The Songs of Distant Earth
By Arthur C. Clarke
Nowhere in all space or on a thousand worlds will there be men to share our loneliness. There may be wisdom; there may be power; somewhere across space great instruments ... may stare vainly at our floating cloud wrack, their owners yearning as we yearn. Nevertheless, in the nature of life and in the principles of evolution we have had our answer. Of men elsewhere, and beyond, there will be none forever ...
-Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey (1957)
I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.
-Melville to Hawthorne (1851)
Author's Note
This novel is based on an idea developed almost thirty years ago in a short story of the same name (now in my collection The Other Side of the Sky). However, this version was directly - and negatively -inspired by the recent rash of space-operas on TV and movie screen. (Query: what is the opposite of inspiration - expiration?)
Please do not misunderstand me: I have enormously enjoyed the best of Star Trek and the Lucas/Spielberg epics, to mention only the most famous examples of the genre. But these works are fantasy, not science fiction in the strict meaning of the term. It now seems almost certain that in the real universe we may never exceed the velocity of light. Even the very closest star systems will always be decades or centuries apart; no Warp Six will ever get you from one episode to another in time for next week's installment. The great Producer in the Sky did not arrange his programme planning that way.
In the last decade, there has also been a significant, and rather surprising, change in the attitude of scientists towards the problem of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The whole subject did not become respectable (except among dubious characters like the writers of science fiction) until the 1960s: Shklovskii and Sagan's Intelligent Life in the Universe (1966) is the landmark here.
But now there has been a backlash. The total failure to find any trace of life in this solar system, or to pick up any of the interstellar radio signals that our great antennae should be easily able to detect, has prompted some scientists to argue 'Perhaps we are alone in the Universe ...' Dr Frank Tipler, the best-known exponent of this view, has (doubtless deliberately) outraged the Saganites by giving one of his papers the provocative title 'There Are No Intelligent Extra-Terrestrials'. Carl Sagan et al argue (and I agree with them) that it is much too early to jump to such far-reaching conclusions.
Meanwhile, the controversy rages; as has been well said, either answer will be awe-inspiring. The question can only be settled by "evidence, not by any amount of logic, however plausible. I would like to see the whole debate given a decade or two of benign neglect, while the radio astronomers, like gold-miners panning for dust, quietly sieve through the torrents of noise pouring down from the sky.
This novel is, among other things, my attempt to create a wholly realistic piece of fiction on the interstellar theme - just as, in Prelude to Space (1951), I used known or foreseeable technology to depict mankind's first voyage beyond the Earth. There is nothing in this book which defies or denies known principles; the only really wild extrapolation is the 'quantum drive', and even this has a highly respectable paternity. (See Acknowledgements.) Should it turn out to be a pipe-dream, there are several possible alternatives; and if we twentieth-century primitives can imagine them, future science will undoubtedly discover something much better.
Arthur C. Clarke
COLOMBO, SRI LANKA
JULY 1985
I
Thalassa
1 The Beach at Tarna
Even before the boat came through the reef, Mirissa could tell that Brant was angry. The tense attitude of his body as he stood at the wheel - the very fact that he had not left the final passage in Kumar's capable hands - showed that something had upset him.
She left the shade of the palm trees and walked slowly down the beach, the wet sand tugging at her feet. When she reached the water's edge, Kumar was already furling the sail. Her 'baby' brother - now almost as tall as she was, and solid muscle - waved to her cheerfully. How often she had wished that Brant shared Kumar's easygoing good nature, which no crisis ever seemed capable of disturbing ...
Brant did not wait for the boat to hit the sand, but jumped into the water while it was still waist-deep and came splashing angrily towards her. He was carrying a twisted mass of metal festooned with broken wires and held it up for her inspection.
'Look!' he cried. 'They've done it again!'
With his free hand, he waved towards the northern horizon.
'This time - I'm not going to let them get away with it! And the mayor can say what she damn well pleases!'
Mirissa stood aside while the little catamaran, like some primeval sea-beast making its first assault on the dry land, heaved itself slowly up the beach on its spinning outboard rollers. As soon as it was above the high-water line, Kumar stopped the engine, and jumped out to join his still-fuming skipper.
'I keep telling Brant,' he said, 'that it must be an accident - maybe a dragging anchor. After all, why should the Northers do something like this deliberately?'
'I'll tell you,' Brant retorted. 'Because they're too lazy to work out the technology themselves. Because they're afraid we'll catch too many fish. Because -
He caught sight of the other's grin and sent the cat's cradle of broken wires spinning in his direction. Kumar caught it effortlessly.
'Anyway - even if it is an accident, they shouldn't be anchoring here. That area's clearly marked on the chart: keep out - research project. So I'm still going to lodge a protest.'
Brant had already recovered his good humour; even his most furious rages seldom lasted more than a few minutes. To keep him in the right mood, Mirissa started to run her fingers down his back and spoke to him in her most soothing voice.
'Did you catch any good fish?'
'Of course not,' Kumar answered. 'He's only interested in catching statistics - kilograms per kilowatt - that sort of nonsense. Lucky I took my rod. We'll have tuna for dinner.'
He reached into the boat and pulled out almost a metre of streamlined power and beauty, its colours fading rapidly, its sightless eyes already glazed in death.
'Don't often get one of these,' he said proudly. They were still admiring his prize when History returned to Thalassa, and the simple, carefree world they had known all their young lives came abruptly 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 dome of heaven. Even as they watched, the gleaming vapour trail began to fray at the edges, breaking up into wisps of cloud, until it seemed that a bridge of snow had been thrown from horizon to horizon.
And now a distant thunder was rolling down from the edge of space. It was a sound that Thalassa had not heard for seven hundred years but which any child would recognize at once.
Despite the warmth of the evening, Mirissa shivered and her hand found Brant's. Though his fingers closed about hers, he scarcely seemed to notice; he was still staring at the riven sky.
Even Kumar was subdued, yet he was the first to speak.
'One of the colonies must have found us.'
Brant shook his head slowly but without much conviction.
'Why should they bother? They must have the old maps -they'll know that Thalassa is almost all ocean. It wouldn't make any sense to come here.'
'Scientific curiosity?' Mirissa suggested. 'To see what's happened to us? I always said we should repair the communications link...'
This was an old dispute, which was revived every few decades. One day, most people agreed, Thalassa really should rebuild the big dish on East Island, destroyed when Krakan erupted four hundred years ago. But meanwhile there was so much that was more important - or simply more amusing.
'Building a starship's an enormous project,' Brant said thoughtfully. 'I don't believe that any colony would do it - unless it had to. Like Earth..’
His voice trailed off into silence. After all these centuries, that was still a hard name to say.
As one person, they turned towards the east, where the swift equatorial night was advancing across the sea.
A few of the brighter stars had already emerged, and just climbing above the palm trees was the unmistakable, compact little group of the Triangle. Its three stars were of almost equal magnitude - but a far more brilliant intruder had once shone, for a few weeks, near the southern tip of the constellation.
Its now-shrunken husk was still visible, in a telescope of moderate power. But no instrument could show the orbiting cinder that had been the planet Earth.
2 The Little Neutral One
More than a thousand years later, a great historian had called the period 1901-2000 'the Century when everything happened'. He added that the people of the time would have agreed with him -but for entirely the wrong reasons.
They would have pointed, often with justified pride, to the era's scientific achievements - the conquest of the air, the release of atomic energy, the discovery of the basic principles of life, the electronics and communications revolution, the beginnings of artificial intelligence - and most spectacular of all, the exploration of the solar system and the first landing on the Moon. But as the historian pointed out, with the 20/20 accuracy of hindsight, not one in a thousand would even have heard of the discovery that transcended all these events by threatening to make them utterly irrelevant.
It seemed as harmless, and as far from human affairs, as the fogged photographic plate in Becquerel's laboratory that led, in only fifty years, to the fireball above Hiroshima. Indeed, it was a by-product of that same research, and began in equal innocence.
Nature is a very strict accountant, and always balances her books. So physicists were extremely puzzled when they discovered certain nuclear reactions in which, after all the fragments were added up, something seemed to be missing on one side of the equation.
Like a bookkeeper hastily replenishing the petty cash to keep one jump ahead of the auditors, the physicists were forced to invent a new particle. And, to account for the discrepancy, it had to be a most peculiar one - with neither mass nor charge, and so fantastically penetrating that it could pass, without noticeable inconvenience, through a wall of lead billions of kilometres thick.
This phantom was given the nickname 'neutrino' - neutron plus bambino. There seemed no hope of ever detecting so elusive an entity; but in 1956, by heroic feats of instrumentation, the physicists had caught the first few specimens. It was also a triumph for the theoreticians, who now found their unlikely equations verified.
The world as a whole neither knew nor cared; but the countdown to doomsday had begun.
3 Village Council
Tarna's local network was never more than ninety-five per cent operational - but on the other hand never less than eighty-five per cent of it was working at any one time. Like most of the equipment on Thalassa, it had been designed by long-dead geniuses so that catastrophic breakdowns were virtually impossible. Even if many components failed, the system would still continue to function reasonably well until someone was sufficiently exasperated to make repairs.
The engineers called this 'graceful degradation' - a phrase that, some cynics had declared, rather accurately described the Lassan way of life.
According to the central computer, the network was now hovering around its normal ninety-five per cent serviceability, and Mayor Waldron would gladly have settled for less. Most of the village had called her during the past half-hour, and at least fifty adults and children were milling round in the council chamber - which was more than it could comfortably hold, let alone seat. The quorum for an ordinary meeting was twelve, and it sometimes took draconian measures to collect even that number of warm bodies in one place. The rest of Tarna's five hundred and sixty inhabitants preferred to watch - and vote, if they felt sufficiently interested - in the comfort of their own homes.
There had also been two calls from the provincial governor, one from the president's office, and one from one North Island news service, all making the same completely unnecessary request. Each had received the same short answer: Of course we'll tell you if anything happens ... and thanks for your interest.
Mayor Waldron did not like excitement, and her moderately successful career as a local administrator had been based on avoiding it. Sometimes, of course, that was impossible; her veto would hardly have deflected the hurricane of '09, which - until today - had been the century's most notable event.
'Quiet, everybody!' she cried. 'Reena - leave those shells alone - someone went to a lot of trouble arranging them! Time you were in bed, anyway! Billy - off the table! Now!'
The surprising speed with which order was restored showed that, for once, the villagers were anxious to hear what their mayor had to say. She switched off the insistent beeping of her wrist-phone and routed the call to the message centre.
'Frankly, I don't know much more than you do - and it's not likely we'll get any more information for several hours. But it certainly was some kind of spacecraft, and it had already reentered - I suppose I should say entered - when it passed over us. Since there's nowhere else for it to go on Thalassa, presumably it will come back to the Three Islands sooner or later. That might take hours if it's going right round the planet.'
'Any attempt at radio contact?' somebody asked.
'Yes, but no luck so far.'
'Should we even try?' an anxious voice said.
A brief hush fell upon the whole assembly; then Councillor Simmons, Mayor Waldron's chief gadfly, gave a snort of disgust.
'That's ridiculous. Whatever we do, they can find us in about ten minutes. Anyway, they probably know exactly where we are.'
'I agree completely with the councillor,' Mayor Waldron said, relishing this unusual opportunity. 'Any colony ship will certainly have maps of Thalassa. They may be a thousand years old - but they'll show First Landing.'
'But suppose -just suppose - that they are aliens?'
The mayor sighed; she thought that thesis had died through sheer exhaustion, centuries ago.
'There are no aliens,' she said firmly. 'At least, none intelligent enough to go starfaring. Of course, we can never be one hundred per cent certain - but Earth searched for a thousand years with every conceivable instrument.'
'There's another possibility,' said Mirissa, who was standing with Brant and Kumar near the back of the chamber. Every head turned towards her, but Brant looked slightly annoyed. Despite his love for Mirissa, there were times when he wished that she was not quite so well-informed, and that her family had not been in charge of the Archives for the last five generations.
'What's that, my dear?'
Now it was Mirissa's turn to be annoyed, though she concealed her irritation. She did not enjoy being condescended to by someone who was not really very intelligent, though undoubtedly shrewd - or perhaps cunning was the better word. The fact that Mayor Waldron was always making eyes at Brant did not bother Mirissa in the least; it merely amused her, and she could even feel a certain sympathy for the older woman.
'It could be another robot seedship, like the one that brought our ancestor's gene patterns to Thalassa.'
'But now - so late?'
'Why not? The first seeders could only reach a few percent of light velocity. Earth kept improving them - right up to the time it was destroyed. As the later models were almost ten times faster, the earlier ones were overtaken in a century or so; many of them must still be on the way. Don't you agree, Brant?'
Mirissa was always careful to bring him into any discussion and, if possible, to make him think he had originated it. She was well aware of his feelings of inferiority and did not wish to add to them.
Sometimes it was rather lonely being the brightest person in Tarna; although she networked with half a dozen of her mental peers on the Three Islands, she seldom met them in the face-to-face encounters that, even after all these millennia, no communications technology could really match.
'It's an interesting idea,' Brant said. 'You could be right.'
Although history was not his strong point, Brant Falconer had a technician's knowledge of the complex series of events that had led to the colonization of Thalassa. 'And what shall we do,' he asked, 'if it's another seedship, and tries to colonize us all over again? Say "Thanks very much, but not today"?'
There were a few nervous little laughs; then Councillor Simmons remarked thoughtfully, 'I'm sure we could handle a seedship if we had to. And wouldn't its robots be intelligent enough to cancel their program when they saw that the job had already been done?'
'Perhaps. But they might think they could do a better one. Anyway, whether it's a relic from Earth or a later model from one of the colonies, it's bound to be a robot of some kind.'
There was no need to elaborate; everyone knew the fantastic difficulty and expense of manned interstellar flight. Even though technically possible, it was completely pointless. Robots could do the job a thousand times more cheaply.
'Robot or relic - what are we going to do about it?' one of the villagers demanded.
'It may not be our problem,' the mayor said. 'Everyone seems to have assumed that it will head for First Landing, but why should it? After all, North Island is much more likely - '
The mayor had often been proved wrong, but never so swiftly. This time the sound that grew in the sky above Tarna was no distant thunder from the ionosphere but the piercing whistle of a low, fast-flying jet. Everyone rushed out of the council chamber in unseemly haste; only the first few were in time to see the blunt-nosed delta-wing eclipsing the stars as it headed purposefully towards the spot still sacred as the last link with Earth.
Mayor Waldron paused briefly to report to central, then joined the others milling around outside.
'Brant - you can get there first. Take the kite.'
Tarna's chief mechanical engineer blinked; it was the first time he had ever received so direct an order from the mayor. Then he looked a little abashed.
'A coconut went through the wing a couple of days ago. I've not had time to repair it because of that problem with the fishtraps. Anyway, it's not equipped for night flying.'
The mayor gave him a long, hard look.
'I hope my car's working,' she said sarcastically.
'Of course,' Brant answered, in a hurt voice. 'All fuelled up, and ready to go.'
It was quite unusual for the mayor's car to go anywhere; one could walk the length of Tarna in twenty minutes, and all local transport of food and equipment was handled by small sandrollers. In seventy years of official service the car had clocked up less than a hundred thousand kilometres, and, barring accidents, should still be going strong for at least a century to come.
The Lassans had experimented cheerfully with most vices; but planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption were not among them. No one could have guessed that the vehicle was older than any of its passengers as it started on the most historic journey it would ever make.
4 Tocsin
No one heard the first tolling of Earth's funeral bell - not even the scientists who made the fatal discovery, far underground, in an abandoned Colorado gold mine.
It was a daring experiment, quite inconceivable before the mid-twentieth century. Once the neutrino had been detected, it was quickly realized that mankind had a new window on the universe. Something so penetrating that it passed through a planet as easily as light through a sheet of glass could be used to look into the hearts of suns.
Especially the Sun. Astronomers were confident that they understood the reactions powering the solar furnace, upon which all life on Earth ultimately depended. At the enormous pressures and temperatures at the Sun's core, hydrogen was fused to helium, in a series of reactions that liberated vast amounts of energy. And, as an incidental by-product, neutrinos.
Finding the trillions of tons of matter in their way no more obstacle than a wisp of smoke, those solar neutrinos raced up from their birthplace at the velocity of light. Just two seconds later they emerged into space, and spread outward across the universe. However many stars and planets they encountered, most of them would still have evaded capture by the insubstantial ghost of 'solid' matter when Time itself came to an end.
Eight minutes after they had left the Sun, a tiny fraction of the solar torrent swept through the Earth - and an even smaller fraction was intercepted by the scientists in Colorado. They had buried their equipment more than a kilometre underground so that all the less penetrating radiations would be filtered out and they could trap the rare, genuine messengers from the heart of the Sun. By counting the captured neutrinos, they hoped to study in detail conditions at a spot that, as any philosopher could easily prove, was forever barred from human knowledge or observation.
The experiment worked; solar neutrinos were detected. But -there were far too few of them. There should have been three or four times as many as the massive instrumentation had succeeded in capturing.
Clearly, something was wrong, and during the 1970s the Case of the Missing Neutrinos escalated to a major scientific scandal. Equipment was checked and rechecked, theories were overhauled, and the experiment rerun scores of times - always with the same baffling result.
By the end of the twentieth century, the astrophysicists had been forced to accept a disturbing conclusion - though as yet, no one realized its full implications.
There was nothing wrong with the theory, or with the equipment. The trouble lay inside the Sun.
The first secret meeting in the history of the International Astronomical Union took place in 2008 at Aspen, Colorado - not far from the scene of the original experiment, which had now been repeated in a dozen countries. A week later IAU Special Bulletin No. 55/08, bearing the deliberately low-key title 'Some Notes on Solar Reactions', was in the hands of every government on Earth.
One might have thought that as the news slowly leaked out, the announcement of the End of the World would have produced a certain amount of panic. In fact, the general reaction was a stunned silence - then a shrug of the shoulders and the resumption of normal, everyday business.
Few governments had ever looked more than an election ahead, few individuals beyond the lifetimes of their grandchildren. And anyway, the astronomers might be wrong. Even if humanity was under sentence of death, the date of execution was still indefinite. The Sun would not blow up for at least a thousand years, and who could weep for the fortieth generation?
5 Night Ride
Neither of the two moons had risen when the car set off along Tarna's most famous road, carrying Brant, Mayor Waldron, Councillor Simmons, and two senior villagers. Though he was driving with his usual effortless skill, Brant was still smouldering slightly from the mayor's reprimand. The fact that her plump arm was accidentally draped over his bare shoulders did little to improve matters.
But the peaceful beauty of the night and the hypnotic rhythm of the palm trees as they swept steadily through the car's moving fan of light quickly restored his normal good humour. And how could such petty personal feelings be allowed to intrude, at such an historic moment as this?
In ten minutes, they would be at First Landing and the beginning of their history. What was waiting for them there? Only one thing was certain; the visitor had homed on the still-operating beacon of the ancient seedship. It knew where to look, so it must be from some other human colony in this sector of space.
On the other hand - Brant was suddenly struck by a disturbing thought. Anyone - anything - could have detected that beacon, signalling to all the universe that Intelligence had once passed this way. He recalled that, a few years ago, there had been a move to switch off the transmission on the grounds that it served no useful purpose and might conceivably do harm. The motion had been rejected by a narrow margin, for reasons that were sentimental and emotional rather than logical. Thalassa might soon regret that decision, but it was certainly much too late to do anything about it.
Councillor Simmons, leaning across from the back seat, was talking quietly to the mayor.
'Helga,' he said - and it was the first time Brant had ever heard him use the mayor's first name - 'do you think we'll still be able to communicate? Robot languages evolve very rapidly, you know.'
Mayor Waldron didn't know, but she was very good at concealing ignorance.
'That's the least of our problems; let's wait until it arises. Brant - could you drive a little more slowly? I'd like to get there alive.'
Their present speed was perfectly safe on this familiar road, but Brant dutifully slowed to forty klicks. He wondered if the mayor was trying to postpone the confrontation; it was an awesome responsibility, facing only the second outworld spacecraft in the history of the planet. The whole of Thalassa would be watching.
'Krakan!' swore one of the passengers in the back seat. 'Did anybody bring a camera?'
'Too late to go back,' Councillor Simmons answered. 'Anyway, there will be plenty of time for photographs. I don't suppose they'll take off again right after saying "hello!"'
There was a certain mild hysteria in his voice, and Brant could hardly blame him. Who could tell what was waiting for them just over the brow of the next hill?
'I'll report just as soon as there's anything to tell you, Mr. President,' said Mayor Waldron to the car radio. Brant had never even noticed the call; he had been too lost in a reverie of his own. For the first time in his life, he wished he had learned a little more history.
Of course, he was familiar enough with the basic facts; every child on Thalassa grew up with them. He knew how, as the centuries ticked remorselessly by, the astronomers' diagnosis became ever more confident, the date of their prediction steadily more precise. In the year 3600, plus or minus 75, the Sun would become a nova. Not a very spectacular one - but big enough...
An old philosopher had once remarked that it settles a man's mind wonderfully to know that he will be hanged in the morning. Something of the same kind occurred with the entire human race, during the closing years of the Fourth Millennium. If there was a single moment when humanity at last faced the truth with both resignation and determination, it was at the December midnight when the year 2999 changed to 3000. No one who saw that first 3 appear could forget that there would never be a 4.
Yet more than half a millennium remained; much could be done by the thirty generations that would still live and die on Earth as had their ancestors before them. At the very least, they could preserve the knowledge of the race, and the greatest creations of human art.
Even at the dawn of the space age, the first robot probes to leave the solar system had carried recordings of music, messages, and pictures in case they were ever encountered by other explorers of the cosmos. And though no sign of alien civilizations had ever been detected in the home galaxy, even the most pessimistic believed that intelligence must occur somewhere in the billions of other island universes that stretched as far as the most powerful telescope could see.
For centuries, terabyte upon terabyte of human knowledge and culture were beamed towards the Andromeda Nebula and its more distant neighbours. No one, of course, would ever know if the signals were received - or, if received, could be interpreted. But the motivation was one that most men could share; it was the impulse to leave some last message - some signal saying, 'Look -I, too, was once alive!'
By the year 3000, astronomers believed that their giant orbiting telescopes had detected all planetary systems within five hundred light-years of the Sun. Dozens of approximately Earth-size worlds had been discovered, and some of the closer ones had been crudely mapped. Several had atmospheres bearing that unmistakable signature of life, an abnormally high percentage of oxygen. There was a reasonable chance that men could survive there - if they could reach them.
Men could not, but Man could.
The first seedships were primitive, yet even so they stretched technology to the limit. With the propulsion systems available by 2500, they could reach the nearest planetary system in two hundred years, carrying their precious burden of frozen embryos.
But that was the least of their tasks. They also had to carry the automatic equipment that would revive and rear these potential humans, and teach them how to survive in an unknown but probably hostile environment. It would be useless - indeed, cruel - to decant naked, ignorant children on to worlds as unfriendly as the Sahara or the Antarctic. They had to be educated, given tools, shown how to locate and use local resources. After it had landed and the seedship became a Mother Ship, it might have to cherish its brood for generations.
Not only humans had to be carried, but a complete biota. Plants (even though no one knew if there would be soil for them), farm animals, and a surprising variety of essential insects and microorganisms also had to be included in case normal food-production systems broke down and it was necessary to revert to basic agricultural techniques.
There was one advantage in such a new beginning. All the diseases and parasites that had plagued humanity since the beginning of time would be left behind, to perish in the sterilizing fire of Nova Solis.
Data banks, 'expert systems' able to handle any conceivable situation, robots, repair and backup mechanisms - all these had to be designed and built. And they had to function over a timespan at least as long as that between the Declaration of Independence and the first landing on the Moon.
Though the task seemed barely possible, it was so inspiring that almost the whole of mankind united to achieve it. Here was a long-term goal - the last long-term goal - that could now give some meaning to life, even after Earth had been destroyed.
The first seedship left the solar system in 2553, heading towards the Sun's near twin, Alpha Centauri A. Although the climate of the Earth-sized planet Pasadena was subject to violent extremes, owing to nearby Centauri B, the next likely target was more than twice as far away. The voyage time to Sirius X would be over four hundred years; when the seeder arrived, Earth might no longer exist.
But if Pasadena could be successfully colonized, there would be ample time to send back the good news. Two hundred years for the voyage, fifty years to secure a foothold and build a small transmitter, and a mere four years for the signal to get back to Earth - why, with luck, there would be shouting in the streets, around the year 2800.
In fact, it was 2786; Pasadena had done better than predicted. The news was electrifying, and gave renewed encouragement to the seeding programme. By this time, a score of ships had been launched, each with more advanced technology than its precursor. The latest models could reach a twentieth of the velocity of light, and more than fifty targets lay within their range.
Even when the Pasadena beacon became silent after beaming no more than the news of the initial landing, discouragement was only momentary. What had been done once could be done again - and yet again - with greater certainty of success.
By 2700 the crude technique of frozen embryos was abandoned. The genetic message that Nature encoded in the spiral structure of the DNA molecule could now be stored more easily, more safely, and even more compactly, in the memories of the ultimate computers, so that a million genotypes could be carried in a seedship no larger than an ordinary thousand-passenger aircraft. An entire unborn nation, with all the replicating equipment needed to set up a new civilization, could be contained in a few hundred cubic metres, and carried to the stars.
This, Brant knew, was what had happened on Thalassa seven hundred years ago. Already, as the road climbed up into the hills, they had passed some of the scars left by the first robot excavators as they sought the raw materials from which his own ancestors had been created. In a moment, they would see the long-abandoned processing plants and -
'What's that?' Councillor Simmons whispered urgently.
'Stop!' the mayor ordered. 'Cut the engine, Brant.' She reached for the car microphone.
'Mayor Waldron. We're at the seven-kilometre mark. There's a light ahead of us - we can see it through the trees - as far as I can tell it's exactly at First Landing. We can't hear anything. Now we're starting up again.'
Brant did not wait for the order, but eased the speed control gently forward. This was the second most exciting thing that had happened to him in his entire life, next to being caught in the hurricane of '09.
That had been more than exciting; he had been lucky to escape alive. Perhaps there was also danger here, but he did not really believe so. Could robots be hostile? Surely there was nothing that any outworlders could possibly want from Thalassa, except knowledge and friendship ...
'You know,' Councillor Simmons said, 'I had a good view of the thing before it went over the trees, and I'm certain it was some kind of aircraft. Seedships never had wings and streamlining, of course. And it was very small.'
'Whatever it is,' Brant said, 'we'll know in five minutes. Look at that light - it's come down in Earth Park - the obvious place. Should we stop the car and walk the rest of the way?'
Earth Park was the carefully tended oval of grass on the eastern side of First Landing, and it was now hidden from their direct view by the black, looming column of the Mother Ship, the oldest and most revered monument on the planet. Spilling round the edges of the still-untarnished cylinder was a flood of light, apparently from a single brilliant source.
'Stop the car just before we reach the ship,' the mayor ordered. 'Then we'll get out and peek around it. Switch off your lights so they won't see us until we want them to.'
'Them - or It?' asked one of the passengers, just a little hysterically. Everyone ignored him.
The car came to a halt in the ship's immense shadow, and Brant swung it round through a hundred and eighty degrees.
'Just so we can make a quick getaway,' he explained, half seriously, half out of mischief; he still could not believe that they were in any real danger. Indeed, there were moments when he wondered if this was really happening. Perhaps he was still asleep, and this was merely a vivid dream.
They got quietly out of the car and walked up to the ship, then circled it until they came to the sharply defined wall of light. Brant shielded his eyes and peered around the edge, squinting against the glare.
Councillor Simmons had been perfectly correct. It was some kind of aircraft - or aerospacecraft - and a very small one at that. Could the Northers? - No, that was absurd. There was no conceivable use for such a vehicle in the limited area of the Three Islands, and its development could not possibly have been concealed.
It was shaped like a blunt arrowhead and must have landed vertically, for there were no marks on the surrounding grass. The light came from a single source in a streamlined dorsal housing, and a small red beacon was flashing on and off just above that. Altogether, it was a reassuringly - indeed, disappointingly -ordinary machine. One that could not conceivably have travelled the dozen light-years to the nearest known colony.
Suddenly, the main light went out, leaving the little group of observers momentarily blind. When he recovered his night vision, Brant could see that there were windows in the forepart of the machine, glowing faintly with internal illumination. Why - it looked almost like a manned vehicle, not the robot craft they had taken for granted!
Mayor Waldron had come to exactly the same astonishing conclusion.
'It's not a robot - there are people in it! Let's not waste any more time. Shine your flashlight on me, Brant, so they can see us.'
'Helga!' Councillor Simmons protested.
'Don't be an ass, Charlie. Let's go, Brant.'
What was it that the first man on the Moon had said, almost two millennia ago? 'One small step ...' They had taken about twenty when a door opened in the side of the vehicle, a double-jointed ramp flipped rapidly downward, and two humanoids walked out to meet them.
That was Brant's first reaction. Then he realized that he had been misled by the colour of their skin - or what he could see of it, through the flexible, transparent film that covered them from head to foot.
They were not humanoids - they were human. If he never went out into the sun again, he might become almost as bleached as they were.
The Mayor was holding out her hands in the traditional 'See -no weapons!' gesture as old as history.
'I don't suppose you'll understand me,' she said, 'but welcome to Thalassa.'
The visitors smiled, and the older of the two - a handsome, grey-haired man in his late sixties - held up his hands in response.
'On the contrary,' he answered, in one of the deepest and most beautifully modulated voices that Brant had ever heard, 'we understand you perfectly. We're delighted to meet you.'
For a moment, the welcoming party stood in stunned silence. But it was silly, thought Brant, to have been surprised. After all, they did not have the slightest difficulty understanding the speech of men who had lived two thousand years ago. When sound recording was invented, it froze the basic phoneme patterns of all languages. Vocabularies would expand, syntax and grammar might be modified - but pronunciation would remain stable for millennia.
Mayor Waldron was the first to recover.
'Well, that certainly saves a lot of trouble,' she said rather lamely. 'But where have you come from? I'm afraid we've lost touch with - our neighbours - since our deep-space antenna was destroyed.'
The older man glanced at his much taller companion, and some silent message flashed between them. Then he again turned towards the waiting mayor. There was no mistaking the sadness in that beautiful voice, as he made his preposterous claim.
'It may be difficult for you to believe this,' he said. 'But we're not from any of the colonies. We've come straight from Earth.'
II
Magellan
6 Planetfall
Even before he opened his eyes, Loren knew exactly where he was, and he found this quite surprising. After sleeping for two hundred years, some confusion would have been understandable, but it seemed only yesterday that he had made his last entry in the ship's log. And as far as he could remember, he had not had a single dream. He was thankful for that.
Still keeping his eyes closed, he concentrated one at a time on all his other sense channels. He could hear a soft murmur of voices, quietly reassuring. There was the familiar sighing of the air exchangers, and he could feel a barely perceptible current, wafting pleasant antiseptic smells across his face.
The one sensation he did not feel was that of weight. He lifted his right arm effortlessly: it remained floating in midair, awaiting his next order.
'Hello, Mister Lorenson,' a cheerfully bullying voice said. 'So you've condescended to join us again. How do you feel?'
Loren finally opened his eyes and tried to focus them on the blurred figure floating beside his bed.
'Hello ... doctor. I'm fine. And hungry.'
'That's always a good sign. You can get dressed - don't move too quickly for a while. And you can decide later if you want to keep that beard.'
Loren directed his still-floating hand towards his chin; he was surprised at the amount of stubble he found there. Like the majority of men, he had never taken the option of permanent eradication - whole volumes of psychology had been written on that subject. Perhaps it was time to think about doing so; amusing how such trivia cluttered up the mind, even at a moment like this.
'We've arrived safely?'
'Of course - otherwise you'd still be asleep. Everything's gone according to plan. The ship started to wake us a month ago - now we're in orbit above Thalassa. The maintenance crews have checked all the systems; now it's your turn to do some work. And we have a little surprise for you.'
'A pleasant one, I hope.'
'So do we. Captain Bey has a briefing two hours from now, in Main Assembly. If you don't want to move yet, you can watch from here.'
'I'll come to assembly - I'd like to meet everyone. But can I have breakfast first? It's been a long time
Captain Sirdar Bey looked tired but happy as he welcomed the fifteen men and women who had just been revived, and introduced them to the thirty who formed the current A and B crews. According to ship's regulations, C crew was supposed to be sleeping - but several figures were lurking at the back of the Assembly room, pretending not to be there.
'I'm happy you've joined us,' he told the newcomers. 'It's good to see some fresh faces around here. And it's better still to see a planet and to know that our ship's carried out the first two hundred years of the mission plan without any serious anomalies. Here's Thalassa, right on schedule.'
Everyone turned towards the visual display covering most of one wall. Much of it was devoted to data and state-of-ship information, but the largest section might have been a window looking out into space. It was completely filled by a stunningly beautiful image of a blue-white globe, almost fully illuminated. Probably everyone in the room had noticed the heart-breaking similarity to the Earth as seen from high above the Pacific - almost all water, with only a few isolated landmasses.
And there was land here - a compact grouping of three islands, partly hidden by a veil of cloud. Loren thought of Hawaii, which he had never seen and which no longer existed. But there was one fundamental difference between the two planets. The other hemisphere of Earth was mostly land; the other hemisphere of Thalassa was entirely ocean.
'There it is,' the captain said proudly. 'Just as the mission planners predicted. But there's one detail they didn't expect, which will certainly affect our operations.
'You'll recall that Thalassa was seeded by a Mark 3A fifty-thousand unit module which left Earth in 2751 and arrived in 3109. Everything went well, and the first transmissions were received a hundred and sixty years later. They continued intermittently for almost two centuries, then suddenly stopped, after a brief message reporting a major volcanic eruption. Nothing more was ever heard, and it was assumed that our colony on Thalassa had been destroyed - or at any rate reduced to barbarism as seems to have happened in several other cases.
'For the benefit of the newcomers, let me repeat what we've found. Naturally, we listened out on all frequencies when we entered the system. Nothing - not even power-system leakage radiation.
'When we got closer, we realized that didn't prove a thing. Thalassa has a very dense ionosphere. There might be a lot of medium- and short-wave chatter going on beneath it, and nobody outside would ever know. Microwaves would go through, of course, but maybe they don't need them, or we haven't been lucky enough to intercept a beam.
'Anyway, there's a well-developed civilization down there. We saw the lights of their cities - towns, at least - as soon as we had a good view of the nightside. There are plenty of small industries, a little coastal traffic - no large ships - and we've even spotted a couple of aircraft moving at all of five hundred klicks, which will get them anywhere in fifteen minutes.
'Obviously, they don't need much air transport in such a compact community, and they have a good system of roads. But we've still not been able to detect any communications. And no satellites, either - not even meteorological ones, which you'd think they'd need ... though perhaps not, as their ships probably never get out of sight of land. There's simply no other land to go to, of course.
'So there we are. It's an interesting situation - and a very pleasant surprise. At least, I hope it will be. Now, any questions? Yes, Mister Lorenson?'
'Have we tried to contact them, sir?'
'Not yet; we thought it inadvisable until we know the exact level of their culture. Whatever we do, it may be a considerable shock.'
'Do they know we're here?'
'Probably not.'
'But surely - our drive - they must have seen that!'
It was a reasonable question, since a quantum ramjet at full power was one of the most dramatic spectacles ever contrived by man. It was as brilliant as an atomic bomb, and it lasted much longer - months instead of milliseconds.
'Possibly, but I doubt it. We were on the other side of the sun when we did most of our braking. They wouldn't have seen us in its glare.'
Then someone asked the question that everybody had been thinking.
'Captain, how will this affect our mission?'
Sirdar Bey looked thoughtfully at the speaker.
'At this stage, it's still quite impossible to say. A few hundred thousand other humans - or whatever the population is - could make things a lot easier for us. Or at least much more pleasant. On the other hand, if they don't like us -'
He gave an expressive shrug.
'I've just remembered a piece of advice that an old explorer gave to one of his colleagues. If you assume that the natives are friendly, they usually are. And vice versa. 'So until they prove otherwise, we'll assume that they're friendly. And if they're not ..."
The Captain's expression hardened, and his voice became that of a commander who had just brought a great ship across fifty light-years of space.
'I've never claimed that might is right, but it's always very comforting to have it.'
7 Lords of the Last Days
It was hard to believe that he was really and truly awake, and that life could begin again.
Lieutenant Commander Loren Lorenson knew that he could never wholly escape from the tragedy that had shadowed more than forty generations and had reached its climax in his own lifetime. During the course of his first new day, he had one continuing fear. Not even the promise, and mystery, of the beautiful ocean-world hanging there below Magellan could keep at bay the thought: what dreams will come when I close my eyes tonight in natural sleep for the first time in two hundred years?
He had witnessed scenes that no one could ever forget and which would haunt Mankind until the end of time. Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth.
That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ...
... the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ...
... the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift...
... the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ...
... the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ...
... the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ...
In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History's closing act.
It was a time of strange paradoxes, of wild oscillations between despair and feverish exhilaration. Many, of course, sought oblivion through the traditional routes of drugs, sex, and dangerous sports - including what were virtually miniature wars, carefully monitored and fought with agreed weapons. Equally popular was the whole spectrum of electronic catharsis, from endless video games, interactive dramas, and direct stimulation of the brain's centres.
Because there was no longer any reason to take heed for the future on this planet, Earth's resources and the accumulated wealth of all the ages could be squandered with a clear conscience. In terms of material goods, all men were millionaires, rich beyond the wildest dreams of their ancestors, the fruits of whose toil they had inherited. They called themselves wryly, yet not without a certain pride, the Lords of the Last Days.
Yet though myriads sought forgetfulness, even more found satisfaction, as some men had always done, in working for goals beyond their own lifetimes. Much scientific research continued, using the immense resources that had now been freed. If a physicist needed a hundred tons of gold for an experiment, that was merely a minor problem in logistics, not budgeting.
Three themes dominated. First was the continual monitoring of the Sun - not because there was any remaining doubt but to predict the moment of detonation to the year, the day, the hour ...
Second was the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, neglected after centuries of failure, now resumed with desperate urgency - and, even to the end, with no greater success than before. To all Man's questioning, the Universe still gave a dusty answer.
And the third, of course, was the seeding of the nearby stars in the hope that the human race would not perish with the dying of its Sun.
By the dawn of the final century, seedships of ever-increasing speed and sophistication had been sent to more than fifty targets. Most, as expected, had been failures, but ten had radioed back news of at least partial success. Even greater hopes were placed on the later and more advanced models, though they would not reach their distant goals until long after Earth had ceased to exist. The very last to be launched could cruise at a twentieth of the speed of light and would make planetfall in nine hundred and fifty years -if all went well.
Loren could still remember the launching of Excalibur from its construction cradle at the Lagrangian point between Earth and Moon. Though he was only five, even then he knew that this seedship would be the very last of its kind. But why the centuries-long programme had been cancelled just when it had reached technological maturity, he was still too young to understand. Nor could he have guessed how his own life would be changed, by the stunning discovery that had transformed the entire situation and given mankind a new hope, in the very last decades of terrestrial history.
Though countless theoretical studies had been made, no one had ever been able to make a plausible case for manned space-flight even to the nearest star. That such a journey might take a century was not the decisive factor; hibernation could solve that problem. A rhesus monkey had been sleeping in the Louis Pasteur satellite hospital for almost a thousand years and still showed perfectly normal brain activity. There was no reason to suppose that human beings could not do the same - though the record, held by a patient suffering from a peculiarly baffling form of cancer, was less than two centuries.
The biological problem had been solved; it was the engineering one that appeared insuperable. A vessel that could carry thousands of sleeping passengers, and all they needed for a new life on another world, would have to be as large as one of the great ocean liners that had once ruled the seas of Earth.
It would be easy enough to build such a ship beyond the orbit of Mars and using the abundant resources of the asteroid belt. However, it was impossible to devise engines that could get it to the stars in any reasonable length of time.
Even at a tenth of the speed of light, all the most promising targets were more than five hundred years away. Such a velocity had been attained by robot probes - flashing through nearby star systems and radioing back their observations during a few hectic hours of transit. But there was no way in which they could slow down for rendezvous or landing; barring accidents, they would continue speeding through the galaxy forever.
This was the fundamental problem with rockets - and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.
A full-scale hibership could indeed be built to reach a tenth of the speed of light. It would require about a million tons of somewhat exotic elements as propellant; difficult, but not impossible.
But in order to cancel that velocity at the end of the voyage, the ship must start not with a million - but a preposterous million, million tons of propellant. This, of course, was so completely out of the question that no one had given the matter any serious thought for centuries.
And then, by one of history's greatest ironies, Mankind was given the keys to the Universe - and barely a century in which to use them.
8 Remembrance of Love Lost
How glad I am, thought Moses Kaldor, that I never succumbed to that temptation - the seductive lure that art and technology had first given to mankind more than a thousand years ago. Had I wished, I could have brought Evelyn's electronic ghost with me into exile, trapped in a few gigabytes of programming. She could have appeared before me, in any one of the backgrounds we both loved, and carried on a conversation so utterly convincing that a stranger could never have guessed that no one - nothing - was really there.
But I would have known, after five or ten minutes unless I deluded myself by a deliberate act of will. And that I could never do. Though I am still not sure why my instincts revolt against it, I always refused to accept the false solace of a dialogue with the dead. I do not even possess, now, a simple recording of her voice.
It is far better this way, to watch her moving in silence, in the little garden of our last home, knowing that this is no illusion of the image-makers but that it really did happen, two hundred years ago on Earth.
And the only voice will be mine, here and now, speaking to the memory that still exists in my own human, living brain.
Private recording One. Alpha scrambler. Autoerase program.
You were right, Evelyn, and I was wrong. Even though I am the oldest man on the ship, it seems that I can still be useful.
When I awoke, Captain Bey was standing beside me. I felt flattered - as soon as I was able to feel anything.
'Well, Captain,' I said, 'this is quite a surprise. I half expected you to dump me in space as unnecessary mass.'
He laughed and answered. 'It could still happen, Moses; the voyage isn't over yet. But we certainly need you now. The Mission planners were wiser than you gave them credit.'
'They listed me on the ship's manifest as quote Ambassador-Counsellor unquote. In which capacity am I required?'
'Probably both. And perhaps in your even better-known role as -'
'Don't hesitate if you wanted to say crusader, even though I never liked the word and never regarded myself as a leader of any movement. I only tried to make people think for themselves - I never wanted anyone to follow me blindly. History has seen too many leaders.'
'Yes, but not all have been bad ones. Consider your namesake.'
'Much overrated, though I can understand if you admire him. After all, you, too, have the task of leading homeless tribes into a promised land. I assume that some slight problem has arisen.'
The captain smiled and answered. 'I'm happy to see that you're fully alert. At this stage, there's not even a problem, and there's no reason why there should be. But a situation has arisen that no one expected, and you're our official diplomat. You have the one skill we never thought we'd need.'
I can tell you, Evelyn, that gave me a shock. Captain Bey must have read my mind very accurately when he saw my jaw drop.
'Oh,' he said quickly, 'we haven't run into aliens! But it turns out that the human colony on Thalassa wasn't destroyed as we'd imagined. In fact, it's doing very well.'
That, of course, was another surprise, though quite a pleasant one. Thalassa - the Sea, the Sea! - was a world I had never expected to set eyes upon. When I awoke, it should have been light-years behind and centuries ago.
'What are the people like? Have you made contact with them?'
'Not yet; that's your job. You know better than anyone else the mistakes that were made in the past. We don't want to repeat them here. Now, if you're ready to come up to the bridge, I'll give you a bird's-eye view of our long-lost cousins.'
That was a week ago, Evelyn; how pleasant it is to have no time pressures after decades of unbreakable - and all too literal -deadlines! Now we know as much about the Thalassans as we can hope to do without actually meeting them face-to-face. And this we shall do tonight.
We have chosen common ground to show that we recognize our kinship. The site of the first landing is clearly visible and has been well kept, like a park - possibly a shrine. That's a very good sign: I only hope that our landing there won't be taken as sacrilege. Perhaps it will confirm that we are gods, which should make it easier for us. If the Thalassans have invented gods - that's one thing I want to find out.
I am beginning to live again, my darling. Yes, yes - you were wiser than I, the so-called philosopher! No man has a right to die while he can still help his fellows. It was selfish of me to have wished otherwise ... to have hoped to lie forever beside you, in the spot we had chosen, so long ago, so far away ... Now I can even accept the fact that you are scattered across the solar system, with all else that I ever loved on Earth.
But now there is work to be done; and while I talk to your memory, you are still alive.
9 The Quest for Superspace
Of all the psychological hammer blows that the scientists of the twentieth century had to endure, perhaps the most devastating -and unexpected - was the discovery that nothing was more crowded than 'empty' space.
The old Aristotelian doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum was perfectly true. Even when every atom of seemingly solid matter was removed from a given volume, what remained was a seething inferno of energies of an intensity and scale unimaginable to the human mind. By comparison, even the most condensed form of matter - the hundred-million-tons-to-the-cubic-centimetre of a neutron star - was an impalpable ghost, a barely perceptible perturbation in the inconceivably dense, yet foamlike structure of 'superspace.'
That there was much more to space than naive intuition suggested was first revealed by the classic work of Lamb and Rutherford in 1947. Studying the simplest of elements - the hydrogen atom - they discovered that something very odd happened when the solitary electron orbited the nucleus. Far from travelling in a smooth curve, it behaved as if being continually buffeted by incessant waves on a sub-submicroscopic scale. Hard though it was to grasp the concept, there were fluctuations in the vacuum itself.
Since the time of the Greeks, philosophers had been divided into two schools - those who believed that the operations of Nature flowed smoothly and those who argued that this was an illusion; everything really happened in discrete jumps or jerks too small to be perceptible in everyday life. The establishment of the atomic theory was a triumph for the second school of thought; and when Planck's Quantum Theory demonstrated that even light and energy came in little packets, not continuous streams, the argument finally ended.
In the ultimate analysis, the world of Nature was granular -discontinuous. Even if, to the naked human eye, a waterfall and a shower of bricks appeared very different, they were really much the same. The tiny 'bricks' of H2O were too small to be visible to the unaided senses, but they could be easily discerned by the instruments of the physicists.
And now the analysis was taken one step further. What made the granularity of space so hard to envisage was not only its sub-submicroscopic scale - but its sheer violence.
No one could really imagine a millionth of a centimetre, but at least the number itself - a thousand thousands - was familiar in such human affairs as budgets and population statistics. To say that it would require a million viruses to span the distance of a centimetre did convey something to the mind.
But a million-millionth of a centimetre? That was comparable to the size of the electron, and already it was far beyond visualization. It could perhaps be grasped intellectually, but not emotionally.
And yet the scale of events in the structure of space was unbelievably smaller than this - so much so that, in comparison, an ant and an elephant were of virtually the same size. If one imagined it as a bubbling, foamlike mass (almost hopelessly misleading, yet a first approximation to the truth) then those bubbles were ...
a thousandth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth of a millionth ...
... of a centimetre across.
And now imagine them continually exploding with energies comparable to those of nuclear bombs - and then reabsorbing that energy, and spitting it out again, and so on forever and forever.
This, in a grossly simplified form, was the picture that some late twentieth-century physicists had developed of the fundamental structure of space. That its intrinsic energies might ever be tapped must, at the time, have seemed completely ridiculous.
So, a lifetime earlier, had been the idea of releasing the new-found forces of the atomic nucleus; yet that had happened in less than half a century. To harness the 'quantum fluctuations' that embodied the energies of space itself was a task orders of magnitude more difficult - and the prize correspondingly greater.
Among other things, it would give mankind the freedom of the universe. A spaceship could accelerate literally forever, since it would no longer need any fuel. The only practical limit to speed would, paradoxically, be that which the early aircraft had to contend with - the friction of the surrounding medium. The space between the stars contained appreciable quantities of hydrogen and other atoms, which could cause trouble long before one reached the ultimate limit set by the velocity of light.
The quantum drive might have been developed at any time after the year 2500, and the history of the human race would then have been very different. Unfortunately - as had happened many times before in the zig-zag progress of science - faulty observations and erroneous theories delayed the final breakthrough for almost a thousand years.
The feverish centuries of the Last Days produced much brilliant - though often decadent - art but little new fundamental knowledge. Moreover, by that time the long record of failure had convinced almost everyone that tapping the energies of space was like perpetual motion, impossible even in theory, let alone in practice. However - unlike perpetual motion - it had not yet been proved to be impossible, and until this was demonstrated beyond all doubt, some hope still remained.
Only a hundred and fifty years before the end, a group of physicists in the Lagrange 1 zero-gravity research satellite announced that they had at last found such a proof; there were fundamental reasons why the immense energies of superspace, though they were real enough, could never be tapped. No one was in the least interested in this tidying-up of an obscure corner of science.
A year later, there was an embarrassed cough from Lagrange 1. A slight mistake had been found in the proof. It was the sort of thing that had happened often enough in the past though never with such momentous consequences.
A minus sign had been accidentally converted into a plus.
Instantly, the whole world was changed. The road to the stars had been opened up - five minutes before midnight.
III
South Island
10 First Contact
Perhaps I should have broken it more gently, Moses Kaldor told himself; they all seem in a state of shock. But that in itself is very instructive; even if these people are technologically backward (just look at that car!) they must realize that only a miracle of engineering could have brought us from Earth to Thalassa. First they will wonder how we did it, and then they will start to wonder why.
That, in fact, was the very first question that had occurred to Mayor Waldron. These two men in one small vehicle were obviously only the vanguard. Up there in orbit might be thousands - even millions. And the population of Thalassa, thanks to strict regulation, was already within ninety per cent of ecological optimum ...
'My name is Moses Kaldor,' the older of the two visitors said. 'And this is Lieutenant Commander Loren Lorenson, Assistant Chief Engineer, Starship Magellan. We apologize for these bubble suits - you'll realize that they are for our mutual protection. Though we come in friendship, our bacteria may have different ideas.'
What a beautiful voice, Mayor Waldron told herself- as well she might. Once it had been the best-known in the world, consoling - and sometimes provoking - millions in the decades before the End.
The mayor's notoriously roving eye did not, however remain long on Moses Kaldor; he was obviously well into his sixties, and a little too old for her. The younger man was much more to her liking, though she wondered if she could ever really grow accustomed to that ugly white pallor. Loren Lorenson (what a charming name!) was nearly two metres in height, and his hair was so blond as to be almost silver. He was not as husky as - well, Brant - but he was certainly more handsome.
Mayor Waldron was a good judge both of men and of women, and she classified Lorenson very quickly. Here were intelligence, determination, perhaps even ruthlessness - she would not like to have him as an enemy, but she was certainly interested in having him as a friend. Or better ...