The City And The Stars - Arthur C. Clarke [88]
‘I’m afraid I misled you last night,’ said Alvin cheerfully. ‘I didn’t come to Lys by the old route, so your attempt to close it was quite unnecessary. As a matter of fact, the Council of Diaspar also closed it at their end, with equal lack of success.’
The senators’ faces were a study in perplexity as one solution after another chased through their brains.
‘Then how did you get there?’ said the leader. There was a sudden, dawning comprehension in his eyes, and Alvin could tell that he had begun to guess the truth. He wondered if he had intercepted the command his mind had just sent winging across the mountains. But he said nothing, and merely pointed in silence to the northern sky.
Too swiftly for the eye to follow, a needle of silver light arced across the mountains, leaving a mile-long trail of incandescence. Twenty thousand feet above Lys, it stopped. There was no deceleration, no slow braking of its colossal speed. It came to a halt instantly, so that the eye that had been following it moved on across a quarter of the heavens before the brain could arrest its motion. Down from the skies crashed a mighty peal of thunder, the sound of air battered and smashed by the violence of the ship’s passage. A little later the ship itself, gleaming splendidly in the sunlight, came to rest upon the hillside a hundred yards away.
It was difficult to say who was the most surprised, but Alvin was the first to recover. As they walked—very nearly running—towards the spaceship, he wondered if it normally travelled in this meteoric fashion. The thought was disconcerting, although there had been no sensation of movement on his first voyage. Considerably more puzzling, however, was the fact that a day ago this resplendent creature had been hidden beneath a thick layer of iron-hard rock—the coating it had still retained when it had torn itself loose from the desert. Not until Alvin had reached the ship, and burnt his fingers by incautiously resting them on the hull, did he understand what had happened. Near the stern there were still traces of earth, but it had been fused into lava. All the rest had been swept away, leaving uncovered the stubborn shell which neither time nor any natural force could ever touch.
With Hilvar by his side, Alvin stood in the open door and looked back at the silent senators. He wondered what they were thinking—what, indeed, the whole of Lys was thinking. From their expressions, it almost seemed as if they were be yond thought.…
‘I am going to Shalmirane,’ said Alvin, ‘and I will be back in Airlee within an hour or so. But that is only a beginning, and while I am away, there is a thought I would leave with you.
‘This is no ordinary flyer of the kind in which men travelled over the Earth. It is a spaceship, one of the fastest ever built. If you want to know where I found it, you will find the answer in Diaspar. But you will have to go there, for Diaspar will never come to you.’
He turned to Hilvar, and gestured to the door. Hilvar hesitated for a moment only, looking back once at the familiar scenes around him. Then he stepped forward into the airlock.
The senators watched until the ship, now moving quite slowly—for it had only a little way to go—had disappeared into the south. Then the grey-haired young man who led the group shrugged his shoulders philosophically and turned to one of his colleagues.
‘You’ve always opposed us for wanting change,’ he said, ‘and so far you have won. But I don’t think the future lies with either of our groups now. Lys and Diaspar have both come to the end of an era, and we must make the best of it.’
‘I am afraid you are right,’ came the gloomy reply. ‘This is a crisis, and Alvin knew what he was saying when he told us to go to Diaspar. They know about us now, so there is no further purpose in concealment. I think we had better get in touch with our cousins—we may find them more anxious to co-operate