Arthur Clarke - Imperial Earth

The sun was sinking, driven down into the west with unnatural speed by the shuttle’s velocity. It clung to the horizon for a few seconds, then winked out. For perhaps a minute longer the forest was still visible; then it faded into obscurity.

But not into darkness. As if by magic, faint lines of light had appeared on the land below—spiders’ webs of luminosity, stretching as far as the eye could see. Sometimes three or four lines would meet at a single glowing knot. There were also isolated islands of phosphorescence, apparently unconnected with the main network. Here was further proof of Man’s existence; that great forest was a much busier place than it appeared to be by daylight. Yet Duncan could to help comparing this modest display with pictures he had seen from the early Atomic Age, when millions of square kilometers blazed at night with such brilliance that men could no longer see the stars.

He suddenly became aware of a compact constellation of flashing lights, moving independently of the glimmering landscape far below. For a moment, he was baffled; then he realized that he was watching some great airship, cruising not much faster than a cloud with its cargo of freight or passengers. This was one experience Titan could not provide. He determined to enjoy it as soon as the opportunity arose.

And there was a city—quite a big one, at least a hundred thousand people. The shuttle was now so low that he could make out blocks of buildings, roads, parks, and a stadium blazing with light, presumably the scene of some sporting event. The city fell astern, and a few minutes later everything was lost in a gray mist, lit by occasional flashes of lightning, not very impressive by the standards of Titan. Inside the cabin, Duncan could hear nothing of the storm through which they were now flying, but the vibration of the engines had taken on a new note and he could sense that the ship was dropping rapidly. Nevertheless, he was taken completely by surprise when there was a sudden surge of weight, the slightest of jolts—and there on the screen was a sea of wet concrete, a confusion of lights, and half a dozen buses and service vehicles scurrying around in the driving rain.

After thirty years, Duncan Makenzie had returned to the world where he was born, but which he had never seen...

“Sorry about the weather,” said George Washington. “We used to have local climate control, but gave it up after an Independence Day parade was blocked by snow.”

Duncan laughed dutifully, though he was not quite sure if he was supposed to believe this.

“I don’t mind,” he said. “It’s all new to me. I’ve never seen rain before.”

That was not the literal truth, but it was near enough. He had often driven through ammonia gales and could still remember the poisonous cascades streaming down the windows only a few centimeters before his eyes. But this was harmless—no, beneficent —water, the source of life both on Earth and on Titan. If he opened the door now he would merely get wet; he would not die horribly. But the instincts of a lifetime were hard to overcome, and he knew that it would require a real effort of will to leave the protection of the limousine.

And it was a genuine limousine—another first for Duncan. Never before had he traveled in such sybaritic comfort, with a communications console on one side and a well-stocked bar on the other. Washington saw his admiring gaze and commented: “Impressive, isn’t it? They don’t make them any more. This was President Bernstein’s favorite car.”

Duncan was not too good on American presidents—after all, there had been by now ninety-five of them—but he had an approximate idea of Bernstein’s date. He performed a quick calculation, didn’t believe the result, and repeated it.

“That means—it’s more than a hundred and fifty years old!”

“ And it’s probably good for another hundred and fifty. Of course, the upholstery—real leather, notice—is replaced every twenty years or so. If these seats could talk, they could tell some secrets. As a matter of fact, they often did—by you have my personal assurance that it’s now been thoroughly debugged.”

“Debugged? Oh, I know what you mean. Anyway, I don’t have any secrets.”

“Then we’ll soon provide you with some; that’s our chief local industry.”

As the beautiful old car cruised in almost perfect silence under the guidance of its automatic controls, Duncan tried to see something of the terrain through which he was passing. The spaceport was fifty kilometers from the city—no one had yet invented a noiseless rocket—and the four-lane highway bore a surprising amount of traffic. Duncan could count at least twenty vehicles of various types, and even though they were all moving in the same direction, the spectacle was somewhat alarming.

“I hope all those other cars are on automatic,” he said anxiously.

Washington looked a little shocked. “Of course,” he said. “It’s been a criminal offense for—oh—at least a hundred years to drive manually on a public highway. Though we still have occasional psychopaths who kill themselves and other people.”

That was an interesting admission; Earth had not solved all its problems. One of the greatest dangers to the Technological Society was the unpredictable madman who tried to express his frustrations—consciously or otherwise—by sabotage. There had been hideous instances of this in the past. The destruction of the Gondwana reactor in the early twenty-first century was perhaps the best-known example. Since Titan was even more vulnerable than Earth in this respect, Duncan would have liked to discuss the matter further; but to do so within an hour of his arrival would hardly be tactful.

He was quite sure that if he did commit such a faux pas, his host would neatly divert the conversation without causing him the slightest embarrassment. During the short time they had been acquainted, Duncan had decided that George Washington was a very polished diplomat, with the self-assurance that comes only with a family tree whose roots are several hundred years deep. Yet it would have been hard to imagine anyone less like his distinguished namesake, for this George Washington was a short, bald, and rather plump brown man, very elegantly dressed and bejeweled. The baldness and plumpness were both rather surprising, since they could be so easily corrected. On the other hand, they did provide a mark of distinction, and perhaps that was the idea. But this was another sensitive subject that Duncan would be well advised to avoid—at least until he knew his host much better. And perhaps not even then.

The car was now passing over a slender bridge spanning a wide and rather dirty river. The spectacle of so much genuine water was impressive, but it looked very cold and dismal on this dreary night.

“The Potomac,” said Washington. “But wait until you see it on a sunny day, after that silt’s gone downstream. Then it’s blue and sparkling, and you’d never guess it took two hundred years of hard work to get it that way. And that’s Watergate—not the original, of course; that was pulled down around 2000, though the Democrats wanted to make it a national monument. And the Kennedy Center—that is the original, more or less. Every fifty years some architect tries to salvage it, but now it’s been given up as a bad job.”

So this was Washington, still basking (though not very effectively, on a night like this) in its former glories. Duncan had read that the physical appearance of the city had changed very little in three hundred years, and he could well believe it. Most of the old government and public buildings had been carefully preserved. The result, said the critics, was the largest inhabited museum in the world.