The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke by Arthur C. Clarke Read Free Book Online Page B

thin lines of light. Overhead, the great telescope was swinging across the sky, seeking for its incredibly distant target. Suddenly the image steadied, the stars became tiny, needle-sharp points, and among them floated something that was not a star at all.
    It was hard to describe, hard even for the eye to grasp. An oval of fiery mist, its edges fading so imperceptibly into the surrounding blackness that no one could tell where it ended, the Great Nebula glimmered like a ghost beyond the veil of the stars.
    ‘Our neighbours,’ said Norman quietly. ‘The very next universe to our own—yet it’s so far away that the light you’re seeing now began its journey before Man existed on the Earth.’
    ‘But what is it?’ whispered Daphne.
    ‘Well, I suppose you know that all the stars are gathered in great disc-shaped clusters—island universes, someone called them—each containing thousands of millions of suns. We’re right inside one of them—the Milky Way. And that’s the next nearest, floating out there. It’s too far away for you to see the separate stars, though you can in the bigger telescopes. Beyond it are millions of other universes, as far as we can see.’
    ‘With worlds like our Earth in them?’
    ‘Who knows? At that distance you couldn’t see the Sun, let alone the Earth! But I expect there must be any number of planets out there, and on many of them there’ll probably be life of some kind. I wonder if we’ll ever find out? But let’s come a bit nearer home—we haven’t much time.’
    To Daphne, the next half hour was a revelation. Overhead, out on the dusty, silent plain, the great telescope ranged across the sky, gathering in the wonders of the heavens and presenting them to her gaze. Beautiful groups of coloured stars, like jewels gleaming with all the hues of the rainbow—clouds of incandescent mist, twisted into strange shapes by unimaginable forces—Jupiter and his family of moons—and, perhaps most wonderful of all, Saturn floating serenely in his circle of rings, like some intricate work of art rather than a world eight times the size of Earth…
    And now she understood the magic that had lured the astronomers up into the clear mountain skies, and at last out across space to the Moon.
    Slowly the outer doors of the great underground garage slid apart, and the bus began to climb the steep ramp that led to the surface of the Moon. It still seemed strange to Daphne that the only means of transport on the Moon was something as old-fashioned as a motor-bus, but like many of the peculiar things she had met here it was reasonable enough when explained. Rockets were much too expensive for journeys of only a few hundred miles, and as there was no atmosphere air transport was, of course, impossible.
    The big vehicle was really a sort of mobile hotel in which a couple of dozen people could live comfortably for a week or more. It was about forty feet long and mounted on two sets of caterpillar tractors, operated by powerful electric motors. The driver had a little raised cabin at the front, and the passenger compartment was fitted with comfortable seats that became bunks at night. At the back was a kitchen, storeroom, and even a tiny shower-bath.
    Daphne looked around to see who her fellow passengers were. Besides her own family there were ten other travellers, most of them—like Norman—scientists going to relieve the staff at Number Two Base. She knew them all by sight, if not by name, so it looked as if there would be plenty of company for the trip.
    The bus was now rolling briskly across the crater floor at about forty miles an hour, heading due north. It was easy to make good speed here as the ground was quite level and any obstacles had been bulldozed out of the way when the rough track they were following was made. Daphne hoped that there would soon be a change of scenery; it would get rather dull if it was like this all the way.
    Her wish was quickly granted. Far ahead, a line of jagged