2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey #1)

by Arthur C. Clarke

The night wore on, cold and clear, without further alarms, and the Moon rose slowly amid equatorial constellations that no human eye would ever see. In the caves, between spells of fitful dozing and fearful waiting, were being born the nightmares of generations yet to be.

They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated.

and went through the same routine. This was a younger, more adaptable specimen; it succeeded where the older one had failed. On the planet Earth, the first crude knot had been tied. . . .

One by one, every member of the tribe was briefly possessed. Some succeeded, but most failed at the tasks they had been set, and all were appropriately rewarded by spasms of pleasure or of pain.

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 toward humanity.

It was a slow, tedious business, but the crystal monolith was patient. Neither it, nor its replicas scattered across half the globe, expected to succeed with all the scores of groups involved in the experiment. A hundred failures would not matter, when a single success could change the destiny of the world.

As a result, food was short in every country; even the United States had meatless days, and widespread famine was predicted within fifteen years, despite heroic efforts to farm the sea and to develop synthetic foods.

In a million years, the human race had lost few of its aggressive instincts; along symbolic lines visible only to politicians, the thirty-eight nuclear powers watched one another with belligerent anxiety. Among them, they possessed sufficient megatonnage to remove the entire surface crust of the planet.

The more wonderful the means of communication, the more trivial, tawdry, or depressing its contents seemed to be.

After ten thousand years, Man had at last found something as exciting as war.

Hal (for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer, no less) was a masterwork of the third computer breakthrough.

For relaxation he could always engage Hal in a large number of semimathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this.

On the average, there was only one asteroid in a volume a million miles on a side; that Discovery should also happen to occupy this same point, and at the same time, was the very least of her crew’s worries.

“There is a third possibility, which may be more serious. Your computer may have made an error in predicting the fault. Both our own nine-triple-zeros agree in suggesting this, on the basis of their information. This is not necessarily cause for alarm, in view of the back-up systems we have, but we would like you to watch out for any further deviations from nominal performance.

“I don’t understand it, Hal. Two units can’t blow in a couple of days.” “It does seem strange, Dave. But I assure you there is an impending failure.”

“I don’t want to insist on it, Dave, but I am incapable of making an error.”

Only one thought kept hammering in his brain. Frank Poole would be the first of all men to reach Saturn.

“I’m sorry, Dave, but in accordance with special subroutine C1435-dash-4, quote, When the crew are dead or incapacitated, the onboard computer must assume control, unquote. I must, therefore, overrule your authority, since you are not in any condition to exercise it intelligently.”

Down in the space-pod bay, the airlock doors were opening.

For the last hundred million miles, he had been brooding over the secret he could not share with Poole and Bowman. He had been living a lie; and the time was fast approaching when his colleagues must learn that he had helped to deceive them. The three hibernators already knew the truth—for they were Discovery’s real payload, trained for the most important mission in the history of mankind.

He had begun to make mistakes, although, like a neurotic who could not observe his own symptoms, he would have denied it. The link with Earth, over which his performance was continually monitored, had become the voice of a conscience he could no longer fully obey. But that he would deliberately attempt to break that link was something that he would never admit, even to himself.

To Hal, this was the equivalent of Death. For he had never slept, and therefore he did not know that one could wake again. . . . So he would protect himself, with all the weapons at his command. Without rancor—but without pity—he would remove the source of his frustrations.

“Dave,” said Hal, “I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me. . . . I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission. . . . You are destroying my mind. . . . Don’t you understand? . . . I will become childish. . . . I will become nothing.

Bowman could bear no more. He jerked out the last unit, and Hal was silent forever.

“Piecing things together after the event, we decided that the monolith was some kind of Sun-powered, or at least Sun-triggered, signaling device. The fact that it emitted its pulse immediately after sunrise, when it was exposed to daylight for the first time in three million years, could hardly be a coincidence.

As long ago as 1945, a British astronomer had pointed out that the rings were ephemeral; gravitational forces were at work which would soon destroy them.

Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust.

But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea.

“The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars!”

He could read only the word Washington; the rest of the printing was a blur, as if it had been copied from a newspaper photograph. He opened the book at random and riffled through the pages. They were all blank sheets of crisp white material which was certainly not paper, though it looked very much like it.

He continued to wander across the spectrum, and suddenly recognized a familiar scene. Here was this very suite, now occupied by a celebrated actor who was furiously denouncing an unfaithful mistress.

So that was how this reception area had been prepared for him; his hosts had based their ideas of terrestrial living upon TV programs. His feeling that he was inside a movie set was almost literally true.

He was retrogressing down the corridors of time, being drained of knowledge and experience as he swept back toward his childhood. But nothing was being lost; all that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal.

He was back, precisely where he wished to be, in the space that men called real.

A thousand miles below, he became aware that a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies it contained were no possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe.

For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.