Childhood's End - Arthur C. Clarke [85]
Jan Rodricks was coming home, six months older, to the world he had left eighty years before.
This time he was no longer a stowaway, hidden in a secret chamber. He stood behind the three pilots (why, he wondered, did they need so many?) watching the patterns come and go on the great screen that dominated the control room. The colours and shapes it showed were meaningless to him; he assumed that they were conveying information which in a vessel designed by men would have been displayed on banks of meters. But sometimes the screen showed the surrounding star-fields, and soon, he hoped, it would be showing Earth.
He was glad to be home, despite the effort he had devoted to escaping from it. In these few months he had grown up. He had seen so much, travelled so far, and now was weary for his own familiar world. He understood, now, why the Overlords had sealed Earth from the stars. Humanity still had very far to go before it could play any part in the civilization he had glimpsed.
It might be-though this he refused to accept-that mankind could never be more than an inferior species, preserved in an out-of-the-way zoo with the Overlords as keepers. Perhaps that was what Vindarten had meant when he gave Jan that ambiguous warning, just before his departure. "Much may have happened," the Overlord had said, "in the time that has passed on your planet. You may not know your world when you see it again."
Perhaps not, thought Jan; eighty years was a long time, and though he was young and adaptable, he might find it hard to understand all the changes that had come to pass. But of one thing he was certain-men would want to hear his story, and to know what he had glimpsed of the civilization of the Overlords.
They had treated him well, as he had assumed they would. Of the outward journey he had known nothing; when the injection had worn off and he had emerged, the ship was already entering the Overlord system. He had climbed out of his fantastic hiding-place, and found to his relief that the oxygen set was not needed. The air was thick and heavy, but he could breathe without difficulty. He had found himself in the ship's enormous red-lit hold, among countless other packing-cases and all the impedimenta one would expect on a liner of space or of sea. It had taken him almost an hour to find his way to the control room and to introduce himself to the crew.
Their lack of surprise had puzzled him; he knew that the Overlords showed few emotions, but he had expected some reaction. Instead, they simply continued with their work, watching the great screen and playing with the countless keys on their control panels. It was then that he knew that they were landing, for from time to time the image of a planet-larger at each appearance-would flash upon the screen.
Yet there was never the slightest sense of motion or acceleration-only a perfectly constant gravity, which he judged to be about a fifth of Earth's. The immense forces that drove the ship must have been compensated with exquisite precision.
And then, in unison, the three Overlords had risen from their seats, and he knew that the voyage was over. They did not speak to their passenger or to each other, and when one of them beckoned to him to follow, Jan realized something that he should have thought of before. There might well be no one here, at this end of Karellen's enormously long supply line, who understood a word of English.
They watched him gravely as the great doors opened before his eager eyes. This was the supreme moment of his life; now he was to be the first human being ever to look upon a world lit by another sun. The only light of NGS 549672 came flooding into the ship, and there before him lay the planet of the Overlords.
What had he expected? He was not sure. Vast buildings, cities whose towers were lost among the clouds, machines beyond imagination-these would not have surprised him.
Yet what he saw was an almost featureless plain, reaching out to an unnaturally