The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (6 page)

One day, Norman told her, it might be possible to develop plants which could be cultivated out on the airless surface of the Moon, and then the green carpet of life would begin to spread across the empty plains, changing the face of a world.

Now that the early pioneering days were over, existence in the colony was a little less austere, although by the standards of Earth it was spartan enough. There were quite extensive games and recreation rooms, and although the living quarters were very small they were also extremely comfortable.

What Daphne liked most, however, were the people themselves. They seemed much more friendly and helpful than on Earth, and she didn’t think that was merely because she was the Director’s daughter. Somehow she got the impression that they all felt part of one big family—they knew they had to work together in order to survive at all.

‘Well,’ said Norman with a grin, ‘what are you thinking about now?’

Daphne woke from her day dreams with a start. ‘I was just wondering,’ she said, ‘what it really feels like to live here for a long time. Don’t you ever miss the Earth? Surely you must get fed up with all these bare rocks and that sky full of stars! I know they’re wonderfully—well, dramatic—but they never change. Don’t you sometimes wish you had clouds, or green fields, or the sea? I think I should miss the sea most of all.’

Norman smiled, although a little wistfully. ‘Yes, we miss them sometimes, but usually we’re too busy to brood over it. You see, when you’ve got a big, exciting job to do, nothing else really matters. Besides, we go on Earth-leave every two years, and then I guess we appreciate what the old planet’s got to offer a lot more than you stay-at-homes!’

He gave a little laugh. ‘It isn’t as if we can’t see Earth whenever we want to. After all, it’s there all the time, hanging up in the sky. From this side of the Moon, you can always see your own home town—at least, when it isn’t covered with clouds. Oh, that reminds me—I’ve been able to grab one of the smaller telescopes for you. Let’s go along and see if it’s ready.’

It seemed a little odd that it had taken three days to arrange this. The trouble was that the telescopes were in almost continual use on various research programmes, and there was no time for casual star-gazing. Moreover, the really big instruments were permanently fitted up for photographic work, so it was impossible to look through them even when they were free.

The room to which Norman led Daphne was only just below the Moon’s surface, as they had to climb a flight of steps from the main Observatory level to reach it. It was quite small, and crowded with apparatus in a state of extreme disorder—at least, so this seemed to Daphne. An elderly man with a very worried expression was doing something with a soldering iron to the inside of what looked like a complicated television set. He did not seem too pleased at the interruption.

‘I can give you only thirty minutes,’ he said. ‘I’ve promised Professor Martin to get this spectrum analyser fixed by eighteen hours. What do you want to look at?’

‘What have you got to offer?’

‘Let’s see—ten planets, about fifty satellites, a few million nebulae and several billion stars. Take your choice.’

‘We can’t see many of them in thirty minutes, so let’s start with—oh, say the Andromeda nebula.’

The astronomer looked at the clock, did some mental calculations, and pressed several buttons. There was a faint whirring of electric motors and the lights began to dim.

‘What do I look through?’ asked Daphne, who had seen nothing at all that looked like any part of a telescope.

‘Sit at this desk and use this eyepiece. Focus with the knob on the right—that’s the idea. Got it?’

She was peering into a circle of intense, blackness, across which the stars were moving so quickly that they looked like thin lines of light. Overhead, the great telescope was swinging across the sky, seeking for its incredibly distant target. Suddenly the image steadied, the stars became tiny, needle-sharp points, and among them floated something that was not a star at all.

It was hard to describe, hard even for the eye to grasp. An oval of fiery mist, its edges fading so imperceptibly into the surrounding blackness that no one could tell where it ended, the Great Nebula glimmered like a ghost beyond the veil of the stars.

‘Our neighbours,’ said Norman quietly. ‘The very next universe to our own—yet it’s so far away that the light you’re seeing now began its journey before Man existed on the Earth.’

‘But what
is
it?’ whispered Daphne.

‘Well, I suppose you know that all the stars are gathered in great disc-shaped clusters—island universes, someone called them—each containing thousands of millions of suns. We’re right inside one of them—the Milky Way. And that’s the next nearest, floating out there. It’s too far away for you to see the separate stars, though you can in the bigger telescopes. Beyond it are millions of other universes, as far as we can see.’

‘With worlds like our Earth in them?’

‘Who knows? At that distance you couldn’t see the Sun, let alone the Earth! But I expect there must be any number of planets out there, and on many of them there’ll probably be life of some kind. I wonder if we’ll ever find out? But let’s come a bit nearer home—we haven’t much time.’

To Daphne, the next half hour was a revelation. Overhead, out on the dusty, silent plain, the great telescope ranged across the sky, gathering in the wonders of the heavens and presenting them to her gaze. Beautiful groups of coloured stars, like jewels gleaming with all the hues of the rainbow—clouds of incandescent mist, twisted into strange shapes by unimaginable forces—Jupiter and his family of moons—and, perhaps most wonderful of all, Saturn floating serenely in his circle of rings, like some intricate work of art rather than a world eight times the size of Earth…

And now she understood the magic that had lured the astronomers up into the clear mountain skies, and at last out across space to the Moon.

Slowly the outer doors of the great underground garage slid apart, and the bus began to climb the steep ramp that led to the surface of the Moon. It still seemed strange to Daphne that the only means of transport on the Moon was something as old-fashioned as a motor-bus, but like many of the peculiar things she had met here it was reasonable enough when explained. Rockets were much too expensive for journeys of only a few hundred miles, and as there was no atmosphere air transport was, of course, impossible.

The big vehicle was really a sort of mobile hotel in which a couple of dozen people could live comfortably for a week or more. It was about forty feet long and mounted on two sets of caterpillar tractors, operated by powerful electric motors. The driver had a little raised cabin at the front, and the passenger compartment was fitted with comfortable seats that became bunks at night. At the back was a kitchen, storeroom, and even a tiny shower-bath.

Daphne looked around to see who her fellow passengers were. Besides her own family there were ten other travellers, most of them—like Norman—scientists going to relieve the staff at Number Two Base. She knew them all by sight, if not by name, so it looked as if there would be plenty of company for the trip.

The bus was now rolling briskly across the crater floor at about forty miles an hour, heading due north. It was easy to make good speed here as the ground was quite level and any obstacles had been bulldozed out of the way when the rough track they were following was made. Daphne hoped that there would soon be a change of scenery; it would get rather dull if it was like this all the way.

Her wish was quickly granted. Far ahead, a line of jagged peaks had now become visible on the horizon, and minute by minute they climbed higher into the sky. At first, because of the steep curvature of the Moon’s surface, it seemed that they were approaching nothing more than a modest range of hills, but presently Daphne saw that ahead of them lay a mountain wall several miles in height.

She looked in vain for any pass or valley through which they could penetrate—and then, with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, she realised that they were attempting nothing less than a direct frontal assault on that titanic barrier.

Ahead of them the ground tilted abruptly in a slope as steep as the roof of a house. There was a sudden deepening in the vibration of the motors, and then, scarcely checking its speed, the great bus charged up the apparently endless, rock-strewn escarpment that seemed to stretch ahead of them all the way to the stars. Daphne gave a little cry of fright as the change of level thrust her back in the seat, and Mrs Martin also looked none too happy as she turned anxious eyes on her husband.

Professor Martin smiled back at his family with a mischievous twinkle. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘It’s perfectly safe—another advantage of our low gravity. Just sit back and enjoy the view!’

It was worth enjoying. Soon they could see for miles, far back across the great plain over which they had been travelling. As more and more of the crater wall came into view, Daphne saw that it was built up in a series of vast terraces, the innermost of which they had now nearly surmounted.

Presently they reached the crest, and turned left along it instead of descending into the valley ahead.

It took them nearly two hours to reach the outer rim of the crater—two hours of doubling back and forth along great valleys, of exhilarating and terrifying charges up those impossible slopes. At last the whole of the walled plain lay spread out behind them, while ahead was range after range of broken hills. They could travel more quickly now, for the downward slopes were much less steep than those inside the crater, as was usually the case on the Moon. Even so, it was another two hours before they had finished the descent and reached open country again.

One gets used to anything in time, even to driving across the Moon. At last, the featureless landscape that now flowed uneventfully past lulled Daphne into sleep. She operated the lever that turned her chair into a couch and settled down for the night.

She woke once, hours later, when the tilt of the floor told her that the bus was climbing again. It was quite dark; the blinds had been drawn to keep out the sunlight still blazing from the velvet sky above. Everyone was asleep, and Daphne was not long in rejoining them.

The next time she woke the blinds were up, the sunlight was shining into the cabin, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking coming from the little galley. The bus was moving rather slowly along the crest of a low range of hills, and Daphne was surprised to see that all the other passengers were clustered around the observation windows at the rear.

She went over to the window and looked back across the miles of land through which they had travelled during the night. When she had seen it last, Earth had been hanging low in the southern sky—but where was it now? Only the silver tip of its great crescent still showed above the horizon; while she had been sleeping, it had been dropping lower and lower in the sky.

They were passing over the rim of the Moon, into the mysterious, hidden land where the light of Earth had never shone—the land that, before the coming of the rocket, no human eyes had ever seen.

Millions of years ago, the lava welling up from the secret heart of the Moon had frozen and congealed to form this great, wrinkled plain. In all that time, nothing had ever moved upon its surface; not even the faintest breath of wind had ever stirred the thin layer of meteor dust that, through the ages, had drifted down from the stars.

But there was movement now. Glittering in the sunlight like some strange, armoured insect, the powerful motor-vehicle was racing swiftly towards its goal—the Second Lunar Base, which had been built five years before as headquarters for the exploration of the Moon’s hidden hemisphere. Unlike the Observatory, Base Two was not underground, and when Daphne first caught sight of its buildings they reminded her irresistibly of Eskimo igloos.

They were, so Norman told her, simply plastic domes blown up like balloons and painted silver to conserve heat. Each had its private airlock, and was linked to its neighbour by a short connecting tube. There was no sign of life, but a pressurised tractor—a small edition of the machine in which Daphne was riding—was joined to one of the domes by a flexible coupling rather like a great hose-pipe, wide enough for men to walk through.

‘That’s Joe Hargreaves’s tractor,’ said Norman. ‘He’d just started on a thousand mile circuit before I left. I wonder if he’s found anything interesting.’

‘What was he looking for?’

Norman grinned. ‘I don’t suppose it sounds very exciting, but we’re trying to make an accurate geological map of the Moon, showing where all its mineral deposits are—particularly things like uranium, of course. So we send these tractors all over the place, drilling holes and collecting samples. But it’s going to be centuries before the job’s finished.’

It certain wasn’t as glamorous as the astronomers’ work, Daphne decided, but she realised that it was just as important. And Norman seemed to find it interesting enough, for he was still talking about magnetic surveys and other mysteries of his trade when their bus was coupled up to one of the domes and they walked through the airlock. The flexible connection didn’t fit very well and there was a rather frightening hiss of escaping air, but as no one seemed to worry, Daphne supposed it was all right.

They found themselves beneath a large dome about fifty feet across. The level rock floor was littered with packing cases, pieces of machinery, and all the miscellaneous stores needed for life on this inhospitable world. However, there was not a single human being in sight.

Professor Martin looked a trifle annoyed. ‘Where is everyone?’ he said to the driver. ‘You radioed that we were coming, didn’t you?’

‘They must all be busy in one of the other domes, I suppose, but it’s a bit odd.’

At that moment a small, grey-haired man came bustling breathlessly into the chamber and hurried up to Professor Martin.

‘Sorry we weren’t ready to meet you, Professor,’ he gasped, ‘but something terrific has just happened. Come and see what we’ve found.’