Arthur Clarke - Time’s Eye

These discussions never went very far. Perhaps they all lacked the imagination to deal with what they saw. Or perhaps they feared that by talking about it they would somehow make it real.

Kolya tried to be analytical. The Soyuz ’s external sensor pod was functioning well. Designed to photograph the Station’s exterior, the pod had a virtually unlimited electronic capacity for storing images. It had been easy for Kolya to reconfigure the pod so that it pointed downward at the Earth. The Soyuz ’s orbit, a shadow of the vanished Station’s, did not cover the whole planet, but it did loop far from the equator, and as the Earth turned beneath them so new segments of the planet were brought into the cameras’ view. Kolya would be able to create a photographic record from orbit of the state of Earth, covering a great swath to north and south.

Patiently, as the lonely Soyuz circled, Kolya tried to put aside preconceptions, to control his emotions and his fears, and simply to record what he saw, what was there. But it was strange to think that somewhere in the pod’s vast electronic memory were stored the images of the Station they had taken just after separation—images of a Station now somehow vanished, its loss a grace note in the unfolding symphony of strangeness around them.

Sable demanded to know what was the point of this patient recording. Her ham radio project, by comparison, was aimed at establishing communications that could enable them to survive; what use were all these images? Kolya didn’t feel the need to justify himself. There was surely nobody else in a position to do it—and Earth, he felt, deserved a witness to its metamorphosis.

And besides, as far as he knew, his wife and boys were gone. If that were true, then what was the point of anything they did?

The climate seemed restless: great low pressure systems prowled the oceans, and pushed their way toward the land, spinning off huge electrical storms. Seen from space the storms were wonders, with lightning flickering and branching between the clouds, releasing chain reactions that could span a continent. And at the equator clouds stacked up in great heaps that seemed to be straining toward him, and sometimes he imagined the Soyuz might plunge into those thunderheads. Perhaps the sea and the air had been as churned up as the land. As the days wore by the seeing slowly worsened. But, oddly, the increasing obscurity made him feel better about his situation—as if he was a child, able to believe that the badness had gone away if he couldn’t see it.

When it got too hard to bear Kolya would turn to his lemon tree. This tree, bonsai small, had been the subject of one of his experiments on the Station. After the first day in the Soyuz he had dug it out of its packaging and now kept it in the little space under his seat. One day, aboard great liners sailing between the worlds, people would have grown fruit in space, and Kolya might have been remembered as a pioneer in a new way of cultivating life beyond the Earth itself. Those possibilities were all gone now, it seemed, but the little tree remained. He would hold it up to the sunlight that streamed in through the windows, and sprinkle precious water from his mouth onto its small leaves. If he rubbed the leaves between his fingers, he could smell their tang, and he was reminded of home.

The strangeness of the transformed world beneath its pond of air contrasted with the cozy kitchen-like familiarity of the Soyuz , so that it was as if what they saw beyond the windows was all a light show, not real at all.

About midday on that tenth day Sable stuck her head, upside down, out of the hatch to the living compartment. “Unless you two have another appointment,” she said, “I think we need to talk.”

The others huddled in their couches, under thin silvered survival blankets, avoiding each other’s eyes. Sable twisted into her place.

“We’re running out,” Sable said bluntly. “We’re running out of food, and water, and air and wet wipes, and I’m out of tampons.”

Musa said, “But the situation on the ground has not normalized—”

“Oh, come on, Musa,” Sable snapped. “Isn’t it obvious that the situation never is going to normalize ? Whatever has happened to the Earth—well, it looks as if it’s stuck that way. And we are stuck with it.”

“We can’t land,” Kolya said quietly. “We have no ground support.”

“Technically,” Musa said, “we could handle the reentry ourselves. The Soyuz ’s automated systems—”

“Yeah,” Sable said, “this is the Little Spaceship That Could, right?”

“There will be no retrieval,” Kolya insisted. “No helicopters, no medics. We have all been in space for three months, plus ten unexpected days. We will be as weak as kittens. We may not even be able to get out of the descent compartment.”

“Then,” Musa growled, “we must ensure we land somewhere close to people—any people—and throw ourselves on their mercy.”

“It’s not a good prospect,” Sable said, “but what choice do we have? To stay on orbit? Is that what you want, Kolya? To sit up here taking pictures until your tongue is stuck to the roof of your mouth?”

Kolya said, “It might be a better end than whatever awaits us down there.” At least he was in a familiar environment, here in this failing Soyuz. He had literally no idea what might await them on the ground, and he wasn’t sure if he had the courage to face it.

Musa reached over with his bearlike hand and pressed Kolya’s knee. “Nothing in our past—our training, our tradition—has prepared us for an experience like this. But we are Russians. And if we are the last Russians of all, as we may be, then we must live, or die, with suitable honor.”

Sable had the good sense to keep her mouth shut.

Kolya, reluctantly, nodded. “So we land.”

“Thank God for that,” Sable said. “Now, the question is—where?”

The Soyuz was designed to come down on land—happily, Kolya realized, for surely an ocean landing, as the Americans had once used, would have been the death of them without support.

“We can decide where to begin the reentry,” Musa said. “But after that we are in the hands of the automatic sequence; once we are dangling from our parachute, we will have little control over our fate. We don’t even have a weather forecast—the wind could drag us hundreds of kilometers. We need the room for a messy landing. That means we have to land in Central Asia, just as our designers intended.”

He seemed to have expected an argument from Sable over that, but she shrugged. “That’s not necessarily a bad idea. There are signs of people in Central Asia—nothing modern, but human habitation, quite a concentration—all those campfires we saw. We need to find people, and that’s as good a place as any to look.” This seemed logical, but Kolya saw a puzzling hardness in the set of her mouth—as if she was calculating, already thinking ahead to the situation beyond the landing.

Musa clapped his hands. “Good. That’s settled. There is no reason to hesitate. Now we must prepare the ship—”

A buzzer sounded from the living compartment.

“Shit,” said Sable. “That’s my ham radio rig.” With a single movement she launched herself up through the hatchway.

The simple detector Sable had rigged up had actually detected two signals. One was a steady pulse, strong but apparently automated, coming out of a site somewhere in the Middle East. The other, though, was a human voice, scratchy and faint.

“ … Othic. This is Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic, USASF and UN, at Jamrud Fort in Pakistan, broadcasting to any station. Please respond. I am Chief Warrant Officer Casey Othic …”