Arthur Clarke: The Songs of Distant Earth

“What’s that, my dear?”

Now it was Mirissa’s turn to be annoyed, though she concealed her irritation. She did not enjoy being condescended to by someone who was not really very intelligent, though undoubtedly shrewd — or perhaps cunning was the better word. The fact that Mayor Waldron was always making eyes at Brant did not bother Mirissa in the least; it merely amused her, and she could even feel a certain sympathy for the older woman.

“It could be another robot seedship, like the one that brought our ancestor’s gene patterns to Thalassa.”

“But now — so late?”

“Why not? The first seeders could only reach a few percent of light velocity. Earth kept improving them — right up to the time it was destroyed. As the later models were almost ten times faster, the earlier ones were overtaken in a century or so; many of them must still be on the way. Don’t you agree, Brant?”

Mirissa was always careful to bring him into any discussion and, if possible, to make him think he had originated it. She was well aware of his feelings of inferiority and did not wish to add to them.

Sometimes it was rather lonely being the brightest person in Tarna; although she networked with half a dozen of her mental peers on the Three Islands, she seldom met them in the face-to-face encounters that, even after all these millennia, no communications technology could really match.

“It’s an interesting idea,” Brant said. “You could be right.”

Although history was not his strong point, Brant Falconer had a technician’s knowledge of the complex series of events that had led to the colonization of Thalassa. “And what shall we do,” he asked, “if it’s another seedship, and tries to colonize us all over again? Say “Thanks very much, but not today”?”

There were a few nervous little laughs; then Councillor Simmons remarked thoughtfully, “I’m sure we could handle a seedship if we had to. And wouldn’t its robots be intelligent enough to cancel their program when they saw that the job had already been done?”

“Perhaps. But they might think they could do a better one. Anyway, whether it’s a relic from Earth or a later model from one of the colonies, it’s bound to be a robot of some kind.”

There was no need to elaborate; everyone knew the fantastic difficulty and expense of manned interstellar flight. Even though technically possible, it was completely pointless. Robots could do the job a thousand times more cheaply.

“Robot or relic — what are we going to do about it?” one of the villagers demanded.

“It may not be our problem,” the mayor said. “Everyone seems to have assumed that it will head for First Landing, but why should it? After all, North Island is much more likely —“

The mayor had often been proved wrong, but never so swiftly. This time the sound that grew in the sky above Tarna was no distant thunder from the ionosphere but the piercing whistle of a low, fast-flying jet. Everyone rushed out of the council chamber in unseemly haste; only the first few were in time to see the blunt-nosed delta-wing eclipsing the stars as it headed purposefully towards the spot still sacred as the last link with Earth.

Mayor Waldron paused briefly to report to central, then joined the others milling around outside.

“Brant — you can get there first. Take the kite.”

Tarna’s chief mechanical engineer blinked; it was the first time he had ever received so direct an order from the mayor. Then he looked a little abashed.

“A coconut went through the wing a couple of days ago. I’ve not had time to repair it because of that problem with the fishtraps. Anyway, it’s not equipped for night flying.”

The mayor gave him a long, hard look.

“I hope my car’s working,” she said sarcastically.

“Of course,” Brant answered, in a hurt voice. “All fuelled up, and ready to go.”

It was quite unusual for the mayor’s car to go anywhere; one could walk the length of Tarna in twenty minutes, and all local transport of food and equipment was handled by small sandrollers. In seventy years of official service the car had clocked up less than a hundred thousand kilometres, and, barring accidents, should still be going strong for at least a century to come.

The Lassans had experimented cheerfully with most vices; but planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption were not among them. No one could have guessed that the vehicle was older than any of its passengers as it started on the most historic journey it would ever make.

No one heard the first tolling of Earth’s funeral bell — not even the scientists who made the fatal discovery, far underground, in an abandoned Colorado gold mine.

It was a daring experiment, quite inconceivable before the mid-twentieth century. Once the neutrino had been detected, it was quickly realized that mankind had a new window on the universe. Something so penetrating that it passed through a planet as easily as light through a sheet of glass could be used to look into the hearts of suns.

Especially the Sun. Astronomers were confident that they understood the reactions powering the solar furnace, upon which all life on Earth ultimately depended. At the enormous pressures and temperatures at the Sun’s core, hydrogen was fused to helium, in a series of reactions that liberated vast amounts of energy. And, as an incidental by-product, neutrinos.

Finding the trillions of tons of matter in their way no more obstacle than a wisp of smoke, those solar neutrinos raced up from their birthplace at the velocity of light. Just two seconds later they emerged into space, and spread outward across the universe. However many stars and planets they encountered, most of them would still have evaded capture by the insubstantial ghost of ‘solid’ matter when Time itself came to an end.

Eight minutes after they had left the Sun, a tiny fraction of the solar torrent swept through the Earth — and an even smaller fraction was intercepted by the scientists in Colorado. They had buried their equipment more than a kilometre underground so that all the less penetrating radiations would be filtered out and they could trap the rare, genuine messengers from the heart of the Sun. By counting the captured neutrinos, they hoped to study in detail conditions at a spot that, as any philosopher could easily prove, was forever barred from human knowledge or observation.

The experiment worked; solar neutrinos were detected. But — there were far too few of them. There should have been three or four times as many as the massive instrumentation had succeeded in capturing.

Clearly, something was wrong, and during the 1970s the Case of the Missing Neutrinos escalated to a major scientific scandal. Equipment was checked and rechecked, theories were overhauled, and the experiment rerun scores of times — always with the same baffling result.

By the end of the twentieth century, the astrophysicists had been forced to accept a disturbing conclusion — though as yet, no one realized its full implications.

There was nothing wrong with the theory, or with the equipment. The trouble lay inside the Sun.

The first secret meeting in the history of the International Astronomical Union took place in 2008 at Aspen, Colorado — not far from the scene of the original experiment, which had now been repeated in a dozen countries. A week later IAU Special Bulletin No. 55/08, bearing the deliberately low-key title ‘Some Notes on Solar Reactions’, was in the hands of every government on Earth.

One might have thought that as the news slowly leaked out, the announcement of the End of the World would have produced a certain amount of panic. In fact, the general reaction was a stunned silence — then a shrug of the shoulders and the resumption of normal, everyday business.