Prelude to Space by Arthur C. Clarke Read Free Book Online Page B

down
     upon the eternal icewalls of the Antarctic. He remembered the
Discovery
, moored not half a mile away. His eye could encompass in a moment the whole of the
     land over which Scott and his companions, less than a lifetime ago, had struggled
     and died.
    And then the edge of the world reared up before him. The wonderfully efficient gyro-stabilization
     was beginning to fail and the camera wandered away into space. For a long time, it
     seemed, there was blackness and night; then, without warning, the camera came full
     upon the sun and the screen was blasted with light.
    When the Earth returned, he could see the entire hemisphere spread beneath him. The
     picture froze once more and the music stilled, so that he had time to pick out the
     continents and oceans on that remote and unfamiliar world below.
    For long minutes that distant globe hung there before his eyes; then, slowly, it dissolved.
     The lesson was over, but he would not soon forget it.

Seven
    On the whole, Dirk’s relations with the two young draftsmen who shared the office
     were cordial. They were not quite sure of his official position (that, he sometimes
     thought, made three of them) and so treated him with an odd mixture of deference and
     familiarity. There was one respect, however, in which they annoyed him intensely.
    It seemed to Dirk that there were only two attitudes to adopt towards interplanetary
     flight. Either one was for it, or one was against it. What he could not understand
     was a position of complete indifference. These youngsters (he himself, of course,
     was a good five years older) earning their living in the very heart of Interplanetary
     itself, did not seem to have the slightest interest in the project. They drew their
     plans and made their calculations just as enthusiastically as if they were preparing
     drawings for washing machines instead of spaceships. They were, however, prepared
     to show traces of vivacity when defending their attitudes.
    “The trouble with you, Doc,” said the elder, Sam, one afternoon, “is that you take
     life too seriously. It doesn’t pay. Bad for the arteries and that sort of thing.”
    “Unless some people did a bit of worrying,” retorted Dirk, “there’d be no jobs for
     lazy so-and-sos like you and Bert.”
    “What’s wrong with that?” said Bert. “They ought to be grateful. If it wasn’t for
     chaps like Sam and me, they’d have nothing to worry about and would die of frustration.
     Most of ’em do, anyway.”
    Sam shifted his cigarette. (Did he use glue to keep it dangling from his lower lip
     at that improbable angle?)
    “You’re always agitating about the past, which is dead and done with, or the future,
     which we won’t be around to see. Why not relax and enjoy yourself for a change?”
    “I
am
enjoying myself,” said Dirk. “I don’t suppose you realize that there are people who
     happen to like work.”
    “They kid themselves into thinking they do,” explained Bert. “It’s all a matter of
     conditioning. We were smart enough to dodge it.”
    “I think,” said Dirk admiringly, “that if you keep on devoting so much energy to concocting
     excuses to avoid work, you’ll evolve a new philosophy. The philosophy of Futilitarianism.”
    “Did you make that up on the spur of the moment?”
    “No,” confessed Dirk.
    “I thought not. Sounded as if you’d been saving it up.”
    “Tell me,” Dirk asked, “don’t you feel any intellectual curiosity about anything?”
    “Not particularly, as long as I know where my next pay check’s coming from.”
    They were pulling his leg, of course, and they knew he knew it. Dirk laughed and went
     on:
    “It seems to me that Public Relations has overlooked a nice little oasis of inertia
     right on its own doorstep. Why, I don’t believe you care a hoot whether the ‘Prometheus’
     reaches the Moon or not!”
    “I wouldn’t say that,” protested Sam. “I’ve got a fiver on her.”
    Before Dirk could think of a