Arthur Clarke - The Songs of Distant Earth

A full-scale hibership could indeed be built to reach a tenth of the speed of light. It would require about a million tons of somewhat exotic elements as propellant; difficult, but not impossible.

But in order to cancel that velocity at the end of the voyage, the ship must start not with a million — but a preposterous million, million tons of propellant. This, of course, was so completely out of the question that no one had given the matter any serious thought for centuries.

And then, by one of history’s greatest ironies, Mankind was given the keys to the Universe — and barely a century in which to use them.

How glad I am, thought Moses Kaldor, that I never succumbed to that temptation — the seductive lure that art and technology had first given to mankind more than a thousand years ago. Had I wished, I could have brought Evelyn’s electronic ghost with me into exile, trapped in a few gigabytes of programming. She could have appeared before me, in any one of the backgrounds we both loved, and carried on a conversation so utterly convincing that a stranger could never have guessed that no one — nothing — was really there.

But I would have known, after five or ten minutes unless I deluded myself by a deliberate act of will. And that I could never do. Though I am still not sure why my instincts revolt against it, I always refused to accept the false solace of a dialogue with the dead. I do not even possess, now, a simple recording of her voice.

It is far better this way, to watch her moving in silence, in the little garden of our last home, knowing that this is no illusion of the image-makers but that it really did happen, two hundred years ago on Earth.

And the only voice will be mine, here and now, speaking to the memory that still exists in my own human, living brain.

Private recording One. Alpha scrambler. Autoerase program.

You were right, Evelyn, and I was wrong. Even though I am the oldest man on the ship, it seems that I can still be useful.

When I awoke, Captain Bey was standing beside me. I felt flattered — as soon as I was able to feel anything.

“Well, Captain,” I said, “this is quite a surprise. I half expected you to dump me in space as unnecessary mass.”

He laughed and answered. “It could still happen, Moses; the voyage isn’t over yet. But we certainly need you now. The Mission planners were wiser than you gave them credit.”

“They listed me on the ship’s manifest as quote Ambassador-Counsellor unquote. In which capacity am I required?”

“Probably both. And perhaps in your even better-known role as — ”

“Don’t hesitate if you wanted to say crusader, even though I never liked the word and never regarded myself as a leader of any movement. I only tried to make people think for themselves — I never wanted anyone to follow me blindly. History has seen too many leaders.”

“Yes, but not all have been bad ones. Consider your namesake.”

“Much overrated, though I can understand if you admire him. After all, you, too, have the task of leading homeless tribes into a promised land. I assume that some slight problem has arisen.”

The captain smiled and answered. “I’m happy to see that you’re fully alert. At this stage, there’s not even a problem, and there’s no reason why there should be. But a situation has arisen that no one expected, and you’re our official diplomat. You have the one skill we never thought we’d need.”

I can tell you, Evelyn, that gave me a shock. Captain Bey must have read my mind very accurately when he saw my jaw drop.

“Oh,” he said quickly, “we haven’t run into aliens! But it turns out that the human colony on Thalassa wasn’t destroyed as we’d imagined. In fact, it’s doing very well.”

That, of course, was another surprise, though quite a pleasant one. Thalassa — the Sea, the Sea! — was a world I had never expected to set eyes upon. When I awoke, it should have been light-years behind and centuries ago.

“What are the people like? Have you made contact with them?”

“Not yet; that’s your job. You know better than anyone else the mistakes that were made in the past. We don’t want to repeat them here. Now, if you’re ready to come up to the bridge, I’ll give you a bird’s-eye view of our long-lost cousins.”

That was a week ago, Evelyn; how pleasant it is to have no time pressures after decades of unbreakable — and all too literal — deadlines! Now we know as much about the Thalassans as we can hope to do without actually meeting them face-to-face. And this we shall do tonight.

We have chosen common ground to show that we recognize our kinship. The site of the first landing is clearly visible and has been well kept, like a park — possibly a shrine. That’s a very good sign: I only hope that our landing there won’t be taken as sacrilege. Perhaps it will confirm that we are gods, which should make it easier for us. If the Thalassans have invented gods — that’s one thing I want to find out.

I am beginning to live again, my darling. Yes, yes — you were wiser than I, the so-called philosopher! No man has a right to die while he can still help his fellows. It was selfish of me to have wished otherwise… to have hoped to lie forever beside you, in the spot we had chosen, so long ago, so far away… Now I can even accept the fact that you are scattered across the solar system, with all else that I ever loved on Earth.

But now there is work to be done; and while I talk to your memory, you are still alive.

Of all the psychological hammer blows that the scientists of the twentieth century had to endure, perhaps the most devastating — and unexpected — was the discovery that nothing was more crowded than ‘empty’ space.

The old Aristotelian doctrine that Nature abhorred a vacuum was perfectly true. Even when every atom of seemingly solid matter was removed from a given volume, what remained was a seething inferno of energies of an intensity and scale unimaginable to the human mind. By comparison, even the most condensed form of matter — the hundred-million-tons-to-the-cubic-centimetre of a neutron star — was an impalpable ghost, a barely perceptible perturbation in the inconceivably dense, yet foamlike structure of ‘superspace.”

That there was much more to space than naive intuition suggested was first revealed by the classic work of Lamb and Rutherford in 1947. Studying the simplest of elements — the hydrogen atom — they discovered that something very odd happened when the solitary electron orbited the nucleus. Far from travelling in a smooth curve, it behaved as if being continually buffeted by incessant waves on a sub-submicroscopic scale. Hard though it was to grasp the concept, there were fluctuations in the vacuum itself.

Since the time of the Greeks, philosophers had been divided into two schools — those who believed that the operations of Nature flowed smoothly and those who argued that this was an illusion; everything really happened in discrete jumps or jerks too small to be perceptible in everyday life. The establishment of the atomic theory was a triumph for the second school of thought; and when Planck’s Quantum Theory demonstrated that even light and energy came in little packets, not continuous streams, the argument finally ended.

In the ultimate analysis, the world of Nature was granular — discontinuous. Even if, to the naked human eye, a waterfall and a shower of bricks appeared very different, they were really much the same. The tiny ‘bricks’ of H2O were too small to be visible to the unaided senses, but they could be easily discerned by the instruments of the physicists.