The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke Read Online Free PDF Page A

suddenly an electric motor started to whirr very close at hand. Then things began to happen all over the place. Switches clicked, powerful pumps began to whine, and valves snapped open down in the heart of the great rocket.
    Each time she thought, ‘This is it!’, but still they didn’t move. When the voyage finally began, she wasn’t prepared for it.
    A long way off, it seemed, there was a noise like a thousand waterfalls, or a thunderstorm in which the crashes followed each other so quickly that there was no moment of silence between them. The rockets had started, but were not yet delivering enough power to lift the ship.
    Quickly the roar mounted, the cabin began to vibrate, and the Centaurus began to ascend from the desert, spraying the sands with flame for a hundred yards around. To Daphne, it seemed that something was pushing her down, quite gently, into the thick padding of the couch. It wasn’t at all uncomfortable, but the pressure mounted until her limbs seemed to be made of lead and it needed a deliberate effort to keep breathing.
    She tried to lift her hand, and the effort to move it even a few inches was so tiring that she let it drop back on the couch. After that, she just lay limp and relaxed, waiting to see what would happen next. She wasn’t really frightened—it was too exciting for that, this feeling of infinite power sweeping her up into the sky.
    There was a sudden fall in the thunder of the rockets, the feeling of immense weight ebbed away, and she could breathe more easily. Power was being reduced: they had almost escaped the Earth’s grip. A moment later silence came flooding back as the last of the motors was cut out, and all feeling of weight vanished completely.
    For several minutes the pilot conferred with his navigator, checking instruments and figures. Then he swung round in his seat, smiled at the passengers and said, ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it? We’ve reached escape velocity now—25,000 miles an hour—and you won’t feel any weight again until we’re nearly at the Moon and we start the rockets to slow down.’
    He rose from his seat, still holding on to it with one hand, and Daphne saw that both his feet were clear of the floor. Releasing his grip, he floated towards them like something in a slow-motion film. Daphne knew that this sort of thing happened in space, but it was weird to see it before her own eyes. And it was weirder still when it began to happen to her .
    It was a long time before she got used to the idea that ‘up’ and ‘down’ simply didn’t have any meaning, and got the knack of gliding across the cabin without hitting the other side too hard, or colliding head-first with the walls. But it was such great fun that several minutes had passed before Daphne suddenly remembered what she must be missing, and dived towards the nearest of the little circular windows set in the wall of the ship.
    She had expected to see Earth as a great globe hanging in space, with the seas and continents clearly visible—just like those globes you see in map-sellers’ windows.
    What she saw, however, was totally unexpected and so wonderful that it took away her breath. Almost filling the sky was a tremendous, blinding crescent, the shape of a new moon, but hundreds of times bigger. The rocket must have passed over the night side of Earth, and the greater part of the planet was in darkness.
    But presently, as she stared at that great shadowy circle eclipsing the stars, she could see here and there upon its face tiny patches of light, and knew that she was looking down upon the cities of mankind, shining like fireflies in the night.
    It was several minutes before she could tear her eyes away from that huge crescent and the disc of darkness it embraced. As she watched, the crescent slowly narrowed, for the spaceship was still speeding into the shadow of the Earth. For a few minutes the sun would be totally eclipsed before the Centaurus came racing out into the light again, and only