The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [23]
But, wonderfully, the joy of exploring Sol’s other worlds kept getting better and better. Especially when, in the second session, Dr. Vorhulst got into the possibilities of actually visiting some of the planets, at least perhaps one or two of the least forbidding ones.
Vorhulst ran through the list for them. Mercury, no; you would hardly want to go there because it was far too hot and dry, even though there did appear to be some water—actually, ice—at one pole. Venus looked to be even worse, wrapped in that carbon dioxide blanket that trapped heat. “The same kind of blanket,” Vorhulst told the class, “that is causing the global warming right here on Earth that I hope we may actually, one day, escape. Or at least the worst parts of it.” On Venus, he added, those “worst parts” had added up to a surface temperature that would melt lead.
Next out was the Earth, “which we don’t actually need to colonize anymore,” Vorhulst joked, “because apparently someone, or something, did already, a good long time ago.” He didn’t give them a chance to react to that but went right on: “So let’s look at Mars. Do we want to visit Mars? More interesting, is there life there? That argument went back and forth for years.” The American astronomer Percival Lowell, he said, had thought not only that there was life on Mars but that it was a highly civilized, massively technological kind of life, capable of building the enormous network of canals Giovanni Schiaparelli had observed on its surface. Better telescopes—with the help of the late Captain Percy Molesworth of Trincomalee—ruined that idea when it was established that Schiaparelli’s “canali” were only random markings that his eye had tricked him into linking into straight lines. Then the first three Mariner missions ended that debate by sending back pictures of a surface that was arid, cratered, and cold. “But,” Dr. Vorhulst finished, “better photographs of the surface of Mars since then have shown indications of actual flowing water. Not flowing anymore now, of course, but pretty definitely real water that did flow sometime in the past. So the life-on-Mars people were riding high again. But,” he added, “then the pendulum swung back. So which way is right?” Dr. Vorhulst swept the audience with his glance, then grinned. “I think the only way we’ll know is to send some people there, preferably with a lot of digging equipment.”
He paused. Then he said, “I guess your next question is, ‘What would they be digging for?’ But before I answer that, do any of you know of a place in the solar system that we have left out so far?”
Silence for a moment while a hundred students counted on their fingers—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—until a young woman in the front row called, “Are you talking about the moon, Dr. Vorhulst?”
He glanced at his finder plate for her name, then tipped her a salute. “Right on, Roshini. But before we get to the moon let me show you some pictures of a place I’ve actually been to, namely, Hawaii.”
He turned to the wall screen behind him, which had begun to display a nighttime shot of a dark hillside running down to the sea. The slope was dotted with splotches of red fires, like the campsite of an army, and where the splotches reached the shoreline there were violent pyrotechnics with fiery meteors flying above the surface.
“That’s Hawaii,” Vorhulst said. “The big island. The volcano Kilauea is erupting, and what you see is its lava flowing into the sea. As it flows along, each little stream begins to cool on the outside, and so it forms a sort of a pipe of hardened stone that the liquid lava flows on through. Only, sometimes the lava breaks through the pipe. Then you see these isolated patches of red-hot lava shining out.” He gave the class time to wonder why they were looking at Hawaii when the subject had ostensibly been the moon. Then he touched his controller again. Now the screen displayed Dr. Vorhulst himself along with a rather