2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [76]
Perhaps that monolith on Japetus was hollow; perhaps the “roof” was only an illusion, or some kind of diaphragm that had opened to let him through. (But into what?) As far as he could trust his senses, he appeared to be dropping vertically down a huge rectangular shaft, several thousand feet deep. He was moving faster and faster — but the far end never changed its size, and remained always at the same distance from him.
Only the stars moved, at first so slowly that it was some time before he realized that they were escaping out of the frame that held them. But in a little while it was obvious that the star field was expanding, as if it was rushing toward him at an inconceivable speed. The expansion was nonlinear; the stars at the center hardly seemed to move, while those toward the edge accelerated more and more swiftly, until they became streaks of light just before they vanished from view.
There were always others to replace them, flowing into the center of the field from an apparently inexhaustible source. Bowman wondered what would happen if a star came straight toward him; would it continue to expand until he plunged directly into the face of a sun? But not one came near enough to show a disk; eventually they all veered aside, and streaked over the edge of their rectangular frame.
And still the far end of the shaft came no closer. It was almost as if the walls were moving with him, carrying him to his unknown destination. Or perhaps he was really motionless, and space was moving past him…
Not only space, he suddenly realized, was involved in whatever was happening to him now. The clock on the pod’s small instrument panel was also behaving strangely.
Normally, the numbers in the tenths-of-a-second window flickered past so quickly that it was almost impossible to read them; now they were appearing and disappearing at discrete intervals, and he could count them off one by one without difficulty. The seconds themselves were passing with incredible slowness, as if time itself were coming to a stop. At last, the tenth-of-a-second counter froze between 5 and 6.
Yet he could still think, and even observe, as the ebon walls flowed past at a speed that might have been anything between zero and a million times the velocity of light. Somehow, he was not in the least surprised, nor was he alarmed. On the contrary, he felt a sense of calm expectation, such as he had once known when the space medics had tested him with hallucinogenic drugs. The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to fear. He had traveled these millions of miles in search of mystery; and now, it seemed, the mystery was coming to him.
The rectangle ahead was growing lighter. The luminous star streaks were paling against a milky sky, whose brilliance increased moment by moment. It seemed as if the space pod was heading toward a bank of cloud, uniformly illuminated by the rays of an invisible sun.
He was emerging from the tunnel. The far end, which until now had remained at that same indeterminate distance, neither approaching nor receding, had suddenly started to obey the normal laws of perspective. It was coming closer, and steadily widening before him. At the same time, he felt that he was moving upward, and for a fleeting instant he wondered if he had fallen right through Japetus and was now ascending from the other side. But even before the space pod soared out into the open he knew that this place had nothing to do with Japetus, or with any world within the experience of man.
There was no atmosphere, for he could see all details unblurred, clear down to an incredibly remote and flat horizon. He must be above a world of enormous size — perhaps one much larger than Earth. Yet despite its extent, all the surface that Bowman could see was tessellated into obviously artificia1 patterns that must have been miles