Arthur Clarke: The Songs of Distant Earth

“Why should they bother? They must have the old maps — they’ll know that Thalassa is almost all ocean. It wouldn’t make any sense to come here.”

“Scientific curiosity?” Mirissa suggested. “To see what’s happened to us? I always said we should repair the communications link…”

This was an old dispute, which was revived every few decades. One day, most people agreed, Thalassa really should rebuild the big dish on East Island, destroyed when Krakan erupted four hundred years ago. But meanwhile there was so much that was more important — or simply more amusing.

“Building a starship’s an enormous project,” Brant said thoughtfully. “I don’t believe that any colony would do it — unless it had to. Like Earth..”

His voice trailed off into silence. After all these centuries, that was still a hard name to say.

As one person, they turned towards the east, where the swift equatorial night was advancing across the sea.

A few of the brighter stars had already emerged, and just climbing above the palm trees was the unmistakable, compact little group of the Triangle. Its three stars were of almost equal magnitude — but a far more brilliant intruder had once shone, for a few weeks, near the southern tip of the constellation.

Its now-shrunken husk was still visible, in a telescope of moderate power. But no instrument could show the orbiting cinder that had been the planet Earth.

More than a thousand years later, a great historian had called the period 1901–2000 ‘the Century when everything happened’. He added that the people of the time would have agreed with him — but for entirely the wrong reasons.

They would have pointed, often with justified pride, to the era’s scientific achievements — the conquest of the air, the release of atomic energy, the discovery of the basic principles of life, the electronics and communications revolution, the beginnings of artificial intelligence — and most spectacular of all, the exploration of the solar system and the first landing on the Moon. But as the historian pointed out, with the 20/20 accuracy of hindsight, not one in a thousand would even have heard of the discovery that transcended all these events by threatening to make them utterly irrelevant.

It seemed as harmless, and as far from human affairs, as the fogged photographic plate in Becquerel’s laboratory that led, in only fifty years, to the fireball above Hiroshima. Indeed, it was a by-product of that same research, and began in equal innocence.

Nature is a very strict accountant, and always balances her books. So physicists were extremely puzzled when they discovered certain nuclear reactions in which, after all the fragments were added up, something seemed to be missing on one side of the equation.

Like a bookkeeper hastily replenishing the petty cash to keep one jump ahead of the auditors, the physicists were forced to invent a new particle. And, to account for the discrepancy, it had to be a most peculiar one — with neither mass nor charge, and so fantastically penetrating that it could pass, without noticeable inconvenience, through a wall of lead billions of kilometres thick.

This phantom was given the nickname ‘neutrino’ — neutron plus bambino. There seemed no hope of ever detecting so elusive an entity; but in 1956, by heroic feats of instrumentation, the physicists had caught the first few specimens. It was also a triumph for the theoreticians, who now found their unlikely equations verified.

The world as a whole neither knew nor cared; but the countdown to doomsday had begun.

Tarna’s local network was never more than ninety-five per cent operational — but on the other hand never less than eighty-five per cent of it was working at any one time. Like most of the equipment on Thalassa, it had been designed by long-dead geniuses so that catastrophic breakdowns were virtually impossible. Even if many components failed, the system would still continue to function reasonably well until someone was sufficiently exasperated to make repairs.

The engineers called this ‘graceful degradation’ — a phrase that, some cynics had declared, rather accurately described the Lassan way of life.

According to the central computer, the network was now hovering around its normal ninety-five per cent serviceability, and Mayor Waldron would gladly have settled for less. Most of the village had called her during the past half-hour, and at least fifty adults and children were milling round in the council chamber — which was more than it could comfortably hold, let alone seat. The quorum for an ordinary meeting was twelve, and it sometimes took draconian measures to collect even that number of warm bodies in one place. The rest of Tarna’s five hundred and sixty inhabitants preferred to watch — and vote, if they felt sufficiently interested — in the comfort of their own homes.

There had also been two calls from the provincial governor, one from the president’s office, and one from one North Island news service, all making the same completely unnecessary request. Each had received the same short answer: Of course we’ll tell you if anything happens… and thanks for your interest.

Mayor Waldron did not like excitement, and her moderately successful career as a local administrator had been based on avoiding it. Sometimes, of course, that was impossible; her veto would hardly have deflected the hurricane of ‘09, which — until today — had been the century’s most notable event.

“Quiet, everybody!” she cried. “Reena — leave those shells alone — someone went to a lot of trouble arranging them! Time you were in bed, anyway! Billy — off the table! Now!”

The surprising speed with which order was restored showed that, for once, the villagers were anxious to hear what their mayor had to say. She switched off the insistent beeping of her wrist-phone and routed the call to the message centre.

“Frankly, I don’t know much more than you do — and it’s not likely we’ll get any more information for several hours. But it certainly was some kind of spacecraft, and it had already reentered — I suppose I should say entered — when it passed over us. Since there’s nowhere else for it to go on Thalassa, presumably it will come back to the Three Islands sooner or later. That might take hours if it’s going right round the planet.”

“Any attempt at radio contact?” somebody asked.

“Yes, but no luck so far.”

“Should we even try?” an anxious voice said.

A brief hush fell upon the whole assembly; then Councillor Simmons, Mayor Waldron’s chief gadfly, gave a snort of disgust.

“That’s ridiculous. Whatever we do, they can find us in about ten minutes. Anyway, they probably know exactly where we are.”

“I agree completely with the councillor,” Mayor Waldron said, relishing this unusual opportunity. “Any colony ship will certainly have maps of Thalassa. They may be a thousand years old — but they’ll show First Landing.”

“But suppose — just suppose — that they are aliens?”

The mayor sighed; she thought that thesis had died through sheer exhaustion, centuries ago.

“There are no aliens,” she said firmly. “At least, none intelligent enough to go starfaring. Of course, we can never be one hundred per cent certain — but Earth searched for a thousand years with every conceivable instrument.”

“There’s another possibility,” said Mirissa, who was standing with Brant and Kumar near the back of the chamber. Every head turned towards her, but Brant looked slightly annoyed. Despite his love for Mirissa, there were times when he wished that she was not quite so well-informed, and that her family had not been in charge of the Archives for the last five generations.