Arthur Clarke - Earthlight

“Well, that’s the picture. I’m going to cross with the first team just to show how easy it is. Now I want you to split up into four groups, and I’ll drill you each separately.”

Side by side, the Pegasus and the Acheron raced toward the distant planet that only one of them would ever reach. The airlocks of the liner were open, gaping wide no more than a few meters from the hull of the crippled battleship. The space between the two vessels was strung with guide ropes, and among them floated the men of the liner’s crew, ready to give assistance if any of the escaping men were overcome during the brief but dangerous crossing.

It was lucky for the crew of the Acheron that four pressure bulkheads were still intact. Their ship could still be divided into four separate compartments, so that a quarter of the crew could leave at a time. The airlocks of the Pegasus could not have held everyone at once if a mass escape had been necessary.

Captain Halstead watched from the bridge as the signal was given. There was a sudden puff of smoke from the hull of the battleship, then the emergency hatch—certainly never designed for an emergency such as this —blew away into space. A cloud of dust and condensing vapor blasted out, obscuring the view for a second. He knew how the waiting men would feel the escaping air sucking at their bodies, trying to tear them away from their handholds.

When the cloud had dispersed, the first men had already emerged. The leader was wearing a spacesuit, and all the others were strung on the three lines attached to him. Instantly, men from the Pegasus grabbed two of the lines and darted off to their respective airlocks. The men of the Acheron, Halstead was relieved to see, all appeared to be conscious and to be doing everything they could to help.

It seemed ages before the last figure on its drifting line was towed or pushed into an airlock. Then the voice from one of those spacesuited figures out there shouted, “Close Number Three!” Number One followed almost at once; but there was an agonizing delay before the signal for Two came. Halstead could not see what was happening; presumably someone was still outside and holding up the rest. But at last all the locks were closed. There was no time to fill them in the normal way; the valves were jerked open by brute force and the chambers flooded with air from the ship.

Aboard the Acheron, Commodore Brennan waited with his remaining ninety men, in the three compartments that were still unsealed. They had formed their groups and were strung in chains of ten behind their leaders. Everything had been planned and rehearsed; the next few seconds would prove whether or not in vain.

Then the ship’s speakers announced, in an almost quietly conversational tone:

“Pegasus to Acheron. We’ve got all your men out of the locks. No casualties. A few hemorrhages. Give us five minutes to get ready for the next batch.”

They lost one man on the last transfer. He panicked and they had to slam the lock shut without him, rather than risk the lives of all the others. It seemed a pity that they could not all have made it, but for the moment everyone was too thankful to worry about that.

There was only one thing still to be done. Commodore Bren-nan, the last man aboard the Acheron, adjusted the timing circuit that would start the drive in thirty seconds. That would give him long enough; even in his clumsy spacesuit he could get out of the open hatch in half that time. It was cutting it fine, but on!y he and his engineering officer knew how narrow the margin was.

He threw the switch and dived for the hatch. He had already reached the Pegasus when the ship he had commanded, still loaded with millions of kilowatt-centuries of energy, came to life for the last time and dwindled silently toward the stars of the Milky Way.

The explosion was easily visible among all the inner planets. It blew to nothingness the last ambitions of the Federation, and the last fears of Earth.

Every evening, as the sun drops down beyond the lonely pyramid of Pico, the shadow of the great mountain reaches out to engulf the metal column that will stand in the Sea of Rains as long as the Sea itself endures. There are five hundred and twenty-seven names on that column, in alphabetical order. No mark distinguishes the men who died for the Federation from those who died for Earth, and perhaps this simple fact is the best proof that they did not die in vain.

The Battle of Pico ended the domination of Earth and marked the coming of age of the planets. Earth was weary after her long saga and the efforts she had put forth to conquer the nearer worlds—those worlds which had now so inexplicably turned against her, as long ago the American colonies had turned against their motherland. In both cases the reasons were similar, and in both the eventual outcomes equally advantageous to mankind.

Had either side won a clearcut victory, it might have been a disaster. The Federation might have been tempted to impose on Earth an agreement which it could never enforce. Earth, on the other hand, might well have crippled its errant children by withdrawing all supplies, thus setting back for centuries the colonization of the planets.

Instead, it had been a stalemate. Each antagonist had learned a sharp and salutary lesson; above all, each had learned to respect the other. And each was now very busy explaining to its citizens exactly what it had been doing in their names…

The last explosion of the war was followed, within a few hours, by political explosions on Earth, Mars and Venus. When the smoke had drifted away, many ambitious personalities had disappeared, at least for the time being, and those in power had one main objective—to re-establish friendly relations, and to erase the memory of an episode which did credit to no one.

The Pegasus incident, cutting across the divisions of war and reminding men of their essential unity, made the task of the statesmen far easier than it might otherwise have been. The Treaty of Phobos was signed in what one historian called an atmosphere of shamefaced conciliation. Agreement was swift, for Earth and Federation each possessed something that the other needed badly.

The superior science of the Federation had given it the secret of the accelerationless drive, as it is now universally but inaccurately called. For its part, Earth was now prepared to share the wealth she had tapped far down within the Moon. The barren crust had been penetrated, and at last the heavy core was yielding up its stubbornly guarded treasures. There was wealth here that would supply all man’s needs for centuries to come.

It was destined, in the years ahead, to transform the solar system and to alter completely the distribution of the human race. Its immediate effect was to make the Moon, long the poor relation of the old and wealthy Earth, into the richest and most important of all the worlds. Within ten years, the Independent Lunar Republic would be dictating F.O.B. terms to Earth and Federation with equal impartiality.

But the future would take care of itself. All that mattered now was that the war was over.

Central City, thought Sadler, had grown since he was here thirty years ago. Any one of these domes could cover the whole seven they had back in the old days. How long would it be, at this rate, before the whole Moon was covered up? He rather hoped it would not be in his time.

The station itself was almost as large as one of the old domes. Where there had been five tracks, there were now thirty. But the design of the monocabs had not altered much, and their speed seemed to be about the same. The vehicle which had brought him from the spaceport might well have been the one that had carried him across the Sea of Rains a quarter of a lifetime ago.