Earthlight (Arthur C. Clarke Collection) Read online

  realized that there was a crisis if he went by the headlines alone; it was necessary to search through the paper to find the really significant items. Low down on page two, for example, was a report that a liner from Earth was having quarantine trouble off Mars and was not being allowed to land—while another on Venus was not being allowed to take off. Sadler was fairly sure that the real trouble was political rather than medical; the Fed­eration was simply getting tough.

  On page four was a still more thought-provoking piece of news, A party of prospectors had been arrested on some remote asteroid in the vicinity of Jupiter. The charge, it seemed, was a violation of space-safety regulations. Sadler suspected that the charge was phony—and that so were the prospectors. Central Intelligence had probably lost some of its agents.

  On the center page of the paper was a rather naive editorial making light of the situation and expressing the confident hope that common sense would prevail. Sadler, who had no illusions about the commonness of common sense, remained skeptical and turned to the local news.

  All human communities, wherever they may be in space, follow the same pattern. People were getting born, being cre­mated (with careful conservation of phosphorus and nitrates), rushing in and out of marriage, moving out of town, suing their neighbors, having parties, holding protest meetings, getting in­volved in astonishing accidents, writing Letters to the Editor, changing jobs. . . . Yes, it was just like Earth. That was a somewhat depressing thought. Why had Man ever bothered to leave his own world if all his travels and experiences had made so little difference to his fundamental nature? He might just as well have stayed at home, instead of exporting himself and his foibles, at great expense, to another world.

  Your job's making you cynical, Sadler told himself. Let's see what Central City has in the way of entertainment.

  He'd just missed a tennis tournament in Dome Four, which should have been worth watching. It was played, so someone had told him, with a ball of normal size and mass. But the ball was honeycombed with holes, which increased its air-resistance so much that ranges were no greater than on earth. Without some such subterfuge, a good drive would easily span one of the

  41

  domes. However, the trajectories followed by these doctored balls were most peculiar, and enough to induce a swift nervous breakdown in anyone who had learned to play under normal gravity.

  There was a cyclorama in Dome Three, promising a tour of the Amazon Basin (mosquito bites optional), starting at every alternate hour. Having just come from Earth, Sadler felt no desire to return so promptly. Besides, he felt he had already seen an excellent cyclorama display in the thunderstorm that had now passed out of sight. Presumably it had been produced in the same manner, by batteries of wide-angle projectors.

  The attraction that finally took his fancy was the swimming pool in Dome Two. It was the star feature of the Central City gymnasium, much frequented by the Observatory staff. One of the occupational risks of life on the Moon was lack of exercise and resultant muscular atrophy. Anyone who stayed away from Earth for more than a few weeks felt the change of weight very severely when he came home. What lured Sadler to the gym, however, was the thought that he could practice some fancy dives that he would never dare risk on Earth, where one fell five meters in the first second and acquired far too much kinetic energy before hitting the water.

  Dome Two was on the other side of the city, and as Sadler felt he should save his energy for his destination he took the subway. But he missed the slow-speed section which led one off the continuously moving belt, and was carried willy-nilly on to Dome Three before he could escape. Rather than circle the city again, he retraced the way on the surface, passing through the short connecting tunnel that linked all the domes together at the points where they touched. There were automatic doors here that opened at a touch—and would seal instantly if air-pressure dropped on either side.

  Half the Observatory staff seemed to be exercising itself in the gym. Dr. Molton was sculling a rowing machine, one eye fixed anxiously on the indicator that was adding up his strokes. The chief engineer, eyes closed tightly as per the warning in­structions, was standing in the center of a ring of ultra-violet tubes which gave out an eerie glare as they replenished his tan. One of the M.D.'s from Surgery was attacking a punchbag with

  42

  such viciousness that Sadler hoped he would never have to meet him professionally. A tough-looking character who Sadler be­lieved came from Maintenance was trying to see if he could lift a clear ton; even if one allowed mentally for the low gravity, it was still awe-inspiring to watch.

  Everybody else was in the swimming pool, and Sadler quickly joined them. He was not sure what he had expected, but some­how he had imagined that swimming on the Moon would differ drastically from the same experience on the Earth. But it was exactly the same, and the only effect of gravity was the abnormal height of the waves, and the slowness with which they moved across the pool.

  The diving went well as long as Sadler attempted nothing ambitious. It was wonderful to know just what was going on, and to have time to admire the surroundings during one's leisurely descent. Then, greatly daring, Sadler tried a somer­sault from five meters. After all, this was equivalent to less than a meter on Earth. . . .

  Unfortunately, he completely misjudged his time of fall, and made half a turn too many—or too few. He landed on his shoulders, and remembered too late just what a crack one could give oneself even from a low height if things went wrong. Limping slightly, and feeling that he had been flayed alive, he crawled out of the pool. As the slow ripples ebbed languidly away, Sadler decided to leave this sort of exhibitionism to younger men.

  After all this exertion, it was inevitable that he join Molton and a few of his other acquaintances when they left the gym­nasium. Tired but relaxed, and feeling that he had learned a good deal more about the lunar way of life, Sadler leaned back in his seat as the monocab pulled out of the station and the great doors sealed tight behind them. Blue, cloud-flecked skies gave place to the harsh reality of the lunar night. There was the unchanged Earth, just as he had seen it hours ago. He looked for the blinding star of Nova Draconis, then remembered that in these latitudes it was hidden below the northern edge of the Moon.

  The dark domes, which gave so little sign of the life and light they held, sank beneath the horizon. As he watched them go,

  43

  Sadler was struck by a sudden, somber thought. They had been built to withstand the forces that Nature could bring against them—but how pitiably fragile they would be if ever they faced the fury of Man!

  Chapter VII

  "I still think," said Jamieson, as the tractor headed toward the southern wall of Plato, "that there'll be a hell of a row when the Old Man hears about it."

  "Why should he?" asked Wheeler. "When he gets back, he'll be too busy to bother about us. And anyway, we're paying for all the fuel we use. So stop worrying and enjoy yourself. This is our day off, in case you'd forgotten."

  Jamieson did not reply. He was too busy concentrating on the road ahead—if it could be called a road. The only sign that other vehicles had ever been this way were the occasional fur­rows in the dust. Since these would last for eternity here on the windless Moon, no other signposts were needed, though occa­sionally one came across unsettling notices that read DANGER —CLEFTS AHEAD! or EMERGENCY OXYGEN—10 KIL­OMETERS.

  There are only two methods of long-range transport on the Moon. The highspeed monorails link the main settlements with a fast, comfortable service running on a regular schedule. But the rail system is very limited, and likely to remain so because of its cost. For unrestricted ranging over the lunar surface, one must fall back on the powerful turbine-driven tractors known as "Caterpillars" or, more briefly, "Cats." They are, virtually, small spaceships mounted on fat little tires that enable them to go anywhere within reason even over the appallingly jagged surface of the Moon. On smooth terrain they can easily do a hundred kilometers an hour, but normally they
are lucky to manage half that speed. The weak gravity, and the caterpillar treads they can lower if necessary, enable them to climb fan­tastic slopes. In emergencies, they have been known to haul themselves up vertical cliffs with their built-in winches. One

  44

  can live in the larger models for weeks at a time without undue hardship, and all the detailed exploration of the Moon has been carried out by prospectors using these tough little vehicles.

  Jamieson was a more-than-expert driver, and knew the way perfectly. Nevertheless, for the first hour Wheeler felt that his hair would never lie down again. It usually took newcomers to the Moon quite a while to realize that slopes of one-in-one were perfectly safe if treated with respect. Perhaps it was just as well that Wheeler was a novice, for Jamieson's technique was so unorthodox that it would have filled a more experienced pas­senger with real alarm.

  Why Jamieson was such a recklessly brilliant driver was a paradox that had caused much discussion among his colleagues. Normally he was very painstaking and cautious, inclined not to act at all unless he could be certain of the consequences. No one had ever seen him really annoyed or excited; many thought him lazy, but that was a libel. He would spend weeks working on some observations until the results were absolutely unchallenge­able—and would then put them away for two or three months to have another look at them later.

  Yet once at the controls of a "cat," this quiet and peace-loving astronomer became a daredevil driver who held the un­official record for almost every tractor run in the northern hemi­sphere. The reason lay—buried too deeply even for Jamieson to be aware of it himself—in a boyhood desire to be a spaceship pilot, a dream that had been frustrated by an erratic heart.

  From space—or through a telescope on Earth—the walls of Plato seem a formidable barrier when the slanting sunlight shows them to best advantage. But in reality they are less than a kilometer high, and if one chooses the correct route through the numerous passes, the journey out of the crater and into the Mare Imbrium presents no great difficulty. Jamieson got through the mountains in less than an hour, though Wheeler wished that he had taken a little longer.

  They came to a halt on a high escarpment overlooking the plain. Directly ahead, notching the horizon, was the pyramidal summit of Pico. Toward the right, sinking down into the north­east, were the more rugged peaks of the Teneriffe Mountains. Very few of those peaks had ever been climbed, largely because

  45

  no one had so far bothered to attempt it. The brilliant Earth-light made them appear an uncanny blue-green, contrasting strangely with their appearance by day, when they would be bleached into raw whites and blacks by the merciless sun.

  While Jamieson relaxed to enjoy the view, Wheeler began a careful search of the landscape with a pair of powerful binocu­lars. Ten minutes later he gave it up, having discovered nothing in the least unusual. He was not surprised by this, for the area where the unscheduled rockets had been landing was well below the horizon.

  "Let's drive on," he said. "We can get to Pico in a couple of hours, and we'll have dinner there."

  "And then what?" asked Jamieson in resigned tones.

  "If we can't see anything, we'll come back like good little boys."

  "O.K.—but you'll find it rough going from now on. I don't suppose more than a dozen tractors have ever been down there before. To cheer you up, I might tell you that our Ferdinand is one of them."

  He eased the vehicle forward, gingerly skirting a vast talus slope where splintered rock had been accumulating for millen­nia. Such slopes were extremely dangerous, for the slightest dis­turbance could often set them moving in slow, irresistible ava­lanches that would overwhelm everything before them. For all his apparent recklessness, Jamieson took no real risks, and al­ways gave such traps a very wide berth. A less experienced driver would have gaily galloped along the foot of the slide without a moment's thought—and ninety-nine times out of a hundred would have got away with it. Jamieson had seen what happened on the hundredth time. Once the wave of dusty rubble had en­gulfed a tractor, there was no escape, since any attempt at rescue would only start fresh slides.

  Wheeler began to feel distinctly unhappy on the way down the outer ramparts of Plato. This was odd, for they were much less steep than the inner walls, and he had expected a smoother journey. He had not allowed for the fact that Jamieson would take advantage of the easier conditions to crowd on speed, with the result that Ferdinand was indulging in a peculiar rocking motion. Presently Wheeler disappeared to the rear of the well-

  46

  appointed tractor, and was not seen by his pilot for some time. When he returned he remarked rather crossly, "No one ever told me you could actually be seasick on the Moon."

  The view was now rather disappointing, as it usually is when one descends to the lunar lowlands. The horizon is so near— only two or three kilometers away—that it gives a sense of con­finement and restraint. It is almost as if the small circle of rock surrounding one is all that exists. The illusion can be so strong that men have been known to drive more slowly than necessary, as if subconsciously afraid they might fall off the edge of that uncannily near horizon.

  For two hours Jamieson drove steadily onward, until at last the triple tower of Pico dominated the sky ahead. Once this magnificent mountain had been part of a vast crater wall that must have been a twin to Plato. But ages ago the encroaching lava of the Mare Imbrium had washed away all the rest of the hundred-and-fifty-kilorneter-diameter ring, leaving Pico in lone­ly and solitary state.

  The travelers paused here to open a few food packs and make some coffee in the pressure kettle. One of the minor discomforts of life on the Moon is that really hot drinks are an impossibility —water boils at about seventy degrees centigrade in the oxygen-rich, low-pressure atmosphere universally employed. After a while, however, one grows used to lukewarm beverages.

  When they had cleared up the debris of the meal, Jamieson remarked to his colleague, "Sure you still want to go through with it?"

  "As long as you say it's safe. Those walls look awfully steep from here."

  "It's safe, if you do what I tell you. I was just wondering how you felt now. There's nothing worse than being sick in a spacesuit."

  "I'm all right," Wheeler replied with dignity. Then another thought struck him. "How long will we be outside, anyway?"

  "Oh, say a couple of hours. Four at the most. Better do all the scratching you want to now."

  "I wasn't worrying about that" retorted Wheeler, and retired to the back of the cabin again.

  In the six months he had been on the Moon, Wheeler had

  47

  worn a suit no more than a dozen times, and most of those oc­casions were on emergency drill. There were very few times when the observing staff had to go into vacuum—most of their equipment was remotely controlled. But he was not a complete novice, though he was still in the cautious stage which is so much safer than lighthearted overconfidence.

  They called Base, via Earth, to report their position and in­tentions, then adjusted each other's equipment. First Jamieson, then Wheeler, chanted the alphabetical mnemonic—"A is for airlines, B is for batteries, C is for couplings, D is for D.F. loop . . ." which sounds so childish the first time one hears it, but which so quickly becomes part of the routine of lunar life— and is something nobody ever jokes about. When they were sure that all their equipment was in perfect condition, they cracked the doors of the airlock and stepped out onto the dusty plain.

  Like most lunar mountains, Pico was not so formidable when seen close at hand as when glimpsed from a distance. There were a few vertical cliffs, but they could always be avoided, and it was seldom necessary to climb slopes of more than forty-five degrees. Under a sixth of a gravity, this is no great hardship, even when one is wearing a spacesuit.

  Nevertheless, the unaccustomed exertion made Wheeler sweat and pant somewhat after they had been climbing for half an hour, and his face plate was misting badly so that he had to peer out
of the corners to see properly. Though he was too stub­born to request a slower pace, he was very glad when Jamieson called a halt.

  They were now almost a kilometer above the plain, and could see for at least fifty kilometers to the north. They shielded their eyes from the glare of the Earth and began to search.

  It took only a moment to find their objective. Halfway to the horizon, two extremely large freight rockets were standing like ungainly spiders on their extended undercarriages. Large though they were, they were dwarfed by the curious dome-shaped structure rising out of the level plain. This was no ordi­nary pressure dome—its proportions were all wrong. It looked almost as if a complete sphere had been partly buried, so that the upper three-quarters emerged from the surface. Through his

  48

  binoculars, whose special eye pieces allowed him to use them despite his face plate, Wheeler could see men and machines moving round the base of the dome. From time to time clouds of dust shot into the sky and fell back again as if blasting was in progress. That was another odd thing about the Moon, he thought. Most objects fell too slowly here in this low gravity, for anyone accustomed to conditions on Earth. But dust fell much too quickly—at the same rate as anything else, in fact— for there was no air to check its descent.