Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (25 page)

He never looked back as they walked silently
together across the clinging sand. This moment would be with him all his life,
but he was still too stunned to do more than walk blindly into a future he
could not understand.

The three figures dwindled into the distance
and were gone. A long while later, a silver cloud seemed to lift above the
hills and move slowly out to sea. In a shallow arc, as though reluctant to
leave its world, the last of the great ships climbed toward the horizon and
shrank to nothingness over the edge of the Earth.

The tide was returning with the dying day.
As though its makers still walked within its walls, the low metal building upon
the hills had begun to blaze with light. Near the zenith, one star had not
waited for the sun to set, but already burned with a fierce white glare against
the darkling sky. Soon its companions, no longer in the scant thousands that
man had once known, began to fill the heavens. The Earth was now near the
centre of the universe, and whole areas of the sky were an unbroken blaze of
light.

But rising beyond the sea in two long
curving arms, something black and monstrous eclipsed the stars and seemed to
cast its shadow over all the world. The tentacles of the Dark Nebula were
already brushing against the frontiers of the solar system….

In the east, a great yellow moon was
climbing through the waves. Though man had torn down its mountains and brought
it air and water, its face was the one that had looked upon Earth since history
began, and it was still the ruler of the tides. Across the sand the line of
foam moved steadily onward, overwhelming the little canals and planing down the
tangled footprints.

On the sky line, the lights in the strange
metal building suddenly died, and the spinning mirrors ceased their moonlight
glittering. From far inland came the blinding flash of a great explosion, then
another, and another fainter yet.

Presently the ground trembled a little, but
no sound disturbed the solitude of the deserted shore.

Under the level light of the sagging moon,
beneath the myriad stars, the beach lay waiting for the end. It was alone now,
as it had been at the beginning. Only the waves would move, and but for a
little while, upon its golden sands.

For Man had come and gone.

First published in
If
, June 1958

Collected in
The Other Side of the Sky

Many years later, this became the basis for my own favourite novel, and
a beautiful suite by Mike ‘Tubular Bells’ Oldfield.

Beneath the palm trees Lora waited, watching
the sea. Clyde’s boat was already visible as a tiny notch on the far horizon –
the only flaw in the perfect mating of sea and sky. Minute by minute it grew in
size, until it had detached itself from the featureless blue globe that
encompassed the world. Now she could see Clyde standing at the prow, one hand
twined around the rigging, statue-still as his eyes sought her among the
shadows.

‘Where are you, Lora?’ his voice asked
plaintively from the radio bracelet he had given her when they became engaged.
‘Come and help me – we’ve got a big catch to bring home.’

So! Lora told herself;
that’s
why you
asked me to hurry down to the beach. Just to punish Clyde and to reduce him to
the right state of anxiety, she ignored his call until he had repeated it half
a dozen times. Even then she did not press the beautiful golden pearl set in
the ‘Transmit’ button, but slowly emerged from the shade of the great trees and
walked down the sloping beach.

Clyde looked at her reproachfully, but gave
her a satisfactory kiss as soon as he had bounded ashore and secured the boat.
Then they started unloading the catch together, scooping fish large and small
from both hulls of the catamaran. Lora screwed up her nose but assisted gamely,
until the waiting sand sled was piled high with the victims of Clyde’s skill.

It was a good catch; when she married Clyde,
Lora told herself proudly, she’d never starve. The clumsy armoured creatures of
this young planet’s sea were not true fish; it would be a hundred million years
before nature invented scales here. But they were good enough eating, and the
first colonists had labelled them with names they had brought, with so many
other traditions, from unforgotten Earth.

‘That’s the lot!’ grunted Clyde, tossing a
fair imitation of a salmon onto the glistening heap. ‘I’ll fix the nets later –
let’s go!’

Finding a foothold with some difficulty,
Lora jumped onto the sled behind him. The flexible rollers spun for a moment
against the sand, then got a grip. Clyde, Lora, and a hundred pounds of
assorted fish started racing up the wave-scalloped beach. They had made half
the brief journey when the simple, carefree world they had known all their young
lives came suddenly to its end.

The sign of its passing was written there
upon the sky, as if a giant hand had drawn a piece of chalk across the blue
vault of heaven. Even as Clyde and Lora watched, the gleaming vapour trail
began to fray at its edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud.

And now they could hear, falling down
through the miles above their heads, a sound their world had not known for
generations. Instinctively they grasped each other’s hands, as they stared at
that snow-white furrow across the sky and listened to the thin scream from the
borders of space. The descending ship had already vanished beyond the horizon
before they turned to each other and breathed, almost with reverence, the same
magic word: ‘Earth!’

After three hundred years of silence, the
mother world had reached out once more to touch Thalassa …

Why? Lora asked herself, when the long
moment of revelation had passed and the scream of torn air ceased to echo from
the sky. What had happened, after all these years, to bring a ship from mighty
Earth to this quiet and contented world? There was no room for more colonists
here on this one island in a watery planet, and Earth knew that well enough.
Its robot survey ships had mapped and probed Thalassa from space five centuries
ago, in the early days of interstellar exploration. Long before man himself had
ventured out into the gulfs between the stars, his electronic servants had gone
ahead of him, circling the worlds of alien suns and heading homeward with their
store of knowledge, as bees bring honey back to the parent hive.

Such a scout had found Thalassa, a freak
among worlds with its single large island in a shoreless sea. One day
continents would be born here, but this was a new planet, its history still
waiting to be written.

The robot had taken a hundred years to make
its homeward journey, and for a hundred more its garnered knowledge had slept
in the electronic memories of the great computers which stored the wisdom of
Earth. The first waves of colonisation had not touched Thalassa; there were
more profitable worlds to be developed – worlds that were not nine-tenths
water. Yet at last the pioneers had come; only a dozen miles from where she was
standing now, Lora’s ancestors had first set foot upon this planet and claimed
it for mankind.

They had levelled hills, planted crops,
moved rivers, built towns and factories, and multiplied until they reached the
natural limits of their land. With its fertile soil, abundant seas, and mild,
wholly predictable weather, Thalassa was not a world that demanded much of its
adopted children. The pioneering spirit had lasted perhaps two generations;
thereafter the colonists were content to work as much as necessary (but no
more), to dream nostalgically of Earth, and to let the future look after itself.

The village was seething with speculation
when Clyde and Lora arrived. News had already come from the northern end of the
island that the ship had spent its furious speed and was heading back at a low
altitude, obviously looking for a place to land. ‘They’ll still have the old
maps,’ someone said. ‘Ten to one they’ll ground where the first expedition
landed, up in the hills.’

It was a shrewd guess, and within minutes
all available transport was moving out of the village, along the seldom used
road to the west. As befitted the mayor of so important a cultural centre as
Palm Bay (population: 572; occupations: fishing, hydroponics; industries:
none), Lora’s father led the way in his official car. The fact that its annual
coat of paint was just about due was perhaps a little unfortunate; one could
only hope that the visitors would overlook the occasional patches of bare
metal. After all, the car itself was quite new; Lora could distinctly remember
the excitement its arrival had caused, only thirteen years ago.

The little caravan of assorted cars, trucks,
and even a couple of straining sand sleds rolled over the crest of the hill and
ground to a halt beside the weathered sign with its simple but impressive
words:

LANDING SITE OF THE FIRST EXPEDITION TO
THALASSA
1 JANUARY, YEAR ZERO

(28 May AD 2626)

The
first
expedition, Lora repeated
silently. There had never been a second one –
but here it was
…

The ship came in so low, and so silently,
that it was almost upon them before they were aware of it. There was no sound of
engines – only a brief rustling of leaves as the displaced air stirred among
the trees. Then all was still once more, but it seemed to Lora that the shining
ovoid resting on the turf was a great silver egg, waiting to hatch and to bring
something new and strange into the peaceful world of Thalassa.

‘It’s so small,’ someone whispered behind
her. ‘They couldn’t have come from Earth in
that
thing!’

‘Of course not,’ the inevitable
self-appointed expert replied at once. ‘That’s only a lifeboat – the real ship’s
up there in space. Don’t you remember that the first expedition—’

‘Sshh!’ someone else remonstrated. ‘They’re
coming out!’

It happened in the space of a single
heartbeat. One second the seamless hull was so smooth and unbroken that the eye
looked in vain for any sign of an opening. And then, an instant later, there
was an oval doorway with a short ramp leading to the ground. Nothing had moved,
but something had
happened
. How it had been done, Lora could not
imagine, but she accepted the miracle without surprise. Such things were only
to be expected of a ship that came from Earth.

There were figures moving inside the
shadowed entrance; not a sound came from the waiting crowd as the visitors
slowly emerged and stood blinking in the fierce light of an unfamiliar sun.
There were seven of them – all men – and they did not look in the least like
the super-beings she had expected. It was true that they were all somewhat
above the average in height and had thin, clear-cut features, but they were so
pale that their skins were almost white. They seemed, moreover, worried and
uncertain, which was something that puzzled Lora very much. For the first time
it occurred to her that this landing on Thalassa might be unintentional, and
that the visitors were as surprised to be here as the islanders were to greet
them.

The mayor of Palm Bay, confronted with the
supreme moment of his career, stepped forward to deliver the speech on which he
had been frantically working ever since the car left the village. A second
before he opened his mouth, a sudden doubt struck him and sponged his memory
clean. Everyone had automatically assumed that this ship came from Earth – but
that was pure guesswork. It might just as easily have been sent here from one
of the other colonies, of which there were at least a dozen much closer than
the parent world. In his panic over protocol, all that Lora’s father could
manage was: ‘We welcome you to Thalassa. You’re from Earth – I presume?’ That
‘I presume?’ was to make Mayor Fordyce immortal; it would be a century before
anyone discovered that the phrase was not quite original.

In all that waiting crowd, Lora was the only
one who never heard the confirming answer, spoken in English that seemed to
have speeded up a trifle during the centuries of separation. For in that
moment, she saw Leon for the first time.

He came out of the ship, moving as
unobtrusively as possible to join his companions at the foot of the ramp.
Perhaps he had remained behind to make some adjustment to the controls; perhaps
– and this seemed more likely – he had been reporting the progress of the
meeting to the great mother ship, which must be hanging up there in space, far
beyond the uttermost fringes of the atmosphere. Whatever the reason, from then
onward Lora had eyes for no one else.

Even in that first instant, she knew that
her life could never again be the same. This was something new and beyond all
her experience, filling her at the same moment with wonder and fear. Her fear
was for the love she felt for Clyde; her wonder for the new and unknown thing
that had come into her life.

Leon was not as tall as his companions, but
was much more stockily built, giving an impression of power and competence. His
eyes, very dark and full of animation, were deep-set in rough-hewn features
which no one could have called handsome, yet which Lora found disturbingly
attractive. Here was a man who had looked upon sights she could not imagine – a
man who, perhaps, had walked the streets of Earth and seen its fabled cities.
What was he doing here on lonely Thalassa, and why were those lines of strain
and worry about his ceaselessly searching eyes?