Arthur Clarke - Imperial Earth

“Thank you,” said Duncan. “That’s all I wanted to know.”

The van Hyatts, when he introduced himself to them a little later, were able to fill in a few more details. They were a friendly but rather highly strung couple in late middle age, which was itself some reassurance. Calindy would hardly dump them in the heart of a desert with one canteen of water, or set them climbing Mount Everest. Duncan felt reasonably confident that he could handle whatever was in store for them.

“We’ve been instructed,” said Bill van Hyatt, “to wear old clothes and sturdy boots, and to carry raincoats. It also says here, ‘Hard hats will be provided when necessary.’ What on Earth is a hard hat?”

The van Hyatts, Duncan decided, had led somewhat sheltered lives.

“A hard hat,” he explained, “is a protective helmet of metal or plastic. Miners and construction workers have to wear them.”

“That sounds dangerous,” said Millie van Hyatt, with obvious relish.

“It sounds like cave-exploring to me. I hate caves.”

“Then Enigma won’t send you into them. They have your profile, don’t they?”

“Yes, but sometimes they decide that what you don’t like may be good for you. Shock treatment. Remember what happened to the Mulligans.”

Duncan never did discover what happened to the Mulligans, as he thought it best not to intervene in what looked to be escalating into a family quarrel. He made hasty arrangements for a rendezvous at Washington airport next Thursday, signed off, and then sat wondering if her had done the right thing.

It was quite some time before he was suddenly struck by a curious omission on Calindy’s part—one that both surprised and saddened him.

She had never asked about Karl.

Only an expert on the history of aeronautics could have dated the vehicle that stood glistening in the late-afternoon light. Like sailing ships, though in less than a tenth of the time, aircraft had reached their technological plateau. Improvements in detail would continue indefinitely, but the era of revolutionary change was long past.

Bill van Hyatt was convinced that this flying machine was at least a hundred years old. “It’s powered by rubber bands,” he insisted. “When we get inside, there’ll be a big windlass and we’ll all have to walk round and round, winding it up.”

“Thank you, Mr. van Hyatt,” said the Enigma representative, who had met them at Washington airport. “That’s a very interesting idea. We’ll bear it in mind.”

There were twenty clients in the party, and they all seemed a little tense and expectant. The only person who was in complete control—in more ways than one—was the man from Enigma. He was a tough, self-assured character (“Just call me Boss—you may think of something else later”); Duncan would have guessed his age at about fifty. They never discovered his real name, but he had that indefinable air of authority that comes only from years of command; van Hyatt advanced the plausible theory that he was a spaceship captain, grounded for some technical misdemeanor. However, he showed no signs of concealing any secret disgrace.

Boss’s first order to his customers was completely unexpected, but set the tone for the whole enterprise.

“I must ask you,” he said, “to hand over all watches, radios, and communications devices. You won’t need them until you get home.”

He held up an admonitory hand at the chorus of protests.

“There’s a good reason for this—and for any other peculiar requests I may make. Remember, this whole program has been worked out for your benefit. If you won’t cooperate, you’re only cheating yourselves. Cameras and recorders—yes, of course. Use them as much as you like.”

There was a general sigh of relief at this. Duncan had noticed that most of his companions were festooned with equipment designed to capture every aspect of their experience. A couple were obviously “tapeworms,” those particular addicts who went through life accompanied by voice-actuated recorders, so that nothing they said—or heard—was ever lost. Unless they could do this, Duncan had been told, they did not believe that they had really and truly lived...

Such a backward-looking obsession was typically Terran. Duncan could not imagine anyone on his world trying to encapsulate his whole life so that whenever he wished he could recall any moment of the past. On Titan, it was the future that mattered.

As he walked to the aircraft, carrying his scanty baggage (toilet necessities, a change of underwear, raincoat), Duncan decided that van Hyatt’s guess at its age was not too far out. An obvious vertical-lift fusion jet, it probably dated from the turn of the century, and looked as if it had been built to last forever. He guessed that it was designed to operate in the five-thousand-klick range, which meant that it could reach anywhere on Earth in three or four hours. Now he began to understand why all watches had been confiscated; if the flight lasted any length of time, it would be almost impossible to estimate how far they had traveled.

Though the jet was a small one, the score of passengers barely half filled it, and quickly segregated themselves into little groups. Duncan, with some skillful seatsmanship, managed to get away from the van Hyatts. He was beginning to suspect that he would see—or certainly hear—more than he wanted of them before the adventure was over.

He snuggled down into the luxurious, though slightly worn, upholstery and tried his luck with the video screen. As he had expected, there was no external view, just continuous loops of canned scenery. And the global viddy channels were all blank. There would be no clues here...

There was, however, a bulky package of literature thoughtfully provided by Enigma, and he settled down to read this. It described, in tantalizingly vague detail, the types of service provided by the organization. As far as Duncan could judge, Enigma seemed to combine many of the functions of a travel agency, psychiatrist, nursemaid, procurer, baby-sitter, father confessor, educator, and theatrical impresario. He could understand how Calindy had been attracted to such an enterprise, and was sure that she was very good at her job.

There was a brief announcement from Boss, who had disappeared into the crew quarters.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Please prepare for takeoff. Our flight time will be between one hour and one day, and we shall not be going beyond the orbit of the Moon. Refreshments will be available shortly for those who need them. Thank you.”

There was scarcely any change of sound level in the cabin as the jet lifted and began to climb like an elevator. Presently Duncan felt a surge of forward acceleration, but by this time he had already lost all sense of direction, despite a deliberate attempt to monitor his inertial-guidance system. There was no way of telling whether they were flying north, south, east or west.

He continued to browse through the Enigma literature, glancing from time to time at the fare provided by the video screen. If this was to be believed, they were flying in rapid succession over a desert, over the open sea, over a range of magnificent mountains, over an ice field, over clouds, over the Moon (or Mercury), and over an apparently endless stretch of flat, cultivated fields, laid out in huge squares. This last display was particularly interesting, for Duncan was quite sure that nothing like it had existed for a couple of hundred years. However, he reluctantly dismissed the theory that Enigma Associates had managed to invent a time machine.

Presently, coffee and light snacks were brought around by the inevitable and unchanging stewardesses. Perhaps an hour later—it was amazing how soon one lost the ability to estimate the passage of time when mechanical aids were no longer available—they came around again with a second serving. Almost immediately after this, the aircraft started to descend.