches of light, and knew that she was looking down upon the cities of mankind, shining like fireflies in the night.

It was several minutes before she could tear her eyes away from that huge crescent and the disc of darkness it embraced. As she watched, the crescent slowly narrowed, for the spaceship was still speeding into the shadow of the Earth. For a few minutes the sun would be totally eclipsed before the
Centaurus
came racing out into the light again, and only the Moon and the stars would be visible.

The Moon! Where was it? She moved to another window, and there it was, still looking just the same as she had always seen it from Earth. Of course, it wouldn’t be any bigger yet: the journey had scarcely begun. But in the next two days it would slowly grow until it filled the sky and they were dropping down towards its shining mountains and great, dusty plains—towards that strange and silent world that had now become Man’s first stepping-stone on the road to the stars. What would it be like? Who would she meet? Daphne’s excitement was so great that she felt certain this was one night when sleep would be impossible.

It was a lovely dream. Daphne was flying—gliding effortlessly over the ground, able to move as freely as a bird in whatever direction she pleased. She had experienced such dreams before, of course, but they had never been as vivid as this, and even the fact that, somehow, she
knew
she was dreaming, did not destroy the beautiful illusion.

A sudden jolt broke the spell of sleep and dragged her back to reality. She opened her eyes, stretched herself—and gave a shriek of pure terror. There was darkness all around, and wherever she reached she could feel nothing at all, only the empty air. The dream had turned suddenly to a nightmare: she was in truth floating in space, but helpless, without any power of movement…

The cabin light came on with a ‘click’ and the rocket pilot pushed his head through the curtains round the door.

‘What’s the fuss?’ he said. Then he shook his head reprimandingly. ‘There! And after all my warnings!’

Daphne felt very sheepish. It was her own fault, of course. She had loosened the broad elastic bands that held her in the bunk, and while she had been sleeping she must have gently drifted out into the room. Now she was floating in mid-air, slowly revolving, but unable to move in any direction.

‘I’ve got a good mind to leave you there as an object lesson,’ said the pilot. But his eyes were twinkling as he grabbed a pillow from the empty bunk. ‘Catch!’ he said.

The gentle impact set Daphne moving again, and a moment later she had reached the wall and was no longer helpless. Mrs Martin and Michael had now awakened and were rubbing their eyes sleepily.

‘We’re landing in an hour,’ the pilot explained. ‘We’ll have breakfast in a few minutes, and then I suggest you go to the observation windows and make yourselves comfortable.’

Breakfast was soon finished. In space, because the absence of gravity reduced physical effort to a minimum, one never had much appetite. Even Michael was satisfied with two pieces of toast and a quarter pint of milk, stored in a flexible container so that it could be squirted straight into the mouth simply by squeezing.

Pouring liquids was, of course, impossible where there was neither ‘up’ nor ‘down’. Any attempt to do so would simply have resulted in a very large drop drifting through the air until it reached the wall and spattered over everything.

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 spaceship 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 spaceship 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.