Arthur Clarke - Childhood’s End

Jan Rodricks was coming home, six months older, to the world he had left eighty years before.

This time he was no longer a stowaway, hidden in a secret chamber. He stood behind the three pilots (why, he wondered, did they need so many?) watching the patterns come and go on the great screen that dominated the control room. The colours and shapes it showed were meaningless to him: he assumed that they were conveying information which in a vessel designed by men would have been displayed on banks of meters. But sometimes the screen showed the surrounding star-fields, and soon, he hoped, it would be showing Earth.

He was glad to be home, despite the effort he had devoted to escaping from it. In these few months he had grown up. He had seen so much, travelled so far, and now was weary for his own familiar world. He understood, now, why the Overlords had sealed Earth from the stars. Humanity still had very far to go before it could play any part in the civilization he had glimpsed.

It might be — though this he refused to accept — that mankind could never be more than an inferior species, preserved in an out-of-the-way zoo with the Overlords as keepers. Perhaps that was what Vindarten had meant when he gave Jan that ambiguous warning, just before his departure. “Much may have happened,” the Overlord had said, “in the time that has passed on your planet. You may not know your world when you see it again.”

Perhaps not, thought Jan: eighty years was a long time, and though he was young and adaptable, he might find it hard to understand all the changes that had come to pass. But of one thing he was certain — men would want to hear his story, and to know what he had glimpsed of the civilization of the Overlords.

They had treated him well, as he had assumed they would. Of the outward journey he had known nothing: when the injection had worn off and he had emerged, the ship was already entering the Overlord system. He had climbed out of his fantastic hiding-place, and found to his relief that the oxygen set was not needed. The air was thick and heavy, but he could breathe without difficulty. He had found himself in the ship’s enormous red-lit hold, among countless other packing-cases and all the impedimenta one would expect on a liner of space or of sea. It had taken him almost an hour to find his way to the control room and to introduce himself to the crew.

Their lack of surprise had puzzled him: he knew that the Overlords showed few emotions, but he had expected some reaction. Instead, they simply continued with their work, watching the great screen and playing with the countless keys on their control panels. It was then that he knew that they were landing, for from time to time the image of a planet — larger at each appearance — would flash upon the screen.

Yet there was never the slightest sense of motion or acceleration — only a perfectly constant gravity, which he judged to be about a fifth of Earth’s. The immense forces that drove the ship must have been compensated with exquisite precision.

And then, in unison, the three Overlords had risen from their seats, and he knew that the voyage was over. They did not speak to their passenger or to each other, and when one of them beckoned to him to follow, Jan realized something that he should have thought of before. There might well be no one here, at this end of Karellen’s enormously long supply line, who understood a word of English.

They watched him gravely as the great doors opened before his eager eyes. This was the supreme moment of his life: now he was to be the first human being ever to look upon a world lit by another sun. The ruby light of NGS 549672 came flooding into the ship, and there before him lay the planet of the Overlords. What had he expected? He was not sure. Vast buildings, cities whose towers were lost among the clouds, machines beyond imagination — these would not have surprised him. Yet what he saw was an almost featureless plain, reaching out to an unnaturally close horizon, and broken only by three more of the Overlords’ ships, a few kilometres away.

For a moment Jan felt a surge of disappointment. Then he shrugged his shoulders, realizing that, after all, one would expect to find a space-port in some such remote and uninhabited region as this.

It was cold, though not uncomfortably so. The light from the great red sun low down on the horizon was quite ample for human eyes, but Jan wondered how long it would be before he yearned for greens and blues. Then he saw that enormous, wafer-thin crescent reaching up the sky like a great bow placed beside the sun. He stared at it for a long time before he realized that his journey was not yet altogether ended. That was the world of the Overlords. This must be its satellite, merely the base from which their vessels operated.

They had taken him across in a ship no larger than a terrestrial airliner. Feeling a pygmy, he had climbed up into one of the great seats to try and see something of the approaching planet through the observation windows.

The journey was so swift that he had time to make out few details on the expanding globe beneath. Even so near to home, it seemed, the Overlords used some version of the stardrive, for in a matter of minutes they were falling down through a deep, cloud-flecked atmosphere. When the doors opened, they stepped out into a vaulted chamber with a roof that must have swung swiftly shut behind them, for there was no sign of any entrance overhead.

It was two days before Jan left this building. He was an unexpected consignment, and they had nowhere to put him. To make matters worse, not one of the Overlords could understand English. Communication was practically impossible, and Jan realized bitterly that getting in touch with an alien race was not so easy as it was so often depicted in fiction. Sign language proved singularly unsuccessful, for it depended too much on a body of gestures, expressions and attitudes which the Overlords and mankind did not possess in common.

It would be more than frustrating, thought Jan, if the only Overlords who spoke his language were all back on Earth. He could only wait and hope for the best. Surely some scientist, some expert on alien races, would come and take charge of him! Or was he so unimportant that no one could be bothered?

There was no way he could get out of the building, because the great doors had no visible controls. When an Overlord walked up to them, they simply opened. Jan had tried the same trick, had waved objects high in the air to interrupt any controlling light-beam, had tried everything he could imagine — with no result at all. He realized that a man from the Stone Age, lost in a modern city building, might be equally helpless. Once he had tried to walk out when one of the Overlords left, but had been gently shooed back. As he was very anxious not to annoy his hosts, he did not persist.

Vindarten arrived before Jan had begun to get desperate. The Overlord spoke very bad English, much too rapidly, but improved with amazing speed. In a few days they were able to talk together with little trouble on any subject that did not demand a specialized vocabulary.

Once Vindarten had taken charge of him, Jan had no more worries. He also had no opportunity of doing the things he wished, for almost all his time was spent meeting Overlord scientists anxious to carry out obscure tests with complicated instruments. Jan was very wary of these machines, and after one session with some kind of hypnotic device had a splitting headache for several hours. He was perfectly willing to cooperate, but was not sure if his investigators realized his limitations, both mental and physical. It was certainly a long time before he could convince them that he had to sleep at regular intervals.

Between these investigations, he caught momentary glimpses of the city, and realized how difficult — and dangerous — it would be for him to travel around in it. Streets were practically non-existent, and there seemed to be no surface transport. This was the home of creatures who could fly, and who had no fear of gravity. It was nothing to come without warning upon a vertiginous drop of several hundred metres, or to find that the only entrance into a room was an opening high up in the wall. In a hundred ways, Jan began to realize that the psychology of a race with wings must be fundamentally different from that of earthbound creatures. It was strange to see the Overlords flying like great birds among the towers of their city, their pinions moving with slow, powerful beats. And there was a scientific problem here. This was a large planet — larger than Earth. Yet its gravity was low, and Jan wondered why it had so dense an atmosphere. He questioned Vindarten on this, and discovered, as he had half expected, that this was not the original planet of the Overlords. They had evolved on a much smaller world and then conquered this one, changing not only its atmosphere but even its gravity.