Arthur Clarke: The Fires Within

“At the same time, I’m going to push up my transmitter power again. I hope to be able to beam the output much more narrowly, and so greatly increase the energy concentration. But this will involve all sorts of mechanical difficulties, and I’ll need more assistance.”

I promised to do my utmost to get further aid, and the Professor hopes that you will soon be able to visit his laboratory yourself. In the meantime I am attaching a photograph of the vision screen, which although not as clear as the original will, I hope, prove beyond doubt that our observations are not mistaken.

I am well aware that our grant to the Interplanetary Society has brought us dangerously near the total estimate for the year, but surely even the crossing of space is less important than the immediate investigation of this discovery which may have the most profound effects on the philosophy and the future of the whole human race.

I sat back and looked at Karn. There was much in the document I had not understood, but the main outlines were clear enough.

“Yes,” I said, “this is it! Where’s that photograph?”

He handed it over. The quality was poor, for it had been copied many times before reaching us. But the pattern was unmistakable and I recognized it at once.

“They were good scientists,” I said admiringly. “That’s Callastheon, all right. So we’ve found the truth at last, even if it has taken us three hundred years to do it.”

“Is that surprising,” asked Karn, “when you consider the mountain of stuff we’ve had to translate and the difficulty of copying it before it evaporates?”

I sat in silence for a while, thinking of the strange race whose relics we were examining. Only once—never again!—had I gone up the great vent our engineers had opened into the Shadow World. It had been a frightening and unforgettable experience. The multiple layers of my pressure suit had made movement very difficult, and despite their insulation I could sense the unbelievable cold that was all around me.

“What a pity it was,” I mused, “that our emergence destroyed them so completely. They were a clever race, and we might have learned a lot from them.”

“I don’t think we can be blamed,” said Karn. “We never really believed that anything could exist under those awful conditions of near-vacuum, and almost absolute zero. It couldn’t be helped.”

I did not agree. “I think it proves that they were the more intelligent race. After all, they discovered us first. Everyone laughed at my grandfather when he said that the radiation he’d detected from the Shadow World must be artificial.”

Karn ran one of his tentacles over the manuscript.

“We’ve certainly discovered the cause of that radiation,” he said. “Notice the date—it’s just a year before your grandfather’s discovery. The Professor must have got his grant all right!” He laughed unpleasantly. “It must have given him a shock when he saw us coming up to the surface, right underneath him.”

I scarcely heard his words, for a most uncomfortable feeling had suddenly come over me. I thought of the thousands of miles of rock lying below the great city of Callastheon, growing hotter and denser all the way to the Earth’s unknown core. And so I turned to Karn.

“That isn’t very funny,” I said quietly. It may be our turn next.”