Arthur Clarke - Imperial Earth

Purely by chance, Sirius passed within fewer than a million kilometers of the tiny world. At first, even under the highest power of the ship’s telescope, Mnemosyne was only a minute crescent showing no visible features at all, but as it swiftly grew to a half-moon, patches of light and shade emerged which eventually resolved themselves into craters. It was typical of all the denser, Mercury-type satellites—as opposed to the inner snow-balls like Mimas, Enceladus, and Tethys—but to Duncan it now held a special interest. It was more to him than the last landmark on the road to Earth.

Karl was there, and had been for many weeks, with the joint Titan-Terran Outer Satellite Survey. Indeed, that survey had been in progress as long as Duncan could remember—the surface area of all the moons added up to a surprising number of million square kilometers—and the TTOSS team was doing a thorough job. There had been complaints about the cost, and the critics had subsided only when promised that the survey would be so thorough that it would never be necessary to go back to the outer moons again. Somehow, Duncan doubted that the promise would be kept.

He watched the pale crescent of Mnemosyne wax to full, simultaneously dwindling astern as the ship dropped sunward, and wondered fleetingly if he should send Karl a farewell greeting. But if he did, it would only be interpreted as a taunt.

It took Duncan several days to adjust to the complicated schedule of shipboard life—a schedule dominated by the fact that the dining room (as the lounge adjacent to the cafeteria was grandly called) could seat only one third of the passengers at a time. There were consequently three sittings for each of the three main meals—so for nine hours of every day, at least a hundred people were eating, while two hundred were either thinking about the next meal or grumbling about the last. This made it very difficult for the Purser, who doubled as Entertainment Officer, to organize any shipboard activities. The fact that most of the passengers had no wish to be organized did not help him.

Nevertheless, the day was loosely structured by a series of events, at which a good attendance was guaranteed by sheer boredom. There would be a thirty-minute newscast from Earth at 0800, with a repeat at 1000, and updates in the evening at 1900 and 2100. At the beginning of the voyage, the Earth news would be at least an hour and a half late, but it would become more and more timely as Sirius approached her destination. When she reached her final parking orbit, a thousand kilometers above the Equator, the delay would be effectively zero, and watches could at last be set by the radio time signals. Those passengers who did not realize this were liable to get into a hopeless state of confusion and, even worse, to miss meal sittings.

All types of visual display, including the contents of several million volumes of fiction and nonfiction, as well as most of the musical treasures of mankind, were available in the tiny library; at a squeeze, it could hold ten people. However, there were two movie screenings every evening in the main lounge, selection being made—if the Purser could be believed—in the approved Democratic manner by public ballot. Almost all the great film classics were available, right back to the beginning of the twentieth century. For the first time in his life, Duncan saw Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times , much of the Disney canon, Olivier’s Hamlet , Ray’s Pather Panchali , Kubrick’s Napoleon Bonaparte , Zymanowski’s Moby Dick , and many other old masterpieces that had not even been names to him. But by far the greatest popular success was If This Is Tuesday, This Must Be Mars —a selection from the countless space-travel movies made in the days before space flight was actually achieved. This invariably reduced the audience to helpless hysterics, and it was hard to believe that it had once been banned for in-flight screening because some unimaginative bureaucrat feared that its disasters—such as accidentally arriving at the wrong planet—might alarm nervous passengers. In fact, it had just the opposite effect; they laughed too much to worry.

The big event of the day, however, was the lottery on the ship’s run, simple but ingenious device for redistributing the wealth among the passengers. All that one had to do was to guess how far Sirius had traveled along her heliocentric trajectory during the previous twenty-four hours; any number of guests was permitted, at the cost of one solar each.

At noon, the Captain announced the correct result. The suspense was terrific, as he read out the figures very slowly: “Today’s run has been two—two—seven—five—nine—zero—six—four—point—three kilometers.” (Cheers and moans.) Since everyone knew the ship’s position and acceleration, it required very little mathematics to calculate the first four or five figures, but beyond that the digits were completely arbitrary, so winning was a matter of luck. Although it was rumored that navigating officers had been bribed to trim the last few decimal places by minute adjustments to the thrust, no one had ever been able to prove it.

Another wealth-distributor was a noisy entertainment called “Bingo,” apparently the main surviving relic of a once-flourishing religious order. Duncan attended one session, then decided that there were better ways of wasting time. Yet a surprising percentage of his very talented and intellectually superior companions seemed to enjoy this rather mindless ritual, jumping up and down and shrieking like small children when their numbers were called...

They could not be criticized for this; they needed some such relaxation. For they were the loneliest people in the Solar System; hundreds of millions of kilometers separated them from the rest of mankind. Everybody knew this, but no one ever mentioned it. Yet it would not have taken an astute psychologist to detect countless slightly unusual reactions—even minor symptoms of stress—in the behavior of Sirius ’s passengers and crew.

There was, for example, a tendency to laugh at the feeblest of jokes, and to go into positive convulsions over catch phrases such as “This is the Captain speaking” or “Dining room closes in fifteen minutes.” Most popular of all—at least among the men—was “Any more for Cabin 44.” Why the two middle-aged and rather quiet lady geologists who occupied this cabin had acquired a reputation for ravening insatiability was a mystery that Duncan never solved.

Nor was he particularly interested; his heart still ached for Marissa and he would not seek any other consolation until he reached Earth. Moreover, with the somewhat excessive conscientiousness that was typical of the Makenzies, he was already hard at work by the second day of the voyage.

He had three major projects—one physical and two intellectual. The first, carried out under the hard, cold eye of the ship’s doctor, was to get himself fit for life at one gravity. The second was to learn all that he could about his new home, so that he would not appear too much of a country cousin when he arrived. And the third was to prepare his speech of thanks, or at least to write a fairly detailed outline, which could be revised as necessary during the course of his stay.

The toughening-up process involved a fifteen-minute session, twice a day, in the ship’s centrifuge or on the ‘race track.’ Nobody enjoyed the centrifuge; not even the best background music could alleviate the boredom of being whirled around in a tiny cabin until legs and arms appeared to be made of lead. But the race track was so much fun that it operated right around the clock, and some enthusiasts even tried to get extra time on it.