A Fall of Moondust

by Arthur C. Clarke

perhaps no man could appreciate his own world, until he had seen it from space.

There was much scrabbling in handbags and baskets. The total haul consisted of assorted lunar guides—including six copies of the official handbook; a current best-seller The Orange and the Apple, whose unlikely theme was a romance between Nell Gywnn and Sir Isaac Newton; a Harvard Press edition of Shane, with scholarly annotations by a professor of English; an introduction of the logical positivism of Auguste Comte; and a week-old copy of the New York Times, Earth edition. It was not much of a library, but with careful rationing it would help to pass the hours that lay ahead.

It was easy to believe in them when you were with a mere handful of companions on some strange, hostile world where the very rocks and air (if there was air) were completely alien. Then nothing could be taken for granted, and the experience of a thousand Earth-bound generations might be useless. As ancient man had peopled the unknown around him with gods and spirits, so Homo astronauticus looked over his shoulder when he landed upon each new world, wondering who or what was here already. For a few brief centuries Man had imagined himself the lord of the universe, and those primeval hopes and fears had been buried in his subconscious. But now they were stronger than ever, and with good reason, as he looked into the shining face of the heavens, and thought of the power and knowledge that must be lurking there.

He could tell, by the expressions of those around him, that this was the moment that separated the men from the boys. Until that helmet was seated, you were still part of the human races; afterwards, you were alone, in a tiny mechanical world of your own. There might be other men only centimetres away, but you had to peer at them through thick plastic, talk to them by radio. You could not even touch them, except through double layers of artificial skin. Someone had once written that it was very lonely to die in a spacesuit; for the first time, Tom realised how true that must be.

It was a reminder of the fact, which no scientist should ever forget, that human senses perceived only a tiny, distorted picture of the Universe. Tom Lawson had never heard of Plato’s analogy of the chained prisoners in the cave, watching shadows cast upon a wall and trying to deduce from them the realities of the external world. But here was a demonstration that Plato would have appreciated; for which Earth was ‘real’—the perfect crescent visible to the eye, the tattered mushroom glowing in the far infra-red—or neither?

Lawrence picked up a tall vertical cylinder, the lower third of which was filled with an amorphous grey substance. He tilted it—and the stuff began to flow. It moved more quickly than syrup, more slowly than water, and it took a few seconds for its surface to become horizontal again after it had been disturbed. No one could ever have guessed, by looking at it, that it was not a fluid. “This cylinder is sealed,” explained Lawrence, “with a vacuum inside, so the dust is showing its normal behaviour. In air, it’s quite different; it’s much stickier, and behaves rather like very fine sand or talcum powder. I’d better warn you—it’s impossible to make a synthetic sample that has the properties of the real thing; it takes a few billion years of desiccation to produce the genuine article. If you want to do some experimenting, we’ll ship you as much dust as you like; heaven knows, we can spare it.

“I thought everything was done by nucleonics these days.”

Now that civilisation needed all the talent that it could find, merely to maintain itself, any other educational policy would have been suicide.

Both Pat and McKenzie—or almost certainly one of them—could survive if they abandoned the other passengers to their fate. Trying to keep these twenty men and woman alive, they might also doom themselves. The situation was one in which logic warred against conscience. But it was nothing new; certainly it was not peculiar to the age of space. It was as old as Mankind, for countless times in the past, lost or isolated groups had faced death through lack of water, food or warmth. Now it was oxygen that was in short supply, but the principle was just the same.

“Now, I can write down the differential equations of the Moon’s orbital motion, but I don’t claim to be brighter than grandfather. If we’d been switched in time, he might have been the better physicist. Our opportunities were different—that’s all. Grandfather never had occasion to learn to count, and I never had to raise a family in the desert—which was a highly-skilled, full-time job.”

Hector Berlioz could never have dreamed that, two centuries after he had composed it, the soul-stirring rhythm of his Rákóczy March would bring hope and strength to men fighting for their lives on another world.

The whole subject had been thoroughly investigated by a group of psychologists during—if Hansteen remembered correctly—the 1970s. They had concluded that around the mid-twentieth century a substantial percentage of the population was convinced that the world was about to be destroyed, and that the only hope lay in intervention from space. Having lost faith in themselves, men had sought salvation in the sky. The Flying Saucer religion flourished among the lunatic fringe of mankind for almost exactly ten years; then it had abruptly died out, like an epidemic that had run its course. Two factors, the psychologists had decided, were responsible for this: the first was sheer boredom—the second was the International Geophysical Year, that had heralded Man’s own entry into space. In the eighteen months of the IGY, the sky was watched and probed by more instruments, and more trained observers, than in the whole of previous history. If there had been celestial visitors poised above the atmosphere, this concentrated scientific effort would have revealed them. It did nothing of the sort; and when the first manned vehicles started leaving Earth, the Flying Saucers were still more conspicuous by their absence. For most men, that settled the matter. The thousands of unidentified flying objects that had been seen over the centuries had some natural cause, and with better understanding of meteorology and astronomy there was no lack of reasonable explanations. As the Age of Space dawned, r...