chapter 15 Rendezvous
II - THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK SNOW
Chapter 15 Rendezvous
And now Halley was too close to be seen; ironically, observers back on Earth would get a far better view of the tail, already stretching fifty million kilometres at right angles to the comet's orbit, like a pennant fluttering in the invisible gale of the solar wind.
On the morning of the rendezvous, Heywood Floyd woke early from a troubled sleep. It was unusual for him to dream - or at least to remember his dreams - and doubtless the anticipated excitements of the next few hours were responsible. He was also slightly worried by a message from Caroline, asking if he had heard from Chris lately. He had radioed back, a little tersely, that Chris had never bothered to say thank you when he had helped him get his current position on Universe's sister ship Cosmos; perhaps he was already bored with the Earth-Moon run and was looking for excitement elsewhere.
'As usual,' Floyd had added, 'we'll hear from him in his own good time.'
Immediately after breakfast, passengers and science team had gathered for a final briefing from Captain Smith. The scientists certainly did not need it, but if they felt any irritation, so childish an emotion would have been quickly swept away by the weird spectacle on the main viewscreen.
It was easier to imagine that Universe was flying into a nebula, rather than a comet. The entire sky ahead was now a misty white fog - not uniform, but mottled with darker condensations and streaked with luminous bands and brightly glowing jets, all radiating away from a central point. At this magnification, the nucleus was barely visible as a tiny black speck, yet it was clearly the source of all the phenomena around it.
'We cut our drive in three hours,' said the Captain. 'Then we'll be only a thousand kilometres away from the nucleus, with virtually zero velocity. We'll make some final observations, and confirm our landing site.'
'So we'll go weightless at 12.00 exactly. Before then, your cabin stewards will check that everything's correctly stowed. It will be just like turnaround, except that this time it's going to be three days, not two hours, before we have weight again.
'Halley's gravity? Forget it - less than one centimetre per second squared - just about a thousandth of Earth's. You'll be able to detect it if you wait long enough, but that's all. Takes fifteen seconds for something to fall a metre.
'For safety, I'd like you all here in the observation lounge, with your seat belts properly secured, during rendezvous and touchdown. You'll get the best view from here anyway, and the whole operation won't take more than an hour. We'll only be using very small thrust corrections, but they may come from any angle and could cause minor sensory disturbances.'
What the Captain meant, of course, was spacesickness - but that word, by general agreement, was taboo aboard Universe. It was noticeable, however, that many hands strayed into the compartments beneath the seats, as if checking that the notorious plastic bags would be available if urgently required.
The image on the viewscreen expanded, as the magnification was increased. For a moment it seemed to Floyd that he was in an aeroplane, descending through light clouds, rather than in a spacecraft approaching the most famous of all comets. The nucleus was growing larger and clearer; it was no longer a black dot, but an irregular ellipse - now a small, pockmarked island lost in the cosmic ocean - then, suddenly, a world in its own right.
There was still no sense of scale. Although Floyd knew that the whole panorama spread before him was less than ten kilometres across, he could easily have imagined that he was looking at a body as large as the Moon. But the Moon was not hazy around the edges, nor did it have little jets of vapour - and two large ones - spurting from its surface.
'My God!' cried Mihailovich, 'what's that?'
He pointed to the lower edge of the nucleus, just inside the terminator. Unmistakably - impossibly -a light was flashing there on the nightside of the comet with a perfectly regular rhythm: on, off, on, off, once every two or three seconds.
Dr Willis gave his patient 'I can explain it to you in words of one syllable' cough, but Captain Smith got there first.
'I'm sorry to disappoint you, Mr Mihailovich. That's only the beacon on Sampler Probe Two - it's been sitting there for a month, waiting for us to come and pick it up.'
'What a shame; I thought there might be someone - something - there to welcome us.'
'No such luck, I'm afraid; we're very much on our own out here. That beacon is just where we intend to land - it's near Halley's south pole and is in permanent darkness at the moment. That will make it easier on our life-support systems. The temperature's up to 120 degrees on the Sunlit side - way above boiling point.'
'No wonder the comet's perking,' said the unabashed Dimitri. 'Those jets don't look very healthy to me. Are you sure it's safe to go in?'
'That's another reason we're touching down on the nightside; there's no activity there. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must get back to the bridge. This is the first chance I've ever had of landing on a new world - and I doubt if I'll get another.'
Captain Smith's audience dispersed slowly, and in unusual silence. The image on the viewscreen zoomed back to normal, and the nucleus dwindled once more to a barely visible spot. Yet even in those few minutes it seemed to have grown slightly larger, and perhaps that was no illusion. Less than four hours before encounter, the ship was still hurtling towards the comet at fifty thousand kilometres an hour.
It would make a crater more impressive than any that Halley now boasted, if something happened to the main drive at this stage of the game.
2061 Odyssey Three
Arthur C. Clarke's books
- Autumn
- Trust
- Autumn The Human Condition
- Autumn The City
- Straight to You
- Hater
- Dog Blood
- 3001 The Final Odyssey
- 2001 A Space Odyssey
- 2010 Odyssey Two
- The Garden of Rama(Rama III)
- Rama Revealed(Rama IV)
- Rendezvous With Rama
- The Lost Worlds of 2001
- The Light of Other Days
- Foundation and Earth
- Foundation's Edge
- Second Foundation
- Foundation and Empire
- Forward the Foundation
- Prelude to Foundation
- Foundation
- The Currents Of Space
- The Stars Like Dust
- Pebble In The Sky
- A Girl Called Badger
- Alexandria
- Alien in the House
- All Men of Genius
- An Eighty Percent Solution
- And What of Earth
- Apollo's Outcasts
- Beginnings
- Blackjack Wayward
- Blood of Asaheim
- Cloner A Sci-Fi Novel About Human Clonin
- Close Liaisons
- Consolidati
- Credence Foundation
- Crysis Escalation
- Daring
- Dark Nebula (The Chronicles of Kerrigan)
- Darth Plagueis
- Deceived
- Desolate The Complete Trilogy
- Earthfall
- Eden's Hammer
- Edge of Infinity
- Extensis Vitae
- Farside
- Flight
- Grail
- Heart of Iron
- House of Steel The Honorverse Companion
- Humanity Gone After the Plague
- I Am Automaton
- Icons
- Impostor
- Invasion California
- Isle of Man
- Issue In Doubt
- John Gone (The Diaspora Trilogy)
- Know Thine Enemy
- Land and Overland Omnibus
- Lightspeed Year One
- Maniacs The Krittika Conflict
- My Soul to Keep
- Portal (Boundary) (ARC)
- Possession
- Quicksilver (Carolrhoda Ya)
- Ruin
- Seven Point Eight The First Chronicle
- Shift (Omnibus)
- Snodgrass and Other Illusions
- Solaris
- Son of Sedonia
- Stalin's Hammer Rome
- Star Trek Into Darkness
- Star Wars Dawn of the Jedi, Into the Voi
- Star Wars Riptide
- Star Wars The Old Republic Fatal Allianc
- Sunset of the Gods
- Swimming Upstream
- Take the All-Mart!
- The Affinity Bridge
- The Age of Scorpio
- The Assault
- The Best of Kage Baker
- The Complete Atopia Chronicles
- The Curve of the Earth
- The Darwin Elevator
- The Eleventh Plague
- The Games
- The Great Betrayal
- The Greater Good
- The Grim Company
- The Heretic (General)
- The Last Horizon
- The Last Jedi
- The Legend of Earth