The Foundations of Paradise - Arthur C. Clarke [79]
Sessui had used all his considerable influence to borrow this unique site, now crawling down through the ionosphere at two kilometers a day toward its rendezvous with Earth. It was essential, he had argued forcibly, to get his equipment installed before the peak of the current sunspot maximum.
Already, solar activity had reached unprecedented levels, and Sessui’s young assistants often found it hard to concentrate on their instruments; the magnificent auroral displays outside were too much of a distraction. For hours on end, both northern and southern hemispheres were filled with slowly moving curtains and streamers of greenish light, beautiful and awe-inspiring—yet only a pale ghost of the celestial firework displays taking place around the poles. It was rare for the aurora to wander so far from its normal domains: only once in generations did it invade the equatorial skies.
Sessui had driven his students back to work with the admonition that they would have plenty of time for sightseeing during the long climb back to Midway. Yet it was noticeable that even the Professor himself sometimes stood at the observation window for minutes at a time, entranced by the spectacle of the burning heavens.
Someone had christened the project Expedition to Earth—which, as far as distance was concerned, was ninety-eight percent accurate. As the capsule crawled down the face of the Tower at its miserable five hundred klicks, the increasing closeness of the planet beneath made itself obvious. Gravity was slowly increasing, from the delightful less-than-lunar buoyancy of Midway to almost its full terrestrial value. To any experienced space traveler, this was strange indeed: to feel any gravity before the moment of atmospheric entry seemed a reversal of the normal order of things.
Apart from complaints about the food, stoically endured by the overworked steward, the journey had been devoid of incident. A hundred kilometers from the Basement, the brakes had been gently applied and speed had been halved. It was halved again at fifty kilometers; as one of the students remarked: “Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if we ran off the end of the track?”
The driver—who insisted on being called pilot—retorted that this was impossible, because the guidance slots down which the capsule was falling terminated several meters short of the Tower’s end, and there was also an elaborate buffer system, just in case all four independent sets of brakes failed to work.
And everyone agreed that the joke, besides being perfectly ridiculous, was in extremely poor taste.
41
Meteor
The vast artificial lake known for two thousand years as the Sea of Paravana lay calm and peaceful beneath the stone gaze of its builder. Though few now visited the lonely statue of Kalidasa’s father, his work, if not his fame, had outlasted that of his son; and it had served his country infinitely better, bringing food and drink to a hundred generations of men.
And to many more generations of birds, deer, buffalo, monkeys, and their predators, like the sleek and well-fed leopard now drinking at the water’s edge. The big cats were becoming rather too common, and were inclined to be a nuisance now that they no longer had anything to fear from hunters. But they never attacked men unless they were cornered or molested.
Confident of his security, the leopard was leisurely drinking his fill as the shadows around the lake lengthened and twilight advanced from the east. Suddenly, he pricked up his ears, instantly alert; but no mere human senses could have detected any change in land, water, or sky. The evening was as tranquil as ever.
Then, directly out of the zenith, came a faint whistling that grew steadily to a rumbling roar, with tearing, ripping undertones, quite unlike that of a reentering spacecraft. Up in the sky, something metallic was sparking in the last rays of the sun, growing larger and leaving a trail of smoke behind it.
As it expanded, it disintegrated. Pieces shot off in all directions, some of them burning as they did so. For a few seconds,