Authors: Arthur C Clarke
The fuel container was already on its way up to meet us. It had been launched an hour ago, and we had been told by radio that it was proceeding on the correct orbit. The Moon's gravitational field would curve its path and we would pass within a few hundred miles of it. Our job then was to match speeds by careful use of our remaining fuel and, when we had coupled our ship up to the tank, pump across its contents. Then we could turn for home and the empty container would coast on out into space, to join the rest of the debris circulating in the Solar System.
'But just suppose,' I said anxiously to Norman Powell, 'that they score a direct hit on us! After all, the whole thing's rather like shooting a gun at a target. And
we're
the target.'
Norman laughed.
'It'll be moving very slowly when it comes up to us, and we'll spot it in our radar when it's a long way off. So there's no danger of a collision. By the time it is really close, we'll have matched speeds and if we bump it'll be about as violent as two snowflakes meeting head-on.'
That was reassuring, though I still didn't really like the idea of this projectile from the Moon tearing up at us through space…
We picked up the signals from the fuel container when it was still a thousand miles away—not with our radar, but thanks to the tiny radio beacon that all these missiles carried to aid their detection. After this I kept out of the way while Commander Doyle and the pilot made our rendezvous in space. It was a delicate operation, this jockeying of a ship until it matched the course of the still-invisible projectile. Our fuel reserves were too slim to permit of many more mistakes, and everyone breathed a great sigh of relief when the stubby, shining cylinder was hanging beside us.
The transfer took only about ten minutes, and when our pumps had finished their work the Earth had emerged from behind the Moon's shield. It seemed a good omen: we were once more masters of the situation—and in sight of home again.
I was watching the radar screen—because no one else wanted to use it—when we turned on the motors again. The empty fuel container, which had now been uncoupled, seemed to fall slowly astern. Actually, of course, it was
we
who were falling back—checking our speed to return Earthwards. The fuel capsule would go shooting on out into space, thrown away now that its task was completed.
The extreme range of our radar was about five hundred miles, and I watched a bright spot representing the fuel container drift slowly towards the edge of the screen. It was the only object near enough to produce an echo. The volume of space which our beams were sweeping probably contained quite a number of meteors, but they were far too small to produce a visible signal. Yet there was something fascinating about watching even this almost empty screen—empty, that is, apart from an occasional sparkle of light caused by electrical interference. It made me visualize the thousand-mile-diameter globe at whose centre we were travelling. Nothing of any size could enter that globe without our invisible radio fingers detecting it and giving the alarm.
We were now safely back on course, no longer racing out into space. Commander Doyle had decided not to return directly to the Inner Station, because our oxygen reserve was getting low. Instead, we would home on one of the three Relay Stations, twenty-two thousand miles above the Earth. The ship could be re-provisioned there before we continued the last lap of our journey.
I was just about to switch off the radar screen when I saw a faint spark of light at extreme range. It vanished a second later as our beam moved into another sector of space, and I waited until it had swept through the complete cycle, wondering if I'd been mistaken. Were there any other spaceships around here? It was quite possible, of course.
There was no doubt about it—the spark appeared again, in the same position. I knew how to work the scanner controls, and stopped the beam sweeping, so that it locked on to the distant echo. It was just under five hundred miles away, moving very slowly with respect to us. I looked at it thoughtfully for a few seconds, and then called Tim. It was probably not important enough to bother the Commander. However, there was just the chance that it was a really large meteor, and they were always worth investigating. One that gave an echo this size would be much too big to bring home, but we might be able to chip bits off it for souvenirs—if we matched speed with it, of course.
Tim started the scanner going as soon as I handed over the controls. He thought I'd picked up our discarded fuel container again—which annoyed me since it showed little faith in my common sense. But he soon saw that it was in a completely different part of the sky and his scepticism vanished.
'It must be a space-ship,' he said, 'though it doesn't seem a large enough echo for that. We'll soon find out—if it's a ship, it'll be carrying a radio beacon.'
He tuned our receiver to the beacon frequency, but without result. There were a few ships at great distances in other parts of the sky, but nothing as close as this.
Norman had now joined us and was looking over Tim's shoulder.
'If it's a meteor,' he said, let's hope it's a nice lump of platinum or something equally valuable. Then we can retire for life.'
'Hey!' I exclaimed, '
I
found it!'
'I don't think that counts. You're not on the crew and shouldn't be here anyway.'
'Don't worry,' said Tim, 'no one's ever found anything except iron in meteors—in any quantity, that is. The most you can expect to run across out here is a chunk of nickel-steel, probably so tough that you won't even be able to saw off a piece as a souvenir.'
By now we had worked out the course of the object, and discovered that it would pass within twenty miles of us. If we wished to make contact, we'd have to change our velocity by about two hundred miles an hour—not much, but it would waste some of our hard-won fuel and the Commander certainly wouldn't allow it, if it was merely a question of satisfying our curiosity.
'How big would it have to be,' I asked, 'to produce an echo this bright?'
'You can't tell,' said Tim. 'It depends what it's made of—and the way it's pointing. A spaceship could produce a signal as small as that, if we were only seeing it end-on.'
'I think I've found it,' said Norman suddenly. 'And it isn't a meteor. You have a look.'
He had been searching with the ship's telescope, and I took his place at the eyepiece, getting there just ahead of Tim. Against a background of faint stars a roughly cylindrical object, brilliantly lit by the sunlight, was very slowly revolving in space. Even at first glance I could see it was artificial. When I had watched it turn through a complete revolution, I could see that it was stream-lined and had a pointed nose. It looked much more like an old-time artillery shell than a modern rocket. The fact that it was stream-lined meant that it couldn't be an empty fuel container from the launcher in Hipparchus: the tanks it shot up were plain, stubby cylinders, since stream-lining was no use on the airless Moon.
Commander Doyle stared through the telescope for a long time when we called him over. Finally, to my joy, he remarked: 'Whatever it is, we'd better have a look at it and make a report. We can spare the fuel and it will only take a few minutes.'
Our ship spun round in space as we began to make the course-correction. The rockets fired for a few seconds, our new path was rechecked, and the rockets operated again. After several shorter bursts, we had come to within a mile of the mysterious object and began to edge towards it under the gentle impulse of the steering jets alone. Through all these manoeuvres it was impossible to use the telescope, so when I next saw my discovery it was only a hundred yards beyond our port, very gently approaching us.
It was artificial all right, and a rocket of some kind. What it was doing out here near the Moon we could only guess, and several theories were put forward. Since it was only about ten feet long, it might be one of the automatic reconnaissance missiles sent out in the early days of space-flight. Commander Doyle didn't think this likely: as far as he knew, they'd all been accounted for. Besides, it seemed to have none of the radio and TV equipment such missiles would carry.
It was painted a very bright red—an odd colour, I thought, for anything in space. There was some lettering on the side—apparently in English, though I couldn't make out the words at this distance. As the projectile slowly revolved, a black pattern on a white background came into view, but went out of sight before I could interpret it. I waited until it came into view again: by this time the little rocket had drifted considerably closer, and was now only fifty feet away.
'I don't like the look of the thing,' Tim Ben ton said, half to himself. 'That colour, for instance—red's the sign of danger.'
'Don't be an old woman,' scoffed Norman. 'If it was a bomb or something like that, it certainly wouldn't advertise the fact.'
Then the pattern I'd glimpsed before swam back into view. Even on the first sight, there had been something uncomfortably familiar about it. Now there was no longer any doubt.
Clearly painted on the side of the slowly approaching missile was the symbol of Death—the skull and crossbones.
Commander Doyle must have seen that ominous warning as quickly as we did, for an instant later our rockets thundered briefly. The crimson missile veered slowly aside and started to recede once more into space. At the moment of closest approach, I was able to read the words painted below the skull and crossbones—and I understood. The notice read:
WARNING!
RADIOACTIVE WASTE!
ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION
'I wish we'd got a Geiger counter on board,' said the Commander thoughtfully. 'Still, by this time it can't be very dangerous and I don't expect we've had much of a dose. But we'll all have to have a blood-count when we get back to base.'
'How long do you think it's been up here, Sir?' asked Norman.
'Let's think—I believe they started getting rid of dangerous waste this way back in the 1970s. They didn't do it for long—the Space Corporations soon put a stop to it! Nowadays, of course, we know how to deal with all the by-products of the atomic piles, but back in the early days there were a lot of radio-isotopes they couldn't handle. Rather a drastic way of getting rid of them—and a short-sighted solution, too!'
'I've heard about these waste-containers,' said Tim, 'but I thought they'd all been collected and the stuff in them buried somewhere on the Moon.'
'Not this one, apparently. But it soon will be when we report it. Good work, Malcolm! You've done your bit to make space safer!'
I was pleased at the compliment, though still a little worried lest we'd received a dangerous dose of radiation from the decaying isotopes in the celestial coffin. Luckily my fears turned out to be groundless—we had left the neighbourhood too quickly to come to any harm.
We also discovered, a good while later, the history of this stray missile. The Atomic Energy Commission is still a bit ashamed of this episode in its history, and it was some time before it gave the whole story. Finally it admitted the despatch of a waste-container in 1981 that had been intended to crash on the Moon but had never done so. The astronomers had a lot of fun working out how the thing had got into the orbit where we found it—it was a complicated story involving the gravities of the Earth, Sun and Moon.
Our detour had not lost us a great deal of time, and we were only a few minutes behind schedule when we came sweeping into the orbit of Relay Station Two—the one that sits above Latitude 30° East, over the middle of Africa. I was now used to seeing peculiar objects in space, so the first sight of the Station didn't surprise me in the least. It consisted of a flat rectangular lattice-work, with one side facing the Earth. Covering this face were hundreds of small, concave reflectors—the focusing systems that beamed the radio signals to the planet beneath, or collected them on the way up.
We approached cautiously, making contact with the back of the Station. A pilot who let his ship pass in front of it was very unpopular—as he might cause a temporary failure on thousands of circuits, as he blocked the radio beams. For the whole of the planet's long-distance services, and most of the radio and TV networks, were routed through the Relay Stations. As I looked more closely, I saw that there were two other sets of radio reflector systems, aimed not at Earth but in the two directions sixty degrees away from it. These were handling the beams to the other two stations, so that altogether the three formed a vast triangle, slowly rotating with the turning Earth.
We spent only twelve hours at the Relay Station, while our ship was overhauled and reprovisioned. I never saw the pilot again, though I heard later that he had been partly exonerated from blame. When we continued our interrupted journey, it was with a fresh captain who showed no willingness to talk about his colleague's fate. Space pilots seem to form a very select and exclusive club: they never let each other down or discuss each other's mistakes—at least, not with people outside their trade union. I suppose you can hardly blame them, since theirs is one of the most responsible jobs that exist.
The living arrangements aboard the Relay Station were much the same as on the Inner Station, so I won't spend any time describing them. In any case, we weren't there long enough to see much of the place, and everyone was too busy to waste time showing us around. The TV people did ask us to make one appearance to describe our adventures since leaving the Hospital. The interview took place in a makeshift studio so tiny that it wouldn't hold us all, and we had to slip in quietly one by one when a signal was given. It seemed funny to find no better arrangements here at the very heart of the world's TV network. Still, it was reasonable enough—a 'live' broadcast from the Relay Station was a very rare event indeed.