Arthur Clarke: Imperial Earth

And to do this, one had to go to Earth; as in the days of the Caesars, there was no alternative. Those who believed otherwise—or pretended to—risked being tagged with the dreaded word “colonial.”

It might have been different if the velocity of light were infinite; but it was a mere billion kilometers an hour—and therefore, realtime conversation would be forever impossible between Earth and anyone beyond the orbit of the Moon. The global electronic village which had existed for centuries on the mother world could never be extended into space; the political and psychological effects of this were enormous, and still not fully understood.

For generations, earth-dwellers had been accustomed to being in each other’s presence at the touch of a button. The communications satellites had made possible, and then inevitable, the creation of the World State in all but name. And despite many earlier fears, it was a state still controlled by men, not by machines.

There were perhaps a thousand key individuals, and ten thousand important ones—and they talked to each other incessantly from Pole to Pole. The decisions needed to run a world sometimes had to be made in minutes, and for this the instantaneous feedback of face-to-face conversation was essential. Across a fraction of a light-second, that was easy to arrange, and for three hundred years men had taken it for granted that distance could no longer bar them from each other.

But with the establishment of the first Mars Base, this intimacy had ended. Earth could talk to Mars—but its words would always take at least three minutes to get there, and the reply would take just as long. Conversation was thus impossible, and all business had to be done by Telex or its equivalent.

In theory, this should have been good enough, and usually it was. But there were disastrous exceptions—costly and sometimes fatal interplanetary misunderstandings resulting from the fact that the two men at the opposite ends of the circuit did not really know each other, or comprehend each other’s ways of thought, because they had never been in personal contact.

And personal contact was essential at the highest levels of statesmanship and administration. Diplomats had known this for several thousand years, with their apparatus of missions and envoys and official visits. Only after that contact, with its inevitable character evaluation, had been made, and the subtle links of mutual understanding and common interest established, could one do business by long-distance communications with any degree of confidence.

Malcolm Makenzie could never have achieved his own rise on Titan without the friendships made when he had returned to Earth. Once he had thought it strange that a personal tragedy should have led him to power and responsibility beyond all the dreams of his youth; but unlike Ellen, he had buried his dead past and it had ceased to haunt him long ago.

When Colin had repeated the pattern, forty years later, and had returned to Titan with the infant Duncan, the position of the clan had been immensely strengthened. To most of the human race, Saturn’s largest moon was now virtually identified with the Makenzies. No one could hope to challenge them if he could not match the network of personal contacts they had established not only on Earth, but everywhere else that mattered. It was through this network, rather than official channels, that the Makenzies, as even their opponents grudgingly admitted, Got Things Done.

And now a fourth generation was being prepared to consolidate the dynasty. Everyone knew that this would happen eventually, but no one expected it so soon.

Not even the Makenzies. And especially not the Helmers.

In the past, Duncan had always cycled to Grandmother Ellen’s home, or taken an electric cart whenever he had to deliver some household necessity. This time, however, he walked the two-kilometer tunnel from the city, carrying fifty kilos of carefully distributed mass—which, however, only gave him ten kilos of extra weight. Had he known that such characters had once existed, he might have felt a strong affinity with old-time smugglers, wearing a stylish waistcoat of gold bars.

Colin had presented him with the complex harness of webbing and pouches, with a heartfelt “Thank God I’ll never have to use it again! I knew I had it around somewhere, but it took a couple of days to find. It’s only too true that the Makenzies never throw anything away.”

Duncan found that it needed both hands to lift the harness off the table; when he unzipped one of the many small pouches, he found that it contained a pencil-sized rod of dull metal, astonishingly massive.

“What is it?” he asked. “It feels heavier than gold.”

“It is. Tungsten superalloy, if I remember. The total mass is seventy kilos, but don’t start wearing it all at once. I began at forty, and added a couple of kilos a day. The important thing is to keep the distribution uniform, and to avoid chafing.

Duncan was doing some mental arithmetic, and finding the results very depressing. Earth gravity was five time Titan’s—yet this diabolical device would merely double his local weight.

“It’s impossible,” he said gloomily. “I’ll never be able to walk on Earth.”

“Well, I did—thought it wasn’t easy at first. Do everything that the doctors tell you, even if it sounds silly. Spend all the time you can in baths, or lying down. Don’t be ashamed to use wheelchairs or prosthetic devices, at least for the first couple of weeks. And never try to run.”

“Run!”

“Sooner or later you’ll forget you’re on Earth, and then you’ll break a leg. Like to bet on it?”

Betting was one of the useful Makenzie vices. The money stayed in the family, and the loser always learned some valuable lesson. Though Duncan found it impossible to imagine five gravities, it could not be denied that Colin had spent a year on Earth and had survived to tell the tale. So this was not a bet that promised favorable odds.

Now he was beginning to believe Colin’s prediction, and he scarcely noticed the extra mass—at least when he was moving in a straight line. It was only when he tried to change direction that he felt himself in the grip of some irresistible force. Not counting visitors from Earth, he was probably now the strongest man on Titan. It was not that his body was developing new strength; rather, it was recovering latent powers which had been slumbering, waiting for the moment when they would be called forth. In a few more years, what he was now attempting would be too late.

The four-meter-wide tunnel had been lasered, years ago, through the rim of the small crater which surrounded Oasis. Originally, it had been a pipeline for the ammoniated petrochemicals of the aptly named Loch Hellbrew, one of the region’s chief natural resources. Most of the lake had gone to feed the industries of Titan; later, the tapping of the moon’s internal heat, as part of the local planetary engineering project, had caused the remainder to evaporate.

There had been a certain amount of quiet grumbling when Ellen Makenzie had made her intentions clear, but the Department of Resources had pumped the remaining hydrogen-methane fog out of the tunnel, and now it carried oxygen, to the annual annoyance of the auditors, on inventory as part of the city’s air reserve. There were two manually operated bulkheads, as well as the city’s own backup seals. Anyone went beyond the second bulkhead at his own risk, but that was negligible. The tunnel was through solid rock, and since the pressure inside was higher than ambient, there was no danger of Titanian poisons leaking inward.

Half a dozen side tunnels, all of them now blocked, led out of the main passageway. When he had first come here as a small boy, Duncan had filled those sealed-off shafts with wonder and magic. Now he knew that they merely led to long-abandoned surge chambers. Yet though all the mystery was gone, it still seemed to him that these corridors were haunted by two ghosts. One was a little girl who had been known and loved by only a handful of pioneers; the other was a giant who had been mourned by millions.