The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

MAELSTROM II ARTHUR C. CLARKE

He was not the first man, Cliff Leyland told himself bitterly, to know the exact second and the precise manner of his death; times beyond number, condemned criminals had waited for their last dawn. Yet until the very end, they could have hoped for a reprieve; human judges can show mercy, but against the laws of nature there was no appeal.

And only six hours ago he had been whistling happily while he packed his ten kilos of personal baggage for the long fall home. He could still remember (even now, after all that had happened) how he had dreamed that Myra was already in his arms, that he was taking Brian and Sue on that promised cruise down the Nile. In a few minutes, as Earth rose above the horizon, he might see the Nile again; but memory alone could bring back the faces of his wife and children. And all because he had tried to save nine hundred fifty sterling dollars by riding home on the freight catapult instead of the rocket shuttle.

He had expected the first twelve seconds of the trip to be rough, as the electric launcher whipped the capsule along its ten-mile track and shot him off the Moon. Even with the protection of the water bath in which he had floated during countdown, he had not looked forward to the twenty g of takeoff. Yet when the acceleration had gripped the capsule, he had been hardly aware of the immense forces acting upon him. The only sound was a faint creaking from the metal walls; to anyone who had experienced the thunder of a rocket launch, the silence was uncanny. When the cabin speaker had announced, “T plus five seconds—speed two thousand miles an hour,” he could scarcely believe it.

Two thousand miles an hour in five seconds from a standing start—with seven seconds still to go as the generators smashed their thunderbolts of power into the launcher. He was riding the lightning across the face of the Moon; and at T plus seven seconds, the lightning failed.

Even in the womblike shelter of the tank, Cliff could sense that something had gone wrong. The water around him, until now frozen almost rigid by its weight, seemed suddenly to become alive. Though the capsule was still hurtling along the track, all acceleration had ceased and it was merely coasting under its own momentum.

He had no time to feel fear, or to wonder what had happened, for the power failure lasted little more than a second. Then, with a jolt that shook the capsule from end to end and set off a series of ominous, tinkling crashes, the field came on again.

When the acceleration faded for the last time, all weight vanished with it. Cliff needed no instrument but his stomach to tell that the capsule had left the end of the track and was rising away from the surface of the Moon. He waited impatiently until the automatic pumps had drained the tank and the hot-air driers had done their work; then he drifted across the control panel and pulled himself down into the bucket seat.

“Launch Control,” he called urgently, as he drew the restraining straps around his waist. “What the devil happened?”

A brisk but worried voice answered at once.

“We’re still checking—call you back in thirty seconds. Glad you’re okay,” it added belatedly.

While he was waiting, Cliff switched to forward vision. There was nothing ahead except stars—which was as it should be. At least he had taken off with most of his planned speed and there was no danger that he would crash back to the Moon’s surface immediately. But he would crash back sooner or later, for he could not possibly have reached escape velocity. He must be rising out into space along a great ellipse—and, in a few hours, he would be back at his starting point.

“Hello, Cliff,” said Launch Control suddenly. “We’ve found what happened. The circuit breakers tripped when you went through section five of the track, so your take-off speed was seven hundred miles an hour low. That will bring you back in just over five hours—but don’t worry; your course-correction jets can boost you into a stable orbit. We’ll tell you when to fire them; then all you have to do is to sit tight until we can send someone to haul you down.”

Slowly, Cliff allowed himself to relax. He had forgotten the capsule’s vernier rockets; low-powered though they were, they could kick him into an orbit that would clear the Moon. Though he might fall back to within a few miles of the lunar surface, skimming over mountains and plains at a breath-taking speed, he would be perfectly safe.

Then he remembered those tinkling crashes from the control compartment, and his hopes dimmed again—for there were not many things that could break in a space vehicle without most unpleasant consequences.

He was facing those consequences, now that the final checks of the ignition circuits had been completed. Neither on manual nor on auto would the navigation rockets fire; the capsule’s modest fuel reserves, which could have taken him to safety, were utterly useless. In five hours, he would complete his orbit—and return to his launching point.

I wonder if they’ll name the new crater after me? thought Cliff. “Crater Leyland—diameter ...” What diameter? Better not exaggerate—I don’t suppose it will be more than a couple of hundred yards across. Hardly worth putting on the map.

Launch Control was still silent, but that was not surprising; there was little that one could say to a man already as good as dead. And yet, though he knew that nothing could alter his trajectory, even now he did not believe that he would soon be scattered over most of Farside. He was still soaring away from the Moon, snug and comfortable in his little cabin. The idea of death was utterly incongruous—as it is to all men until the final second.

And then, for a moment, Cliff forgot his own problem. The horizon ahead was no longer flat; something even more brilliant than the blazing lunar landscape was lifting against the stars. As the capsule curved round the edge of the Moon, it was creating the only kind of Earthrise that was possible—a man-made one. In a minute it was all over, such was his speed in orbit. By that time the Earth had leaped clear of the horizon and was climbing swiftly up the sky.

It was three-quarters full and almost too bright to look upon. Here was a cosmic mirror made not of dull rocks and dusty plains, but of snow and cloud and sea. Indeed, it was almost all sea, for the Pacific was turned toward him, and the blinding reflection of the Sun covered the Hawaiian Islands. The haze of the atmosphere—that soft blanket that should have cushioned his descent in a few hours’ time— obliterated all geographical details; perhaps that darker patch emerging from night was New Guinea, but he could not be sure.

There was a bitter irony in the knowledge that he was heading straight toward that lovely, gleaming apparition. Another seven hundred miles an hour and he would have made it. Seven hundred miles an hour—that was all. He might as well ask for 7,000,000.

The sight of the rising Earth brought home to him, with irresistible force, the duty he feared but could postpone no longer. “Launch Control,” he said, holding his voice steady with a great effort. “Please give me a circuit to Earth.”

This was one of the strangest things he had ever done in his life—sitting here above the Moon, listening to the telephone ring in his own home a quarter of a million miles away. It must be near midnight down there in Africa and it would be some time before there would be any answer. Myra would stir sleepily—then, because she was a spaceman’s wife, always alert for disaster, she would be instantly awake. But they had both hated to have a phone in the bedroom, and it would be at least fifteen seconds before she could switch on the lights, close the nursery door to avoid disturbing the baby, get down the stairs and—

Her voice came clear and sweet across the emptiness of space. He would recognize it anywhere in the Universe, and he detected at once the undertone of anxiety.

“Mrs. Leyland?” said the Earthside operator. “I have a call from your husband. Please remember the two-second time lag.”

Cliff wondered how many people were listening to this call, either on the Moon, the Earth or the relay satellites. It was hard to talk for the last time to your loved ones, not knowing how many eavesdroppers there might be. But as soon as he began to speak, no one else existed but Myra and himself.

“Darling,” he began. “This is Cliff. I’m afraid I won’t be coming home as I promised. There’s been a—a technical slip. I’m quite all right at the moment, but I’m in big trouble.”

He swallowed, trying to overcome the dryness in his mouth, then went on quickly before she could interrupt. As briefly as he could, he explained the situation. For his own sake as well as hers, he did not abandon all hope.

“Everyone’s doing their best,” he said. “Maybe they can get a ship up to me in time—but in case they can’t—well, I wanted to speak to you and the children.”

She took it well, as he had known she would. He felt pride as well as love when her answer came back from the dark side of Earth.

“Don’t worry, Cliff. I’m sure they’ll get you out and well have our holiday after all, exactly the way we planned.”

“I think so, too,” he lied. “But just in case—would you wake the children? Don’t tell them that anything’s wrong.”

It was an endless half minute before he heard their sleepy yet excited voices. Cliff would willingly have given these last few hours of his life to have seen their faces once again, but the capsule was not equipped with such luxuries as phonevision. Perhaps it was just as well, for he could not have hidden the truth had he looked into their eyes. They would know it soon enough, but not from him. He wanted to give them only happiness in these last moments together.

Yet it was hard to answer their questions, to tell them that he would soon be seeing them, to make promises that he could not keep. It needed all his self-control when Brian reminded him of the Moon dust he had forgotten once before—but had remembered this time.

“I’ve got it, Brian—it’s in a jar right beside me—soon you’ll be able to show it to your friends.” (No: Soon it will be back on the world from which it came.) “And Susie —be a good girl and do everything that Mummy tells you. Your last school report wasn’t too good, you know, especially those remarks about behavior . . . Yes, Brian, I have those photographs, and the piece of rock from Aristarchus—”

It was hard to die at thirty-five; but it was hard, too, for a boy to lose his father at ten. How would Brian remember him in the years ahead? Perhaps as no more than a fading voice from space, for he had spent so little time on Earth. In these last few minutes, as he swung outward and then back to the Moon, there was little enough that he could do except project his love and his hope across the emptiness that he would never span again. The rest was up to Myra.

When the children had gone, happy but puzzled, there was work to do. Now was the time to keep one’s head, to be businesslike and practical. Myra must face the future without him, but at least he could make the transition easier. Whatever happens to the individual, life goes on; and to modern man life involves mortgages and installments, insurance policies and joint bank accounts. Almost impersonally, as if they concerned someone else—which would soon be true enough—Cliff began to talk about these things. There was a time for the heart and a time for the brain. The heart would have its final say three hours from now, when he began his last approach to the surface of the Moon.

No one interrupted them; there must have been silent monitors maintaining the link between two worlds, but they might have been the only people alive. Sometimes, while he was speaking, Cliff’s eyes would stray to the periscope and be dazzled by the glare of Earth—now more than halfway up the sky. It was impossible to believe that it was home for seven billion souls. Only three mattered to him now.

It should have been four, but with the best will in the world he could not put the baby on the same footing as the others. He had never seen his younger son; and now he never would.

At last, he could think of no more to say. For some things, a lifetime was not enough—but an hour could be too much. He felt physically and emotionally exhausted, and the strain on Myra must have been equally great. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts and with the stars, to compose his mind and to make his peace with the Universe.

“I’d like to sign off for an hour or so, darling,” he said. There was no need for explanations; they understood each other too well. “I’ll call you back in—in plenty of time. Goodbye for now.”

He waited the two seconds for the answering goodbye from Earth; then he cut the circuit and stared blankly at the tiny control desk. Quite unexpectedly, without desire or volition, tears sprang into his eyes, and suddenly he was weeping like a child.

He wept for his loved ones and for himself. He wept for the future that might have been and the hopes that would soon be incandescent vapor, drifting between the stars. And he wept because there was nothing else to do.

After a while he felt much better. Indeed, he realized that he was extremely hungry; there was no point in dying on an empty stomach, and he began to rummage among the space rations in the closet-sized galley. While he was squeezing a tube of chicken-and-ham paste into his mouth, Launch Control called.

There was a new voice at the end of the line—a slow, steady and immensely competent voice that sounded as if it would brook no nonsense from inanimate machinery.

“This is Van Kessel, Chief of Maintenance, Space Vehicles Division. Listen carefully, Leyland—we think we’ve found a way out. It’s a long shot—but it’s the only chance you have.”

Alternations of hope and despair are hard on the nervous system. Cliff felt a sudden dizziness; he might have fallen, had there been any direction in which to fall.

“Go ahead,” he said faintly, when he had recovered. Then he listened to Van Kessel with an eagerness that slowly changed to incredulity.

“I don’t believe it!” he said at last. “It just doesn’t make sense!”

“You can’t argue with the computers,” answered Van Kessel. “They’ve checked the figures about twenty different ways. And it makes sense all right; you won’t be moving so fast at apogee, and it doesn’t need much of a kick then to change your orbit. I suppose you’ve never been in a deep-space rig before?”

“No, of course not.”

“Pity—but never mind. If you follow instructions you can’t go wrong. You’ll find the suit in the locker at the end of the cabin. Break the seals and haul it out.”

Cliff floated the full six feet from the control desk to the rear of the cabin, and pulled on the lever marked: emergency only-type 17 deep-space suit. The door opened and the shining silver fabric hung flaccid before him.

“Strip down to your underclothes and wriggle into it,” said Van Kessel. “Don’t bother about the biopack—you clamp that on later.”

“I’m in,” said Cliff presently. “What do I do now?”

“You wait twenty minutes—and then we’ll give you the signal to open the air lock and jump.”

The implications of that word “jump” suddenly penetrated. Cliff looked around the now familiar, comforting little cabin, and then thought of the lonely emptiness between the stars—the unreverberant abyss through which a man could fall until the end of time.

He had never been in free space; there was no reason why he should. He was just a farmer’s boy with a master’s degree in agronomy, seconded from the Sahara Reclamation Project and trying to grow crops on the Moon. Space was not for him; he belonged to the worlds of soil and rock, of Moon dust and vacuum-formed pumice.

“I can’t do it,” he whispered. “Isn’t there any other way?”

“There’s not,” snapped Van Kessel. “We’re doing our damnedest to save you, and this is no time to get neurotic. Dozens of men have been in far worse situations—badly injured, trapped in wreckage a million miles from help. But you’re not even scratched, and already you’re squealing! Pull yourself together—or we’ll sign off and leave you to stew in your own juice.”

Cliff turned slowly red, and it was several seconds before he answered.

“I’m all right,” he said at last. “Let’s go through those instructions again.”

“That’s better,” said Van Kessel approvingly. “Twenty minutes from now, when you’re at apogee, you’ll go into the air lock. From that point, we’ll lose communication: Your suit radio has only a ten-mile range. But we’ll be tracking you on radar and we’ll be able to speak to you when you pass over us again. Now, about the controls on your suit...”

The twenty minutes went quickly enough; at the end of that time, Cliff knew exactly what he had to do. He had even come to believe that it might work.

“Time to bail out,” said Van Kessel. “The capsule’s correctly orientated—the air lock points the way you want to go. But direction isn’t critical—speed is what matters. Put everything you’ve got into that jump—and good luck!”

“Thanks,” said Cliff inadequately. “Sorry that I—”

“Forget it,” interrupted Van Kessel. “Now get moving!”

For the last time, Cliff looked round the tiny cabin, wondering if there was anything that he had forgotten. All his personal belongings would have to be abandoned, but they could be replaced easily enough. Then he remembered the little jar of Moon dust he had promised Brian; this time, he would not let the boy down. The minute mass of the sample—only a few ounces—would make no difference to his fate; he tied a piece of string round the neck of the jar and attached it to the harness of his suit.

The air lock was so small that there was literally no room to move; he stood sandwiched between inner and outer doors until the automatic pumping sequence was finished. Then the wall slowly opened away from him and he was facing the stars.

With his clumsy, gloved fingers, he hauled himself out of the air lock and stood upright on the steeply curving hull, bracing himself tightly against it with the safety line. The splendor of the scene held him almost paralyzed; he forgot all his fears of vertigo and insecurity as he gazed around him, no longer constrained by the narrow field of vision of the periscope.

The Moon was a gigantic crescent, the dividing line between night and day a jagged arc sweeping across a quarter of the sky. Down there the sun was setting, at the beginning of the long lunar night, but the summits of isolated peaks were still blazing with the last light of day, defying the darkness that had already encircled them.

That darkness was not complete. Though the Sun was gone from the land below, the almost full Earth flooded it with glory. Cliff could see, faint but clear in the glimmering Earthlight, the outlines of seas and highlands, the dim stars of mountain peaks, the dark circles of craters. He was flying above a ghostly, sleeping land—a land which was trying to drag him to his death. For now he was poised at the highest point of his orbit, exactly on the line between Moon and Earth. It was time to go.

He bent his legs, crouching against the hull. Then, with all his force, he launched himself toward the stars, letting the safety line run out behind him.

The capsule receded with surprising speed, and as it did so, he felt a most unexpected sensation. He had anticipated terror or vertigo—but not this unmistakable, haunting sense of familiarity. All this had happened before; not to him, of course, but to someone else. He could not pinpoint the memory, and there was no time to hunt for it now.

He flashed a quick glance at Earth, Moon and receding spacecraft, and made his decision without conscious thought The line whipped away as he snapped the quick release; now he was alone, two thousand miles above the Moon, a quarter of a million miles from Earth. He could do nothing but wait; it would be two and a half hours before he would know if he could live—and if his own muscles had performed the task that the rockets had failed to do.

And then, as the stars slowly revolved around him, he suddenly knew the origin of that haunting memory. It had been many years since he had read Poe’s short stories; but who could ever forget them?

He, too, was trapped in a maelstrom, being whirled down to his doom; he, too, hoped to escape by abandoning his vessel. Though the forces involved were totally different, the parallel was striking. Poe’s fisherman had lashed himself to a barrel because stubby, cylindrical objects were being sucked down into the great whirlpool more slowly than his ship. It was a brilliant application of the laws of hydrodynamics; Cliff could only hope that his use of celestial mechanics would be equally inspired.

How fast had he jumped away from the capsule? At a good five miles an hour, surely. Trivial though that speed was by astronomical standards, it should be enough to inject him into a new orbit—one that, Van Kessel had promised him, would clear the Moon by several miles. That was not much of a margin, but it would be enough on this airless world, where there was no atmosphere to draw him down.

With a sudden spasm of guilt, Cliff realized that he had never made that second call to Myra. It was Van Kessel’s fault; the engineer had kept him on the move, given him no time to brood over his own affairs. And Van Kessel was right: In a situation like this, a man could think only of himself. All his resources, mental and physical, must be concentrated on survival. This was no time or place for the distracting and weakening ties of love.

He was racing now toward the night side of the Moon, and the daylit crescent was shrinking even as he watched. The intolerable disk of the Sun, toward which he dared not look, was falling swiftly toward the curved horizon. The crescent moonscape dwindled to a burning line of light, a bow of fire set against the stars. Then the bow fragmented into a dozen shining beads, which one by one winked out as he shot into the shadow of the Moon.

With the going of the Sun, the Earthlight seemed more brilliant than ever, frosting his suit with silver as he rotated slowly along his orbit. It took him about ten seconds to make each revolution; there was nothing he could do to check his spin, and indeed he welcomed the constantly changing view. Now that his eyes were no longer distracted by occasional glimpses of the Sun, he could see the stars in thousands where there had been only hundreds before. The familiar constellations were drowned, and even the brightest of the planets were hard to find in that blaze of light.

The dark disk of the lunar nightland lay across the star field like an eclipsing shadow, and it was slowly growing as he fell toward it. At every instant some star, bright or faint, would pass behind its edge and wink out of existence. It was almost as if a hole were growing in space, eating up the heavens.

There was no other indication of his movement, or of the passage of time—except for his regular ten-second spin. When Cliff looked at his watch, he was astonished to see that he had left the capsule half an hour ago. He searched for it among the stars, without success. By now, it would be several miles behind—but presently it would draw ahead of him, as it moved on its lower orbit, and would be the first to reach the Moon.

Cliff was still puzzling over this paradox when the strain of the last few hours, combined with the euphoria of weightlessness, produced a result he would hardly have believed possible. Lulled by the gentle susurration of the air inlets, floating lighter than any feather as he turned beneath the stars, he fell into a dreamless sleep.

When he awoke at some prompting of his subconscious, the Earth was nearing the edge of the Moon. The sight almost brought on another wave of self-pity, and for a moment he had to fight for control of his emotions. This was the very last he might ever see of Earth, as his orbit took him back over Farside, into the land where the Earthlight never shone. The brilliant Antarctic ice caps, the equatorial cloud belts, the scintillation of the Sun upon the Pacific— all were sinking swiftly behind the lunar mountains. Then they were gone; he had neither Sun nor Earth to light him now, and the invisible land below was so black that it hurt his eyes.

Unbelievably, a cluster of stars had appeared inside the darkened disk, where no stars could possibly be. Cliff stared at them in astonishment for a few seconds, then realized he was passing above one of the Farside settlements. Down there beneath the pressure domes of their city, men were waiting out the lunar night—sleeping, working, loving, resting, quarreling . . . Did they know that he was speeding like an invisible meteor through their sky, racing above their heads at four thousand miles an hour? Almost certainly, for by now the whole Moon, and the whole Earth, must know of his predicament. Perhaps they were searching for him with radar and telescope, but they would have little time to find him. Within seconds, the unknown city had dropped out of sight, and he was once more alone above Farside.

It was impossible to judge his altitude above the blank emptiness speeding below, for there was no sense of scale or perspective. But he knew that he was still descending, and that at any moment one of the crater walls or mountain peaks that strained invisibly toward him might claw him from the sky.

For in the darkness somewhere ahead was the final obstacle—the hazard he feared most of all. Across the heart of Farside, spanning the equator from north to south in a wall more than a thousand miles long, lay the Soviet Range. He had been a boy when it was discovered, back in 1959, and could still remember his excitement when he had seen the first smudged photographs from Lunik III. He could never have dreamed that one day he would be flying toward those same mountains, waiting for them to decide his fate.

The first eruption of dawn took him completely by surprise. Light exploded ahead of him, leaping from peak to peak until the whole arc of the horizon was limned with flame. He was hurtling out of the lunar night, directly into the face of the Sun. At least he would not die in darkness, but the greatest danger was yet to come. For now he was almost back where he had started, nearing the lowest point of his orbit. He glanced at the suit chronometer, and saw that five full hours had now passed. Within minutes, he would have hit the Moon—or skimmed it and passed safely out into space.

As far as he could judge, he was less than twenty miles above the surface, and he was still descending, though very slowly now. Beneath him, the long shadows of the lunar dawn were daggers of darkness stabbing into the nightland. The steeply slanting sunlight exaggerated every rise in the ground, making even the smallest hills appear to be mountains. And now, unmistakably, the land ahead was rising, wrinkling into the foothills of the Soviet Range. More than 100 miles away, but approaching at a mile a second, a wave of rock was climbing from the face of the Moon. There was nothing he could do to avoid it; his path was fixed and unalterable. All that could be done had already been done, two and a half hours ago.

It was not enough. He was not going to rise above these mountains; they were rising above him.

Now he regretted his failure to make that second call to the woman who was still waiting, a quarter of a million miles away. Yet perhaps it was just as well, for there had been nothing more to say.

Other voices were calling in the space around him, as he came once more within range of Launch Control. They waxed and waned as he flashed through the radio shadow of the mountains; they were talking about him, but the fact scarcely registered on his emotions. He listened with an impersonal interest, as if to messages from some remote point of space or time, of no concern to him. Once he heard Van Kessel’s voice say, quite distinctly: “Tell Callisto’s skipper we’ll give him an intercept orbit, as soon as we know that Leyland’s past perigee. Rendezvous time should be one hour, five minutes from now.” I hate to disappoint you, thought Cliff, but that’s one appointment I’ll never keep.

For now the wall of rock was only fifty miles away, and each time he spun helplessly in space it came ten miles closer. There was no room for optimism now, as he sped more swiftly than a rifle bullet toward that implacable barrier. This was the end, and suddenly it became of great importance to know whether he would meet it face first, with open eyes, or with his back turned, like a coward.

No memories of his past life flashed through Cliff’s mind as he counted the seconds that remained. The swiftly unrolling moonscape rotated beneath him, every detail sharp and clear in the harsh light of dawn. Now he was turned away from the onrushing mountains, looking back on the path he had traveled, the path that should have led to Earth. No more than three of his ten-second days were left to him.

And then the moonscape exploded into silent flame. A light as fierce as that of the Sun banished the long shadows struck fire from the peaks and craters spread below. It lasted for only a fraction of a second, and had faded completely before he had turned toward its source.

Directly ahead of him, only twenty miles away, a vast cloud of dust was expanding toward the stars. It was as if a volcano had erupted in the Soviet Range—but that, of course, was impossible. Equally absurd was Cliff’s second thought—that by some fantastic feat of organization and logistics the Farside Engineering Division had blasted away the obstacle in his path.

For it was gone. A huge, crescent-shaped bite had been taken out of the approaching skyline; rocks and debris were still rising from a crater that had not existed five seconds ago. Only the energy of an atomic bomb, exploded at precisely the right moment in his path, could have wrought such a miracle. And Cliff did not believe in miracles.

He had made another complete revolution and was almost upon the mountains when he remembered that all this while there had been a cosmic bulldozer moving invisibly ahead of him. The kinetic energy of the abandoned capsule—a thousand tons, traveling at over a mile a second— was quite sufficient to have blasted the gap through which he was now racing. The impact of the man-made meteor must have jolted the whole of Farside.

His luck held to the very end. There was a brief pitter-patter of dust particles against his suit, and he caught a blurred glimpse of glowing rocks and swiftly dispersing smoke clouds flashing beneath him. (How strange to see a cloud upon the Moon!) Then he was through the mountains, with nothing ahead but blessed, empty sky.

Somewhere up there, an hour in the future along his second orbit, Callisto would be moving to meet him. But there was no hurry now; he had escaped from the maelstrom. For better or for worse, he had been granted the gift of life.

There was the launching track, a few miles to the right of his path; it looked like a hairline scribed across the face of the Moon. In a few moments he would be within radio range; now, with thankfulness and joy, he could make that second call to Earth, to the woman who was still waiting in the African night.