Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

None of them were very hungry anyhow. The strange conditions of weightlessness ensured that. He did miss hot food, though, which he had not enjoyed since leaving the Station.

Musa had already begun his steady, determined working of the comms system. “Stereo one, Stereo one …” Of course there was no reply, no matter how many hours he spent at the task. But what choice was there but to keep trying?

Sable meanwhile was bustling around “upstairs” in the living compartment. She had discovered the components of an old ham radio rig, which the Station astronauts had once used to contact amateurs across the planet, especially schoolchildren. Public interest in the Station had long waned, and the Station’s aging gear had been disassembled, boxed up and packed into the Soyuz for destruction. Now Sable was trying to make it work. Perhaps they would pick up signals, or even be able to send broadcasts, on wavelengths the conventional gear couldn’t handle. Musa, almost routinely, had grumbled when she wanted to hook the gear up to the spacecraft’s power supply. Another blazing argument had ensued, but on this occasion Kolya had intervened. “It’s a long shot, but it might work. What harm can it do? …”

Kolya leaned forward and pressed the valve of the water tank. A globule a few centimeters across emerged and headed toward his face. Aware of Musa watching greedily—there would be a row if he wasted a single drop—Kolya opened his mouth wide. The water broke on his tongue, and he held it in his mouth, savoring its freshness, before swallowing it. Of all the rationing regimes Musa had imposed, the water was the hardest to bear. The Soyuz had none of the Station’s recycling facilities; designed for short-duration hops from Earth to orbit and back, it was equipped only with a small water tank. But Sable had characteristically argued. “Even when you’re in a desert you don’t ration your water. You drink it down when you need it. There’s no other way …” Right or wrong, the water was running out anyhow.

He dug out a tooth cleaner from a compartment on the wall. This was a bit of muslin impregnated with highly flavored toothpaste that you slipped over your finger and worked around your mouth. Kolya used this carefully, sucking every last bit of minty flavor out of the scrap of cloth; somehow the taste seemed to assuage his thirst a little.

And that was his day begun. He couldn’t wash, for they had long since run out of the soft flannels that you usually used to wash your body and your hair. No doubt they all smelled as bad as the Cossack jockstraps upstairs. But at least they were all the same.

As Musa continued to call plaintively into the dark, Kolya turned to his own self-appointed program of work, which was a study of the Earth.

In his long hours in space, Kolya had always derived great pleasure from watching Earth. The Station, like Soyuz now, orbited only a few hundred kilometers above the surface, so to him the planet had none of the sense of isolation and fragility that the travelers to Mars reported, when they looked back at the blue island where they had been born. To Kolya Earth was huge—and all but empty.

Half of every orbit took him over the great wastes of the Pacific, a sky-blue expanse broken only by the wakes of occasional ships, a dusting of islands. Even land masses were mostly empty of people: across Asia and north Africa the deserts stretched, unmarked save by the smoke of an occasional campfire. Human habitation was confined largely to the coasts, or the river valleys. But even cities were difficult to make out from orbit; when he searched for Moscow or London, Paris or New York, he might make out only a bubbling grayness, fading into the green-brown of the countryside beyond.

It was not the fragility of the Earth that impressed him, then, but its immensity; and it was not the grandeur of man’s conquest of the planet that was so obvious, but the smallness of human tenure, even in the mid-twenty-first century.

But all that was before the metamorphosis.

He clung to what was familiar. The geometry of Earth seen from low orbit was unchanged: every ninety minutes he could watch the sun rise with startling swiftness through the layers of atmosphere, the light brightening from crimson, orange, to yellow, in smoothly curving bands. And the shapes and positions of the continents, the deserts, the distribution of the mountains in their ranges—all those were much as they had been.

But beneath those sunrises, within the frames of the continents, there were many peculiarities.

There had been shifts in the patterns of the ice sheets. Over the Himalayas, he could clearly make out glaciers pouring off the sides of the mountains, clawing their way toward the lower ground. The Sahara, meanwhile, had not remained a desert, not entirely. Here and there new oases had sprung up, patches of green that could be fifty kilometers on a side, bordered by straight-line segments. Similarly he observed bits of desert somehow stuck into the green expanses of the South American rain forests. The world was suddenly a clumsy patchwork. But those odd patches of green in the desert were already fading, he observed as the days wore on, the greenery browning, visibly dying.

If the effects of the changes on the physical world were relatively subtle, the impact on humanity was dramatic.

By day the cities and farms had always been hard to make out from orbit. But now even the great roadways that had once spanned the red center of Australia had vanished. Britain, its shape easily recognizable, seemed to be covered from the Scottish borders to the Channel coast by a thick blanket of forest: Kolya recognized the Thames, but it was much broader than he remembered, and there was no sign of London. Once Kolya made out a bright orange-yellow glow in the middle of the North Sea. It appeared to be a burning oil rig. A great black plume of smoke rose from it and feathered out over Western Europe. As their radio footprint crossed over, Musa tried desperately to make radio contact. But there was no reply, and no sign of ships or planes coming to the aid of the stricken rig.

And so on. If the day side of the world was transformed, the night side was heartbreaking. The city lights, once glowing necklaces around the necks of the continents, were gone, all extinguished.

Everywhere he looked it was the same—save for a few, a very few exceptions. In the middle of a desert, he would make out the spark of a campfire, though he had learned he could be fooled by lightning-struck blazes. There was a denser scattering of fires in Central Asia, near the Mongolian border. There even seemed to be a city in what had been Iraq, but it was small and isolated, and at night its glow was flickering, as if from fires and lanterns, not electricity. Sable claimed she saw some signs of habitation at the site of Chicago. Once the Soyuz crew was excited by the glimpse of an extensive glow along the western seaboard of the continental United States. But that turned out to be a tectonic fault, rivers of lava pouring from a ruptured ground, soon obscured by great billows of ash and dust.

To a first approximation, humanity was gone: that was all you could say about it. And as for Kolya’s own family, Nadia and the boys, Moscow had vanished; Russia was empty.

The crew cautiously discussed what could have caused this tremendous metamorphosis. Perhaps some great war could have left the world depopulated; that seemed the most likely hypothesis. But if so, surely they would have heard the military commands, seen the sparks of ICBMs rising, heard desolate cries for help—seen cities burn, God help them. And what possible force could pick up blocks of ice or tracts of green, dozens of kilometers on a side, and plant them so out of place?