2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [21]
“Clavius Control to Special 14, you are coming in nicely. Please make manual check of landing-gear lock, hydraulic pressure, shock-pad inflation.”
The pilot pressed sundry switches, green lights flashed, and he called back, “All manual checks completed. Landing-gear lock, hydraulic pressure, shock pad O.K.”
“Confirmed,” said the Moon, and the descent continued wordlessly. Though there was still plenty of talking, it was all being done by machines, flashing binary impulses to one another at a thousand times the rate their slow-thinking makers could communicate.
Some of the mountain peaks were already towering above the shuttle; now the ground was only a few thousand feet away, and the beacon light was a brilliant star, flashing steadily above a group of low buildings and odd vehicles. In the final stage of the descent, the jets seemed to be playing some strange tune; they pulsed on and off, making the last fine adjustments to the thrust.
Abruptly, a swirling cloud of dust hid everything, the jets gave one final spurt, and the shuttle rocked very slightly, like a rowboat when a small wave goes by. It was some minutes before Floyd could really accept the silence that now enfolded him and the weak gravity that gripped his limbs.
He had made, utterly without incident and in little more than one day, the incredible journey of which men had dreamed for two thousand years. After a normal routine flight, he had landed on the Moon.
Chapter 10
Clavius Base
Clavius, 150 miles in diameter, is the second largest crater on the visible face of the Moon, and lies in the center of the Southern Highlands. It is very old; ages of vulcanism and bombardment from space have scarred its walls and pockmarked its floor. But since the last era of crater formation, when the debris from the asteroid belt was still battering the inner planets, it had known peace for half a billion years.
Now there were new, strange stirrings on and below its surface, for here Man was establishing his first permanent bridgehead on the Moon. Clavius Base could, in an emergency, be entirely self-supporting. All the necessities of life were produced from the local rocks, after they had been crushed, heated, and chemically processed. Hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus — all these, and most of the other elements, could be found inside the Moon, if one knew where to look for them.
The Base was a closed system, like a tiny working model of Earth itself, recycling all the chemicals of life. The atmosphere was purified in a vast “hothouse”— a large, circular room buried just below the lunar surface. Under blazing lamps by night, and filtered sunlight by day, acres of stubby green plants grew in a warm, moist atmosphere. They were special mutations, designed for the express purpose of replenishing the air with oxygen, and providing food as a by-product.
More food was produced by chemical processing systems and algae culture. Although the green scum circulating through yards of transparent plastic tubes would scarcely have appealed to a gourmet, the biochemists could convert it into chops and steaks only an expert could distinguish from the real thing.
The eleven hundred men and six hundred women who made up the personnel of the Base were all highly trained scientists or technicians, carefully selected before they had left Earth. Though lunar living was now virtually free from the hardships, disadvantages, and occasional dangers of the early days, it was still psychologically demanding, and not recommended for anyone suffering from claustrophobia. Since it was expensive and time-consuming to cut a large underground base out of solid rock or compacted lava, the standard one-man “living module” was a room only about six feet wide, ten feet long, and eight feet high.
Each room was attractively furnished and looked very much like a good motel suite, with convertible sofa, TV, small hi-fi set, and vision-phone. Moreover, by a simple trick of interior decoration, the one unbroken wall could be converted by