2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [62]
And now, at last, there was movement. Shadows were flickering across the blue glow inside the airlock. Something was emerging into space.
It was a cylindrical object, covered with fabric that had been roughly wound about it. A moment later it was followed by another — and yet a third. All had been ejected with considerable velocity; within minutes, they were hundreds of yards away.
Half an hour passed; then something much larger floated through the airlock. One of the pods was inching its way out into space.
Very cautiously, it jetted around the hull, and anchored itself near the base of the antenna support. A spacesuited figure emerged, worked for a few minutes on the mounting, then returned to the pod. After a while the pod retraced its path back to the airlock; it hovered outside the opening for some time, as if finding it difficult to reenter without the cooperation it had known in the past. But presently, with one or two slight bumps, it squeezed its way in.
Nothing else happened for over an hour; the three ominous packages had long since disappeared from view, as they floated in single file away from the ship.
Then the airlock doors closed, opened, and closed again. A little later, the faint blue glow of the emergency lights went out — to be replaced at once by a far more brilliant glare. Discovery was coming back to life.
Presently there was an even better sign. The great bowl of the antenna, which for hours had been staring uselessly at Saturn, began to move again. It twisted round toward the rear of the ship; looking back over the propellant tanks and the thousands of square feet of the radiating fins. It lifted its face like a sunflower seeking the sun.
Inside Discovery, David Bowman carefully centered the cross-wires that aligned the antenna on the gibbous Earth. Without automatic control, he would have to keep readjusting the beam — but it should hold steady for many minutes at a time. There were no dissenting impulses now, throwing it off target.
He began to speak to Earth. It would be over an hour before his words got there, and Mission Control learned what had happened. It would be two hours before any reply could reach him.
And it was difficult to imagine what answer Earth could possibly send, except a tactfully sympathetic, “Good-bye.”
Chapter 30
The Secret
Heywood Floyd looked as if he had had very little sleep, and his face was lined with worry. But whatever his feelings, his voice sounded firm and reassuring; he was doing his utmost to project confidence to the lonely man on the other side of the Solar System.
“First of all, Dr. Bowman,” he began, “we must congratulate you on the way you handled this extremely difficult situation. You did exactly the right thing in dealing with an unprecedented and unforeseen emergency.
“We believe we know the cause of your Hal Nine Thousand’s breakdown, but we’ll discuss that later, as it is no longer a critical problem. All we are concerned with at the moment is giving you every possible assistance, so that you can complete your mission.
“And now I must tell you its real purpose, which we have managed, with great difficulty, to keep secret from the general public. You would have been given all the facts as you approached Saturn; this is a quick summary to put you into the picture. Full briefing tapes will be dispatched in the next few hours. Everything I am about to tell you has the highest security classification.
“Two years ago, we discovered the first evidence for intelligent life outside the Earth. A slab or monolith of hard, black material, ten feet high, was found buried in the crater Tycho. Here it is.”
At his first glimpse of TMA-1, with the spacesuited figures clustering around it, Bowman leaned toward the screen in openmouthed astonishment. In the excitement of this revelation — something which, like every man interested in space, he had half expected all his life