Authors: Arthur C Clarke
I was looking out into the darkness when I saw a faint red glow beneath me. At first, because there was no sense of perspective or distance, it seemed at an immense depth below the ship, and I could not imagine what it might be.
A great forest fire, perhaps—but we were now, surely, over the ocean again. Then I realized, with a shock that nearly jolted me out of my seat, that this ominous red glow came from our wing… The heat of our passage through the atmosphere was turning it cherry red.
I stared at that disturbing sight for several seconds before I decided that everything was really quite in order. All our tremendous energy of motion was being converted into heat—though I had never realized just how
much
heat would be produced. For the glow was increasing even as I watched: when I flattened my face against the window, I could see part of the leading edge, and it was a bright yellow in places. I wondered if the other passengers had noticed it—or perhaps the little leaflets, which I hadn't bothered to read, had already told them not to worry.
I was glad when we emerged into daylight once more, greeting the dawn above the Pacific. The glow from the wings was no longer visible, and so ceased to worry me. Besides, the sheer splendour of the sunrise, which we were approaching at nearly ten thousand miles an hour, took away all other sensations. From the Inner Station, I had watched many dawns and sunsets pass across the Earth. But up there, I had been detached, not part of the scene itself. Now I was once more inside the atmosphere and these wonderful colours were all around me.
We had now made one complete circuit of the Earth, and had shed more than half our speed. It was much longer, this time, before the Brazilian jungles came into view, and they passed more slowly now. Above the mouth of the Amazon the storm was still raging, only a little way beneath us, as we started out on our last crossing of the South Atlantic.
Then night came once more, and there again was the redly glowing wing in the darkness around the ship. It seemed even hotter now, but perhaps I had grown used to it for the sight no longer worried me. We were nearly home—on the last lap of the journey. By now we must have lost so much speed that we were probably travelling no faster than many normal aircraft.
A cluster of lights along the coast of East Africa told us that we were heading out over the Indian Ocean again. I wished I could be up there in the control cabin, watching the preparations for the final approach to the space-port. By now, the pilot would have picked up the guiding radio beacons, and would be coming down the beam, still at a great speed but according to a carefully prearranged programme. When we reached New Guinea, our velocity would be almost completely spent. Our ship would be nothing more than a great glider, flying through the night sky on the last dregs of its momentum.
The loud-speaker broke into my thoughts.
'Pilot to passengers. We shall be landing in twenty minutes.'
Even without this warning, I could tell that the flight was nearing its end. The scream of the wind outside our hull had dropped in pitch, and there had been a just perceptible change of direction as the ship slanted downwards. And, most striking sign of all, the red glow outside the window was rapidly fading. Presently there were only a few dull patches left, near the leading edge of the wing. A few minutes later, even these had gone.
It was still night as we passed over Sumatra and Borneo. From time to time the lights of ships and cities winked into view and went astern—very slowly now, it seemed, after the headlong rush of our first circuit. At frequent intervals the loud-speaker called out our speed and position. We were travelling at less than a thousand miles an hour when we passed over the deeper darkness that was the New Guinea coastline.
There it is!' I whispered to John. The ship had banked slightly, and beneath the wing was a great constellation of lights. A signal flare rose up in a slow, graceful arc and exploded into crimson fire. In the momentary glare, I caught a glimpse of the white mountain peaks surrounding the space-port, and I wondered just how much margin of height we had. It would be very ironic to meet with disaster in the last few miles after travelling all this distance.
I never knew the actual moment when we touched down, the landing was so perfect. At one instant we were still airborne, at the next the lights of the runway were rolling past as the ship slowly came to rest. I sat quite still in my seat, trying to realize that I was back on Earth again. Then I looked at John. Judging from his expression, he could hardly believe it either.
The steward came round helping people release their seat straps and giving last-minute advice. As I looked at the slightly harassed visitors, I could not help a mild feeling of superiority.
I
knew my way about on Earth, but all this must be very strange to them. They must be realizing, also, that they were now in the full grip of Earth's gravity—and there was nothing they could do about it until they were out in space again.
As we had been the first to enter the ship, we were the last to leave it. I helped John with some of his personal luggage, as he was obviously not very happy and wanted at least one hand free to grab any convenient support.
'Cheer up!' I said. 'You'll soon be jumping around just as much as you did on Mars!'
'I hope you're right,' he answered gloomily. 'At the moment I feel like a cripple who's lost his crutch.'
Mr and Mrs Moore, I noticed, had expressions of grim determination on their faces as they walked cautiously to the air-lock. But if they wished they were back on Mars, they kept their feelings to themselves. So did the girls, who for some reason seemed less worried by gravity than any of us.
We emerged under the shadow of the great wing, the thin mountain air blowing against our faces. It was quite warm—surprisingly so, in fact, for night at such a high altitude. Then I realized that the wing above us was still hot—probably too hot to touch, even though it was no longer visibly glowing.
We moved slowly away from the ship, towards the waiting transport vehicles. Before I stepped into the bus that would take us across to the Port buildings, I looked up once more at the starlit sky which had been my home for a little while—and which, I was resolved, would be my home again. Up there in the shadow of the Earth, speeding the traffic that moved from world to world, were Commander Doyle, Tim Benton, Ronnie Jordan, Norman Powell, and all the other friends I'd made on my visit to the Inner Station. I remembered Commander Doyle's promise, and wondered how soon I would remind him of it…
John Moore was waiting patiently behind me, clutching the door-handle of the bus. He saw me looking up into the sky and followed my gaze.
'You won't be able to see the Station,' I said. 'It's in eclipse.'
John didn't answer, and then I saw that he was staring into the east, where the first hint of dawn glowed along the horizon. High against these unfamiliar southern stars was something that I did recognize—a brilliant ruby beacon, the brightest object in the sky.
'My home,' said John, in a faint, sad voice.
I started into that beckoning light, and remembered the pictures John had shown me and the stories he had told. Up there were the great coloured deserts, the old sea-beds that man was bringing once more to life, the little Martians who might, or might not, belong to a race that was more ancient than ours.
And I knew that, after all, I was going to disappoint Commander Doyle. The space-stations were too near home to satisfy me now—my imagination had been captured by that little red world, glowing bravely against the stars. When I went into space again, the Inner Station would only be the first milestone on my outward road from Earth.
Arthur C. Clarke's introduction to
THE SANDS OF MARS
In 2001—where have I seen that date before?—it will be exactly half a century since this novel was published. Or to put it in perhaps better perspective: it is already more than half way back in time, dear reader, between you and the Wright Brothers' first flight…
Though I have not opened it for decades, I have a special fondness for
Sands
, as it was my first full-length novel. When I wrote it, we knew practically nothing about Mars—and what we did 'know' was completely wrong. The mirage of Percival Lowell's canals was beginning to fade, though it would not vanish completely until our space probes began arriving in the late seventies. It was still generally believed that Mars had a thin but useful atmosphere, and that vegetation flourished—at least in the equatorial regions where the temperature often rose above freezing point. And where there was vegetation, of course, there might be more interesting forms of life—though nothing remotely human. Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian princesses have joined the canals in mythology.
When I tapped out 'The End' on my Remington Noiseless (ha!) Portable in 1951 I could never have imagined that exactly twenty years later I should be sitting on a panel with Ray Bradbury and Carl Sagan at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, waiting for the first real Mars to arrive from the Mariner space probes. (See
Mars and the Mind of Man
, Harper & Row, 1973). But that was only the first trickle of a flood of information: during the next two decades, the Vikings were to give stunning images of the gigantic Mariner Valley and, most awe-inspiring of all, Olympus Mons—an extinct volcano more than twice the height of Everest. (Pause for embarrassed cough. Somewhere herein you'll find 'There are no mountains on Mars!' Well, that's what even the best observers, straining their eyes to make sense of the tiny disk dancing in the field of their telescope, believed in the 1950s.
Soon after maps of the real Mars became available, I received a generous gift from computer genius John Hinkley of his Vistapro image processing system. This prompted me to do some desk-top terraforming (a word, incidentally, invented by science fiction's Grandest of Grand Masters, Jack Williamson). I must confess that in
The Snows of Olympus: a Garden on Mars
(Gollancz, 1994) I frequently allowed artistic considerations to override scientific ones. Thus I couldn't resist putting a lake in the caldera of Mount Olympus, unlikely though it is that the most strenuous efforts of future colonists will produce an atmosphere dense enough to permit liquid water at such an altitude.
My next encounter with Mars involved a most ambitious but, alas, unsuccessful space project—the Russian MARS 96 mission. Besides all its scientific equipment, the payload carried a CD/Rom disk full of sounds and images, including the whole of the famous Orson Welles
War of the Worlds
broadcast. (I have a recording of the only encounter between H.G. and Orson, made soon after this historic demonstration of the power of the new medium. Listening to the friendly banter between two of the greatest magicians of our age is like stepping into a time machine.)
It was intended that all these 'Visions of Mars' would, some day in the 21st century, serve as greetings to the pioneers of the next New World. I was privileged to send a video recording, made in the garden of my Colombo home: here is what I said:
MESSAGE TO MARS
My name is Arthur C. Clarke, and I am speaking to you from the island of Sri Lanka, once known as Ceylon, in the Indian Ocean, Planet Earth. It is early spring in the year 1993 but this message is intended for the future.
I am addressing men and woman—perhaps some of you already born—who will listen to these words when they are living on Mars.
As we approach the new millennium, there is a great interest in the planet which may be the first real home for mankind beyond the mother world. During my lifetime, I have been lucky enough to see our knowledge of Mars advance from almost complete ignorance—worse than that, misleading fantasy—to a real understanding of its geography and climate. Certainly we are still very ignorant in many areas, and lack knowledge which you take for granted. But now we have accurate maps of your wonderful world, and can imagine how it might be modified—terraformed—to make it nearer to the heart's desire. Perhaps you are already engaged upon that centuries-long process.
There is a link between Mars and my present home, which I used in what will probably be my last novel,
The Hammer of God
. At the beginning of this century, an amateur astronomer named Percy Molesworth was living here in Ceylon. He spent much time observing Mars, and now there is a huge crater, 175 kilometres wide, named after him in your southern hemisphere.
In my book I've imagined how. a New Martian astronomer might one day look at his ancestral world, to try and see the little island from which Molesworth—and I—often gazed up at your planet.
There was a time, soon after the first landing on the moon in 1969, when we were optimistic enough to imagine that we might have reached Mars by the 1990s. In another of my stories, I described a survivor of the first ill-fated expedition, watching the earth in transit across the face of the sun on May 11—1984!
Well, there was no one on Mars then to watch the event—but it will happen again on November 10, 2084. By that time I hope that many eyes will be looking back towards the earth as it slowly crosses the solar disk, looking like a tiny, perfectly circular sunspot. And I've suggested that we should signal to you then with powerful lasers, so that you will see a star beaming a message to you from the very face of the sun.