More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
Increasing numbers, however, are asking: ‘Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?’ Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger.
He had no conscious memory of what he had seen, but that night, as he sat brooding in the entrance of his lair, his ears attuned to the noises of the world around him, Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy - of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step towards humanity.
They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next, so that each age could profit from those that had gone before. Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope towards a future.
With stone and bronze and iron and steel he had run the gamut of everything that could pierce and slash, and quite early in time he had learned how to strike down his victims from a distance. The spear, the bow, the gun and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power. Without those weapons, often though he had used them against himself, Man would never have conquered his world. Into them he had put his heart and soul, and for ages they had served him well. But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time.
Someone had once said that you could be terrified in space, but you could not be worried there. It was perfectly true.
(That very word ‘newspaper’, of course, was an anachronistic hang-over into the age of electronics.)
The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry or depressing its contents seemed to be. Accidents, crimes, natural and man-made disasters, threats of conflict, gloomy editorials - these still seemed to be the main concern of the millions of words being sprayed into the ether.
the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.
The approaching lunar mountains were utterly unlike those of Earth; they lacked the dazzling caps of snow, the green, close-fitting garments of vegetation, the moving crowns of cloud. Nevertheless, the fierce contrasts of light and shadow gave them a strange beauty of their own.
After ten thousand years man had at last found something as exciting as war. Unfortunately, not all nations had yet realised that fact.
The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children.
The stars overhead were only a little brighter, or more numerous, than on a clear night from the high plateaus of New Mexico or Colorado. But there were two things in that coal-black sky that destroyed any illusion of Earth. The first was Earth itself - a blazing beacon hanging above the northern horizon. The light pouring down from that giant half-globe was dozens of times more brilliant than the full moon, and it covered all this land with a cold, blue-green phosphorescence.
The second celestial apparition was a faint, pearly cone of light slanting up the eastern sky. It became brighter and brighter towards the horizon, hinting of great fires just concealed below the edge of the Moon. Here was a pale glory that no man had ever seen from Earth, save during the few moments of a total eclipse. It was the corona, harbinger of the lunar dawn, giving notice that before long the Sun would smite this sleeping land.
It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, besides the creatures who had made this thing.
Pandora’s Box, thought Floyd, with a sudden sense of foreboding - waiting to be opened by inquisitive Man. And what will he find inside?
He looked up at the Earth, beginning to wane in the morning sky. Only a handful of the six billion people there knew of this discovery; how would the world react to the news when it was finally released? The political and social implications were immense; every person of real intelligence - everyone who looked an inch beyond his nose - would find his life, his values, his philosophy, subtly changed. Even if nothing whatsoever was discovered about T.M.A.-1, and it remained an eternal mystery, Man would know that he was not unique in the Universe. Though he had missed them by millions of years,
...more
A hundred million miles beyond Mars, in the cold loneliness where no man had yet travelled, Deep Space Monitor 79 drifted among the tangled orbits of the asteroids. For three years it had fulfilled its mission flawlessly - a tribute to the American scientists who had designed it, the British engineers who had built it, the Russian technicians who had launched it.
‘Sorry to interrupt the festivities,’ said Hal, ‘but we have a problem.’ ‘What is it?’ Bowman and Poole asked simultaneously.
Space-pods were not the most elegant means of transport devised by man, but they were absolutely essential for construction and maintenance work in vacuum. They were usually christened with feminine names, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their personalities were sometimes slightly unpredictable. Discovery’s trio were Anna, Betty and Clara.
‘We can design a system that’s proof against accident and stupidity; but we can’t design one that’s proof against deliberate malice . . .’
‘But why bury a sun-powered device thirty feet underground? We’ve examined dozens of theories, though we realise that it may be completely impossible to understand the motives of creatures three million years in advance of us. ‘The favourite theory is the simplest, and the most logical. It is also the most disturbing. ‘You hide a sun-powered device in darkness - only if you want to know when it is brought out into the light. In other words, the monolith may be some kind of alarm. And we have triggered it . . .
‘At the moment, we do not know whether to hope or fear. We do not know if, out on the moons of Saturn, you will meet with good or evil — or only with ruins a thousand times older than Troy.’
Bowman also listened, with a curiously detached interest, to Mission Control’s belated apologia for its programming. The voices from Earth seemed to have a defensive note; he could imagine the recriminations that must now be in progress among those who had planned the expedition. They had some good arguments, of course - including the results of a secret Department of Defence study, Project BARSOOM, which had been carried out by Harvard’s School of Psychology in 1989. In this experiment in controlled sociology, various sample populations had been assured that the human race had made contact
...more
And panic was something that Bowman understood, better than he had any wish to, for he had known it twice during his life. The first time as a boy, when he had been caught in a line of surf and nearly drowned; the second was as a spaceman under training, when a faulty gauge had convinced him that his oxygen would be exhausted before he could reach safety. On both occasions, he had almost lost control of all his higher logical processes; he had been within seconds of becoming a frenzied bundle of random impulses. Both times he had won through, but he knew well enough that any man, in the right
...more
The Eye of Japetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust. David Bowman had time for just one broken sentence, which the waiting men in Mission Control, nine hundred million miles away and ninety minutes in the future, were never to forget: ‘The thing’s hollow - it goes on for ever - and - oh my God - it’s full of stars!’
