The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (10 page)

‘I suppose we had better wait for the reception committee,’ said Wheeler. ‘Ah, here it comes!’

A small man who managed to convey an air of importance even in a space-suit was forcing his way through the crowd. Presently there came a peremptory series of knocks on the outer door of the airlock. Jamieson pressed the button that opened the seal and a moment later the ‘reception committee’ was removing his helmet in the cabin.

He was an elderly sharp-featured man and he did not seem in a particularly good temper. ‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped as soon as he had escaped from the confines of his suit.

Jamieson affected surprise at such an unreasonable attitude. ‘We saw you were newcomers around here, so we came over to see how you were getting on.’

‘Who are you?’

‘We’re from the Observatory. This is Mr Wheeler—I’m Dr Jamieson. Both astrophysicists.’

‘Oh!’ There was a sudden change in the atmosphere. The reception committee became quite friendly. ‘Well, you’d better both come along to the office while we check your credentials.’

‘I beg your pardon? Since when has this part of the Moon been restricted territory?’

‘Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Come along, please.’

The two astronomers climbed into their suits and followed the other through the lock. Wheeler was beginning to feel a trifle worried and rather wished he had not suggested making this visit. Already he was visualising all sorts of unpleasant possibilities. Recollections of what he had read about spies, solitary confinement and brick walls at dawn rose up to cheer him.

One of his most valuable assets as a theoretical scientist was his powerful imagination but there were times when he felt that he could do without it. Quite a large portion of his life was spent worrying about things which might happen as a result of the scrapes into which he was continually getting. This looked as if it might be one of them.

Outside the crowd was still gathered around their tractor but it rapidly dispersed as their guide gave instructions over his radio which Jamieson and Wheeler, tuned to the Observatory wavelength, were unable to hear.

They were led to a smoothly-fitting door in the wall of the great dome and found themselves inside the space formed by the outer wall and an inner, concentric hemisphere. The two shells, as far as could be seen, were spaced apart by an intricate webbing of transparent plastic. Even the floor underfoot was made of the same substance. Looking at it closely, Wheeler came to the conclusion that it was some kind of electrical insulator.

Their guide hurried them along at almost a trot, as if he did not wish them to see more than necessary. They entered the inner dome through a small airlock, where they removed their suits. Wheeler wondered glumly when they would be allowed to retrieve them.

III

There was a smell in the air that they did not at once recognise, in spite of its familiarity. Jamieson was the first to identify it. ‘Ozone!’ he whispered to his companion, who nodded in agreement. He was going to add a remark about high voltage equipment when their guide looked back suspiciously and he desisted.

The airlock opened into a small corridor flanked by doors bearing painted numbers and such labels as
Private, Keep Out! Technical Staff Only, Dr Jones, Typists
and
Director
. At the last they came to a halt.

After a short pause a
Come In
panel glowed and the door swung automatically open. Ahead lay a perfectly ordinary office dominated by a determined-looking young man behind a very large desk. ‘Hello—who are these people?’ he asked as his visitors entered.

‘Two astronomers from the Observatory. They just dropped in by tractor. I thought we had better check up on them.’

‘Most certainly. Your names, please?’

There followed a tedious quarter of an hour while the Director took down particulars and finally called the Observatory. Jamieson and Wheeler breathed a sigh of relief when it was all over and everyone was satisfied that they were in fact themselves.

The young man at the imposing desk switched off the radio and regarded the two interlopers with some perplexity. Presently his brow cleared and he began to address them.

‘You realise, of course, that you are a bit of a nuisance. This is about the last place we ever expected visitors, otherwise we should have put up notices telling them to clear off. Needless to say we have means of detecting them when they do arrive—even when they don’t drive up openly as you were sensible enough to do.

‘Anyway, here you are and no harm done. You have probably guessed that this is a Government project, one that we don’t want talked about. Now you are here I suppose I had better explain to you what it is—but I want your word of honour not to repeat what I tell you.’

The two astronomers, feeling rather sheepish, assented.

‘As you know radio communication to the outer planets is carried out in stages and not by direct point-to-point transmission. If we want to send a message to Titan it has to go, for example, Earth-Mars-Callisto-Titan, with repeater stations and all their masses of equipment at each leg of the journey. We want to do away with all that. This is going to be Communications Centre for the entire Solar System and from here we can call any planet direct.’

‘Even Persephone when they get there?’

‘Yes.’

‘One in the eye for the Federation, won’t it be? They own all the relay stations outside Earth.’

The Director looked at Wheeler sharply. ‘Well, I don’t suppose they’ll like it at first,’ he admitted. ‘But in the long run it will reduce costs and give everyone a much better service.’

‘The secrecy, I suppose, is to prevent the Federation thinking of the idea first?’

The Director looked a little embarrassed and refused to answer directly. He rose, made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Well, that’s all, gentlemen. I hope you have a pleasant trip back to the Alps. And please ask your friends to keep away.’

‘Thanks for being so frank with us,’ said Jamieson as they turned to go. ‘We’ll keep it to ourselves. But we’re glad to know the truth, as there are so many rumours flying round nowadays.’

‘Such as?’

‘To be perfectly honest we thought this might be the mythical uranium mine there’s been so much talk about.’

The Director laughed easily. ‘Doesn’t look much like a mine, does it?’

‘It certainly doesn’t. Well, goodbye.’

‘Goodbye.’

The Director remained standing in moody silence for a while after Jamieson and Wheeler had left the room. Then he pressed the buzzer for his secretary. ‘You’ve recorded that?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’re nice chaps. I feel rather ashamed of myself. But if we just sent them away they’d start discussing us with their colleagues—and they might hit on the truth. Now that they think they know it their curiosity will be satisfied and they won’t talk, especially since I’ve asked them not to and they’re the sort who’ll respect a promise. A dirty trick but I think it will work.’

The secretary looked at his chief with a new respect. ‘You know, Chief, there are times when you remind me of that old Roman politician—you know the chap I mean.’

‘Machiavelli, I suppose—though he was a bit later than the Romans. By the way, did the screens detect them all right when they came in?’

‘Yes—the alarms went off in plenty of time.’

‘Good! Then there’s no need to increase our precautions. The only other step we could take is to publicly announce that this part of the Moon is tabu—and the last thing we want to do is to attract attention.’

‘What about the people at the Observatory? There may be more visitors.’

‘We’ll call up Maclaurin again and ask him to discourage these private expeditions. He’s a touchy old bird but I think he’ll play. Now let’s get on with that progress report.’

Jamieson and Wheeler did not return directly to the Observatory, for they were not expected back for a couple of days and there was still a lot of the Moon to explore. Their visit to the dome, they felt, had been something of an anticlimax. It was true that they were sharing a secret and that was always exciting but they could not pretend it was a very spectacular secret.

‘Well, where do we go from here?’ asked Wheeler when the dome had dropped out of sight below the horizon.

Jamieson produced a large-scale photographic map of the
Mare Imbrium
and pinned it down with his forefinger.

‘This is where we are now,’ he said. ‘I’m going on a circular tour that will really show you some lunar scenery. The
Sinus Iridum
’s just two hundred miles east over quite good terrain and I’m heading for that. When we get there we’ll go north until we reach the edge of the plain, and then follow the mountains back to the Observatory. We’ll be home tomorrow or the next day.’

For nearly four hours uneventful landscape flowed past the windows as Jamieson drove the tractor across the Sea. From time to time they passed low ridges and small craters only a few hundred feet high but for the greater part of their journey the terrain was almost flat.

After a while Wheeler ceased to take much notice of it and tried to do some reading but the jolting of the machine made it very uncomfortable and he soon gave up the attempt. In any case the only book in the tractor was Maclaurin’s
Studies of the Dynamics of Multiple Star Systems
and this
was
supposed to be a holiday after all.

‘Sid,’ began Wheeler abruptly. ‘What do you think about the Federation? You’ve met a lot of their people.’

‘Yes and liked them. Pity you weren’t here when the last crowd left. We had about a dozen of them at the Observatory, studying the telescope mounting. They’re thinking of building a fifteen-hundred-inch reflector on one of the moons of Saturn, you know.’

‘That would be some job—I always said we were too close to the Sun here. But to get back to the argument—did they strike you as likely to start a quarrel with Earth?’

‘It’s difficult to say. They were very open and friendly with us but then we were all scientists together and that helps a lot. It might have been different if we’d been politicians or civil servants.’

‘Dammit, we
are
civil servants! Who pays our salaries?’

‘Yes, but you know what I mean. I could tell that they didn’t care a lot for Earth though they were too polite to say so. There’s no doubt that they’re annoyed about the uranium allocation—I often heard them complain about it. Their main point was that they
had
to have atomic power to open up the cold outer planets and that Earth could manage quite easily with alternative sources of energy. After all, she’s done so for a good many thousand years.’

‘Which side do you think is right?’

‘I don’t know. But I will say this—if more uranium does turn up and Earth doesn’t let the Federation have a bigger share of it, then we shall be in the wrong.’

‘I don’t think that’s likely to happen.’

‘Don’t be so sure. As old Mole said, there are a lot of people on Earth who are afraid of the Federation and don’t want to give it any more power. The Federation knows that and it may grab first and argue afterwards.’

‘Hm. Then it’s nice to know that our friends out by Pico aren’t mining the stuff, after all,’ said Wheeler thoughtfully. ‘
Ouch
—was that necessary?’

‘Sorry. But if you will keep me talking you can’t expect me to avoid all the cracks. Looks as though the suspension wants adjusting. I’ll have to turn Ferdy in for an overhaul when we get back. Ah, that’s Mount Helicon coming up over there. No talking while I concentrate on the driving for the next few miles—the next section’s a bit tricky.’

The tractor turned northward and slowly the great wall of the beautiful
Sinus Iridum
—the Bay of Rainbows—rose over the horizon until it stretched east and west as far as the eye could see. So overwhelming was the sight that Wheeler was voluntarily silent and sat for the next twenty miles without a word while Jamieson drove the machine toward the three-mile-high cliffs ahead.

He remembered his first glimpse of the
Sinus Iridum
through a two-inch telescope on Earth many years ago—it seemed scarcely possible that now he was actually skirting its towering walls. What unbelievable changes the twentieth century had brought! It needed a considerable effort to realise that at its beginning man had not even possessed flying machines, still less dreamed of crossing space.

The history of two thousand years seemed to have been crowded into the single century with its vast technical achievements and two tremendous wars. In its first half the air had been conquered more thoroughly than had the sea in all the millennia before.

In its closing quarter the first crude rockets had reached the Moon and the age-long isolation of the human race had ended. Within a single generation there were children to whom the word ‘home’ no longer conveyed the green fields and blue skies of Earth, so swift had been the colonisation of the inner planets.

History, it has been said, never repeats itself but historical situations recur. Inevitably the new worlds began to loosen their ties with Earth. Their populations were still very small compared with those of the mother world but they contained the most brilliant and active minds the race possessed. Free at last from the crushing burden of tradition they planned to build civilisations which would avoid the mistakes of the past. The aim was a noble one—it might yet succeed.

Venus had been the first world to declare its independence and set up a separate government. For a little while there had been considerable tension but good sense had prevailed and since the beginning of the twenty-first century only minor disagreements had disturbed relations between the two governments. Ten years later Mars and the four inhabited moons of Jupiter—Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto—had formed the union which was later to become the Federation of the Outer Planets.

Wheeler had never been to any of these outer worlds. Indeed this was the first time he had even left his native Earth. Like most terrestrials he was a little scared of the Federation though the scientist in him made him admire many of its achievements. He did not believe in the possibility of war but if there were ‘incidents’—as earlier statesmen would have put it—his loyalties lay with Earth.