Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke [54]
What finally decided him was the thought that, if he neglected this incredible opportunity, he would never forgive himself. All the rest of his life would be spent in vain regrets-and nothing could be worse than that.
Sullivan's answer reached him a few hours later, and he knew that the die was cast. Slowly, because there was still plenty of time, he began to put his affairs in order.
"Dear Maia [the letter began], This is going to be-to put it mildly-rather a surprise for you. When you get this letter, I shall no longer be on Earth. By that I don't mean that I shall have gone to the Moon, as many others have done. No; I shall be on my way to the home of the Overlords. I shall be the first man ever to leave the Solar System.
"I am giving this letter to the friend who is helping me; he will hold it until he knows that my plan has succeeded-in its first phase, at least-and that it is too late for the Overlords to interfere. I shall be so far away, and travelling at such a speed, that I doubt if any recall message can overtake me. Even if it could, it seems most unlikely that the ship would be able to put back to Earth. And I very much doubt if I'm all that important, anyway.
"First, let me explain what led to this. You know that I've always been interested in spaceflight, and have always felt frustrated because we've never been allowed to go to the other planets, or to learn anything about the civilization of the Overlords. If they had never intervened, we might have reached Mars and Venus by now. I admit that it is equally probable that we would have destroyed ourselves with cobalt bombs and the other global weapons the twentieth century was developing. Yet sometimes I wish we could have had a chance of standing on our own feet.
"Probably the Overlords have their reasons for keeping us in the nursery, and probably they are excellent reasons. But even if! knew what they were, I doubt if it would make much difference to my own feelings-or my actions.
"Everything really began at that party of Rupert's. (He doesn't know about this, by the way, though he put me on the right track.) You remember that silly sйance he arranged and how it ended when that girl-I forget her name-fainted? I'd asked what star the Overlords came from, and the reply was 'NGS 549672.' I'd not expected any answer, and had treated the whole business as a joke until then. But when I realized that this was a number in a star catalogue, I decided to look into it. I found that the star was in the constellation Carina-and one of the few facts that we do know about the Overlords is that they come from that direction.
"Now I don't pretend to understand how that information reached us, or where it originated. Did someone read Rashaverak's mind? Even if they had, it's hardly likely that he would have known the reference number of his sun in one of our catalogues. It's a complete mystery, and I leave it to people like Rupert to solve-if they can! I'm just content to take the information, and to act on it.
"We know a lot now, through our observation of their departure, about the speed of the Overlord ships. They leave the Solar System under such tremendous accelerations that they approach the velocity of light in less than an hour. That means that the Overlords must possess some kind of propulsive system that acts equally on every atom of their ships, so that anything aboard won't be crushed instantly. I wonder why they employ such colossal accelerations, when they've got all space to play with and could take their time picking up speed?
My theory is that they can somehow tap the energy fields round the stars, and so have to do their starting and stopping while they're fairly close to a sun. But that's all by the way…
"The important fact was that I knew how far they had to travel, and therefore how long the journey took. NGS 549672 is forty light-years from Earth. The Overlords ships reach more than ninety-nine per cent of the speed of light, so the trip must last forty years of our dine. Our time; that's the crux of the matter.
"Now as you may have beard,