The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [53]
But the perverse maddening voices, which all his life had made nothing seem worthwhile, were silent for the moment and he felt content. He had reached the calm at the center of the hurricane. While it lasted he would enjoy it to the full.
THE SENTINEL
Next to “The Star” and “The Nine Billion Names of God,” I suppose “The Sentinel” is my best-known short story—though not for itself, but as the seed from which 2001: A Space Odyssey sprang, twenty years after it was written in 1948. I wonder if I even noticed Christmas that year; Opus 62 bears the date 23–26 December . . .
Unlike most of my short stories, this one was aimed at a specific target—which it missed completely. The BBC had just announced a Short Story Competition; I submitted “The Sentinel” hot from the typewriter, and got it back a month later.
Somehow, I’ve never had any luck with such contests. A few years later I wrote “The Star” specifically for a London Observer competition on the subject “2500 A.D.” It too was bounced—though the judges were perceptive enough to give an award to one Brian Aldiss.
I am continually annoyed by careless references to “The Sentinel” as “the story on which 2001 is based”; it bears about as much relation to the movie as an acorn to the resultant full-grown oak. (Considerably less, in fact, because ideas from several other stories were also incorporated.) Even the elements that Stanley Kubrick and I did actually use were considerably modified. Thus the “glittering, roughly pyramidal structure . . . set in the rock like a gigantic, many-faceted jewel” became—after several modifications—the famous black monolith. And the locale was moved from the Mare Crisium to the most spectacular of all lunar craters, Tycho—easily visible to the naked eye from Earth at Full Moon.
Some time after “The Sentinel” was published, I was asked if I had ever read Jack London’s “The Red One” (1918). As I’d never even heard of it, I hastened to do so, and was deeply impressed by his thirty-year-earlier tale of the “Star-Born,” an enormous sphere lying for ages in the jungles of Guadalcanal. I wonder if this is the first treatment of a theme which has suddenly become topical, now that the focus of the SETI debate has changed from “Where’s Everyone?” to the even more puzzling “Where Are Their Artifacts?”
THE NEXT TIME YOU SEE THE FULL MOON high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain, one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium—the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.
Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisium is very flat. There are none of the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking us wherever we wished to go.
I was geologist—or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic—in charge of the group exploring the southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating down the flanks of those stupendous cliffs, retreating