2001_ A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke [82]
It seemed as if walls of some material like smoked glass were thickening around him, cutting out the red glow and obscuring the view. It became darker and darker; the faint roar of the stellar hurricanes also faded out. The space pod was floating in silence, and in night. A moment later, there was the softest of bumps as it settled on some hard surface, and came to rest.
To rest on what? Bowman asked himself incredulously. Then light returned; and incredulity gave way to a heart-sinking despair — for as he saw what lay around him, he knew that he must be mad.
He was prepared, he thought, for any wonder. The only thing he had never expected was the utterly commonplace.
The space pod was resting on the polished floor of an elegant, anonymous hotel suite that might have been in any large city on Earth. He was staring into a living room with a coffee table, a divan, a dozen chairs, a writing desk, various lamps, a half-filled bookcase with some magazines lying on it, and even a bowl of flowers. Van Gogh’s Bridge at Arles was hanging on one wall — Wyeth’s Christina’s World on another. He felt confident that when he pulled open the drawer of that desk, he would find a Gideon Bible inside it…
If he was indeed mad, his delusions were beautifully organized. Everything was perfectly real; nothing vanished when he turned his back. The only incongruous element in the scene — and that certainly a major one — was the space pod itself.
For many minutes, Bowman did not move from his seat. He half expected the vision around him to go away, but it remained as solid as anything he had ever seen in his life.
It was real — or else a phantom of the senses so superbly contrived that there was no way of distinguishing it from reality. Perhaps it was some kind of test; if so, not only his fate but that of the human race might well depend upon his actions in the next few minutes.
He could sit here and wait for something to happen, or he could open the pod and step outside to challenge the reality of the scene around him. The floor appeared to be solid; at least, it was bearing the weight of the space pod. He was not likely to fall through it — whatever “it” might really be.
But there was still the question of air; for all that he could tell, this room might be in vacuum, or might contain a poisonous atmosphere. He thought it very unlikely — no one would go to all this trouble without attending to such an essential detail — but he did not propose to take unnecessary risks. In any event, his years of training made him wary of contamination; he was reluctant to expose himself to an unknown environment until he knew that there was no alternative. This place looked like a hotel room somewhere in the United States. That did not alter the fact that in reality he must be hundreds of light-years from the Solar System.
He closed the helmet of his suit, sealing himself in, and actuated the hatch of the space pod. There was a brief hiss of pressure equalization; then he stepped out into the room.
As far as he could tell, he was in a perfectly normal gravity field. He raised one arm, then let it fall freely. It flopped to his side in less than a second.
This made everything seem doubly unreal. Here he was wearing a spacesuit, standing — when he should have been floating — outside a vehicle which could only function properly in the absence of gravity. All his normal astronaut’s reflexes were upset; he had to think before he made every movement.
Like a man in a trance he walked slowly from his bare, unfurnished half of the room toward the hotel suite. It did not, as he had almost expected, disappear as he approached, but remained perfectly real — and apparently perfectly solid.
He stopped beside the coffee table. On it sat a conventional Bell System vision-phone, complete with the local directory. He bent down and picked up the volume with his clumsy, gloved hands.
It bore, in the familiar type he had seen thousands