THE WIND FROM THE SUN

by

ARTHUR C. CLARKE


A SIGNET BOOK
NEW AMERICAN LIBRAry
Inmem mWarvom
Published by
THE NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY
OF CANADA LIMITED

For Peter,

these memories of our future

Copyright @ 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1970,
1971, 1972 by Arthur C. Clarke

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopy, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system,
without permissi n in writing from
the publisher.  For information address
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.,
757 Third Avenue, New York, New York 10017.

          Some of these stories appeared originally in Boy's
          Life, Esca ' pade, the Farthest Reaches, Galaxy,
          Infinity 11, Playboy, and This Week.

          This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover
          edition published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

First Printing, July, 1973
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

     WOMM TRAMMA= RM 11.6. PAT. 011F.  AND FOREIGN
COUNTRIES
     REGISTERED TRADEMAEK - MARQL RMSTRADA
0 XEMO XN WINNIPEG, CANADA



Srmw, SzGxET CLAssics, Sir-NnTTE, MENTon AND ftuml: ]3ooxs
are published In Canada by The Ne'@r American Library of
Canada Limited, Scarborough, Ontario

PRINTED IN CANADA

COVER PRINTED IN U.S.A.

                     Contents


Preface                                      Vff
The Food of the Gods                           1
Maelstrom 11                                   6
The Shining Ones                              20
The Wind from the Sun                         36
The Secret                                    55
The Last Command                              61
Dial F for Frankenstein                       63
Reunion                                       70
Playback                                      72
The Light of Darkness                         75
The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told   81
Herbert George Morley Roberts Wells, Esq.     82
Love That Universe                            85
Crusade                                       89
The Cruel Sky                                 94
Neutron Tide                                 112
Transit of Earth                             114
A Meeting with Medusa                        127

Preface



This volume contains all the stories I wrote in the decade of the
'60's, which was one of the most dramatic periods in the entire
history of science and technology.  Those years embraced the
laser, the genetic code, the first robot probes of Man and Venus,
the discovery of pulsars-and the landing on the Moon.  Many of
these events, either in anticipation or after achievement, are
reflected in these tales; for that reason I have placed them in
chronological order.
     This is my sixth volume of short stories, and I was tempted to
give it the subtitle "The Last of Clarke'@-not through any
intimations of mortality (I have every intention of seeing what really
happens in the year 2001), but because I seem to be doing less
and less writing, and more and more talking, traveling, filn-dng,
and skin-diving.  Extmpolating from my present rate of production,
volume seven would appear to lie so far in the future that it may be
better just to add my occasional stories to later editions of this
book.
     "The Wind from the Sun" was called "Sunjammee' when it was
first published, in Boys' Life.  By one of those strange
coincidences that often occur in literature (see "Herbert George
Morley Roberts Wells, Esq."), Poul Anderson used the same title,
almost simultaneously.
     'Me concept of the lunar launcher in "Maelstrom 11" was, I
believe, first put forward in my paper "Electromagnetic Launching
as a Major Contribution to Space Flight" (Journal of the British
Interplanetary Society, November 1950).
     The detailed predictions for the events that will take place as
described in "Transit of Earth" were made by Jan Meeus (Journal
of the British Astronomical Association,.vol. 72, no. 6, 1962). 1 am
greatly indebted to Mr. Meeus's paper for both information and
inspiration.
     The phrase "the Wheels of Poseidon" (in "A Meeting with
Medusa") was coined by my friend the late Willy Ley, and the
relevant quotations were taken from his book On Earth and

in the Sky.  The cause of this extraordinary and awe-inspiring
phenomenon is by no means fully understood.
     Finally, may I say that this volume can perhaps claim one
modest record in "The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told":
no longer story ever has been written, or ever will be.

                                   ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Colombo, Ceylon
February 1971

The Food of the Gods




It's only fair to warn you, Mr. Chairman, that much of my evidence
will be highly nauseating; it involves aspects ofhuman nature that
are very seldom discussed in public, and certainly not before a
congressional committee.  But I am afraid that they have to be
faced; there are times when the veil of hypocrisy has to be ripped
away, and this is one of them.
     You and 1, gentlemen, have descended from a long line of
carnivores.  I see from your expressions that most of you don't
recognize the term.  Well, that's not surprising--it comes from a
language that has been obsolete for two thousand yearL Perhaps
I had better avoid euphemisms and be brutally frank, even if I have
to use words that are never heard in polite society.  I apologize in
advance to anyone I may offend.
     Until a few centuries ago, the favorite food of almost AU men
was meat-the fiesh of once living animals.  I'm not trying to turn
your stomachs; this is a simple statement of fact, which you can
check in any history book....
     Why, certainly, Mr. Chairman.  I'm quite prepared to wait until
Senator Irving feels better.  We professionals sometimes forget
how laymen may react to statements like that.  At the same time,
I must wam the committee that there is very much worse to come. 
If any of you gentlemen are at all squeamish, I suggest you follow
the Senator before it's too late....
     WeH, if I may continue.  Until modem times, all food fell into
two categories.  Most of it was produced from plantscereals, fruits,
plankton, algae, and other forms of vegetation.  It's hard for us to
realize that the vast majority of our ancestors were farmers,
winning food from land or sea by primitive and often backbreaking
techniques; but that is the
truth.
     The second type of food, if I may return to this unpleasant
subject, was meat, produced from a relatively smau number of
animals.  You may be familiar with some of them-cows,

2 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

pigs, sheep, whales.  Most people-I am sorry to stress this, but the
fact is beyond dispute-preferred meat to any other food, though
only the wealthiest were able to indulge this appetite.  To most of
mankind, meat was a rare and occasional delicacy in a diet that
was more than ninety-per-cent vegeta, ble.
     If we look at the matter calmly and dispassionately-as I hope
Senator Irving is now in a position to do-we can see that meat was
bound to be rare and expensive, for its production is an extremely
inefficient process.  To make a kilo of meat, the animal concerned
had to eat at -least ten kilos of vegetable food-very often food that
could have been consumed directly by human beings.  Quite apart
from any consideration of aesthetics, this state of affairs could not
be tolerated after the population explosion of the twentieth century. 
Every man who ate meat was condemning ten or more of his fellow
humans to starvation....
     Luckily for all of us, the biochemists solved the problem; as
you may know, the answer was one of the countless by-products
of space research.  AJI food-animal or vegetable@@Ls built up
from a very few common elements.  Carbon, hydro. gen, oxygen,
nitrogen, traces of sulphur and phosphorusthese half-dozen
elements, and a few others, combine in an almost infinite variety
of ways to make up every food that man has ever eaten or ever will
eat.  Faced with the problem of colonizing the Moon and planets,
the biochemists of the twenty-first century discovered how to
synthesize any de food from the basic raw materials of water, air,
and rock.  R was the greatest, and perhaps the most important,
achieve. ment in the history of science.  But we should not feel too
proud of it.  The vegetable kingdom had beaten us -by a billion
years.
     The chemists could now synthesize any conceivable food,
whether it had a counterpart in nature or not.  Needless to say,
there were rnistakes-even disasters.  Industrial empires rose and
crashed; the switch from agriculture and animal husbandry to the
giant automatic processing plants and omniverters of today was
often a painful one.  But it had to be made, and we are the better
for it.  The danger of starvation has been banished forever, and we
have a richness and variety of food that no other age has ever
known.
     In addition, of course, there was a moral gain.  We no longer
murder millions of living creatures, and such revolting

                                       The Food of the Gody 3

institutions as the slaughterhouse and the butcher shop have
vanished from the face of the Earth.  It seems incredible to us that
even our ancestors, coarse and brutal though they were, could
ever have tolerated such obscenities.
     And yet-it is impossible to make a clean break with the past. 
As I have already remarked, we are carnivores; we inherit tastes
and appetites that have been acquired over a million years of time. 
Whether we like it or not, only a few years ago some of our great-
grandparents were enjoying the flesh of cattle and sheep and pigs-
when they could get it.  And we still enjoy it today....
     Oh dear, maybe Senator Irving had better stay outside from
now on.  Perhaps I should not have been quite so blunt.  What I
meant, of course, was that many of the synthetic foods we now eat
have the same formula as the old natural products; some of them,
indeed, are such exact replicas that no chemical or other test
could reveal any difference.  This situation is logical and inevitable;
we manufacturers simply took the most popular presynthetic foods
as our models, and reproduced their taste and texture.
     Of course, we also created new names that didn't hint of an
anatomical or zoological origin, so that no one would be reminded
of the facts of life.  When you go into a restaurant, most of the
words you'll find on the menu have been invented since the
beginning of the twenty-first century, or else adapted from French
originals that few people would recognize.  If you ever want to find
your threshold of tolerance, you cm try an interesting but highly
unpleasant experiment.  The classified section of the Library of
Congress has a large number of menus. from famous restaurants--
yes, and White House banquets-going back for five hundred years. 
They have a crude, dissecting-room frankness that makes them
almost unreadable.  I cannot think of anything that reveals more
vividly the gulf between us and our ancestors of only a few
generations ago....
     Yes, Mr. Chairman-I am coming to the point; all this is highly
relevant, however disagreeable it may be.  I am not trying to spoil
your appetites; I am merely laying the groundwork for the charge
I wish to bring against my competitor, Triplanetary Food
Corporation.  Unless you understand this background, you may
think that this is a frivolous complaint inspired by the admittedly
serious losses my firm has sustained since Ambrosia Plus came
on the market.

4 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     New foods, gentlemen, are invented every week.  It is hard to
keep track of them.  They come and go like women's fashions, and
only one in a thousand becomes a permanent addition to the
menu.  It is extremely rare for one to hit the public fancy overnight,
and I freely admit that the Ambrosia Plus line of dishes has been
the greatest success in the entire history of food manufacture. 
You all know the position: everything else has been swept off the
market.
     Naturally, we were forced -to accept the challenge.  The
biochemists of my organization are as good as any in the solar
system, and they promptly got to work on Ambrosia Plus.  I am not
giving away any trade secrets when I tell you that we have tapes
of practically every food, natural or synthetic, that has, ever been
eaten by mankind-right back to exotic items that you7ve never
heard of, like fried squid, locusts in honey, peacocks' tongues,
Venusian polypod... Our enormous Hbrary of flavors and textures
is our basic stock in trade, as it is with all firms in the business. 
From it we can select and mix items in any conceivable
combination; and usually we can duplicate, without too much
trouble, any product that our competitors put out.          I
     But Ambrosia Plus had us baffled for quite some time.  Its
protein-fat breakdown classified it as a straightforward meat,
without too many complications--yet we couldn't match it exactly. 
It was the first time my chemists had failed; not one of them could
explain just what gave the stuff its extraordinary appeal-which, as
we all know, makes every other food seem insipid by comparison. 
As well it might ... but I am getting a-head of myself.
     Very shortly, Mr. Chairman, the president of Triplanetary Foods
will be appearing before you-rather reluctantly, rin sure.  He will
tell you that Ambrosia Plus is synthesized from air, water,
limestone, sulphur, phosphorus, and the rest.  That will be
perfectly true, but it will be the least important part of the story. 
For we have now discovered his secret-which, like most secrets,
is very simple once you know it.
     I really must congratulate my competitor.  He has at last made
available unlimited quantities of what is, from the nature of things,
the ideal food for mankind.  Until now, it has been in extremely
short supply, and therefore all the more relished by the few
connoisseurs who could obtain it.  Without exception, they have
sworn that nothing else can remotely compare with it.

                                  The Food of the Gods 5

     Yes, Triplanetary's chemists have done a superb technical job. 
Now you have to resolve the moral and philosophical issues. 
When I began my evidence, I -used the archaic word 66 carnivore."
Now I must introduce you to another: III spell it out the first time:
C-A-N-N-I-B-A-L....

                                             May 1961

Maelstrom It


He was not the first man, Cliff Leyland told himself bitterly, to know
the exact second and the precise man er of his death.  Times
beyond number, condemned criminals had waited for their last
dawn.  Yet until the very end they could hope for a reprieve; human
judges can show mercy.  But against the laws of nature, there is
no appeal.
     And only six hours ago, he had been whistling happily while he
packed his ten kilos of personal baggage for the long fall home. 
He could still remember (even now, after an that had happened)
how he had dreamed that Myra was already in his arms, that he
was taking Brian and Sue on that promised crui e down the Nile. 
In a few minutes, as Earth rose above the horizon, he might see
the Nile again; but memory alone could bring back the faces of his
wife and children.  And all because he had tried to save nine
hundred and fifty sterling doll= by ridinghome on the freight
catapult, instead of the rocket shuttle.
     He had expected the first tweTve seconds of the trip to be
rough, as the electric launcher whipped the capsule along its ten-
mile track and shot him off the Moon.  Even with the protection of
the water-bath in which he would float during countdown, he had
not looked forward to the twenty g!s of take-off.  Yet when the
acceleration had gripped the capsule, ,he had been hardly aware
of the immense forces acting upon him.  The only sound was a
faint creaking from the metal walls; to anyone who had
experienced the thunder of a rocket launch, the silence was
uncanny.  When the cabin speaker had announced "T plus five
seconds; speed two thousand miles an hour," he could scarcely
believe it.
     Two thousand miles an hour in five seconds from a standing
start-with seven seconds still to go as the generators smashed
their thunderbolts of power into the launcher.  He was riding the
lightning across the face of the Moon.  And at T plus seven
seconds, the lightning failed.
                              6

                                            Maelstrom U 7

     Even in the wornblike shelter of the tank, Cliff could sense that
something had gone wrong.  The water around him, until now
frozen almost rapid by its weight, seemed sudden1v to become
alive.  Though the capsule was still hurtling along the track, all
acceleration had ceased, and it was merely coasting under its own
momentum.
     He had no time to feel fear, or to wonder what had happened,
for the power failure lasted little more than a second.  Then, with
a jolt that shook the capsule from end to end and set off a series
of ominous, tinkling crashes, the field came on again.
     When the acceleration faded for the last time, all weiglit
vanished with it.  Cliff needed no instnirnent but his stomach to tell
that the capsule had left the end of the track and was rising away
from the surface of the Moon.  He waited impatiently until the
automatic pumps had drained the tank and the hot-air driers had
done theirmork; then he drifted across the control panel, and
pulled himself down into the bucket seat.
     "Launch Control," he called urgently, as he drew the
restrobting, straps around , his waist, "what the devil happenedr-
     A brisk but worried voice answered at once.
     "Wre still checking-call you back in thirty secondc" Then it
Pdded belatedly "Glad you're O.K."
     While he was waiting, Cliff switched to forward vision.  There
was nothing ahead except stars-whicb. was as it should be. At
leasthe had taken off with most of his planned speed, and there
was no danger that he would crash back to the Moon's surface
immediately.  But he would crash back sooner or later, for be
could not possibly have reached escape velocity.  He must be
rising out into space along a great ellipse-and, in a few hours, he
would be back at his starting point.
     "Hello.  Cliff," said Launch Control suddenly.  "We've found
what happened.  'Me circuit breakers tripped when you went
through section five of the track.  So your take-off speed was
seven hundred miles an hour -low.  That will bring you back in

just over five hours-but don't worry; your course-correction jets
can boost you into a stable orbit.  Well tell you when to

fire them.  Then all you have to do is to sit tight until we can send
someone to haul you down."

     Slowly, Cliff allowed himself to relax.  He had forgotten the
capsule's vernier rockets.  Low-povmred though they were,

8 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

they could kick him into an orbit that would clear the Moon. 
Thoughhe might fall back to within a few miles of the lunar surface,
skimming over mountains and plains at a breath-taking speed, he
would be perfectly safe.
     Then -he remembered those tinkling crashes from the control
compartment, and his hopes dimmed again, for there were not
many things that could break in a space vehicle without most
unpleasant consequences.
     He was facing those consequences, now that the final checks
of the ignition circuits had been completed.  Neither on mANuAL
nor on AuTo would the navigation rockets fire. ne capsule's
modest fuel reserves, which could have taken him to safety, were
utterly useless.  In five hours he would complete his orbit-and
return to his launching point.
     I wonder if they'll name the new crater after me, thought Cliff. 
"Crater Leyland: diameter ..." What diameter? Better not
exaggerate-I don't suppose it will be more than a couple of
hundred yards across.  Hardly worth putting on the map.
     Launch Control was still silent, but that was not surprising. 
'Mere was little that one could say to a man already as good as
dead.  And yet, though he knew that nothing could alter his
trajectory, even now he could not believe that he would soon be
scattered over most of Farside.  He was still soaring away from the
Moon, snug and comfortable in his little cabin.  TU idea of death
was utterly incongruous--as it is to all men until the final second.
     And then, for a moment, Cliff forgot his own problem.  The
horizon ahead was no longer flat.  Something more brilliant even
than the blazing lunar landscape was lifting against the stars.  As
the capsule curved round the edge of the Moon, it was creating the
only kind of earthrise that was possible--a man-made one.  In a
minute it was all over, such was his speed in orbit.  By that time
the Earth had leaped clear of the horizon, and was climbing swiftly
up the sky.
     It was three-quarters full, and almost too bright to look upon. 
Here was a cosmic mirror made not of dull rocks and dusty plains,
but of snow and cloud and sea.  Indeed, it was almost all sea, for
the Pacific was turned toward him, and the blinding reflection of
the sun covered the Hawaiian Islands.  The haze of the
atmosphere-that soft blanket that should have cushioned his
descent in a few -hours' time--obliterated all geographical details;
perhaps that darker patch emerging from night was New Guinea,
but he could not &_1 sure.
     There was a bitter irony in the knowledge that he was

                                                 Maelstrom 11
                                                  9

heading straight toward that lovely, gleaming apparition. . Another
seven hundred miles an hour and he would have made it.  Seven
hundred miles an hour-that was an.  He might as well ask for
seven million.
     The sight of the rising Earth brought home to him, with
irresistible force, the duty he feared but could postpone no longer.
     "Launch Control,",he said, -holding his voice steady with a great
effort "please give me a circuit to Earth."
     This was one of the strangest things he had ever done in his
life: to sit here above the Moon and listen to the telephone ring in
his own home, a quarter of a million miles away.  It must be near
midnight down there in Africa, and it would be some time before
there would be any answer.  Myra would stir sleepily; then,
because she was a spaceman's wife, always alert for disaster, she
would be instantly awake.  But they had both hated to have a
phone in the bedroom, and it would be at least fifteen seconds
before she could switch on the light, close the nursery door to
avoid disturbing the baby, get down the stairs, and .
     Her voice came clear and sweet across the emptiness of space. 
He would recognize it anywhere in the universe, and he detected
at once the undertone of anxiety.
     "Mrs.  Leylandr, said the Earthside operator.  "I have a call from
your husband.  Please remember the two-second time lag.
     Cliff wondered how many people were listening to this call, on
either the Moon, the Earth, or the relay satellites.  It was hard to
talk for the last time to your loved ones when you didn't know how
many eavesdroppers there might be.  But as soon as he began to
speak, no one else existed but Myra and himself.
     "Darling," he began, 'Ws is Cliff.  I'm afraid I won't be coming
home, as I promised.  There's been a . . . a technical slip.  I'm
quite all right at the moment, but I'm in big trouble."
     He swallowed, trying to overcome the dryness in his mouth,
then went on quickly before she could interrupt.  As briefly ashe
could, he explained the situation.  For his own sake as well as
hers, he did not abandon all hope.
     "Everyone's doing their best," he said.  "Maybe they can get a
ship up to me in time.  But in case they can't . . . well, I wanted to
speak to you and the children."
     She took It well, as he had known that she wools He ffelt,

10 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

pride as well as love when her answer came back from the dark
side of Earth.
     "Don't worry, Cliff.  I'm sure they'll get you out, and we'll have
our holiday after all, exactly the way we planned."
     "I think so, too," he lied.  "But just in case, would you wake the
children? Don't tell them that anything's wrong.,,
     It was an endless half-minute before he heard their sleepy,. yet
excited, voices.  Cliff would willingly have given these last few
hours of his life to have seen their faces once again, but the
capsule was not equipped with such luxuries as vision.  Perhaps
it was just as well, forhe could not have hidden the truth had he
looked into their eyes.  They would know it soon enough, but not
from ilum.  He wanted to give them only happiness in these last
moments together.
     Yet it was hard to answer their questions, to tell them that he
would soon be seeing them, to make promises that he could not
keep.  It needed all his self-control when Brian reminded him of the
moondust he had forgotten once before-but had remembered this
time.
     "I've got it, Brian; it's in a jar right beside me.  Soon you'll be
able to show it to your friends." (No: soon it will be back on the
world from which it came.) "And Susie-be a good girl aud do
everything that Mummy tells you.  Your last school report wasn't
too good, you know, especially those -remarks about behavior.   
    Yes, Brian, I have those photographs, and the piece of rock
from Aristarchus......
     It was hard to die at thirty-five; but it was hard, too, for a boy
to lose his father at ten.  How would Brian remember him in the
years ahead? Perhaps as no more than a fading voice from space,
for he had spent so little time on Earth.  In the last few minutes, as
-he swung outward and then back to the Moon, there was little
enough that he could do except project his love and his hopes
across the emptiness that he would never span again.  The rest
was up to Myra.
     When the children had gone, happy but puzzled, there was
work to do.  Now was the time to keep one's head, to be-
businesslike and practical.  Myra must face the future without him,
but at least he could make the transition easier.  Whatever
happens to the individual, life goes on; and to modern man life
involves mortgages and installments due, insurance policies and
joint bank accounts.  Almost impersonally, as if they concerned
someone else-which would soon be true enough-Cliff began to talk
about these things.,There was a dme for the heart and a time for
the brain.  The heart w9iM

                                            Maelstrom 11 11

have its final say three hours from now, when he began his last
approach to the surface of the Moon.
     No one interrupted them.  There must have been silent
monitors maintaining the link between two worlds, but the two of
them might have been the only people alive.  Some. times while he
was speaking Cliff's eyes would stray to the periscope, and be
dazzled by the glare of Earth-now more than halfway up the sky. 
It was impossible to believe that it was home for seven billion
souls.  Only three mattered to him now.
     It should have been four, but with the best will in the world he
could not put the baby on the same footing as the others.  He had
never seen his younger son; and now he never would.
     At last he could think of no more to say.  For some things, a
lifetime was not enough-but an hour could be too much.  He felt
physically and emotionally exhausted, and the strain on Myra must
have been equally great.  He wanted to be alone with his thoughts
and with the stars, to compose his mind and to make his peace
with the universe.
     "I'd like to sign off for an hour or so, darling," he said.  There
was no need for explanations; they understood each other too well. 
"I'll call you back in-in plenty of time.  Good-by for now."
     He waited the two and a half seconds for the answering good-
by from Earth; then he cut the circuit and stared blankly at the tiny
control desk.  Quite unexpectedly, without desire or volition, tears
sprang from his eyes, and suddenly he was weeping like a child.
     He wept for his family, and for himself.  He wept for the future
that might have been, and the hopes that would soon 'be
incandescent vapor, drifting between the stars.  And he wept
because there was nothing else to do.
     After a while he felt much better.  Indeed, he realized that he
was extremely hungry.  There was no point in dying on an empty
stomach, and he began to rummage among the space rations in
the closet-sized galley.  While he was squeezing a tube of chicken-
and-ham paste into his mouth, Launch Control called.
     There was a new voice at the end of the line-a slow, steady,
and immensely competent voice that sounded as if it would brook
no nonsense from inanimate machinery.
     "This is Van Kessel, Chief of Maintenance, Space Vehicles
Division.  Listen carefully; Leyland.  We think we've found a way
out.  It's a long shot-but it's the only chance you have."

12 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

I Alternations of hope and despair are hard on the nervous system. 
Cliff felt a sudden dizziness; he might have fallen had there been
any direction in which to fall.
     "Go ahead," he said faintly, when he had recovered.  Then he
listened to Van Kessel with an eagerness that slowly changed to
incredulity.
     "I don't believe itl" he said at last.  "It just doesn't make sensel"
     "You can't argue with the computers," answered Van Kessel. 
"They've checked the figures about twenty different ways.  And it
makes sense, all right.  You won't be moving so fast at apogee,
and it doesn't need much of a kick then to change your orbit.  I
suppose you!ve never been -in a deep-space rig before?"
          "No, of course not."
     "Pity-but never mind.  If you follow instructions, you cant go
wrong.  You'll find the suit in the locker at the end of the cabin. 
Break the seals and haul it out."
     Cliff floated the full six feet from the control desk to the rear of
the cabin and pulled on the lever marked EMERGENCY .ONLY-
TYPE 17 MEP-SPACE surr.  The door opened, and the shining
silver fabric hung flaccid before him.
     "Strip down to your underclothes and wriggle into it," said Van
Kessel.  "Don't bother about the, biopack-you clamp that on later."
     "I'm in," said Cliff presently.  "What do I do now?"
     "You wait twenty minutes-and then we'll give you the signal to
open the air lock and jump."
     The implications of that word "jump" suddenly penetrated.  Cliff
looked around the now familiar, comforting little cabin, and then
thought of the lonely emptiness between the starsthe
unreverberant abyss through which a man could fall until the end
of time.
     He had never been in free space; there was no reason why he
should.  He was just a farmer's boy with a master's degree in
agronomy, seconded from the Sahara Reclamation Project and
trying to grow crops on the Moon.  Space was not for him; he
belonged to the worlds of soil and rock, of moondust and vacuum-
formed pumice.
     "I can't do it," he whispered.  "Isn't there any other way?'
"There's not," snapped Van Kessel.  "We're doing our damnedest
to save you, and this is no time to get neurotic.' Dozens of men
have been in far worse situations-badly injured, trapped in
wreckage a million miles from help.'But

                                            Maebtrom 11 13

you're not even scratched, and already you're    squealingl Pull
yourself together--or well sign off and leave    you to stew in your
own juice."
     Cliff turned slowly red, and it was several seconds before he
answered.
     "I'm all right," he said at last.  "Let's go through those
instructions again."
     "That's better," said -Van Kessel approvingly.  "Twenty minutes
from now, when you're at apogee, you'll go into the air lock.  From
that point, we'll lose communication; your suit radio has only a ten-
mile range.  But we'll be tracking you on radar and we'll be able to
speak to you when you pass over us again.  Now, about the
controls on your suit .
     The twenty minutes went quickly enough.  At the end of that
time, Cliff knew exactly what he had to do.  He had even come to
believe that it might work.
     "Time to bail out," said Van Kessel.  "The capsule's correctly
oriented-the air lock points the way you want to go.  But direction
isn't critical.  Speed is what matters.  Put everything vou've got
into that jump-and good luckl"
     "Thanks," said Cliff inadequately.  "Sorry that I . .
     "Forget it," interrupted Van Kessel.  "Now get movingl"
     For the last time, Cliff looked around the tiny cabin, wondering
if there was anything that he had forgotten.  AR his personal
belongings would have to be abandoned, but they could be
replaced easily enough.  Then he remembered the little jar of
moondust he had promised Brian; this time, he would not let the
boy down.  The minute mass of the sample---only a few ounces--
would make no difference to his fate.  He tied a piece of string
around the neck of the jar and attached it to the harness of his
suit.
     The air lock was so small that there was literally no room to
move; he stood sandwiched between inner and outer doors until
the automatic pumping sequence was finished.  Then the wall
slowly opened away from him, and he was facing the stars.
     With his clumsy gloved fingers, he hauled himself out of the air
lock and stood upright on the steeply curving hull, bracing himself
tightly against it with the safety line.  The splendor of the scene
held him almost paralyzed.  He forgot allhis fears of vertigo and
insecurity as he gazed around him, no longer constrained by the
narrow field of vision of the periscope.
     The Moon was a gigantic crescent, the dividing line between
night and day a jagged arch sweeping across a quarter

14 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

of the sky.  Down there the sun was setting, at the beginning of the
long lunar night, but the summits of isolated peaks were still
blazing with the last light of day, defying the darkness that had
already encircled them.
     'Mat darkness was not complete.  Though the sun had gone
from the land below, the almost full Earth flooded it with glory. 
Cliff could see, faint but clear in the glimmering earthlight, the
outlines of seas and highlands, the dim stars of mountain peaks,
the dark circles of craters.  He was flying above a ghostly, sleeping
land-a land that was trying to drag him to his death.  For now he
was poised at the highest point of his orbit, exactly on the line
between Moon and Earth.  It was time to go.
     He bent his legs, crouching against the hull.  Then, with an his
force, he launched himself toward the stars, letting the safety line
run out behind him.
     The capsule receded with surprising speed, and as it did go, he
felt a most unexpected sensation.  He had anticipated terror or
vertigo, but not this unmistakable, haunting sense of familiarity.  All
this had happened before; not to him, of course, but to someone
else.  He could not pinpoint the memory, and there was no time to
hunt for it now.
     He flashed a quick glance at Earth, Moon, and receding
spacecraft, and made his decision without conscious thought.  The
line whipped away as he snapped the quick-release.  Now he was
alone, two thousand miles above the Moon, a quarter of a million
miles from Earth.  He could do nothingibut wait; it would be two
and a half hours before he would know if he could live-and if his
own muscles had performed the task that the rockets had failed to
do.
     And as the stars slowly revolved around him, he sudde* knew
the origin of that haunting memory.  It was many years since he
had read Poe's short stories, but who could ever forget them?
     He, too, was trapped in a maelstrom, being whirled down to his
doom; he, too, hoped to escape by abandoning his vessel. 
Though the forces involved were totally different, the parallel was
striking.  Poe's fisherman had lashed himself to a barrel because
stubby, cylindrical objects were being sucked down into the great
whirlpool more slowly than his ship.  It was a brilliant application
of the laws of hydrodynamics.  Cliff could only hope that his use
of celestial mechanics would be equally inspired.
     How fast had he jumped away from the capsule? At a-good

                                            Maektrom U 15

five miles an hour, surely.  Trivial though that speed was by
astronomical standards, it should be enough to inject him into a
new orbit-one that, Van Kessel had promised him, would clear the
Moon by several miles.  That was not much of a margin, but it
would be enough on this airless world, where there was no
atmosphere to claw him down.
     With a sudden spasm of guilt, Cliff realized that he had never
made that second call to Myra.  It was Van Kessel's fault; the
engineer had kept him on the move, given him no time to brood
over his own affairs.  And Van Kessel was right: in a situation like
this, a man could think only of himself.  All his resources, mental
and physical, must be concentrated on survival.  This was no time
or place for the distracting and weakening ties of love.
     He was racing now toward the night side of the Moon, and the
daylit crescent was shrinking as he watched.  The intolerable disc
of the Sun, at which he dared not look, was failing swiftly toward
the curved horizon.  The crescent moonscape dwindled to a
burning line of light, a bow of fire set against the stars.  Then the
bow fragmented into a dozen shining beads, which one by one
winked out as he shot into the shadow of the Moon.
     With the going of the Sun, the earthlight seemed more brilliant
than ever, frosting his suit with silver as he rotated slowly a-long
his orbit.  It took him about ten seconds to make each revolution;
there was nothing he could do to check his spin, and indeed he
welcomed the constantly changing view.  Now that his eyes were
no longer distracted by occasional glimpses of the Sun, he could
see the stars in thousands, where there had been only hundreds
before.  The familiar constellations were drowned, and even the
brightest of the planets were hard to find in that blaze of light.
     The dark disc of the lunar night land lay across the star' field
like an eclipsing shadow, and it was slowly growing as he fell
toward it.  At every instant some star, bright or faint, would pass
behind its edge and wink out of existence.  It was almost as if a
hole were growing in space, eating up the heavens.
     There was no other indication of his movement, or of the
passage of time except for his regular ten-second spin.  When he
looked at his watch, he was astonished to see that he had left the
capsule half an hour ago.  He searched for it among the stars,
without. success.  By now, it would be several miles

16 THE ArM FROM THE SUN

behind.  But presently it would draw ahead of him, as it moved on
its lower orbit, and would be the first to reach the Moon.
     Cliff was still puzzling over this paradox when the strain of the
last few hours, combined with the euphoria of weightlessness,
produced a result he would hardly have believed possible.  Lulled
by the gentle susurration of the air inlets, floating lighter than any
feather as he turned beneath the stars, he fell into a dreamless
sleep.
     When he awoke at some prompting of his subsconscious, the
Earth was nearing the edge of the Moon.  The sight alm ' ost
brought on another wave of self-pity, and for a moment he had to
fight for control of his emotions.  This was the very last he might
ever see of Earth, as his orbit took him back over Farside, into the
land where the earthlight never shone.  The brilliant antarctic
icecaps, the equatorial cloud belts, the scintillation of the Sun
upon the Pacific-all were sinking swiftly behind the lunar
mountains.  Then they were gone; he had neither Sun nor Earth to
light him now, and the invisible land -below was so black that it
hurt his eyes.
     Unbelievably, a. cluster of stars had appeared inside the
darkened disc, wheTe no stars could possibly be.  Cliff stared at
them in astonishment for a few seconds, then realized he was
passing above one of the Farside settlements.  Down there
beneath the pressure domes of their city, men were wafting out the
lunar night--6leeping, working, loving, resting, quarrel.ing.  Did
they know that he was speeding like an invisible meteor through
their sky, racing above their heads at four thousand miles an hour?
Almost certainly; for by now the whole Moon, and the whole Earth,
must know of his predicament.  Perhaps they were searching for
him with radar and telescope, but they would have little time to find
him.  Within seconds, the unknown city had dropped out of sight,
and he was once more alone above Farside.
     It was impossible to judge his altitude above the blank
emptiness speeding below, for there was no sense of scale or
perspective.  Sometimes it seemed that he could reach out and
touch the darkness across which he was racing; yet he knew that
in reality it must still be many miles beneath him.  But he also
knew that he was still descending, and that at any moment one of
the crater walls or mountain peaks that strained invisibly toward
him might claw him from the sky.
     In the darkness somewhere ahead was the final obstaclethe
hazard he feared most of all.  Across the heart of Farside,
spanning the equator from north to south in a wall more than,

                                            Maelstrom 11 17

a thousand miles long, lay the Soviet Range.  He had been a boy
when it was discovered, back in 1959, and could still remember his
excitement when be had seen the first smudged photographs from
Limik 111.  He could never have dreamed that one day he would
be flying toward those same mountains, waiting for them to decide
his fate.
     The first eruption of dawn took him completely by surprise. 
Light exploded ahead of him, leaping from peak to peak until the
whole arc of the horizon was limned with flame.  He was hurtling
out of the lunar night, directly into the face of the Sun.  At least he
would not die in darkness, but the greatest danger was yet to
come.  For now he was almost back where he had started, nearing
the lowest point of his orbit.  He glanced at the suit chronometer,
and saw that five full hours had now-passed.  Within minutes, he
would hit the Moon--or skim it and pass safely out into space.
     As far as he could judge, he was less than twenty miles above
the surface, and he was still descending, though very slowly now. 
Beneath him, the long shadows of the lunar dawn were d,    rs of
darkness, stabbing toward the night land.  The steeply slanting
sunlight exaggerated every rise in the ground, making even the
smallest hills appear to be mountains.  And now, unmistakably, the
lpnd ahead was rising, wrinkling into the foothills of the Soviet
Range.  More than a hundred miles away, but approaching at a
mile a second, a wave of rock was climbine from the face of to
Moon.  There was nothing he could d o to avoid it; his path was
fixed and unalterable.  All that could be done had already been
done, two and a half hours ago. ,
     It was not enough.  He was not going to rise above these
mountains; they were rising above him.
     Now he regretted his failure to make that second call to the
woman who was still waiting, a quarter of a million miles away.  Yet
perhaps it was just as well, for there had been nothing more to
say.
     Other voices were calling in the space around him, as he came
once more within range of Launch Control, They waxed and waned
as he flashed through the radio shadow of the mountains; they
were talking about him, but the fact scarcely registered on him.  He
listened with an impersonal interest, as if to messages from some
remote point of space or time, of no concern to him.  Once he
heard Van Kessel's voice say, quite distinctly: "Tell Callisto's
skipper we'll give him an intercept orbit as soon as we know that
Leyland's past perigee.

18 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

Rendezvous time should be one hour five minutes from now." I
hate to disappoint you, thought Cliff, but that's one appointment r1l
never keep.
     Now the wall of rock was only fifty miles away, and each time
he spun helplessly in space it came ten miles closer.  There was
no room for optimism now, as he sped more swiftly than a rifle
bullet toward that implacable barrier.  This was the end, and
suddenly it became of great importance to know whether he would
meet it face first, with open eyes, or with his back turned, like a
coward.
     No memories of his past life flashed through Cliffs mind as he
counted the seconds that remained.  The swiftly unrolling
moonscape rotated beneath him, every detail sharp and clear in
the harsh light of dawn.  Now he was turned away from the
onrushing mountains, looking back on the path he had traveled,
the path that should have led to Earth.  No more than there of his
ten-second days were left to him.
     And then the moonscape exploded into silent flame.  A light as
fierce as that of the gun banished the long shadows, struck fire
from the peaks and craters spread -below.  It lasted for only a
fraction of a second, and had faded completely before he had
turned toward its source.
     Directly ahead of him, only twenty miles away, a vast cloud of
dust was expanding toward the stars.  It was as if a volcano had
erupted in the Soviet Range-but that, of course, was impossible. 
Equally absurd was Cliffs second thought-that by some fantastic
feat of organization and logistics the Farside Engineering Division
had blasted away the obstacle in his path.
     For it was gone.  A huge, crescent-shaped bite had been taken
out of the approaching skyline; rocks and debris were still rising
from a crater that had not existed five seconds ago.  OnIv the
energy of an atomic bomb, exploded at precisely the right moment
in his path, could have wrought such a miracle.  And Cliff did not
believe in miracles.
     He had made another complete revolution, and was almost
upon the mountains, when be remembered that, all this while, there
had been a cosmic bulldozer moving invisibly ahead of him.  The
kinetic energy of the abandoned capsule-a thousand tons, traveling
at over a mile a second-was quite sufficient to have blasted the
gap through which he was now racing.  The impactof the man-
made meteor must have jolted the whole of Farside.
     His luck held to the end.  There was brief pitter-patter of

                                            Maelytrom 11 19

dust particles against his suit, and he caught a blurred glimpse of
glowing rocks and swiftly dispersing smoke clouds flashing
beneath him. (How strange to see a cloud upon the Moonl) Then
he was through the mountains, with nothing ahead but blessed
empty sky.
     Somewhere up there, an hour in the future along his second
orbit, Callisto would be moving to meet him.  But there was no
huffy now; he had escaped from the maelstrom.  For better or for
worse, he had been granted the gift of life.
     There was the launching track, a few miles to the right of his
path; it looked like a hairline scribed across the face of the Moon. 
In a few moments he would be within radio range.  Now, with
thankfulness and joy, he could make that second call to Earth, to
the woman who was still waiting in the African night.

                                                  May 1962

The Shining Ones




When the switchboard said that the Soviet Embassy was on the
line, my first reaction was: "Good-another jobl" But the moment I
heard Goncharov's voice, I knew there was trouble.
     "Klaus? This is Mikhail.  Can you come over at once? Ifs very
urgent, and I cant talk on the phone."
     I worried all the way to the Embassy, marshaling my defenses
in case anything had gone wrong at our end.  But 1. could think of
nothing; at the moment, we had no outstanding contracts with the
Russians.  The last job had been completed six months ago, on
time' and to their entire satisfaction.
     Well, they were, not satisfied with it now, as I discovered
quickly enough.  Mikhail Goncharov, the Commercial Attach6, was
an pld friend of mine; he told me all he knew, but it was not mucfi.
     "We've just had an urgent cable from Ceylon," he said.  "They
want you out there immediately.  There's serious trouble at the
hydrothermal project."
     "What sort of trouble?" I asked.  I knew atonce, of course, that
it would be the deep end, for that was the only part of the
installation that had concerned us.  The Russians themselves had
done all the work on land, but they had had to call on us to fix
those grids three thousand feet down in the Indian Ocean.  There
is no other firm in the world that can live up to
Our motto: ANY JOB, ANY DEPTH.
     "AU I know," said Mikhail, "is that the site engineers report a
complete breakdown, that the Prime Minister of Ceylon is ,opening
the plant three weeks from now, and that Moscow will be very, very
unhappy if ifs not working then."
     My mind went rapidly through the penalty clauses in our
contract.  The firm seemed to be covered, because the client 'had
signed the take-over certificate, thereby admitting that the job was
up to specification.  However, it was not as simple as that; if
negligence on our part was proved, we might be safe from legal
action-but it would be very bad for business.  And 20

                                            The ShWng Ono 21

it would be even worse for me, personally; for I had been project
supervisor in Trinco Deep.
     Don't call, me a diver, please; I hate the name.  I'm a deep-sea
engineer, and I use diving gear about as often as an airman uses
a parachute.  Most of my work is done with TV ,and remote-
controlled robots.  When I do have to go down myself, I'm inside
a minisub with external manipulators.  We call it a lobster, because
of its claws; the standard model works down to five thousand feet,
but there are special versions that will operate at the bottom of the
Marianas Trench.  I've never been there myself, but will be glad to
quote terms if you're interested.  At a rough estimate, it will cost
you a dollar a foot plus a thousand an hour on the job itself.
     I realized that the Russians meant business when Mikhail Wd
that a jet was waiting at Zurich, and could I be at the airport within
two hours?
     "Look," I said, "I can't do a thing without equipment-and the
gear needed even for an inspection weighs tons.  Besides, it's all
at Spezia."
     "I know," Mikhail answered implacably.  "We'll have another jet
transport there.  Cable from Ceylon as soon as you know what you
want: it will be on the site within twelve hours.  But please don't
talk to anyone about this; we prefer to keep our problems to
ourselves."
     I agreed with this, for it was my problem, too.  As I left the
office, Mikhail pointed to the wall calendar, said "Tbree weeks,"
and ran his finger around his throat.  And I knew he wasn't
thinking of his neck.
     Two hours later I was climbing over the Alps, saying good-by
to the family by radio, and wondering why like every other sensible
Swiss, I hadn't become a banker or gone into the watch business. 
It was all the fault of the Picards and Hannes Keller, I told myself
moodily: why did they have to start this deep-sea tradition, in
Switzerland of. all countries? Then I settled down to sleep,
knowing that I would have little enough in the days to come.
     We landed at Trincomalee just after dawn, and the huge,
complex harbor-whose geography I've never quite mastered-was
a maze of capes, islands, interconnecting waterways, and basins
large enough to hold all the navies of the world.  I could see the
big white control building, in a somewhat flamboyant architectural
style, on a headland overlooking the Indian Ocean.  The site was
pure propaganda-22 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

though of course if I'd been Russian I'd have called it "Public
relations."
     Not that I really blamed my clients; they had good reason to be
proud of this, the most ambitious attempt yet made to harness the
thermal energy of the sea.  It was not the first attempt.  There had
been an unsuccessful one by the French scientist Georges Claude
in the 1930's, and a much bigger one at Abidjan, on the west coast
of Africa, in the 1950's.
     All these projects depended on the same surprising fact: even
in the tropics the sea a mile down is almost at freezing point. 
Where billions of tons of water are concerned, this temperature
difference represents a colossal amount of energy-and a fine
challenge to the engineers of power-starved countries.
     Claude andhis successors had tried to tap this energy with low-
pressure steam engines; the Russians had used a much simpler
and more direct method.  For over a hundred years it had been
known that electric currents flow in many materials if one end is
heated and the other cooled, and ever since the 1940's Russian
scientists had been working to put this "thermoelectric" effect to
practical use.  Their earliest devices had not been very efficient-
though good enough to power thousands of radios by the heat of
kerosene lamps.  But in 1974 they had made a big, and still-secret,
break-through.. Tbough I fixed the power elements at the cold end
of the system, I never really saw them; they were completely
hidden in anticorrosive paint.  AU I know is that they formed a big
grid, like lots of old-fashioned steam radiators bolted together.
     I recognized most of the faces in the little crowd waiting on the
Trinco airstrip; friends or enemies, they all seemed glad to see me
especially Chief Engineer Shapiro.
     "Well, Lev," I said, as we drove off in the station wagon, "what's
the troubleT'
     "We don't know," he said frankly.  "It's your job to find out-and
to put it right."
     "Well, what happened?"
     "Everything worked perfectly up to the full-power tests," he
answered.  "Output was within five per cent of estimate until 0134
Tuesday morning." He grimaced; obviously that time was engraved
on his heart.  "Men the voltage started to fluctuate violently, so we
cut the load and watched the meters.  I thought that some idiot of
a skipper had hooked the cables-you know the trouble we've taken
to avoid that happening-4o we switched on the searchlights and
looked out

                                            The Shining Ones
                                             23

to sea.  There wasn't a ship in sight.  Anyway, who would have
tried to anchor just outside the harbor on a clear, calm night?
     'Here was nothing we could do except watch the instruments
and keep testing; III show you all the graphs when we get to the
office.  After four minutes everything went open circuit.  We can
locate the break exactly, of course-and it's in the deepest part,
right at the grid.  It would be there, and not at this end of the
system," he added gloomily, pointing out the window.
     We were just driving past the Solar Pond-the equivalent of the
boiler in a conventional heat engine.  This was an idea that the
Russians had borrowed from the Israelis.  It was simply a shallow,
lake, blackened at the bottom, holding a concentrated solution of
brine.  It acts as a very efficient heat trap, and the sun's rays bring
the liquid up to almost two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. 
Submerged in it were the "hot" grids of the thermoelectric
system,.every inch of two fathoms down.  Massive cables
connected them to my department, a hundred and fifty degrees
colder and three thousand fee lower, in the undersea canyon that
comes to the very entrawn of Trinco harbor.
     "I suppose you checked for earthquakes?" I asked, not very
hopef uuy.
     "Of course.  There was nothing on the seismograph."
     "What about whales? I warned you that they might give

          so

trouble.
     More than a year ago, when the main conductors wen being rim
out to sea, I'd told the engineers about the drowned sperm whole
found entangled in a telegraph cable half a mile down off South
America.  About a dozen similar cases are )mown-but ours, it
seemed, was not. one of them.
     'Mat was the second thing we thought of," answered Shapiro. 
"We got on to the Fisheries Department, the Navy, and the Air
Force.  No whales anywhere along the coast."
     It was at that point that I stopped theorizing, because I
overheard something that made me' a little uncomfortable.  Like all
Swiss, I'm good at languages, and have picked up a fair amount of
Russian.  There was no need to be much of a linguist, however, to
recognize the word sabotash.
     It was spoken by Dimitri Karpukhin, the political adviser on the
project.  I didn't like him; nor did the engineers, who sometimes
went out of their way to be rude to him.  One of the old-style
Communists who had never quite escaped from theshadow of
Stalin, he was suspicious of everything outside

24 77M WIND FROM THE SUN

the Soviet Union, and most of the things, inside it.  Sabotage was
just the explanation that would appeal to him.
     There were, of course, a great many people who would not
exactly be brokenhearted if the Trinco Power Project failed. 
Politically, the prestige of the USSR was committed; economically,
billions were involved, for if hydrothermal plants proved a success,
they might compete with oil, coal, water power, and, especially,
nuclear energy.
     Yet I could not really believe in sabotage; after all, the Cold War
was over.  It was just possible that someone had made a clumsy
attempt to grab a sample of the grid, but even this seemed
unlikely.  I could count on my fingers the number of people in the
world who could tackle such a job-and half of them were on my
payroll.
     The underwater TV camera arrived that same evening, and by
working all through the night we had cameras, monitors, and over
a mile of coaxial cable loaded aboard a launch.  As we pulled out
of the harbor, I thought I saw a familiar figure standing on the jetty,
but it was too far to be certain and I had other things on my mind. 
If you must know, I am pot a good sailor; I am only really happy
underneath the sea.
     We took a careful fix on the Round Island lighthouse and
stationed ourselves directly above the grid.  The self-propelled
camera, looking like a midget bathyscape, went over the side; as
we watched the monitors, we went with it in spirit.
     The water was extremely clear, and extremely empty, but as we
neared the bottom there were a few signs of life.  A small shark
came and stared at us.  Then a pulsating blob of jelly went drifting
by, followed by a thing like a big spider, with hundreds of hairy
legs tangling and twisting together.  At IM the sloping canyon wall
swam into view.  We were right on target, for there were the thick
cables running down into the depths, just as I had seen them when
I made the final check of the installation six months ago.
     I turned on the low-powered jets and let the camera drift down
the power cables.  They seemed in perfect condition, still firmly
anchored by the pitons we had driven into the - rocL It was not
until I came to the grid itself that there was any sigm of trouble.
     Have you ever seen the radiator grille of a car after it's run into
a lamppost? Well, one section of the grid looked very much like
that.  Something had battered it in, as if a madman had gone to
work on it with a sledgehammer.
'Mere were gasps of astonishment and anger from ft

                                            The Shbdng Ones
                                             25

people looking over my shoulder.  I heard sabotash muttered
again, and for the farst time began to take it seriously.  The only
other explanation that made sense was a fallingboulder, but the
slopes of the canyon had been carefully checked against this very
possibility.
     Whatever the cause, the damaged grid had to be replaced. 
That could not be done until my lobster-all. twenty tons of it-had
been flown out from the Spezia dockyard where it was kept
between jobs.
     "Well," said Shapiro, when I had finished my visual inspection
and photographed the sorry spectacle on the screen, "How long
will it take?"
     I refused to commit myself.  The first thing I ever learned in the
underwater business is that no job turns out as you expect.  Cost
and time estimates can never be firm -because it's not until you're
halfway through a contract that you know exactly what you're up
against.
     My private guess was three days.  So I said: "If everything goes
well, it shouldn't take more than a week."
     Shapiro groaned.  "Can't you do it quickerT'
     "I won't tempt fate by making rash promises.  Anyway, that still
gives you two weeks before your deadline."
     He had tobe content with that, though he kept nagging at me
all the way back into the harbor.  When we got there, he had
something else to think about.
     "Morning, Joe," I said to -the man who was still waiting patiently
on the jetty.  "I thought I recognized you on the way out.  What are
you doing hereT'
     "I was going to ask you the same question."
     "You'd better speak to my boss.  Chief Engineer Shaphv, meet
Joe Watkins, science correspondent of Time.'
     Uv's response was not exactly cordial.  Normally, there was
nothing he liked better than talking to newsmen, who arrived at the
rate of about one a week.  Now, as the target date approached,
they would be flying in from all directions.  Including, of course,
Russia.  And at the present moment Tass would be just as
unwelcome as Time.
     It was amusing to see how Karpukhin took charge of the
situation.  From that moment, Joe had permanently attached to him
as guide, philosopher, and drinking companion a smooth young
public-relations type named Sergei Markov.  Despite all Joe's
efforts, the two were inseparable.  In the -middle of the afternoon,
weary after a long conference in

26 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     Shapiro's office, I caught up with them for a belated lunch at
the government resthouse.
     "What's going on here, Klaus?" Joe asked pathetically.  "I smell
trouble, but no one will admit anything."
     I toyed with my curry, trying to separate the bits that were safe
from those that would take off the top of my head.
     "You can't expect me to discuss a client's affairs," I answered.
     "You were talkative enough," Joe reminded me, "when you were
doing the survey for the Gibraltar Dam."
     "Well, yes," I admitted.  "And I appreciate the write-up you gave
me.  But thin tune there are trade secrets mvOIve& I'm-ah-making
some last-minute adjustments to improve the efficiency of the
system."
     And that, of course, was the truth; for I was indeed hoping to
raise the efficiency of the system from its present value of exactly
zero.
     IIHmm,II said Joe sarcastically.  "Thank you very much!'
"Anyway," I said, trying to head him off, "what's your latest
crackbrained theoryT'
I For a highly competent science writer, Yoe has an odd liking for
the bizarre and the improbable.  Perhaps it's a form of escapism;
I happen to know that he also writes science fiction, though this is
a well-kept secret from his employers.  He has. a sneaking
fondness for poltergeists and ESP and flying saucers, but lost
continents are his real specialty.
     "I am working on a couple of ideas," he admitted.  "They
cropped up when I was doing the research on this story."
     "Go on@l I said, not daring to lookup from the analysis of
MY curry.
     "The other day I came across a very old if you're interested-
of Ceylon.  It remmde4 old map in my collection, and I turned it
up.  There was'the same central mountain, the same
arrangement of rivers flowing to the sea.  But this was a map of
Atlantis."
     "Oh, nol" I groaned.  "Last time we met, you convinced me that
Atlantis was the western Mediterranean basin."
     Joe gave his engaging grin.
     "I could -be wrong, couldn't I? Anyway, rve a much more
striking piece of evidence.  What's the old national name for
Ceylon-and the modem Sinhalese one, for that matter?"
     I thought for a second, then exclaimed: "Good Lordl Why,
Lanka, of course.  Lanka-Atlantis." I rolled the names off my
tonsue.

                                            The Shining Ones
                                             27

     "Precisely," said Joe.  "But two clues, however striking, don't
make a fWl-fiedged theory; and that's as far as I've . got at the
moment."

     "Too bad," I said, genuinely disappointed.  "And your other
projects

     "This will really make you sit up," Joe answered smugly.  He
reached into the battered briefcase he always carried and pulled
out a bundle of papers.
     "Ms happened only one hundred and eighty miles from here,
and just over a century ago.  The source of my information, you'll
note, is about the best there is."
     He handed me a photostat, and I saw that it was a page of the
London Times for July 4, 1874. 1 started to read without much
enthusiasm, for Joe was always producing bits of ancient
newspapers,but my apathy did not last for long.
     Briefly-rd like to give the whole thing, but if you want more
details your local library can dial you a facsimile in ten seconds,--
the clipping described bow the one-hundred-andffty-ton schooner
Pearl left Ceylon in early May 1874 and then fell becalmed in the
Bay of Bengal.  On May 10, just before nightfall, an enormous
squid surfaced half a mile from the schooner, whose captain
foolishly opened fire on it with his rifle.
     Ile squid swam straight for the Pearl, grabbed the masts with
its arms, and pulled the vessel over on her side.  She sank within
seconds, taking two of her crew with her.  The others were
rescued only by the lucky chance that the P. and 0. steamer
Strathowen was in sight and had witnessed the incident herself.
     . "Well," said Joe, whenrd read through it for the second time,
"what do you think?"
          "I don't believe in sea monsters."
     "11, e London Times," Joe answered, "is not prone to
sensational journalism.  And giant squids exist, though the biggest
we know about are feeble, flab-by beasts and don't Weigh more
than a ton, even when they have arms forty feet long."
     "So? An animal like that couldn't capsize a hundred-andfifty-ton
schooner."
     "I'rue-but there's a lot of evidence that the so-called giant squid
is merely a large squid.  There may be decapods in the sea that
really are giants.  Why, only a year after the Pearl incident, a sperm
whale off the coast of Brazil was seen struggling inside gigantic
coils which finally dragged it down

28 THE VM4D FROM THE SUN

into the sea.  You'll find the incident described in the Illus%trated
London News for November 20, 1875.  And then, of course, there's
that chapter in Moby-Dick.
     "What chapter?'
     "Why, the one called 'Squid.' We know that Melville was a very
careful observer-but here he really lets himself go.  He describes
a calm day when a great white mass rose out of the sea 'like a
snow-slide, new slid from the hills.' And this happened here in the
Indian Ocean, perhaps a thousand miles south of the Pearl
incident.  Weather conditions were identical, please note.
     "What the men of the Pequod saw floating on the water-I know
this passage by heart, I've studied it so carefully-was a 'vast pulpy
mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color,
innumerable Ion arms radiating from its centre. .9

curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas."'

     "Just a minute," said Sergei. who h,9d been listening to all this
with mpt attention.  "What's a furlong?"
     Joe looked slightly embarrassed.

     "Actually, it's an eighth of a mile---six hundred and sixty feet."
He raised his hand to stop our incredulous laughter.

"Oh, rm sure Melville didn't mean that literally.  But here was a man
'who met sperm whales every day, groping for a unit of length to
describe something a lot bigger.  So he automatically jumped from
fathoms to furlongs.  That's my theory, anyway.' I pushed away the
remaining untouchable portions of my curry.
     "If -you think you've scared me out of my job," I said, "You've
failed miserably.  But lpromiie you this--when I do meet a giant
squid, I'll ship off a tentacle and bring it back as a souvenir."
     Twenty-four hours later I was out there in the lobster, sinking
slowly down toward the damaged grid.  There was DO way in
which the operation could be kept secret, and Joe was an
interested spectator from a nearby launch, That was the Russians'
problem, not mine; I had suggested to Shapiro that they take
him,into their confidence, but this, of course, was vetoed by
Karpukhin's suspicious Slavic mind.  One could almost see him
thinking: Just why should an American, reporter turn up at this
moment? And ignoring the obvious answer that Trincomalee was
now big news.
     There is nothing in the least exciting or glamorous about deep-
water operations-if they're done properly.  Excitement means lack
of foresight, and that means incompetence.  Tw

                                            The Shining Ones
                                             29

Incompetent do not last long in my business, nor do those who
crave excitement.  I went about my job with all the pent-up emotion
of a plumber dealing with a leaking faucet.
     The grids had been designed for easy maintenance, since
sooner or later they would have to be replaced.  Luckily, none of
the threads had beendamaged, and the securing nuts came off
easily when gripped with the power wrench.  Then I switched
control to the heavy-duty claws, and lifted out the damaged grid
without the slightest difficulty.
     les bad tactics tohurry an underwater operation.  If you try to
do too much at once, you are liable to make mistakes.  And if
things go smoothly and you finish in a day a job you said would
take a week, the client feel's he hasn't had his money's worth.
1hough I was sure I could replace the grid that same afternoon, I
followed the damaged unit up to the surface and closed shop for
the day.
     11   ' e thermoelement was rushed off for an autopsy, and I
spent the rest of the evening hiding from Joe.  Trinco is a small
town, but I managed to keep out of his way by visiting the local
cinema, where I sat through several hours of an interminable Tamil
movie in which three successive generations suffered identical
domestic crises of mistaken identity, dr nkenness, desertion,
death, and insanity, all in Technicolor and with the sound track
turned full up.
     Ile next morning, despite a mild headache, I was at the site
soon after dawn. (So was Joe, and so was Sergel, all set for a
quiet day's fishing.) I cheerfully waved to them. as I climbed into
the lobster, and the tendees crane lowered me over the side.  Over
the other side, where Joe couldn't we it, went the replacement grid. 
A few fathoms down I lifted it out of the hoist and carried it to the
bottom of Trinco Deep, where, without any trouble, it was installed
by the middle of the afternoon.  Before I surfaced again, the lock
nuts had been secured, the conductors spot-wp1ded, and the
engineer's on shore had completed their continuity tests.  By the
time I was back on deck, the system was under load once more,
everything wasback to normal, and even Karpukhin was smiling-
except when he stopped to ask himself the question that no one
had yet been able to answer.
     I still clung to the falling-boulder theory-for want of a Netter. 
And I hoped that the Russians would accept it, so that we could
stop this silly cloak-and-dagger business with Joe.
     No such luck, I realized, when both Shapiro and Karpukhin cam
to see me with very long faces.

30 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     "Klaus," said Lev, "we want you to go down again."
     "It's your money," I replied.  "But what do you want me to do?"
     "We've examined the damaged grid, and there's a section of the
thermoelement missing.  Dimitri thinks that-someonehas
deliberately broken it off and carried it away."
     "Tben they did a damn clumsy job," I answered.  "I cm promise
you it wasn't one of my men."
     It was risky to make such jokes around Karpukhin, and no one
was at all amused.  Not even me; for by this time I was beginning
to think that he had something.
     The sun was setting when I began my last dive into Trinco
Deep ., but the endof day has no meaning down there.  I fell for
two thousand feet with no lights, because I like to watch the
luminous creatures of the sea, as they flash and flicker in the
darkness, sometimes exploding like rockets just outside the
observation window.  In this open water, there was no danger of
a collision; in any case, I had the panoramic sonar scan running,
and that gave far better warning than my eyes.
     At four hundred fathoms, I knew that something was wrong. 
The bottom was coming into view on the vertical sounder-but it
was approaching much too slowly.  My rate of descent was far too
slow.  I could increase it easily enough b@ flooding another
buoyancy onk-but I hesitated to do so.  In my business, anything
out of the ordinary needs an explanation; three times I have saved
my life by waiting until I -had one.
     The thermometer gave me the answer.  The temperature
outside WRS five degrees higher than it should have been, and I
am sorry to say that it took me several seconds to realize why.
     Only a few hundred feet below me, the repaired grid was now
running at full power, pouring out megawatts of heat as it tried to
equalize the temperature difference between Trinco Deep and the
Solar Pond up there on land.  It wouldn't succeed, of course; but
in the attempt it was generating electricity-and I was being swept
upward in the geyser of warm water that was an incidental by-
product.
     When I Rnally reached the grid, it was quite difficult to keep the
lobster in position against the upwelling current, and I began to
sweat uncomfortably as the heat penetrated into the cabin.  Being
too hot on the sea bed was a novel experience-, so also was the
miragelike vision caused by the ascending water, which made my
searchlights dance and tremble over the rock face I was exploring.

                                            The Shhdw Ones
                                             31

     You must picture me, lights ablaze in that five-hundredfathom
darkness, moving slowly down the slope of the canyon.' which at
this spot was about as steep as the roof of a house.  The missing
element--4f it was still around-could not have fallen very far before
coming to rest.  I would find it in ten minutes, or not at all.    -    
After an hour's searching, I had turned up several broken light
bulbs (it's astonishing how many get thrown overboard from ships-
-the sea beds of the world are covered with them), an empty beer
bottle (same comment), and a brandnew boot.  That was the last
thing I found, for then I discovered that I was no longer alone.
     I never switch off the sonar scan, and even whenym, not
moving I always glance at the screen about once a minute to check
the general situation.  The situation now - was that a large object-at
least the size of the lobster-was approaching from. the north. 
When I spotted it, the range@ was about five hundred feet and
closing slowly.  I switched off my lights, cut the jets I had been,
running at low power to hold me in the turbulent water, and drifted
with the current.
     Though I was tempted to call Shapiro and report that I had
company, I decided to wait for more information.  Ibere were -only
three nations with depth ships that could operate at this level, and
I was on excellent terms with all of them.  It would never do to be
too hasty, and to get myself involved in unnecessary political
complications.
     'Mough I felt blind without the sonar, I did not wish to advertise
my presence, so I reluctantly switched it off and relied on my eyes. 
Anyone working at this depth would have to use lights, and I'd see
them covaing long before they could see me.  So I waited in the
hot, spent little cabin, straining my eyes into the darkness, tense
and alert but not particularly worried.
     First there was a dim glow, at an indefinite distance.  It grew
bigger and brighter, yet refused to shape itself into any pattern that
my mind could recognize.  The diffuse glow concentrated into
myriad spots, until it seemed that a constellation was sailing
toward me.  Thus might the rising star, clouds of the galaxy
appear, from some world close to the heart of the Milky Way.
     It is not true that men are frightened of the unknown; they can
be frightened only of the known, the already experienced.  I could
not u1nagme what was approaching, but no creature of

32 THE VMM FROM THE SUN

the sea could touch me M'side six inches of good Swiss armor
plate.
     The thing was almost upon me, glowing with the light of its own
creation, when it split into two separate clouds.  Slowly they came
into focus-not of my eyes, but of my understanding-and I knew that
beauty and terror were rising toward me out of the abyss.
     The terror came first, when I saw that the approaching beasts
were squids, and all Joe's tales reverberated in my brain.  Then,
with a considerable sense of letdown, I realized that they were only
about twenty feet long-little larger than the lobster, and a mere
fraction of its weight.  They could do me no harm.  And quite apart
from that, their indescribable beauty robbed them of all menace.
     This sounds ridiculous, but it is true.  In my travels I have seen
most of the animals of this world, but none to match the luminous
apparitions floating before me now.  The colored lights that pulsed
and danced along their bodies made them seem clothed with
jewels, never the same for two seconds at a time.  There were
patches that glowed a brilliant -blue, like flickering mercury arcs,
then changed almost instantly to burning neon red.  The tentacles -
 seemed strings of luminous beads, trailing through the water-or
the lamps along a super-highway, when you look down upon it
from the air at night.  Barely visible against this background glow
were the enormous eyes, uncannily human and intelligent, each
surrounded by a diadem of shining pearls.
     I am sorry, but that is the best I can do.  Only the movie camera
could do justice to these living kaleidoscopes.  I do not know how
long I watched them, so entranced by their luminous beauty that
I had almost forgotten my mission.  'Mat those delicate, whiplash
tentacles could not possibly have broken the grid was already
obvious.  Yet the presence of these creatures here was, to say the
least, very curious.  Karpukhin would have called it suspicious.
     I was about to call the surface when I saw something
incredible.  It had been before my eyes all the time, but I had not
realized it until now.
     The squids were talking to each other.
     Those glowing, evanescent patterns were not coming and going
at random.  They were as meaningful, I was suddenly sure, as the
illuminated sips of Broadway or Piccadilly.  Every few seconds
there was an image that almost made sense, but it vanished before
I could interpret it.  I knew, of

                                            The Shbdng Ones
                                             33

course, that even the common octopus shows its emotions with
lightning-fast color changes-but this was something 0 a much
higher order.  It was real communication: here were two living
electric signs, flashing messages to one another.
     When I saw an unmistakable picture of the lobster, my last
doubts vanished.  Though I am no scientist, at that moment I
shared the feelings of a Newton or an Einstein at some moment of
revelation.  This would make me famous....
     Then the picture changed-in a most curious manner.  There was
the lobster again, but rather smaller.  And there beside it. much
smaller still, were two peculiar objects.  Each consisted of a pair
of black dots surrounded by a pattern of ten radiating lines.
     Just now I said that we Swiss are good at languages.  However,
it required little intelligence to deduce that this was a formalized
squid's-eye-view of itself, and that what I was seeing was a crude
sketch of the situation.  But why the absurdly small size of the
squids?
     I had no time to puzzle that out before theremas another
change.  A third squid symbol appeared on theliving screenand
this one was enormous completely dwarfing the others.  The
message shone there in the eternal night for a few seconds.  Then
the creature bearing it shot off at incredible speed, and left me
alone with its companion.
     Now the meaning was all too obvious.  "My God!" I said to
myself.  "They feel they can't handle me.  IMey've gone to' fetch
Big.  Brother."
     And of Big Brother's capabilities, I already had better evidence
than Joe Watkins, for all his research and newspaper clippings.
     That was the point-you won't be surprised to hear--when I
decided not to linger.  But before I went, I thought I would try some
talking myself.
     After hanging here in darkness for so long, I had forgotten the
power of my lights.  They hurt my eyes, and must have been
agonizing to_the unfortunate squid.  Transfixed by that intolerable
glare, its, own illumination utterly quenched, it lost aill its beauty,
becoming no more than a pallid bag of jelly with two black buttons
for eyes.  For a moment it seemed paralyzed by the shock; then it
darted after its companion, while I soared upward to a world that
could never be the same again.
"I've found your saboteur," I told Karpukhin, when they

34 7HE WIND FROM THE SUN

o pened the hatch of the lobster. -H you want to know au about
him, ask Joe Watkins."
     I let Dimitri sweat over that for a few seconds, while I

enjoyed his expression.  Then, I gave my slightly edited report.
I implied-without actually saying so-that the squids N met

were powerful enough to have done all the damage; and I said
nothing about the conversation I'd overseen.  That would only
cause incredulity.  Besides, I wanted time to think matters over,
and to tidy up the loose ends-if I could.
     Joe has been a great help, though he stiff knows no more than
the Russians.  He's told me what wonderfully developed nervous
systems squids possess, and has explained how some Of them
can change their appearance in a flash through instantaneous
three-color printing, thanks to the extraordinary network of
"chromophores" covering their bodies.  Presumably this evolved
for camouflage; but it seems natural-even inevitable-that it should
develop into a communication system.
          But there's one thing that worries Joe.
     "What were they doing around the gridT' he keeps asking me
plaintively.  "They're cold-blooded invertebrates.  You'd expect
them to dislike heat as much as they object to light."
     That puzzles Joe; but it doesn% puzzle me.  Indeed, I think It's
the key to the whole mystery.
     Those squids, I'm now certain, are in Trinco Deep for the same
reason that there are men at the South Pole-or on the Moon.  Pure
scientific curiosity has drawn them from their icy home, to
investigate this geyser of hot water welling from the sides of the
canyon.  Here is a strange and -i6explicable phenornenon-possibly
one that menaces their way of life.  So they have summoned their
giant cousin (servant? slave!) to bring them a sample for study.  I
cannot believe that they have a hope of understanding it; after all,
no scientist on earth could have done so as little as a century ago. 
But they are trying; and that is what matters.
     Tomorrow, we begin our countermeasures.  I goback.into
Trinco, Deep to fix the great lights that Shapiro hopes will keep the
squids at bay.  But how long will that ruse work, if intelligence is
dawning in the deep?
     As I dictate this, I'm sitting here below the ancient battlements
of Fort Frederick, watching the Moon come up over the Indian
Ocean.  H everything goes well, this will serve as the operung of
the book that Joe has been badgering me to write.  H it doesn't-
then hello, Joe, Im. talking to you now.

                                       The Shining Ones 35

Please edit this for publication, in any way you think fit, and my
apologies to you and Lev for not giving you all the facts before. 
Now you'll understand why.
     Whatever happens, please remember this: they are beautiful,
wonderful creatures; try to come to tenms with them if you can.

To: Ministry of Power, Moscow
FRom: Lev Shapiro, Chief Engineer, Trincomalee Thermoelectric
Power Project

     Herewith the complete transcript of the tape recording found
among Herr Klaus Muller's effects after his last dive.  We are much
indebted to Mr. Joe Watkins, of Time, for assitance on several
points.
     You will recall that Herr Mullees last intelligible message was
directed to Mr. Watkins and ran as follows: "Joel You were. right
about Melvillel The thing is absolutely gigan-"

                                             December 1962

The Wl-r@d from the Sun




Ile enormous disc of sail strained at its rigging, already filled with
the wind thatblew between the worlds.  In three minutes the race
would begin, yet now John Merton felt more relaxed, more at
peace, than at any time for the past year.  Whatever happened
when the Commodore gave the starting signal, whether Diana
carried him to victory or defeat, he had achieved his ambition. 
After a lifetime spent designing ships for others, nowhe would sail
his own.
     "T minus two minutes," said the cabin radio.  'Please confirm
your readiness."
     One by one, the other skippers answered.  Merton recognized
all the voices-some tense, some calm-for they were the voices of
his friends and rivals.  On the four inhabited worlds, there were
scarcely twenty men who could sail a gun yacht; and they were all
there, on the starting line or aboard the escort vessels, orbiting
twenty-two thousand miles above the equator.
"Number One-Gossamer-ready to go."
"Number Two-Santa Maria-all O.K."
"Number Three-Sunbeam-O.K."
"Number Four-Woamera@all systems oo.' Merton smiled at that
last echo from the early, primitive days of astronautics.  But it
had become part of the traditionof space; and there were times
when a man needed to evoke the shades of those who had gone
before him to the stars.
"Number Five-Lebedev-we're ready."
"Number Six-Arachne-O.K."
Now it was his turn, at the end of the line; strange to think that the
words he was speaking in this tiny cabin were being heard by at
least five billion people.
"Number Seven-Diana-ready to start."
"One through Seven acknowledged," answered that impersonal
voice from the judge's launch.  "Now T minus one minute."
                         36

                                       The Wind from the Sun
                                        37

     Merton scarcely heard it.  For the last time, he was checking
the tension in the rigging.  'Me needles of all the dynamometers
were steady; the immense sail was taut, its mirror surface
sparkling and glittering gloriously in the sun.
     To Merton, floating weightless at the periscope, it seemed to fill
the sky.  As well it might-for out there were fifty million square feet
of sail, linked to his capsule by almost a hundred miles of rigging. 
AU the canvas of all the tea clippers that had once raced like
clouds across the China seas, sewn into one gigantic sheet, could
not match the single sail that Diana had spread beneath the sun. 
Yet it was little more substantial than a soap bubble; that two
square miles of aluminized plastic was only a few millionths of an
inch thicL
     'IT minus ten seconds.  All recording cameras oN."
     Something so huge, yet so frail, was hard for the n-dnd to
grasp.  And it was harder still to realize that this fragile min-or
could tow him free of Earth merely by the power of the sunlight it
would trap.
          ". . . live, four, three, two, one, cuT!"
     Seven knife blades sliced through seven thin fines tethering the
yachts to the mother ships that had assembled and serviced them. 
Until this moment, all. had been circling Earth together in a rigidly
held formation, but now the yachts would begin to disperse, like
dandelion seeds drifting before the breeze.  And the winner
wouldbe the one that first drifted past the Moon.
     Aboard Diana, nothing seemed to be happening.  But Merton
knew better.  Though his body could feel no thrust, the instrument
board told him that he was now accelerating at almost one
thousandth of a gravity.  For a rocket, that figure would have been
ludicrous-but this was the first time any solar yacht had ever
attained it.  Diana's design was sound; the vast sail was living up
to his calculations.  At this rate, two circuits of the Earth would
build up his speed to escape velocity, and then he could head out
for the Moon, with the -full force of the Sun behind him.
          fu

     The 11 force of the Sun ... He smiled wryly, rememberirig all.
his attempts to explain solar sailing to those lecture ,audiences
back on Earth.  That had been the only way he could raise money,
in those early days.  He might be Chief Designer of Cosmodyne
Corporation, with a whole string of successful spaceships to his
credit, hut his firm had not been exactly enthusiastic about his
hobby.
     "Hold your hands out to the Sun," held said.  "What do you

39 THE WIND FROM THE SUIST

feel? Heat, of course.  But there's pressure as well-though you've
never noticed it, because it's so tiny.  Over the area of your hands,
it comes to only about a millionth of an ounce.
     "But out in space, even a pressure as small as that can be
important, for it's acting all the time, hour after hour, day after day. 
Unlike rocket fuel, it's free and unlimited.  If we, want to, we can
use it.  We can build sails to catch the radiation blowing from the
Sun."
     At that point, he would puff out a few square yards of saff
material and toss it toward the audience, 'Me silvery film would coil
and twist like smoke, then drift slowly to the coiling in the hot-air
currents.
     "You can see how light it is," he'd continue.  "A square mile
weighs only a ton, and can collect five pounds of radiation
pressure.  So it will start moving-and we can let it tow us along, if
we attach rigging to it.
I "Of course, its acceleration will be tiny-about a thousandth of a g.
That doesn't seem much, but let's see what it means.
     "It means that in the first second, we'll move about a fifth of an
inch.  I suppose a healthy snail could do better than that.  But after
a minute, we've covered sixty feet, and will be doing just over a
mile an hour.  Tbat's not bad, for something driven by pure
sunlightl After an hour, we're forty miles from our starting point,
and will be moving at eighty miles an hour.  Please remember that
in space there's no friction; so once you start anything moving, it
will keep going forever.  You'll be surprised when I tell you what
our thousandth-of-a-g sailboat will be doing at the end of a day's
run: almost two thousand miles an hourl If it starts from orbit-as it
has to, of course-it can reach escape velocity in a couple of days. 
And all without burning a single drop of fuell"
     Well, he'd convinced them, and in the end he'd even convinced
Cosmodyne.  Over the last twenty years, a new sport had come
into -being.  It had -been called the sport of billionaires, and that
was true.  But it was beginning to pay for itself in terms of publicity
and TV coverage.  The prestige of four continents and two worlds
was riding on this race, and it had the biggest audience in history.
     Diana had made a good start; time to take a look at the
opposition.  Moving very gently-though there were shock
absorbers between the control capsule and the delicate rigging, he
was determined to run no risks---Merton stationed hiniself at the
periscope.

                                       The Wind from the Sun
                                        39

     7bere they were, looking like strange silver flowers planted in
the dark fields of space.  The nearest, South America's, Santa
Maria, was only fifty miles away; it bore a close resemblance to a
boy's kite, but a kite more than a mile on a side.  Farther away, the
University of Astrograd's Lebedev looked like a Maltese cross; the
sails that formed the four arms could apparently be tilted for
steering purposes.  In contrast, the Federation of Australasia's
Woomera was a simple parachute, four miles in circumference. 
General Spacecraft's Arachne, as'its name suggested, looked like
a spider web, and had been built on the same principles, by robot
shuttles spiraling out from a central point.  Eurospace Corpo-
ration's, Gossamer was an identical design, on a slightly smaller
scale.  And the Republic of Mars's Sunbeam was a flat ring, with
a half-mile-@wide hole in the center, spinning slowly, so that
centrifugal force gave ft stiffness.  That was an old idea, but no
one had ever made it work; and Merton was fairly sure that the
colonists would be in trouble when they, started to turn.
     That would not -be for another six hours, when the yachts had
moved along the first quarter of their slow and stately twenty-four-
hour orbit.  Here at the beginning of the race, they were all
heading directly away from the Sun-running, as it were, before the
solar wind.  One had to make the most of this lap, before the boats
swung around to the other side of Earth and then started to head
back into the Sun.
     Time, Merton told himself, for the first check, while he had no
navigational worries.'With the periscope, -he made a careful
examination of the sail, concentrating on the points where the
rigging was attached to it.  The shroud lines-nar6 row bands of
unsilvered plastic film-would have been completely invisible had
they not been coated with fluorescent paint.  Now they were taut
lines of colored light, dwindling away for hundreds of yards toward
that gigantic sail.  Each had its own electric windlass, not much
bigger than a game fisherman's reel.  The little windlasses were
continually taming, playing lines in or out as the autopilot kept the
sail trimmed at the correct angle to the Sun.
     The play of sunlight on the great flexible mirror was beautiful
to watch.  The sail was undulating in slow, stately oscillations,
sending multiple images of the Sun marching across it, until they
faded away at its edges.  Such leisurely vibrations were to be
expected in this vast and flimsy structure.  They were usually quite
harmless, but, Merton watched them

40 THE Va" )FROM THE SUN

carefully.  Sometimes they could build up to the catastrophic
undulations known as the "wriggles," which could tear a sail to
pieces.
     When he was satisfied that everything was shipshape, he swept
the periscope around the sky, rechecking the positions of his
rivals.  It was as he had hoped: the weeding-out process had
begun, as the less efficient boats fell astern.  But the real test
would come when they passed into the shadow of Earth.  Then,
maneuverability would count as much as Wed.
     It seemed a strange thing to do, what with the race having just
started, but he thought it might be a good idea to get some sleep. 
The two-man crews on the other boats could take it in turns, but
Merton had no one to relieve him.  He must rely on his own
physical resources, like that other solitary seaman, Joshua
Slocum, in his tiny Spray.  The American skipper had sailed Spigy
singlehanded around the world; he could never have dreamed that,
two centuries later, a man would be sailingsinglehanded from
Earth to Moon-inspired, at least partly, by his example.
     Merton snapped the elastic bands of the cabin seat around his
waist and legs, then placed the electrodes of the sleep-inducer on
-his forehead.  He set the timer for three hours, and relaxed.  Very
gently, hypnotically, the electronic pulses throbbed in the frontal
lobes of his brain.  Colored spirals of light expanded beneath his
closed eyelids, widening outward to infinity.  Then nothing....
     'rbe brazen clamor of the alarm dragged him back from his
dreamless sleep.  He was instantly awake, his eyes scanning the
instrument panel.  Only two hours had passed-but above the
accelerometer, a red light was Bashing.  Thrust was falling; Diana
was losing power.
     Merton's first thought was that something had happened to the
sail; perhaps the antispin devices had failed, and the rigging had
become twisted.  Swiftly, he checked the meters that showed the
tension of the shroud lines.  Strange---oh one side of the sail they
were reading normally, but on the other the pull was dropping
slowly, even as he watched.
     In sudden understanding, Merton grabbed the periscope,
switched to wide-angle vision, and started to scan the edge of the
sail.  Yes-there was the trouble, and it could have only one cause.
     A huge, sharp-edged shadow had begun to slide across the
gleaming silver of the sail.  Darkness was falling upon Diana, as if
a cloud had passed between her and the Sun.  And in the

                                       The Wind from the Sun
                                        41

dark, robbed of the rays that drove her, she would lose all thrust
and drift helplessly through space.
     But, of course, there were no clouds here, more than twenty
thousand miles above the Earth.  If there was a shadow, it must be
made by man.
     Merton grinned as he swung the periscope toward the Sun,
switching in the filters that would allow him to look full into its
blazing face without being blinded.
     "Maneuver 4a," he muttered to himself.  "Well see who can play
best at that game."
     It looked as if a giant planet was crossing the face of the Sun;
a great black disc had bitten deep into its edge.  Twenty miles
astern, Gossamer was trying to arrange an artificial eclipse,
specially for Diana's benefit.
     The maneuver was a perfectly legitimate one.  Back in the days
of ocean racing, skippers had often tried to I rob each other of the
wind.  With any luck, you could leave your rival becalmed, with his
sails collapsing around him-and be well ahead before he could
undo the damage.
     Merton had no intention of being caught so easily.  There was
plenty of time to take evasive action; things happened very slowly
when you were running a solar sailboat.  It would be at least
twenty minutes before Gossamer could slide completely across the
face of the Sun, and leave him in darkness.
     Diana's tiny computer-the size- of a matchbox, but the
equivalent of a thousand human mathematicians-considered the
problem for a full second and then flashed the answer.  He'd have
to open control panels three and four, until the sail had developed
an extra twenty degrees of tilt, then the radiation pressure would
blow him out of Gossamer's dangerous shadow, back into the full
blast of the Sun.  It was a pity to interfere with the autopilot, which
had been carefully programed to give the fastest possible run-but
that, after all, was why he was here.  This was what made solar
yachting's sport, rather than a battle between computers.
     Out went control lines one and six, slowly undulating like
sleepy snakes as they momentarily lost their tension.  Two miles
away, the triangular panels began to open lazily, spilling sunlight
through the sail.  Yet, for a long time, nothing seemed to happen. 
It was hard to grow accustomed to this slow-motion world, where
it took minutes for the effects of any action tobecome visible to the
eye.  Then Merton saw that the sail was indeed tipping toward the
Sun---and 'that Gossamees

42 THE WrND FROM THE SUN

shadow was sliding harmlessly away, its cone of darkness lost in
the deeper night of space.
     Long before the shadow had vanished, and the disc of the Sun
had cleared again, he reversed the tilt and brought Diana back on
course.  Her new momentum would carry her clear of the danger;
no need to overdo it, and upset his calculations by side-stepping
too far.  That was another rule that was hard to learn: thevery
moment you had started something happening in space, it was
already time to think about stopping it.
     He reset the alarm, ready for the next natural or manmade
emergency.  Perhaps Gossamer, or one of the other contestants,
would try the same trick again.  Meanwhile, it was time to eat,
though he did not feel particularly hungry.  One used little physical
energy in space, and it was easy to forget about food.  Easy-and
dangerous; for when an emergency arose, you might not have the
reserves needed to deal with it.
     He broke open the first of the meal packets, and inspected it
without enthusiasm.  The name on the label-spAcETAs7ms--was
enough to put him off.  And he had grave doubts about the
promise printed underneath: "Guaranteed crumbless." It had been
said that crumbs were a greater danger to space vehicles than
meteorites; they could drift into the most unlikely places, causing
short circuits, blocking vital jets, and getting into instruments that
were supposed to be hermetically sealed.
     Still, the liverwurst went down pleasantly enough; so di4 the
chocolate and the pineapple pur&Me plastic coffee bulb was
warming on the electric heater when the outside world broke in
upon his solitude, as the radio operator on the Commodore's
launch routed a call to him.
     "Dr.  Merton? If you can spare the time, Jeremy Blair would like
a few words with you." Blair was one of the more responsible news
commentators, and Merton had been on his program many times. 
He could refuse to be interviewed, of course, but -be liked Blair,
and at the moment he could certainly not claim to be too busy. 
'111 take it," he answered.
     "Hello, Dr. Merton," said the commentator immediately.  "Glad
you can spare a few minutes.  And congratulations.you seem to be
ahead,of the field."
     "Too early in the game to be sure of that," Merton answered
cautiously.
     "Tell me, Doctor, why did you decide to sail Diana by yourself?
Just because it's never been done before?"
     "Well, isnt that a; good mason? But it waWt the only one,

                                  The Wind from the Sun 43

of course." He paused, choosing his words carefully.  "You know
how critically the performance of a sun yacht depends on its mass. 
A second man, with all his supplies, would mean another five
hundred pounds.  'Mat could easily be the difference between
winning and losing."
     "And you're quite certain that you can handle Diana alone?"
     "Reasonably sure, thanks to the automatic controls Fve
designed.  My main job is to supervise and make decisions"
     "But-two square miles of sail! It just doesn't seem possible for
one man to cope with all that."
     Merton laughed.  "Why not? Those two square miles produce
a maximum pull of just ten pounds.  I can exert more, force with
my little finger."
     "Well, thank you, Doctor.  And good luck.  IT, be calling vou
again. 99
     As the commentator signed off, Merton felt a little ashamed of
himself.  For his answer had been only part of the truth; and he
was sure that Blair was shrewd enough to know it.
     There was just one reason why he was here, alone in space. 
For almost forty years he had worked with teams of hundreds or
even thousands of men, helping to design the most complex
vehicles that the world had ever seen.  For the last twenty years he
had led one of those teams, and watched his creations go soaring
to the stars. (Sometimes ... There were failures, which he could
never forget, even though the fault had not been his.) He was
famous, with a successful career behind him.  Yet he had never
done anything by himself; always he had been one of an army.
     This was his last chance to try for individual achievement, and
he would share it with no one.  There would be no more solar
yachting for at least five years, as the period of the Quiet Sun
ended and the cycle of bad weather began, with radiation storms
bursting through the solar system.  When it was safe again for
these frail, unshielded craft to venture aloft, he would be too old. 
If, indeed, he was not too old already ...
     He dropped the empty food containers into the waste disposal
and turned once more to the periscope.  At first he could find only
five of the other yachts; there was no sign of Woomera.  It took
him several minutes to locate her-a dim, star-eclipsing phantom,
neatly caught in the shadow of Lebedev.  He could imagine the
frantic efforts the Australasians were making to extricate
themselves, and wondered how they had fallen into the trap It
suggested that Lebedev was

44 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

unusually maneuverable.  She wouldbear watching, though she
was too far away to menace Diana at the moment.
     Now the Earth had almost vanished; it had waned to a narrow,
brilliant bow of light that was moving steadily toward the Sun. 
Dimly outlined within that burning bow was the night side of the
planet, with the phosphorescent gleams of great cities showing
here and there through gaps in the clouds.  The disc of darkness
had already blanked out a huge section of the Milky Way.  In a few
minutes, it would start to encroach upon the Sun.
     The light was fading; a purple, twilight hue-the glow of many
sunsets, thousands of miles below-was falling across the sail as
Diana slipped silently into the shadow of Earth.  The Sun
plummeted below that invisible horizon; within minute it was night.
     Me= looked back along the orbit he had traced, now a quarter
of the way around the world.  One by one he saw the brilliant stars
of the other yachts wink out, as they joined him in the brief night. 
It would be an hour before the Sun emerged from that enormous
black shield, and through AU that time they would be completely
helpless, coasting without power.
     He switched on the external spotlight, and started to search the
now-darkened sail with its beam.  Already the thousands ot acres
of film were beginning to wrinkle and beconib flaccid.  The shroud
lines were slackening, and must be wound in lest they become
entangled.  But all this was expected; everything was going as
planned.
     Fifty miles astern, Arachne and Santa Maria were not so lucky. 
Merton learned of their troubles when the radio burst into life on
the emergency circuit.
     "Number Two and Number Six, this is Control.  You are on a
collision course; your orbits will intersect in sixty-five minutes! Do
you require assistance?"
     Iberevas a long pause while the two skippers digested this bad
news.  Merton wondered who was to blame.  Perhaps one yacht
had been trying to shadow the other, and had not completed the
maneuver before they were -both caught in darkness.  Now there
was nothing that either could do.  'Mey were slowly but inexorably
converging, unable to change course by a fraction of a degree.
     Yet-sixty-five minutes! That would just bring them out into
sunlight again, as they emerged from the shadow of the Earth. 
They had a slim chance, if their sells could snatch

                                       The Wind from the Sun
                                        45

enough power to avoid a crash.  There must be some frantic
calculations going on aboard A rachne and Santa Maria.
     Arachne answered first.  Her reply was just what Merton had
expected.
     "Number Six calling Control.  We don't need assistance, thank
you.  We'll work this out for ourselves."
     I wonder, thought Merton; but at least it will be interesting to
watch.  The first real drama of the race was approaching, exactly
above the line of midnight on the sleeping Earth.
     For the next hour, Merton's own sail kept him too busy to worry
about Arachne and Santa Maria.  It was hard to keep a good watch
on that fifty million square feet of dim plastic out there in the
darkness, illuminated only by his narrow spotlight and the rays of
the still-distant Moon.  From now on, for almost half his orbit
around the Earth, he must keep the whole of this immense area
edge-on to the Sun.  During the next twelve or fourteen hours, the
sail would be a useless encumbrance; for he would be heading
into the Sun, and its rays could only drive him backward along his
orbit.  It was a pity that he could not furl the sail completely, until
he was ready to use it again; but no one had yet found a practical
way of doing this.
     Far below, there was the first hint of dawn along the edge of
the Earth.  In ten minutes the Sun would emerge from its eclipse. 
The coasting yachts would come tolife again as the blast of rad
iation struck- their sails.  'Mat would be the moment of crisis for
Arachne and Santa Maria-and, indeed, for all of them.
     Merton swung the periscope until he found the two dark
shadows drifting against the stars.  They were very close together-
perhaps less than three miles apart.  They might, he decided, just
be able to make it....
     Dawn flashed like an explosion along the rim of Earth as the
Sun rose out of the Pacific.  'Me sail and shroud lines glowed a
brief crimson, then gold, then blazed with the pure white light of
day.  The needles of the dynamometers began to lift from their
zeroes-but only just.  Diana was still almost completely weightless,
for with the sail pointing toward the Sun, her acceleration was now
only a few miffiionths of a gravity.
     But Arachne and Santa Maria were crowding on all the sail that
they could manage, in their desperate attempt to keep apart.  Now,
while there was less than two miles between them, their glittering
plastic clouds were unfurling and ex-46 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

panding with agonizing slowness as they felt the first delicate push
of the Sun's rays.  Almost every TV screen on Earth would be
mirroring this protracted drarna; and even now, at this last minute,
it was possible to tell what the outcome would be.
     'Me two skippers were stubborn men.  Either could have cut his
sail and fallen back to give the other a chance; but neither would
do so.  Too much prestige, too many millions, too many
reputations were at stake.  And so, silently and softly as snow-
flakes falling on a winter night, Arachne and Santa MaHa collided.
     The square kite crawled almost imperceptibly into the circular
spider web.  The long ribbons of the shroud lines twisted and
tangled together with dreamlike slowness.  Even aboard Diana,
Merton, busy with his own rigging, could scarcely tear -his eyes
away from this silent, long-drawn-out disaster.
     For more than ten minutes the billowing, shining clouds
continued to merge into one inextricable mass.  'Men the crew
capsules tore loose and went their separate ways, missing each
other by hundreds of yards.  With a flare of rockets, the safety
launches hurried to pick them up.
     IMat leaves five of us, thought Merton.  He felt sorry for the
skippers who had so thoroughly eliminated each other, only a few
hours after the start of the race, but they were young men and
would have another chance.
     Within minutes, the five had dropped to four.  From the
beginning, Merton had had doubts about the slowly rotating
Sunbeam; now he saw them justified.
     The Martian ship had failed to tack properly.  Her spin had
given her too much stability.  Her great ring of a sail was turning
to face the Sun, instead of being edge-on to it.  She -was being
blown back along her course at almost her maximum acceleration.
     That was about the most maddening thing that could happen to
a skipper--even worse than a collision, for he could blame only
himself.  But no one would feel much sympathy for the frustrated
colonials, as they dwindled slowly astern.  They had made too
many brash boasts before the race, and what had happened to
them was poetic justice.
     Yet it would not do to write off Sunbeam completely; with
almost half a million miles still to go, she might yet pull ahead. 
Indeed, if there were a few more casualties, she might be the only
one to complete the race.  It had happened before.

                                       The Wind tmm the Sun
                                        47

     Mhe next twelve hours were uneventful, as the Earth waxed in
the sky from new to full. nere was little to do while the fleet drifted
around the unpowered half of its orbit, but Merton did not find the
time hanging heavily on his hands.  He caught a few hours of
sleep, ate two meals, wrote his log, and became involved in
several more radio interviews.  Sometimes, though rarely, he
talked to the other skippers, exchanging greetings and friendly
taunts.  But most of the time he was content to float in weightless
relaxation, beyond all the cares of Earth, happier than he had been
for many years.  He was--as far as any man could be in space-
master of his own fate, sailing the ship upon which he had
lavished so much skill, so much love, that it had become part of
his very being. .
     7lie next casualty came when they were passing the line
between Earth and Sun, and were just beginning the powered half
of the orbit.  Aboard Diana, Merton saw the great sail stiffen as it
tilted to catch the rays that drove it.  The acceleration began to
climb up from the microgravities, though it would be hours yet
before it would reach its maximum value.
     It would never reach it for Gossamer. 7le moment when power
came on again was always critical, and slie failed to survive it.
     Blair's radio commentary, which Merton had left running at low
volume, alerted him with the news: "Hello, Gossamer has the
wrigglesl" He hurried to the periscope, but at first could see
nothing wrong with the great circular disc of Gossamer's sail.  It
was difficult to study it because it was almost edge-on to him and
so appeared as a thin ellipse; but presently he saw that it was
twisting back and forth in slow, irresistible oscillations.  Unless the
crew could damp out these waves, by properly timed but gentle
tugs on the shroud lines, the sail would tear itself to pieces.
     7bey did their best, and after twenty minutes it seemed that
they had succeeded.  Then, somewhere near the center of the sail,
the plastic film -began to rip.  It was slowly driven outward by the
radiation pressure, like smoke coiling upward from a fire. - Within
a quarter of an hour, nothing was left but the delicate tracery of the
radial spars that had supported the great web.  Once again there
was a flare of rockets, as a launch moved in to retrieve the
Gossamer's capsule and her dejected crew.
     "Getting rather lonely up here, isn't itr' said a conversational
voice 'over the ship-to-ship radio.

48 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     "Not for you, Dimitri," retorted Merton.  "You've still got
company back there at the end of the field.  I'm the one who's
lonely, up here in front." It was not an idle boast; by this time Diana
was three hundred miles ahead of the next competitor, and her
lead should increase still more rapidly in the hours to come
     Aboard Lebedev, Dimitri Markoff gave a good-natured chuckle. 
He did not sound, Merton thought, at all like a man who had
resigned himself to defeat.
     "Remember the legend of the tortoise and the hare,' answered
the Russian.  "A lot can happen in the next quartermillion miles."
     It happened much sooner than that, when they had completed
their first orbit of Earth and were passing the starting line again-
though thousands of miles higher, thanks to the extra energy the
San's rays had given them.  Merton had taken careful sights on the
other yachts, and had fed the figures into the computer.  'The
answer it gave for Woomera was so absurd that he immediately did
a recheck.
     There was no doubt of it-the Australasians were catching up at
a completely fantastic rate.  No solar yacht could possibly have
such an acceleration, unless ...
     A swift look through the periscope gave the answer. 
Woomera's rigging, pared back to the very minimum of mass, bad
given way.  It was her sail alone, still maintaining its shape, that
was racing up behind him like a handkerchief blown before the
wind.  Two hours later it fluttered past, less than twenty miles
away; but long before that, the Australasians had joined the
growing crowd aboard the Commodores launch.
     So now it was a straight fight between Diana and Lebedev-for
though the Martians had not given up, they were a thousand miles
astern and no longer counted as a serious threat.  For that matter,
it was hard to see what Lebedev could do to overtake Diana'slead;
but all the way around the second lap, through eclipse again and
the long, slow drift against the Sun, Merton felt a growing unease.
     He knew the Russian pilots and designers.  They had been
trying to win this race for twenty years-and, after all, it'was only fair
that they should, for had not Pyotr Nikolaevich Lebedev been the
first man to detect the pressure of sunlight, back at the very
beginning of the twentieth century? But they had never succeeded.

                                       The Wind fro?n the Sun
                                        49

     And they would never stop trying.  Dimitri was up to something-
and it would be spectacular.

     Aboard the official launch, a thousand miles behind the racing
yachts, Commodore van Stratten looked at the radiogram with
angry dismay.  It had traveled more than a hundred million miles,
from the chain of solar observatories swinging high above the
blazing surface of the Sun; and it brought the worst possible news.
     The Commodore-his title was purely honorary, of course-, back
on Earth be was Professor of Astrophysics at Harvard-had been
half expecting it.  Never before had the race been arranged so late
in the season.  There had been many delays; they had gambled-
and now, it seemed, they might an lose.
     Deep beneath the surface of the Sun, enormous forces were
gathering.  At any moment the energies of a million hydrogen
bombs might burst forth in the awesome explosion known as a
solar flare.  Climbing at millions of miles an hour, an invisible
fireball many times the size of Earth would leap from the Sun and
head out across space.
     7be cloud of electrified gas would probably miss the Eartb
completely.  But if it did not, it would arrive in just over a day. 
Spaceships could protect themselves, with their shielding and their
powerful magnetic screens; but the lightly built solar yachts, with
their paper-thin walls, were defenseless against such a menace. 
'Me crews would have to be taken off, and the race abandoned.
     John Merton knew nothing of this as he brought Diana around
the Earth for the second time.  If all went well, this would be the
last circuit, both for him and for the Russians.  They had spiraled
upward by thousands of miles, gaining energy from the Sun's rays. 
On this lap, they should escape from Earth completely, and head
outward on the long run to the Moon.  It was a straight race now;
Sunbeam's crew had finally withdrawn exhausted, after battling
valiantly with their. spinning sail for more than a hundred thousand
miles.
     Merton did not feel tired; he had eaten and slept won, and
Diana was behavingberself admirably.  The autopilot, tensioning
the rigging like a busy little spider, kept the great sail trimmed to
the Sun more accurately than any human skipper could have. 
'Mough by this time the two square miles of plastic sheet must
have been riddled by hundreds of microme-50 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

teorites, the pinhead-sized punctures had produced no falling off
of thrust.
     He had only two worries.  The first was shroud line number
eight, which could no longer be adjusted properly.  Without any
warning, the reel had jammed; even after all these years of
astronautical engineering, bearings sometimes seized up in
vacuum.  He could neither lengthen nor shorten the line, and
would have to navigate as best he could with the othem Luckily,
the most difficult maneuvers were over; from now on, Diana would
have the Sun behind her as she sailed straight down the solar
wind.  And as the old-time sailors had often said, it was easy to
handle a boat when the wind was blowinS over your shoulder.
     His other worry was Lebedev, still dogging his heels gum
hundred miles astern.  The Russian yacht had shown remarkable
maneuverability, thanks to the four great panels that could -be
tilted around the central sail.  Her flipovers as she rounded the
Earth had been carried out with superb precision.  But to gain
maneuverability she must have sacrificed speed.  You could not
have it both ways; in the long, straight haul ahead, Merton should
be able to hold his own.  Yet he could not be certain of victory
until, three or four days from now, Diana went flashing past the far
side of the Moon.
     And then, in the fiftieth hour of the race, just after the end of
the second orbit around Earth, Markoff sprang Ws little surprise.

     'Hello, John,"be said casually over the ship-to-ship circuilL Vd
like you to watch this.  It should be interesting."
     Merton drew himself across to the periscope and turned up the
magnification to the limit.  There in the field of view, a most
improbable sight against the background of the stars, was the
glittering Maltese cross of Lebedev, very small but very cim.  As he
watched, the four arms of the cross slowly detached themselves
from the central square, and went drifting away, with 0 their spars
and rigging, into space.
     Markoff had jettisoned all unnecessary mass, now that he was
coming up to escape velocity and need no longer plod patiently
around the Earth, gaining momentum on each circuit.  From now
on, Lebedev would be almost unsteerable-but that did not matter;
all the tricky navigation lay behind her.  It was as if an old-time
yachtsman had deliberately thrown away his rudder and heavy
keel, knowing that the rest of the race would be straight downwind
over a calm gm

                                       The Wind from the Sun
                                        51

     "Congratulations, Dimitri," Merton radioed.  "It's a neat trick. 
But it's not good enough.  You can't catch up with me now
     "I've not finished yet," the Russian answered.  "Ibere's an old
winter's tale in my country about a sleigh being chased by wolves. 
To save himself, the driver has to throw off the passengers one by
one.  Do you see the analogyr'
     Merton did, all too well.  On this final straight lap, Dimitri no
longer neededhis copilot.  Lebedev could really be stripped down
for action.
     "Alexis won't be very happy about this," Merton replied. 
"Besides, it's against the rules."
     "Alexis isn't happy, but I'm the captain.  He'll just have to wait
around for ten minutes until the Commodore picks him up. And the
regulations say nothing about the size of the crew-you should
know that."
     Merton did not answer; be was too busy doing sonic hurried
calculations, based on what he knew of Lebedev's design.  By the
time he had finished, he knew that the race was still in doubt. 
Lebedev would be catching up withhim. at just, about the time he
hoped to pass the Moon.
     But the outcome of the race was already being decided, ninety-
two million miles away.

     On Solar Observatory Three, far inside the orbit of Mercury, the
automatic instruments recorded the whole history of the flare.  A
hundred million square miles of the Sun's surface exploded in
suchblue-white ftiry that, by comparison, the rest of the disc paled
to a dull glow.  Out of that seething inferno, twisting and turning
like a living creature in the magnetic fields of its own creation,
soared the electrified plasma of the great flare.  Ahead of it,
moving at the speed of light, went the warning Bash of ultraviolet
and X rays.  That would reach Earth in eight minutes, and was
relatively harmless.  Not so the charged atoms that were following
behind at their leisurely four million miles an hour-and which, in
just over a day, would engulf Diana, Lebedev, and their
accompanying little fleet in a cloud of lethal radiation.
     The Commodore left his decision to the last possible minutes
Even when the jet of plasma had been tracked past the orbit of
Venus, there was a chance that it might miss the Earth.  But when
it was less than four hours away, and had already been picked up
by the Moon-based radar network, he

52 THE VAM FROM THE SUN

knew that there was no hope.  All solar sailing was over, for the
next five or six years-until the Sun was quiet again.
     A great sigh of disappointment swept across the solar system. 
Diana and Lebedev were halfway between Earth and Moon, running
neck and neck-and now no one would ever know which was the
better boat.  The enthusiasts would argue the result for years;
history would merely record: "Race canceled owing to solar storm."
     When John Merton received the order, he felt a bitterness he
had not known since childhood.  Across the years, sharp and
clear, came the memory of his tenth birthday.  He had been
promised an exact scale model of the famous spaceship Morning
Star, and for weeks hadbeen planning how he would assemble it,
where he would hang it in -his bedroom.  And then, at the last
moment, his father had broken the news.  "I'm sorry, John-it cost
too much money.  Maybe next year . . ."
     Half a century and a successful lifetime later, he was a
heartbroken boy again.
     For a moment, he thought of disobeying the Commodore. 
Supposehe sailed on, ignoring the warning? Even if the race was
abandoned, the could make a crossing to the Moon that would
stand in the record books for generations.
     But that would be worse than stupidity; it would be suicide-and
a very unpleasant form of suicide.  He had seen men die
of.radiation poisoning, when the magnetic shielding of their ships
had failed in deep space.  No-nothing was worth that...
     He felt as sorry for Dimitri Markoff as for himself.  They had
both deserved to win, and now victory would go to neither.  No
man could argue with the Sun in one of its rages, even though he
might ride upon its -beams to the edge of space.
     Only fifty miles astern now, the Commodore's launch was
drawing alongside Lebedev, preparing to take off her, skipper. 
There went the silver sail, as Dimitri-with feelings that he would
share--cut the rigging.  The tiny capsule would be taken back to
Earth, perhaps to be used again; but a sail was spread for one
voyage only.
     He could press the jettison button now, and save his rescuers
a few minutes of time.  But he could not do it; he wanted to stay
aboard to the very end, on the little boat that had been for so long
a part of his dreams and his life.  The great sail was spread now
at right angles to the Sun, exerting

                                  The Wind from the Sun 53

its utmost thrust.  Long ago, it had torn him clear of Earth, and
Diana was still gaining speed.
     Then, out of nowhere, beyond all doubt or hesitation, be knew
what must be done.  For the last time, he sat down before the
computer that had navigated him halfway to the Moon.
     When he had finished, he packed the log and his few personal
belongings.  Clumsily, for he was out of practice, and it was not an
easy job to do by oneself, he climbed into the emergency survival
suit.  He was just sealing the helmet when the Commodore's voice
called over the radio.
     "We'll be alongside in five minutes, Captain.  Please cut your
sail, so we won't foul it."
     John Merton, first and last skipper of the sun yacht Diana,
hesitated a moment.  He looked for the last time around the tiny
cabin, with its shining instruments and its neatly arranged controls,
now all locked in their final positions.  Then he said into the
microphone: "I'm abandoning ship.  Take your time to pick me up. 
Diana can look after herself."
     There was, no reply from the Commodore, and for that he was
grateful.  Professor van Stratten would have guessed what was
happening-and would know that, in these final moments, he wished
tobe left alone'
     He did not bother to exhaust the air lock, and the rush of
escaping gas blew him gently out into space.  The thrust -he gave
her then was his last gift to Diana.  She dwindled away from him,
sail glittering splendidly in the sunlight that would be hers for
centuries to come.  Two days from now she would flash past the
Moon; but the Moon, like the Earth, could never catch her.  Without
his mass to slow her down, she would gain two thousand miles an
hour in every day of sailing.  In a month, she would be traveling
faster than any ship that man had ever built.
     As the Sun's rays weakened with distance, so her acceleration
would fall.  But even at the orbit of Mars, she would be gaining a
thousand miles an hour in every day.  Long before then, she would
be moving too swiftly for the Sun itself to hold her.  Faster than a
comet had ever streaked in fromthe stars, she would be heading
out into the abyss.
     'Me glare of rockets, only a few miles away, caught Merton's
eye.  The launch was approaching to pick him up-at thousands of
times the acceleration that Diana could ever attain.  But its engines
could burn for a few minutes only, before they exhausted their fuel-
while Diana would still be

54 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

gaining speed, driven outward by the Sun's eternal fires, for ages
yet to come.
     "Goo&by, little ship," said John Merton.  "I wonder what eyes
will see you next, how many thousand years from nowT' At last he
felt at peace, as the blunt torpedo of the launch nosed up beside
him.  He would never win the race to the Moon; @but his would be
the first of all man's ships to set sail on the long journey to the
stars.

                                             May 1963

The Secret




Henry Cooper had been on the Moon for almost two weeks before
he discovered that something was wrong.  At Ent it was only an ill-
defined,suspicion, the sort of hunch that a hardheaded science
reporter would not take too seriously.  He had come here, after all,
at the United Nations Space Administration's own request.  UNSA
had always been hot on public relations-especially just before
budget time, when an overcrowded world was screaming for more
roads and schools and sea farms, and complaining about the
billions being poured into space.
     So here he was, doing the lunar circuit for the second time, and
beaming back two thousand words of copy a day.  Although the
novelty had worn off, there still remained the wonder and mystery
of a world as big as Africa, thoroughly mapped, yet almost
completely unexplored.  A stone's throw away from the pressure
domes, the labs, the spaceports, was a yawning emptiness that
would challenge men for centuries to come.
     Some parts of the Moon were almost too familiar, of course. 
Who had not seen that dusty scar in the Mare Imbrium, with its
gleaming metal pylon and the plaque that announced in the three
official languages of Earth:

ON THIS SPOT
AT 2001 uT

13 SEPTEMBER 1959

THE FIRST MAN-MADE OBJECT REACHED ANOTHER WORLD

     Cooper had visited the grave of Lunik 11-and the more famous
tomb of the men who had come after it.  But these thingsbelonged
to the past; already, like Columbus and the Wright brothers, they
were receding intohistory.  What concerned him now was the
future.
     When he had landed at Archimedes Spaceport, the Chief 55

56 THE NVIND FROM THE SUN

Administrator had been obviously glad to see him, and had shown
a personal interest in his tour.  Transportation, accommodation,
and official guide were all arranged.  He could go anywhere he
aiked, ask any questions he pleased.  LTNSA trusted him, for his
stories had always been accurate, his attitude friendly.  Yet the
tour had gone sour; he did not know why, but he was going to find
out.
     He reached for the phone and said: "Operator? Please get me
the Police Department.  I want to speak to the Inspector General."

     Presumably Chandra Coomaraswamy possessed a uniform, but
Cooper had never seen him wearing it.  They met, as arranged, at
the entrance to the little park that was Plato City's chief pride and
joy.  At this time in the morning of the artificial twenty-four-hour
"day" it was almost deserted, and they could talk without
interruption.
     As they walked along the narrow gravel paths, they chatted
about old times, the friends they had known at college together,
the latest developments in interplanetary politics.  They had
reached the middle of the park, under the exact center of the great
blue-painted dome, when Cooper came to the point.
     'You know everything that's happening on the Moon, 'Chandra,"
he said.  "And you know that rm here to do a series for UNSA-hope
to make a book out of it when I get back to Earth.  So why should
people be trying to hide things from me?"
     It was impossible to hurry Chandra.  He always took his time
to answer questions, and his few words escaped with difficulty
around the stem of his hand-carved Bavarian pipe.
     "What people?" he asked at length.
     "You've really no idea?"
     The Inspector General shook his head.
     "Not the faintest," he answered; and Cooper knew that he was
telling the truth.  Chandra might be silent, but he would not lie.
     "I was afraid you7d say that.  Well, if you don't know any
more than I do, here's the only clue I have-and it frightens me.
Medical Research is trying to keep me at arins length.' "Hmm,"
replied Chandra, taking his pipe from his mouth and looking at it
thoughtfully.
w'ls that all you have to say?"

                                                 The SecW 57

          'You haven't given me much to work on.  Remember, rm
     only a cop; I lack your vivid journalistic imagination."
          "All I can tell you is that the higher I get in Medical
     Research, the colder the atmosphere becomes.  Last time I
     was here, everyone was very friend@y, and gave me some
     fine stories.  But now, I can't even meet- the Director.  He's
     always too busy, or on the other side of the Moon.  Anyway,
     what sort of man is he?"
          "Dr.  Hastings? Prickly little character.  Very compete-at,
     but not easy to work with."
     _11VV?hat could he be trying to hide?"

          ,"Knowing you, rat mm you have some interesting theo-
     rigs."

          "Ok I thought of narcotics, and fraud, and political
     conspirades-but they don!t make sense, in these days. go
     vdiat's left wares the hell out of me."
          Chandra!s eyebrows signaled a silent question marL
     "Interplanetary plague," said Cooper bluntly.
     -1 thought that was finpossible."
          'Yes-I've written articles myself proving that- the ft@ forms
     on other planets have such alien chemistries that they can't
     react with us, and that all our microbes and bugs tookmillions
     of years to adapt to our bodies.  But I've always wondered if
     it was true.  Suppose a ship has come back from Mars, say, -
     with somethiW really vicious@--and the doctors caset cope
     with it?"
          There was a long silence.  Then Chandra said: '112 start
     investigating.  I don't like it either, for here's an item you
     probably don't know.  There were three nervous breakdown
     in the Medical Division last month-and that!s very,. very
     unusual."
          He yJanced at his watch, then at the false sky, which
     seetnedso distant, yet which was only two hundred feet above
     their heads,
          "We'd better get moving," he said.  'The morning showees
     due in five minutes."

     The'call came two weeks later, in the middle of the nightthe real
lunar nighL By Plato City time, it was Sunday, p   mortung.
          "Henry? Chandra here.  Can you meet me in half an hour
     at air lock five? Good-I'll see you."
          This was it, Cooper knew.  Air lock five meant that they
     seem iiaint outsid@ the dome.  Chandret had
     found'something.

58 THE Va" FROM TFM SUN

     The presence of the police driver restricted conversation as the
tractor moved away from the city along the road roughly bulldozed
across the ash and pumice.  Low in the south, Earth was almost
fall, c ' asting a brilliant blue-green fight over the Infernal
landscape.  However hard one tried, Cooper told himself, it was
difficult to make the Moon appear glamorous.  But nature guards
her greatest secrets well; to such places men must come to find
them.
     The multiple domes of the city dropped below the sharply
curved horizon.  Presently, the tractor turned aside from the main
road to follow. a scarcely visible trail.  Ten minutes later, Cooper
saw a single glittering hemisphere ahead of them, standing on an
isolated ridge of rock.  Another vehld@e, bearing a red cross, was
parked beside the entrance.  It seemed
that they were not the only visitors.                          .1 I
     Nor were they unexpected.  As they drew up to the &met iffie
flexible tube of the air-lock coupling groped out toward them and
snapped into place against their tractoes outer-hun.  'There was a
brief hissing as pressure equalized.  Then.  Coopw followed
Chandra into the building.
     The air-lock operator led them along carving corridors and




buflding, Cooper told himself when their guide ushered them into
a1arge &cular chamber and shut the door softly bobia

them.
It was a small zoo.  All around them were cages, tanU- It= tAning
a wide selection of the fauna and flora of EartlL Waiting at its
center was a short, gray-haired man, lockh4 very worried, and very
unhappy.
     --Dr. -Hastings,- said Coomarawamy, "meet Mr. Coooer-r Ile
Inspector General turned to his companion and ad" *'I've
convinced the Doctor that there's only one way to keep you quiet-
and that's to tell you everything."
     "Frankly," said Hastings, "I'm not sure if I give a damn any
more.' His voice was unsteady, barely under'oontrol, and Cooper
thought, Hellol There's another breakdown on the way.
     The scientist wasted no time on such formalities as shaking
hands.  He walked to one of the cages, took out a small bundle of
fur, and held it toward Cooper.
OJDO you knowlUtAis is?" bo-asked abruptly.

                                                 The Secret 59

     "Of course.  A hamster--the commonest lab animal."
     "Yes," said Hastings.  "A perfectl ordinary golden hamster.

I y
Except that this one is five years old-4ike all the others in this
cage.
     "Well? What's odd about that?"
     'Oh, nothing, nothing at all ... except for the trifling fact that
hamsters live for only two years.  And we have some here that are
getting on for ten."
     For a moment no one spoke; -but the room was-not silent It
was full of rustlings and slitherings and scratchings, of faint
whimpers and tiny animal cries.  'Men Cooper whispered: "My God-
you've found a way of prolonginglifel"
     'No,' retorted Hastings.  "We've not found it.  The Moon has
given it to -us ... as we might have expected, if we'd looked in front
of our noses."
. He seemed to have gained control over his emotions--as N he
was once more the pure scientist, fascinated by a discovery for its
own sake and heedless of its implications. . "On Earth," he said,
"we spend our whole lives fightinX rivity.  It wears down our
msucles, pulls our stomachs out of shape.  In seventy 'years, how
many tons of blood does the heart lift through how many miles?
And all that work, all that strain is reduced to a sixth here on the
Moon, where a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound human weighs only
thirty pounds."
     "I see," said Cooper slowly.  "Ten years for a hiamster--md how
long for a man?"
     "It's not a simple law," answered Hastings.  "It varies with the
size and the species.  Even a month ago, we weren't certain.  But
now we're quite s ' ure of this: on the Moon, the Spin of human life
will be at least twohundred years."
     'And you've been trying to keep it secrett"
     'You fooll Don't you understand?'
     'Take it easy, Doctor-take it easy," said Chandra softly.
     With an obvious effort -of will, - Hastings got control of' himself
again.  He began, to speak with such icy calm that his words sank
like freezing raindrops into Cooper's mind.
     "Think of them up there," he said, pointing to the roof, to the
invisible Earth, whose looming presence no one on the Moon
could ever forget.  "Six billion of them, packing all the continents
to the edges-and now crowding over into the sea beds.  And here-
@' he pointed to the ground----@'only a hundred thousand of us,
on an almost empty world.  But a world where we need miracles of
technoI4 and engineering meriely to

60 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

exist, where a man with an I.Q. of only a hundred and fifty can't
even get a job.
     "And now we find that we can live for two hundred years. 
Imagine how they're going to react to that newsl This is your
problem now, Mister Journalist; you've asked for it, and you've got
it.  Tell me this, please-I'd really be interested to know-just how are
you going to break it to them?"
     He waited, and waited.  Cooper opened his mouth, then -dosed
it again, unable to think of anything to say.,
     In the far corner of the room, a baby monkey started to cry.

                                                  lune 1%3

The Last Command




t     This Is the President speaking.  Rec@use you are hearing nit
read this message, it means that I am already dead and that our
country is destroyed.  But you are soldien-the most tilghly tramed
in all our history.  You know how to obey, orders.  Now you must
obey the hardest you have ever ifteived. . .
     Hard? thought the First Radar Oflicer bitterly.'No; now It. would
be easy, now that they had seen the laid they love scorched by the
heat -of many suns.  No longer could ftm U any hesitation, anjy
scruples about visiting upon innocent 4ad guilty zMe the
vengeance of the gods.  But why, why had, It been left so late?
     '. . . You know the purpose for which you were set swinging on
your secret orbit beyond the Moon.  Awaro of your existence, but
never sure of your location, an aggressair would hesitate- to
launch an attackagainst, us.  You were to be the Ultimate Deterrent,
beyond the reach of the Earthqua3w@ bombethat could crush
missiles in their buried silos and iw"@ nuclear submarines
prowling the sea bed.  You;could still soft back, even if all,our
other weapons were destroyed......
     As they have been, the Captain told himself.  He bed watched -
the lights wink out one by one on the, operationsboard, until none
werejeft.  Many, perhaps, had done ftk dirty; U not, he would soon
complete their work.  NothW4 that had survived the first
counterwike would exist after the blowhe was now preparing.
     ". . . Only through accident,-or madness, could war begin in, the
face of the threat you represent.  'That was the theory a which we
staked our lives; and now, for reasons which vai. shall never know,
we have lost the gamble. -     The Chief Astronomer let his eyes
roam to the single smal porthole at. the side of the central control
room.  Yes@ they had lost indeed.  There hung the Earth, a
glorious silver crescent tba: background of the stam At first,glahce,
it- looked,

0 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

unchanged; but not at second-for the dark side was no longer
wholly dark.
     Dotted across it, glowing like an evil phosphorscence, were the
seeks of flame that had been cities.  There were few of them now,
for there waslittle left to burn.
     .The familiar voice was still speaking from the other side of the
grave.  How long ago, wondered the Signal Officer, had this
message been recorded? And what other sealed orders did the
fores more-than-human battle computer contain, which no* they
would never -hear, because they dealt with military situations- that
could no longer arise? He dragged his mind back from the worlds
of might-bave-been -to confront the appalling and still-
unimaginable reality.
     .. If we had been -defeated, but not destroyed, we bad hoped
to use your existence as a bargaining weapon.  Now, even that
poor hope has gone-and with it, the last purpose for which you
wereset here in space." - What does be mean? thought the
Armaments Officer.. Now, =rely, the moment of their destiny had
come.  The- millions who were dead, the millions who, wished they
were-4. would be nvenged whes the black cylinders of the gigaton-
bomix spiraled down to Earth.
          You wonder why, now that it has come to this, I have
not'SIVen you the orders to strike back.  I will tell you.
     I "It is now too late.  The Deterrent has failed.  Our motber- find
no longer exists, and revenge canixg bring back the dead.  'Now
that half of mankind has been destroyed, to destroy dw *,ON half
would be insanity, unworthy of reasoning 'men. -71m quarrels that
divided us twenty-four hours ago no longer have any meaning.  As
far as your hearts will let you, you must Iwget the past.
     "You have skills and knowledge that a shattered pland will
@&ipi@@y need.  Use dmi-and without stint, without bitteow ness-
to rebuild the world.  I warned. you that your duW would be hard,
but here is my final command.
     'You will launch your bombs into deep space, and detonate
them ten million kilometers from Earth.  This will prove to our late
enemy, who is also receiving this message, that you have
discarded your weapons.
     "Men you will have one more thing to do.  Men of Fort Lenin,
the President of the Supreme Soviet bids you farewells and orders
you to place yourselves at the disposal of the United Slates.-
                                                  june 150

Dial F for Frankenstein




At 0150 GACr on Doomber 1, 1975, every telephone in the world
started to ring.
     @ A quarter of a billion people picked up their'receivers, Is
Isten for a few seconds with annoyance or perplexity.  TtLoft who
bad been awakened in the middle of the night assumed that some.
far-off friend, was calling, over the satellite tele.  Phone network
that had gone into service, with such a Van te,;%bli ngj,sothe
day'be . fore.  But there- was no @oiov on
               und, which to many seemed like the i6aring of,
ft sea; to others, like the vibrations of harp strings in th6 widd. 
And @ there were many more, in that moment, wh . * recalled a
secret sound of childhood-the noise of blood pulsing through the
veins, heard when a shell is- cupped ova the ear.  Whatever it was,
it lasted no more thii twenty seconds.  Then-it was replaced by the
dial tone.
     The world's subscribers cursed, muttered "Wrong number.sad
hung up.  Some tried to'dial a complaint,but the lim seemed busy. 
In a few hours, everyone had forgotten the incident-except those
whose duty it was to worry about such things.
     At the Post Office Research Station, the argument had bee*
going on all morn-mg, and'had got nowhere.  It continued
imalga7ted--through the lunch break, when the hungry enginceii
poured into the little caf6 across the road.
     "I still think," said Willy Smith, the solid-state electronics man,
"that it, was a temporary surge of current, caused when the
satellite network was switched in."
     "It was obviously something to do with the satellites.' agreed
JulFs Reyher, circuit designer.  "But why the tim delay? They were,
plugged in at midnight; the ringing was two hours later-as we all
know to our cost." He yawned violently.
          "MiA)do YOU tbink@ DocIft asked Bob Andrews, bompal*
     63

64 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     programer.  "You've been very quiet all morning.  Surely you've
got some idea?"
     Dr. John Williams, head of the Mathematics Division, stirred
uneasily.
          "Yes," he said.  "I have.  But you won't take it seriously."
     "Mat doesn't matter.  Even if it's as crazy as those science-
fiction yams you write under a pseudonym, it may give us some
leads."
     Williams blushed, but not much.  Everyone knew about his
stories, and he wasn't ashamed of them.  After all, they had been
collected in book form. (Rernaindered at fine shillings; he still had
a couple of hundred copies.)
     "Very well," he said, doodling on the tablecloth.  'IU is
something I've been wondering about for years.  Have,you ever
considered the analogy between an automatic telephone exchange
and the human brain?"
     "Who hasn't thought of it?" scoffed one of his listvW& 'Mat idea
must go back to, Graham Bell."
     "Poisibly.  I never said it was original. gut I do say it% than we
started taking it seriously." He squinted balefully at-ilis fluorescent
tubes above the table; they were needed on Ibis foggy winter day. 
"What's wrong with the damn NOW They've been flickering for the
last five minutes."
     Von't bother about that.  Maisie's probably forgotten to pay her
electricity bill.  Let's hear more a-bout your theory."
I "Most of it isn't theory; it's plain fact.  We know that the human
brain is a system of switches--neurons--4nterconnected in a very
elaborate fashion by nerves.  An automatic We;phone exchange is
also a system of switches--selectort and so forth-connected. with
wires."
     "Agreed," said Smith@ "But that analogy wonl get YoTA very
far.  Aren't there about fifteen billion neurons in the brain?

     That's a lot more than the number of switches in an auk**
change."

     Williame answer was interrupted by the scream of A; low-flying
jet.  He had to wait until the caf6 had ceased to vibrate before he
could continue.
     "Never heard them fly that low," Andrews grurable& "nought it
was against regulations."
     "So it is, but don't worry-London Airport Control Will catch him."
     "I doubt it," said Reyner.  "That was London Airport. bringing in-
a Concorde on ground approach.  But I've DWAX *,saw @=e sa
low, either.  Glad I wasn't aboaW

                                  Dhd P for FpmkmWdn 0

     "Are we, or an we not, going to get on with this bliistii4'
discussionT' demanded Smith.
     -You're right about the fifteen billion neurons In the human
brain," continued WM, iams, unabashed.  "And that's the whole
point.  Fifteen billion sounds a large number, but it isnt.  Round
about the 1960's, there were more than that number of individual
switches in the world's autoexchanges.  Today, there are
approximately five times as many."
     "I see," said Reyner slowly.  "And as from yesterday, they've
all become capable of fall interconnection, now that the satellite
links have gone into service@"
     "Precise4y,"
     There was silence for a moment, apart from.the disteM
     anging of a fire-engine bell
     OLet me get this straight," said Smith.  "Are you suggesting
     the wmtd telephone system is now a giant brain?"
     "Thaes putting it crudely-anthropoinorphically.  I prefer to
think of it in terms of critical size." Williams held his hands out in
front of him, fingers partly closed.
     "Elere are two lumps of U-235.  Nothing happens as long to
YOU keep them apart.  But bring them togethee-he suited the
action to the words@-and you havesomething very diffuent from
one',bigger lump of uranium.  You have a hole half mile across.
     "It's the same with our telephone networks.  Until tods:%
dwy've been largely independent, autonomous.  But now WeNe
suddenly multiplied the connecting links, the, networks have
merged together, and vWve reached criticality.'
     "And just what does- criticality mean in this can?" NW Smith.
     'For want of a better word-oonsciousness."
     'A weird sort of consciousness," said Reyner.  "What woqM-
@ It use for sense organsr'
     "Well, all the radio and TV stations in the world would be food
ing, information into it, through their Jandlines.  That should VJvP-
it something to think about.1 Ilen there would be all the data stored
in all the computers; it would have access to that-and to the
electronic libraries, the radar tracking systems, the telemetering in
the automatic factories Oh, ft would have enough sense organsl
We chit begin to i -' its picture of the world; but it would be
infinitely richer and more complax than ours."
@"GMQ-sli th*"'@'use its an entertaining idea@" add,

66 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

Reyner, "what could it do except think? It couldn't, go anywhere;
it would have no limbs.'
     -Why should it want to travel? It would already be Everywhere
And every piece of remotely controlled electrical equipment on the
planet could act as a limb." ,
     "Now I understand that time delay," interjected AndrewiL 'It was
conceived at midnight, but it wasn't born until. 1:50 this morning. 
The noise that woke us all up wa&-4ts, bir&

     His attempt, to sound facetious was not altogether oonvineing,
and nobody smiled.  Overhead, the lights continued. their annoying
Ilicker, which seemed to be getting worse.  Then" there was an
interruption from the front of the caM, as Jim Small, of Power
Supplies, made his usual boisterous entry.
     "Look at this, fellows," he said, and ginned, waving a piece of
paper in front of his colleagues.  "I'm rich.  Ever mm a bank
balance.like that?"
     Dr. Williams took the proffered statement, glanced doW48 the
columns, and read the. balance aloud: "Cr.  P-999,999i897.87."
     "Nothing very *dd about that," he continued, above the general
amusement.  Vd say it means an overdraft of R-102, and the
computer's made a slight slip and added eleven niM& That sort of
thing was happening all the time just after The banks converted to
the decimal system."
     'I know, I know," said Small, "but don't spoil my fun.  I'm 00irig
to frame this statement.  And.what would -happen -if %I drew a
check fbr a few million, on the strength of this? Could I am the
bank if-ft bounced?"
     "Not on your life," answered Reyn er.  "I'll take a bet that the
banks thought of that years ago, and protected themselm
somewhere down in the small print.  But, by the way,,when did'
YOU got that statement?"
     "In the noon delivery.  It comes straight to the office, so that my
wife doesn't have a chance of seeing it."
     "Hmm. seat means it was computed early this morning. 
C*rtainly after midnight . . ."

     "What axe you driving at? And why all the long faces?'
     No one answered him.  He had started a new,hare, and do
hounds were in full cry.
     "Does anyone here know about automated banking systems?"
asked Smith.  "How are they tied together?"
     "Like everything else these days," said Andrews.  "They're all,
iwths same network.4he computers talk tweach other &A

                                       Did P tor Phw*vxOebr
                                        67

over the world.  Tes a point for you, John.  If there was real
trouble, that's one of the first places rd expect it.  Besides ths
phone system itself, of course."
     "No @ one answered the question I had asked before JIM came
in," complained Reyner.  "What would this supermind actually do?
Would it be friendly-hostile-indifferent? Would it even know that we
exist? Or would it oonsider the electronic signals it's handling to
be the only reality?"
     11 see you!re beginning to believe me," said Williams, with a
certain grim satisfaction.  "I can only answer your question by
asking another.  What does a newborn baby do? It starts looking
for food " He glanced up at the flickering lights.  "My God," he said
@owly, as if a thought had just struck him 'Ibexes only one food
it would need-electricity."
     I wrhi& nonsense has gone far enough." said Smith.  'What the
devil's happened to our lunch? We gave our orders. twenty
minutes ago-"
          Everyone ignored him.
     "And thm" said Reyner, taking up where Williams had left off, "it
would start looking around, and stretching its limbs.  In fact, it
would start to play, like any growing baby.' ,'And babies break
things," said someonesoftly.
     'It would have enough toys, heaven knows.  That Con=4 that
went over us just.now. 'The automated production low& The traffic
lights in our streets."
     "Punny you, should mention that," interjected Sma% O%om~s
happened to the traffic outside-it's been stopped for the last ten
minutes.  Looks like a big jam"
     "I guess there's a i1ire somewhere.  I heard an engine it* now."
     "I've heard two-and what sounded like an explosion ovw loward
the industrial estate.  Hope it's nothing serious.-     'Maidel What
about some cand1w? We can't we a thing!"I' 'I've just remembered-
this place has an all-electrw kitchen.  We're going to get cold
lunch, if we get any lunch at au.st
     @ "At least we can read the newspaper while we're waiting. -U
Om the latest edition you've got there.  Jim?"
     "Yesi Haven't -had time to look at it yet.  Hmm- Them dp@
seem to have been a lot of odd accidents this mornint-railway
signals jammed-water main blown up through failure of relid.valve-
dozens of complaints about last night's wrong

 ber
Wtwned the Page, And became suddenly si1exL

68 THE WUM FROM THE SUN

     1TVhat's the matter?'
     Without a word, Small handed over the paper.  Only the front
page made sense.  Tbroughout the interior, column after column
was a mess of printees pie, with, here and there, a few
incongruous advertisements making islands of sanity in a sea of
gibberish.  They had obviously been set up as independent blocks,
and -had escaped the scrambling that had overtaken the text
around them.
     "Sothis is where long-distance typesetting and autodistribution
have brought us," grumbied Andrews. ,rm afraid Fleet Streefs been
putting too many eggs in one electronic basket."
     4% have W@e 911,_ rm afraid," said Williams solemnly.  "So
have we all."
     "If I can get a word in edgeways, in time to stop the.mob
hysteria that seems to be infecting this table," said Smith loudly
and firmly, "I'd like to point out that theres nothing to worry about--
-even if John's ingenious fantasy iscorrecL % only have to switch
off the satellites, and well be back when we wem yesterday."
- 'Prefrontal lobotomy," muttered Williams. -rd thought of that."
     -- "Eh? Oh, yes--cuffing out slabs of the brain.  That would
certainly do the trick.  Expensive, of course, and we'd have to go
back to sending telegrams to each other.  But civilization would
survive."
     From not too far away, there was a short, sharp explosion.
     'I don't like thisi" said-Andrews nervously.  "Ut's bear what the
old BBCs got to say.  Tbe one o'clock news has just started."
     He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a transistm radio.
     unprecedented number of industrial accidents, as well a the
unexplained launching of -three salvos of guided missiles from
military installations in the United States.  Several air-' ports have
had to suspend operations owing to the erratic behavior of their
radar, and the banks and stock exchanges have closed because
their informition-processing systems have become completely
unreliable." ("You're telling me," muttered Small, while the others
shushed him.) "One moment, please-there's a news Hash coming
through.... Here it iL We have just been informed that all control
over the newly -installed communication satellites has been lost. 
They am no longer responding to commands from the ground. 
According

                                       Dkd F for Prankensfebt
                                        et

     The BBC went off the air; even the carrier wave die&
Andrews@reaehed for the tuning knob and twisted it around the
dial.  Over the whole band, the ether was silent.
     Presently Reyner said, in a voice not far from hysteria: "Mat
prefrontal lobotomy was a good idea, John.  Too bad that Baby's
already thought of it."
     Williams rose slowly to his feet

     "Let's get back to the lab," he said.  "There must be an
answer, somewhere."
     But be knew already that it was far, far too late.  For Homo
sapiens, the telephone bell had Iolled.

                                                  Yune 1963 -Reunion




People of Earth, do not be afraid.  We come in peace-and why not?
For we are your cousins; we have beenhere before.
     You will recognize us when we meet, a few hours from now. 
We are approaching the solar system almost as swiftly as this
radio message.  Already, your sun dominates the sky ahead of us. 
It is the sun our ancestors and yours shared ten million Yem ago. 
We are men, as you are; but you have forgotten your history, while
we have remembered ours.
     We colonized Earth, in the reign of the great reptiles, who
were'dying when we came and whom we could not save.  Your
world was a tropical planet then, and we felt that it would Make a
fair home for our people.  We were wrong.  Though we were
maders of space, we knew so little about climate, about evolution,
about genetics....
     For millions of summers-there were no winters in those ancient
days,-the colony flourished ' bolated though it had to be, in a
universe where the journey from one star to the next takes years,
it kept in touch with its parent civilization. 11 . uve or four times in
every century, starships would call and bring news of the galaxy.
     But two million years ago, Earth began to change.  For ages it
had been a tropical paradise; then the temperature fell, and the ice
began to creep down from the poles.  As the climate altered, so
did the colonists.  We realize now that it was a natural adaptation
to the end of thelong summer, but those who had made Earth their
home for so many generations believed that they had been
attacked by a strange and repulsive disease.  A disease that did
not kill, that did no physical harm-but merely disfigured.
I Yet some were immune; the change spared them and their
children.  And so, within a few thousand years, the colony had split
into- two separate groups-almost two separate speand jealous of
each other.
               broqSW envy, discord, and, ultimtely, conflict.
                            70

                                                 Reunion 71

As the colony disintegrated and the climate steadily worsewd,
those who could do so withdrew from Earth.  The rest sank into
barbarism.
     We could have kept in touch, but there is so much to do 'in a
universe of a hundred trillion stars.  Until a few years ago, we did
not know that any of you had survived.  Then we picked up your
first radio signals, learned your simple languages, and discovered
that you made the long climb back from savagery.  We come to
greet you, our long-lost relatives -and to help you.
     We have discovered much in the eons since we abandoned
Earth.  If you wish us to bring -back the eternal summer that ruled
before the Ice Ages, we can do so.  Above all, we have a simple
remedy for the offensive yet harmless genetic plague that afflicted
so many of the colonists.
     Perhaps it has run its course-but if not, we have good news for
you.  People of Earth, you can rejoin the society of the universe
without shame, without embarrassment.
If any of you are still white, we can cure you.

                                             November 1963,

Playback



It Is incredible that I have forgotten so much, so quickly.  I have
used my body for forty years; I thought I knew it.  Yet already it is
fading like a dream.
     Arms, legal where are you? What did you ever do for me' when
you were mine? I send out signals, trying to command the limbs I
vaguely remember.  Nothing happens.  It is fike, ebmTftg into a
vacuum.
     Showing.  Yes, I try that.  Perhaps they hem me, but I cannot
hear myself.  Silence has flowed over me, until I can no
lohger'imagine sound.  There is a word in my mind called
'krjsid`;what,does it mean?
     (So many words, drifting before me out of the darkness,
vraiting to be recognized.  One by one they go away, dimppointed.)
.
     Hello.  So you are back.  How softly you tiptoe into my mindl I
know when you are -there,-but I never feel you coming.
     I sense that you are friendly, and I am grateful for what yott
have done.  But who are you? Of course, I know you're not human;
no human science could have rescued me w en the drive field
collapsed.  You see, I am, becoming curious.  "it is a good isign,
is it not? Now that the pain has gone-at last at-last-I can start to
think again.
     Yes, I am ready.  Anything you want to know.  It is the least
thatl can do.
     My name is William Vincent Neuberg.  I am a master pilot of the
Galactic Survey.  I was bom in Port Lowell.  Mars, on August 21,
2095.  My wife, Janita, and my three children are on Ganymede. 
I am also an author; I'vd written a good deal about my travels. 
Beyond Rigel is quite famous....
     What happened? You probably know as much as I do.  I had
just phantomed my ship and was cruising at phase velocity when
the alarm went.  There was no time to move, to do anythin& J
remember the cabin walls starting to glow-and 72

                                                 Playbwk 7-3

the heat, the terrible heat. 17hat is all.  The detonation must have
blown me into space.  But how could I have survived? How could
anyone have reached me in time?
     Tell me--how much is left of my body? Why cannot I feet my
arms, my legs? Don't hide the truth; I am not afraid.  If you can get
me home, the biotechnicians can give me new 'limbs.  Even now,
my right arm is not the one I was born with.
     Why can't you answer? Surely that is a simple question
     What do you mean you do not know what I look like? You must
have saved somethings
     The head?
     The brain, then?
     Not even-@, no ... I

     T am sorry.  Was I away a long time?
     'Let -me get a grip on myself. (Hat Very funnyl) I am Survey
Pilot First Class Vincent William Freeburg.  I was bom in Port Lyot,
Mars, on August 21, 1895. 1 have one ... no,' two, children...

     @ Please, let me have that again, slowly.  My training
prepared,' me for any conceivable reality.  I can face whatever    
       141 you
me. But slowly.

     Well, it could be worse. rm not really dead.  I know whol am I
even think I know what I am'
     I am a-a recording, in Some fantastic storage devim'Yow-'. must
have caught mypsyche, my soul, when the'shipturne Into plasmas
Even though I cannot imagine how it was done, it makes sense. 
After all, a primitive man could nevag,` understand bow we record
a symphony.
     All my memories are trapped in a tape or a crystal, asthey once
were trapped in the cells of my vaporized brain.  And Pot only my
memories.  ME. 1. MYSELF-VINCE WMLBURG, PILOT SECOND
CLASS.
Well, what happens next?
Please say that again.  I do not understand.
Oh, wonderful! You can do even that?
There is a word for -it, a name. . I...
The multitudinous seas incarnadine.  No. Not quite.
Incamadine, incamadine ...
REINCARNATION11
Yis, yes, I understand.  I must give you the basic plan, the
design.  Watch -my thoughts very carefully.
I will start at the top.

74 THE VnND FROM THE SUN

     The head, now.  It is oval--so.  The upper part is covered Vft
hair.  Mine was br-er-blue.
     The eyes.  They are very important.  You have seen the other
animals? Good, that saves trouble.  Can you show me some?
Yes, those will do.
     Now the mouth.  Strange-I must have looked at it a thousand
times when I was shaving, but somehow ...
     Not so round-narrower.
     Oh, no, not that way.  It runs, across the face, horizontally...
     Now, let's see ... there's something between the eyes and the
mouth.
     Stupid of me. 11 never be a cadet if I can't even remember
thati ...
          Of course-NosEl A little longer, I think.
     'Mere's something else, something I've forgotten.  That head
looks raw, unfinished.  It's not me, Billy Vinceburg, thi
soarteftzkid on the block.
     But that isn't my name-Im not a boy.  Im a master pilot Idth
twenty years in the Space Service, and rm, trying to =build ray
body.  Why do my thoughts keep going out of fmn? Help me,
pleasef
     _T1W monstrosity? Is that what I told you I looked MM?
Exase'it, We must start

agam.
     The head now. it is perfectly spherical, and weareth a
suncible cap... .

Too;llwcult

               Begin somewhere else.  Ab, I knowThe thighbone is
connected to the shinbone.  The shinbone k conn6cted to the
thighbone.  The thighbone is connected to tbdL-. shinbone.  The
shinbone ...
AJI fading.  Too late, too late.  Something wr Ong with the
Oayback.  Thank you for trying.  My name b ... my name
W,

Mother-where are you?
Mama-Mamal
Maaaaaaa .

                                             Dece)nber 1963








A

The Light of Darkness




I am not one of those Africans who feel ashamed of their country
because, in fifty years, it has made less progress than Eumpe in
five hundred.  But where we have failed to advano as fast as we
should, it is owing to dictators like Chaka; and for this we have
only ourselves to blame.  The fault being On=, 3a h the
responsibility for the cure.
     Moreover, I had better reasons, than most for'wishiig@ W
destroy the Great Chief,.the Omnipotent, the All-Seeing.@ He was
of my own tribe, being related to me through oneof,s* father's
wives, and he had persecuted our family ever since he came to
power.  Although we, took. no part in I@olitics, two Ct my brothers
had disappeared, and another had been- killed im an unexplained
auto accident My own liberty, there could W Ittle doubt, was largely
due to my standing @ as one of, :tb& countWafew scientists with
an international reputation.
     11ke many of my fellow intellectuals, I had been slow 4W turn
against; Chaka, feeling-aa did the equally misguided Oermans of
the 1930'9--@t there were times wfim I a dictator was the only
answer to political chaos.  Perhaps tbe. first sip of our disastrous
error came when Chaka abolished the constitution and asmuned
the name of the nineteenth-ow tury Ztdu emperor of whom- he
genuinely believed himself t1w reincarnation.  From that moment,
his megalomania 9"swffdy.  Like all tyrants, he would trust no one,
and belkv@d himself surrounded by plots
     This belief was well foQed.  Ile world knows of at least six welt-
publicized attempts on his life, and there are others that were kept
secret.  Their failure increased Chata's confidence in his own
destiny, and confirmed his followiis' fanat& cal belief in his
immortality.  As the opposition became more desperate, so the
Great Chief's countermeasures became more' ruthless,--and more
barbaric, Chaka's regir4e was not the first, in @Afiica or
elsewhere, to torture its enemies; but it was the &*lb do a* on
televidon.



                                                  IL

76 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     ,Even then, shamed though I was by-the shock of horror and
revulsion that went round the world, I would have done nothing if
fate had not placed the weapon in my hands.  I am not a man of
action, and I abhor violence, but once I realized -the power that
was mine, my conscience would not let me rest.  As soon as the
NASA -technicians had installed their equipment and handed over
the Hughes Mark X Infrared Communications System, I began to
make my plans.
     It seems strange that my country, one of the most backward.in
the world, should play a central role in the conquest of space. 
That is an accident of geography, not at all to the liking of the
Russians and the Americans.  But there is nodiing that they could
do about it; Umbala lies on the equator, directly beneath the paths
of all the planets.  And it possesses a unique and priceless natural
feature: the extinct volcan6 known as the Zambue Crater.
     When Zambue died, more than a million years ago, the-Un
retreated step by step, congealing in a series of terracm@ to form
a bowl a mile wide and a thousand feet deep.  It hail taken the
minimum of earth-moving and cable-stringing to -convert this into
the largest radio telescope, on Earth; Becaum the gigantic reflector
is fixed, it scans any given portion of the Ay for only a few minutes
every twenty-four hours, as the Earth turns on its axis.  Ibis was a
price the scientists wems willing to pay for the ability to receive
signals from wood and ships right out to the very limits of the solar
system.   . Chaka was a problem they had not anticipated.  He-Aad"
come to power when the work was almost-completed, and they had
had to make the best of him.  Luckily, -he had a superstitious
respect for science, and he needed all ths- rublos and dollars he
could get.  The Equatorial Deep Space-Facilfty was safe from his
megalomania; indeed, it helpedto reinforce

     'Me Big Dish had just been completed when I made my fird trip
up the tower that sprang from its center.  A vertical mask more
than fifteen hundred feet high, it supported the coffec:6Ing
antennas at -the focus of the binmense bowl.  A small elevator,
which could carry three men, made'a slow ascent to its top.
     Atfirst, there was nothing to see but the dully gleaming saucer
of -aluminum sheet, curving upward all around me 'or half a mile
in every direction.  But presently I rose above the rim of the crater
and could look far.out across the land I hoped, -1v save.  Snow-
capped and blue. in the western baw-Was Motud

                                       The Light of Darkness
                                        77

Tampala, the second highest peak in Africa, separated from me -by
endless miles of jungle.  Through that jungle, in great twisting
loops, wound the muddy waters of the Nya Riverthe only highway
that millions of my countrymen had ever known.  A few clearings,
a railroad, and the distant white gleam of the city were the only
signs of human life.  Once again I knew that overwhelming feeling
of helplessness that always assails me when I look down on
Umbala from the air !md realize the insignificance of man against
the everaleepigg Jungle.    -The elevator cage clicked to a halt, a
quarter of a mile _up in the sky.  When I stepped out, I was in a
tiny room packed wilb -coaxial cables and instruments.  There was
still some di#W606 to go, for a short ladder led through the roof
to a platforift little more than a yard square.  It was not a place for
anyom prone to vertigo; there was not even a handrail for
protection.
A central lightning conductor gave a certain amount of, and I
gripped it firmly with one hand all the time I Security,
stood on this triangular metal raft, so close to the clouds.
     The -stunning view, and the exhilaration of slight but ever-
present danger, made me forget the passage of tim.          -I

felt like a god, completely apart from terrestrial affaiM superior to
all other men.  And then I knew, with mathema& cal certainty, that
here was a challenge that Chaka. could never ignore.
     Colonel Mtanga, his Chief of Security, would object but-bis
protests would be overruled.  Knowing Chaka, =6 cOUIA ct -with
complete assurance that on the official OVM*M Predi
day he would stand here, alone, for many minutes, a, surveyed his
empire.  His bodyguard would remain in the Protons Wow, having
already checked it for booby traps.  They coulddo nothing to save
him when I struck from three miles and through the range ot hills
that lay between the telescope and ?" observatory.  I was glad of
those -hm!@ though they complicated the problem, they would
shield tied from all suspicion.  Colonel Mtanga was a very
intelligiht,@ man, but he was not likely to conceive of a gun that
could _fhe around corners.  And- he would be looking for a gun,
even though he could find no bullets....
     I went back to the laboratory and started my calculations.  'It
was not long before I discovered my first mistake.  Because I had
seen the concentrated light of its laser beam punch a solid steel
in a thousandth of a second, I had my Mark X could kill a man. 
IMIt is notes

78 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

simple as that.  In some ways, a man is a tougher proposition than
a piece of steel.  He is mostly water, which has ten times the heat
capacity of any metal.  A beam of light that will drill a hole through
armor plate, or carry a message as far as Pluto.--which was the job
the Mark X had been designed for@would give a man only a
painful but quite superficial bum.  About the worst I could do to
Chaka, from three mile away, was to drill a hole in the colorful
tribal blanket he wore so ostentatiously, to prove that he was still
one of the People.
     For a while, I almost abandoned the project.  But it v0ould not
die; instinctively, I knew that the answer was there, if Wy I could
see it.  Perhaps I could use my invisible buffets of beat to cut one
of the cables guying the tower, so that it would come crashing
down when Chaka was at the summit.  Calculation& showed that
this was just possible if the Mark X operated continuously for
fifteen seconds.  A cable, unlike a man, would not move, so there
was no need to stake everything on a single pulse of energy.  I
could take my time.
     But damaging the telescope would have been treason to
science, and it was almost a relief when I discovered that this
scheme would not work.  The mast had so many built-in safety
factors that I would have to cut,three separate cables to bring it
down.  This was out of the question; it would require hours Of
delicate adjustment to set and aim the apparatus for each-,
precision shot.
     I had to think of something else; and because it takes men a'
long time to see the obvious, it was not unff-a week before the
official opening of the telescope that I knew how to deal with
Chaka, the All-Seeing, the @Omnipotent, the Father of his People.
     By thistime, my. graduate students had tuned and calibrated
the equipment, and we were ready for the first fulJ-power tests, As
it rotated on its mounting inside the observatory dome, Ifte Mark
X looked exactly like a large double-barreled reflecting. telescope--
which indeed it was.  One thirty-six-inch mirror gathered, the laser
pulse and focused it out across space; the other acted as a
receiver for incoming signals, and was also used; like a
superpowered telescopic sight, to aim the systim.. @ We checked
the line-up on the, nearest celestial target, dw Moon.  Late one
night, I set the cross wires on the center of the waning crescent
and fired off a pulse.  Two and a half seconds later, a fine echo
came bouncing back.  We were in business.
     There was'one detail still to be arran       and. this I had to

                                        ged,

                                       The Light of Darknen 7#

do myself, in utter secrecy.  The radio telescope lay to the north of
the observatory, beyond the ridge of hills that .blocked our direct
view of it.  A mile to the south was a sing% isolated mountain.  I
knew it well, for years ago I had helped to set up a cosmic-ray
station there.  Now it would be used for a purpose I could never
have imagined in the days when my country was free.
     Just below the summit were the ruins of an old fort, deserted
centuries ago.  It took only a little watching to fin& Ow spot I
needed-a small cave, less than a yard higb. between two great
stones that had fallen from the ancient wallL Judging by the
cobwebs, no human being had entered it for generations.
     VA= I crouched in the opening, I could we the whole apause-of
the Deep $pace Facility, stretching away for milesi Over to the east
were the antennas of the old Project Apollo Tracking Station,
wbich- had brought the first men back from the Moon.  Beyond that
lay the airfield, above which a big-' freighter was hovering as it
came in on its underjets.  But aft that interested me were the clear
lines of sight from,this spot, to the Mark X dome, and to the tip of
the radio telescope mast three miles to the north.
     It took me three days to install the carefully silvere4 optically
perfect mirror in its hidden alcove.  'Me tedious micrometer
adjustments to give the exact orientation took so long-that I feared
I would not be ready in time.  But at last the angle was correct, to
a fraction of a second of arc.  Whert I aimed the telescope of the
Mark X at the secret-spot on the@ mountain, I could see over the
hills behind me.  The field of view was tiny, but it was sufficient;
the target area was only -a yard across, and I could sight on any
part of it to within fit hich.
     Along the path I had arranged, light could travel in either
direction.  Whatever I saw through the viewing telescope was
automatically in the line of fire of the transmitter.
     It was strange, three days later, to sit in the. quiet observatory,
with the power packs huninung around me, and to watch Chaka
move into the field of the telescope.  I felt a brief: gkw of triumph,
like an astronomer who has calculated the orbit of a new planet
and then finds it in the predlapd,spotamong the stars.  The cruel
face was in profile when I saw it first, apparently only thirty feet
away at the extreme magnification I was using.  I waited patiently,
in serene confidence, for the moment that I knew -must, come-the
moment when

90 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

Chaka seemed to be looking. directly toward me.  'Men with my left
hand I held- the image of an ancient god who must be nameless,
and with my right I tripped the capacitor banks that fired the laser,
launching my silent, mivisible thunderbolt across the mountains.
     Yes, it was so much better this way.  Chaka deserved to be
killed, but death would have turned him into a martyr and
strengthened the hold of his regime.  What I had visited upon him
was worse than death, and would throw his supporters into
superstitious terror.
     Chaka still lived; but the All-Seeing would see no more. la the
space of a few microseconds, I had made him less Om humblest
beggar in the streets.
     And I had not even hurt him.  'Mere is no pain when the
delicate film of the retina is fused by the heat of a thouiand suns.

                                             February 1964

The Longest Science-Fidlon
Story Ever Told


Dear.Mr. rmx:
     @ rm afraid your idea Is not at all original.  Stories abott writers
whose work is always plagiarized even Wore they can, complete
it go back at least to H. 0. Wells's 'The Anticipator.' A-bout once a
week I receive a manuscript beginning:

Dew Mr. Jinx:

          rm afraid your Idea Is not at all original.  Stories about
     writers whose work is always plagiarized 'even before they
     can complete it go back at least to H. 0. WelWs IM
     Anticipator." About once a week I receive
     A manuscript bezinnina:

Dear Mr. Jinx-rm afraid your idea is not

                    Better luck next timel Sincerely,
                    Morris K. Mobius
Editor, Stupefying Stories

Better luck wxt timel

Sincerely,

                              Morris K. Mobius;
                              FAtor, Stupefying Stories,

                              Better luck next timel Sincerely,
                              Morris K. Mobius.  Editor,
                              Stupefying Stories.

                                                  April 1965


81

Herbert Ceorge Morley
Roberts Wells.. Esq.



A couple of years ago I wrote a tale accurately entitled 'The bXgOit
Science-Fiction Story Ever Told," which Fred PoM duly published
on a single page of his magazine. (BecAm editors have. to jtist:ify
their existence somehow, be. renamed @jt 'A Recursion in
Metastories." You'll find it in Galaxy for October 1966.) Near the
beginning of this metastory, but an fafiniate number of words from
its end, I referred to 1@@: Anticipator" by H. 0. Wells.
     Iliough I encountered this short fantasy some twenty yean ago,
and have never read it since, it left a vivid inlpr@ cii, my miII& It
concerned two writers, one of whom had all his bW . d6des
published by the other-4efore be mm *visit complete them himself. 
At last, in desperation, he decidedfliit murder was the only'cure for
this chronic (literally) plaglarism.
     But, of course, once again his rival beat him to it, and do, story
ends with the words 'the anticipator, horribly afraid., ran down a
by-street"
     Now I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that this stay
was written by H. 0. Wells.  However, some months after
appearance I received, a letter from Leslie A. Gritten, of Everett,
Washington, saying that he couldn't locate it ArA Mr. Oritten has
been a Wells fan for a long, long time; @ ht' clearly recalls the
serialization of "'Me War of the Worlde' inthe Strand Magazine at
the end of the 1890's.  As one of the.  Master's cockney
characters would say, I@Gor blimey.1 - Refusing to believe that
my mental filling system had playe& such a dirty trick on me, I
quickly searched through tIW twentyn-odd volumes of the
autographed Atlantic Edition imthe Colonibo Public Library. (By
a charming coincidence, tbeBritish Council had just arranged a
Wells Centenary Exhibition, and the library entrance was
festooned with photos illustrating his background and career.) I
soon found that Mr. Grittan was right: there was no such story
as M Anftlpli82

                   Herbert George Morley Roberu Wells, Esq.
                    83

tor" in the collected works.  Yet in the months since TLSFSET was
published, not one other reader has queried the reference.  I find
this depressing; where are all the Wells fans these days?
     Now my erudite informant has solved at least part of the
mystery.  "Me Anticipator" was written by one Morley Roberts; it
was first published in 1898 in The Keeper of the Waters and Other
Stories.  I probably encountered it in a Doubledayanthology,
Travelers In Time (1947), edited by Philip Van Doren Stern.
     Yet several problems remain.  First of all, why was I so
convinced- that the story was by Wells? I can only suggestand it
seems pretty farfetched, even for my grasshopper mind-4hat the
similarity of words had made me link ft subconsciously with "The
Accelerator."
     I would also like to know why this story has stuck so vividly 'in
my memory.  Perhaps, like all writers, I am peculiarly sensitive to
the dangers of plagiarism.  So far (touch wood) I have been lucky;
but I have notes for several tales rm afraid to write until I can be
quite sure they're original. (Iberes this couple, see, who land their
spaceship on a new world after their planet has been blown up,
and when they've started things all over again you find-surprise,
surprisel-4hat they're called Adam and Eve .... )
     One worth-while result of my error was to start me skimming
through Wells's short stories again, and I -was surprised to find
what a relatively small proportion could be called science fiction,
or even fantasy.  Although I was wet Aware that only a fraction of
his hundred-odd publishe4' volumes were S.F., I had forgotten that
this was also true of the short stories.  A depressing quantity are
dramas - and comedies of Edwardian life ("Me Jilting of Jane"),
rather painful attempts at humor ("My First Aeroplane"), near-
autobiography ("A Slip Under the Microscope"), or pure sadism
("Tbe Cone").  Undoubtedly, I am biased, but among these tales
such masterpieces as "'Me Star," "The CrysW P4M" 'The Flowering
of the Strange Orchid," and, above all, 'Me Country of the Blind"
blaze like diamonds amid costume jewelry.
     But back to Morley Roberts.  I know nothing whatsoever about
him, and wonder if his little excursion in time was itself Inspired by
"rhe Time Machine," published just a couple of years before 'The
Anticipator." I also wonder which story was actually written-not
published-first.

84 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     And why did such an ingenious writer not make more of a
name for himself? Perhaps ...
     I have just been struck by a perfectly horrid thought.  If I-L G.
WelWs contemporary Morley Roberts was ever found murdared
in a dark alley, I simply doift want to know about it

                                             April 1967

Love That Universe




Mt President, National Administrator, Planetary Delegates, It
booth an honor a@d a grave responsibility to address you # ft
"ment of crisis.  I am aware--I can very well undei0*d-that many
of you are shocked and dismayed,by sorm Wthe rumors that you
have heard.  But I must beg you W Uget your natural prejudices
at a time when the veky. aftence of the human race-of the Earth
itself-is at stakc@ me time ago I came Across a century-old
phrase: "thinkift the unthinkable." This is exactly what we have to
do now. we must face the facts without flinching; we must not
letow sway our logic.  Indeed, we must do the plicisi@ Ofposite:
we must let our logic sway our emotionsl

     The situation is desperate, but it is not hopeless, thanks tl@
AP-astonishing discoveries my colleagues have made at tho
AMigean Station.  For the reports are indeed true; we, can't
odhblish contact with the supercivilizations at the Galactk" am if
Cm. At least we can let them know of our existence-
Vi.  can do that, it should be possible for us to appeal to -hills.

     ,Ibereis,nothing,absolutelynothing,thatwecand6byoiir'. *van
efforts in the brief time available.  It is only ten ye", 400@6 the
search for trans-Plutonian planets revealed - tl*

Dw
Men e of the Black         'arf.  Only ninety years from now, if c '

     make its perihelion passage and swing around the Sun, as It
beads once more into the depths of space--Ieavm'g 4, d stoldar
system behind it.  AU our resources , 4. out Lte 7aun e control over
the forces of nature, cannotAltet

of an inch.
                    the flat of the so-called "beacoft stars" was the
               end of the twentieth century, we have were
               civilizations with access to energy arably greater
               than ours.  Some of you wiff the incredulity of the
               astronomers-and later race-when the first examples
               of CdAink SS

86 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

engineering were detected in the Magellanic Clouds. 3110@ were
stellar structures obeying no natural laws; even now, -W* CIO not
know their purpose but we know their awpsam implications.  We
share a universe with creatures who'.'VW juggle with the very
stars.  If they choose to help, it would be child's play for them to
deflect a body like the Black D*UL only a few thousand times the
mass of Earth.... Child's p*, did I call it? Yes, that may be literally
truel
     You will all, I am certain, remember the great debate tbAtt -
1011owed,the discovery of the supercivilizations.  Should we
a#empt to communicate with them, or would it be best to ramfn
inconspicuous? There was the possibility, of, cousin
that,they'already knew everything about us, or might-to 4pnpyed.
by our presumption, or might react in any number, at wipleasant
ways.  Though the benefits from such contus,





                          if i
    thousand  away. Even  11
it would be   years             we c

          wiswer.  In these circumstances, it seemed that-*W be,
               neither a help to us nor a threat. this has changed. 
               We can send signals to d that cannot yet be
               measured, axid @tb,4`,
               And we know that they am @vsing
               r, we have detected their impulses, though we ;oanot
begin to interpret them.
               ses- are not electromagnetic, of aouM wo they are;
               we do not even hEwe a nam we have too many
               names.

                                                       ft
                    there, is something, after al, in
telepathy, ESP, or whatever ym care to dd -But it Is no wonder
that the study of such phoonmena newj@pi* progress here on
Earth, where there is the cqpi@ ous background roar of a billion
minds to sw@ Evem tire pitiably limited progress that was r=A
Skiace Agi seems a miracle-4ike discoverift I zqusic in a boiler
factory.  It was not'until we cou from our planet's mental tumult
that there vA* i
4"HAing a real science of parapsychology.
               then we had to WHO to the

                                            Love That univfm 97

     where the noise was not only diminished by, a eighty million
miles of distance, but also shielded by the- unimaginable bulk of
the Sun itself.  Only there, on our ('artificial planetoid Antigeos,
could we, detect- and measure the feeble radiations of mentality,
and uncover their laws of Propagation.

     In many respects, those laws are still bafiling.  However, vve
ba" established the basic facts.  As had long been suspecteA
by"the few who believed in -these phenomena, they triSgered by
emotional states-not by pure willpower or 'ideliberate. conscious
thought.  It is not surprising, therefore, 'that so.

j       many reports of paranormal events in the past were -
@,@@assocjated with moments of death or disaster.  Fear is a
!jPo*#rM:Vnerator; on rare occasions it can manifest itself above
the surrounding noise.
     ..,Once this fact was recognized, we began to make progrest
               artificial emotional states, first in single indivjdw@,
                    We were able to measure how the sisnW
               distance.  Now, we have a reliable, qusntitk_@-_ at
               has been checked out as far as Saturn.  W*-
               calculations can be extended even to the , we can
               produce a ... a shout that * over the whole galaxy
               And surely there o will respondl
               is only one way in which a signal of the req be
               produced.  I said that fear was a ut it is not
               powerful enough.  Even if we could moment of
               terror, the more than two thousand

                              least four times -this I range.  Aad
                              the only entotion,that it "I"

                                   co-operation of not fewer than a billion   
            als, at a moment of time that must ba

     svechronized to the second.  My colleagues have solved all
     thi.
                                             quite trivial. , ju
                                             have been used.
                                             CenturIG and
                                                  the planetary s networks. 
               AU the units needed can be massl@ a month, and
               instruction in their use requacs minutes.  It is the
               psychological preparation I it 0 Day-that will take a
               little longer. . . . gentlemen, isygur problem;
               naturally, we scien.;

88 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

tists will give you all possible help.  We realize that there wic'@.
be protests, cries of outrage, refusals to co-operate.  But
when7@@, one looks at the matter logically, is the idea really so
offensive? Many of us think that, on the contrary, it has a certain
appropriateness-even a poetic justice.
     Mankind now faces its ultimate emergency.  In such a moment
of crisis, is it not right for us to call upon the instinct that has
always ensured our survival in the past? A poet in an earlier, almost
equally troubled age put it better than I can ever hope to do:

WE MUST LOVE ONE ANarHER OR DM

                                             October 1966

Crusade



It was a world that had never known a sun.  For more   *04r
billion, years, it had hovered midway between two galaziek @      
I the prey of their conflicting gravitational pulls.  In some futurd,
age the balance would be tilted, one way or the other, and it
would start to fall across- the light-centuries, down towart-A
warmth alien to all its experience.
     Now it was cold beyond imagination; the intergalactic nit&
had drained away such heat as it had once there were seas
ther&--seas of the only elemen in- the liquid form at a fraction of
a degree above ,zm.,InttwshaffowoceansofheHumthat,bathedtliiss
ulaim@ world electric currents once started could flow forever,
w* no ;@Z@ of power.  Here superconductivity was the 4ormal
order of things; switching proce&ies could take plam' bftmimf
4mes a second, f or millions of years, with negftibl@
consunqpfion of energy.

hsve

     It was a computers paradise.  No world could
mme hostile to life, or more hospitable to intelligence.
     And intelligence was there, dwelling in a planet-wide
fimmstation of crystals and microscopic metal threads.  IU feeble
fight, of the two contending galaxies-briefty doubI4 conturies by
the filcke-rof a

say few                                 supernova-4
SbAk lawh"pe of sculptured geometrical forms moved, for there
was no need of movement in a thoughts flashed from one
hemisphere to the other at the speed of light.  Where only
information was important, it was &,-waste of precious energy to
transfer bulk matter.
     Yet when it was essential, that, too, could be arranged.  For -
Minme millions Of years, the intelligence brooding over this, Gjy
world bad become aware of a certain lack of essentid data.. In a
future that, though still remote, it could already foresee, one of
those beckoning galaxies would capture it.  What it ' would
encounter, when it dived into those swarms of suns, @Was beyond
its power of -computation.
                         89

90 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     So it put forth its will, and myriad crystal lattices reshaped
themselves.  Atoms of metal flowed across the face of the planet. 
In the depths of the helium sea, two identical subbraim began to
bud and grow. . . .
     Once it had made its decision, the mind of the planet worked
swiftly; in a few thousand years, the task was done.  Without a
sound, with scarcely a ripple in the surface of the frictionless sea,
the newly created entities lifted from their birthplace and set forth
for the distant stars.
     They departed in almost opposite directions,'and for mm
thim,amillion years the parent intelligence heard no more of Its
bff3pring.  It had not expected to; until they reached their Vals, there
would be nothing to report.
     @- Then, almost simultaneously, came the news that -both,
minions had faded.  As they approached the great galactic fim and
felt the massed warmth of a trillion suns, the -two explorers died. 
Their vital circuits overheated and lost Aw superconductivity
essential for their operation, and two mindless metal hulks drifted
on toward the thickening stars.
     But before disaster overtook them, they had reported on their @
problems; without surprise or disappointment, the motheiworld
prepared its second attempt.
          a million years later, its third . . . and its fourth NW fail Afth.
. . .

     Such-unwearying patience -deserved success; and at last it
came, 'in the shape of two long, intricately modulated trains of
pulses, pouring in, century upon century, from opposite quarters of
the sky.  They were stored in memory circuits idesitical: with those
of the lost exploren-so that, for- 'all it was as if the two scouts had
themselves burden of knowledge.  That their metal lmsks;ha& in
fact vanished among the stars was totally, usaimportant; the
problem@of personal identity was not coo that had ever occurred
to the planetary mind or its o5spring,
     Vim came the surprising news that- one universe'was empty. 
IMe visiting probe had listened ft all possible frequen. cies, to all
conceivable radiations; it could detect nothin& except the mindless
background of star noise.  It had scanned, a thousand worlds
without observing any trace of intelligence.  True, the tests were
inconclusive, for it was unable to approach any star closely enough
to make a detailed examination of its planets.  It had been
attempting this when its insulation broke down, its temperature
soared to-the freezin&@ Ointotaltrogmandit,died-fromtheheaL

                                                 Crusade 91

     The parent mind was still pondering the enigma of a deserted
galaxy when reports came in from its second ex. plorer.  Now all
other problems were swept aside; for this universe teemed with
intelligences, whose thoughts echoed hom du to star in a myriad
electronic codes.  It had taken ady alew centuries for the probe to
analyze and interprel@; tbem An.
     @:It realized quickly enou @ gh that ft was faced with WM-
gences ot,a very strange form indeed.  Why, some of them existed
on worlds so unimaginably hot that even water was POsent in the
liquid statel Just what manner of intelligeme it was confronting,
however, it did not learn for a millennium.
     It barely survived the shock.  Gathering its last strength; It'_
bmted',ts, final report into the abyss; then it, too. vP4 consumed by
the rising heat.
     Now, half a million years later, the interrogation -of fty-st-bome
twin's mind, holding all its memories and ezpof@ ences, was under
way. . .

@@Wylou detected intelligence?"
     "Yes, Six hundred and thirty-seven certain cam: thlrty@@
probable ones.  Data herewith."

                                                       interval [Approximately three
quadrillion bits of infortnaflon.
of @a -few years to process this in several thousand dwarfed
V*sAJ0q*Ise and confusion.]

     ']Me data must be invalid.  All these- sources of intefflio-M, S are
correlated with high temperatures?'

     'That is correct.  But the facts are beyond dispute; fty must -be
accepted."
11rive hundred years of thought and experimenting.  At Italy end
of -that time, definite proof that simple but iting machines could
function at temperatures water.  Large areas of the planet badly
clam =of the demonstration.]
     "M facts are, indeed, as you reported.  Why did you not attempt
communications"
190 answer.  Question repeated.]
     -,7W-ause there appears to be a second and even inow..,4 itilous
anomaly."
     "Give data."
     fSeveral quadrillion bits of information, sampled over sk'
hundred cultures, comprising voice, video, and neural trans.
mkdons, navigation =d control dgnats; inst@ telemetir-92 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

ing; test patterns; jamming; electrical interference; medical
equipment, etc., etc.
     This followed by five centuries of analysis.  That followed, by
Uffer consternation.
     @ After a long pause, selected data reexamined.  Tbousan&
of visual images scanned and processed in every conceivable
manner.  Great attention paid to several planetary civilizations
educational TV programs, especially those concerned with
elementary biology, chemistry, and-cybernetics.  Finally:]
     IpIhi information is self-consistent, but must be incorrect If it is
not, we are forced to these absurd conclusions: 1 Although
intelligences of our type exist, they appear to be in ; minority-2. 
Most intelligent entities are partially liquid objects of very short
duration.  They are not even rigid and are constructed in a most
inefficient manner'from carbon, hydroM oxygen, phosphorus, and
other atoms. 3. Though they operate, at unbelievably high
temperatures, all their information processing is extremely slow. 4.
Their methods of replication are so complicated, improbable, and
varied that we- have not been able to obtain a clear picture of them,
in even a single Instance.
     "But, worst of all: S. They claim to have created ow. obviously
far superior type of intelligence" [CmWW re-mmmination of all the
data.  Independent procew ing by Isolated subsections of the global
mind.  Cross-checking ,of results.  A thousand years later: I
     "Most probable conclusion: Though much of the information
relayed back to us is certainly valid, the existence of high-order,
nonmechanical intelligences is a fantasy. (DeftiItion: apparently self-
consistent rearrangement of facts having no correspondence with
the real universe.) This fantasy or mental artifact is a construct
created by our probe during its n. Why? Thermal damage? Partial
destabilization of intelligence, caused by long period of isolationand
absence of controlling feedback?
     "Why this particular form? Protracted brooding over the problem
of origins?,71is could lead to such delusions; model systems have
produced almost identical results in simulated tests.  The false logic
involved is: 'We exist; therefore some. tbing-call it X-created us.'
Once this assumption is made, the properties of the hypothetical X
can be fantasied in an unlimited number of ways.
     "But the entire process is obviously fallacious; for by the -same
logic something must have created X-and so on.  We

                                                 Chuade 93

are immediately involved in an infinite regress, which can have
no meaning in the real universe.
     "Second most probable conclusion: Fairly high-order, non-
mechanical intelligence's do indeed exist.  They suffer from the
delusion that they have created entities of our type.  In some
cases, they have even imposed their control upon then-L
     'rbough this hypothesis is most unlikely, it must be investi-
gated.  If it,is found to be true, remedial action must be taken.  It
should be as follows

     71iis final monologue occurred a million years ago.  It
explains why, in the last half-century, almost one-quarter of the
brighter novae have occurred in one tiny region of the sky: the
constellation Aquila.
     'Me crusade will reach the vicinity of Earth about the year
2050.

                                             October 1966

The Cruet Sky




By midnight, the sununit of Everest was only a hundred yards away,
a pyramid of snow, pale and ghostly in the light of the rising Moon. 
The sky was cloudless, and thewind that had been blowing for days
had dropped almost to zeft It must be rare indeed for the highest
point on Earth to be so calm and peaceful; they had chosen their
Ume well.
     Perhaps too well, thought George Harper; it had been almost
disappointingly easy.  Their only veal problem had been getting out
of the hotel without being observed.  The management objected to
unauthorized midnight excursions up the, mountain; there could be
accidents, which were bad for business.
     But Dr. Elwin was determined to do it this way, and he had the
best of reasons, though he never discussed them The presence of
one of the world's most famous scientists-,wd certainly the world's
most famous cripple-at Hotel Everest during the height of the tourist
season had already aroused a good deal of polite surprise.  HarW
had allayed some of the curiosity by hinting that they were engaged
in gravity measurements, which was at least part of the truth.  But
a part of the truth that, by this time, was vanishingly small.
     Anyone looking at Jules Elwin now, as he forged steadily toward
the twenty-nine-thousand-foot level with fifty pounds of equipment
on his shoulders, would never have guessed IW his legs were
almost useless.  He-had been born a victim of the,.1961 thalidomide
disaster, which had left more than ten thousand partially deformed
children scattered over the, face of the world.  Elwin, was one of the
lucky ones.  His arms wets quite normal, and,had been
strengthened by exercise until' they were considerably more
powerful than most mens' His legs, however, were mere wisps of
flesh and bone.  With the aid of braces, he could stand and even
totter a few uncertain steps, but he could never really_ walk.
                              94

                                             The Cruel Sky 95
     Yet now he was two hundred feet from the top of Everest.

     A travel poster bad started it all, more than three years ago.  As
a junior computer programer in the Applied Physics Division,
George Harper knew Dr. Elwin only by sight and by reputation. 
Even to those working directly under him, Astro. tech's brilliant
Director of Research was a slightly remote personality, cut off from
the ordinary run of men both by his body and by his mind.  He was
neither liked nor disliked, and, though he was admired and pitied,
he was certainly not envied.
     @Karper, only a few months out of college, doubted if the
Doctor even knew of his existence, except as a name on an
oqpnization chart. nerc were ten other programers in the division,
all senior to him, and most of them had never exchanged more than
a dozen words with their research director.  When Harper was co-
opted as messenger boy to carry one of the classified files into Dr.
Elwin's office, he ex;pected to be in and- out with nothing more than
a few polite formalities.

     That was almost what happened.  But just as he was leavin& he
was stopped dead by the magnificent panorama of Himalayan peaks
covering half of one wall.  It had been placed-where Dr. Elwin could
see it whenever he looked UP from his desk, and it showed a scene
that Harper knew very well indeed, for he had photographed it
himself, as an awed and slightly breathless tourist standing on the
trampled snow at the crown of Everest.

     There was the white ridge of Kanchenjunga, rearing through the
clouds almost a hundred miles away.  Nearly in, line with it, but
much nearer, were the twin peaks of Makalu; and closer still,
dominating the foreground, was the immense bulk of Lhotse,
Everest's neighbor and rival.  Farther around to the west, flowing
down valleys so huge that the eye cou not appreciate their scale,
were the jumbled ice rivers of the Khumbu and Rongbuk glaciers. 
From this height, their frozen wrinkles looked no larger than the,
furrows in a plowed field; but those ruts and scars of iron-hard ice
were hundreds of feet deep.
     I Harper was still taking in that spectacular view, reliving old
memories, when he heard Dr. Elwin's voice behind him.
'You seem interested.  Have you ever been there?"
"Yes, Doctor.  My folks took me after I graduated from

96 THE V4M FROM TIM SUN

high school.  We stayed at the hotel for a week, and thought we'd
have to go home before the weather cleared.  But on the last day
the,wind stopped blowing, and about twenty of us made it to the
summit.  We were'there for an hour, taking pictures of each other."
     Dr. Elwin seemed to digest this information for rather a long
time.  Then he said, in a voice that had lost its previous remoteness
and now held a definite undercurrent of excite* ment: "Sit down,
Mr.---ah-Harper. rd like to hear more."
     As he walked back to the chair facing the Director's big
uncluttered desk, George Harper found himself somewhat puzzled. 
What he had done was not in the least unusual; every year
thousands of people went to the Hotel Everest, and about a quarter
of them reached the mountain's summit.  Only last year, in fact,
there had been a much-publicized presentstion to the ton-
thousandth tourist to stand on the top of the world.  Some cynics
had commented on the extraordinary coincidence that Number
10,000 had just happened to be a rather well-known video starlet.
     There was nothing that Harper could tell Dr. Elwin that he
couldn't discover just as easily from a dozen other source*--: the
tourist brochures, for example.  However, no young and ambitious
scientist would nuiss this opportunity to impress a man who could
do so much to help his career.  Harper was neither coldly
calculating nor inclined to dabble in office politics, but he knew a
good chance when he saw one.
     "Well, Doctor," he began, speaking slowly at first as ho. tried to
put his thoughts and, memories in order, "thl jets land you at a little
town called Namchi, about twenty miles from the mountain.  Then
the bus takes you along eL spectacular road up to the hotel, which
overlooks the Khumbu Glacier.  It's at an altitude of eighteen
thousand feet, and there are pressurized rooms for anyone who
finds it hard to breathe.  Of course, theres a medical staff in
attendance, and the manage. ment won't accept guests who aren't
physically fit.  You have to stay at the hotel for at least two days, on
a special diet before you're allowed to go higher.
     "From the hotel you can't actually see the summit, because
you're too close to the mountain, and it seems to loom right above
you.  But the view is fantastic.  You can see Lhotse and half a dozen
other peaks.  And it can be scary, too-especially at night.  The wind
is usually howling somewhere high overhead, and there are-weird
noises from the moving ice.  It's




4

                                            The Cnwl Sky 97

easy to imagine that there are monsters prowling around up in the
mountains. . . .
     'Ilere's not much to do at the hotel, except to relax and watch
the scenery, and to wait until the doctors give you the. go-ahead. 
In the old days it used to take weeks to acclimatize to the thin air;
'now they ran make your blood count shoot up to the right level in
forty-eight hours.  Even so, about half the visitors-mostly the older
ones-decide that this is quite high enough for them.
     ITVhat happens next depends on how experienced you am and
how much you're willing to pay.  A few expert climbers hire guides
and make their own way to the top, using standard nwantaineering
equipment.-Ibat isn't too difficult nowadays,, and there are shelters
at various strategic spots.  Most of thew groups I make it.  But the
weather is always a gamble, and every year a few people get killed.
     *The average tourist does it the easier way.  No aircraft are
allowed to land on Everest itself, except in emergencies, but there's
a lodge near the crest of Nuptse and a helicopter service to it 'from
the hotel.  From the lodge it's only three 'nulas to the summit, via
the South Col-an easy climb for mWone in good condition, with a
little mountaineering experience.  Some people do it without
oxygen, though tha's not recommended.  I kept my mask on until I
reached the-top; then I took it off and found I could breathe without
much difficulty.09
"Did you use filters or gas cylinders?"
"Oh, molecular -filters-they're quite reliable now, aad

increase the oxygen concentration over a hundred per ceftL
JWve simplified high-altitude climbing enormously.  No one
carries compressed gas any more."
'How long did the climb taker
     "A full day.  We left just before dawn and were back'at nightfall. 
That , would have surprised the old-timers. gut of course we were
starting fresh and traveling light.  There are no real problems on the
route from the lodge, and steps have been cut at all the tricky
places.  As I said, it's easy for anyone m good condition."
     The instant he repeated those words, Harper wished that he had
bitten off his tongue.  It seemed incredible that he could have
forgotten who he was talking to, but the wonder and excitement of
that climb to the top of the world had come back- so vividly that for
a moment he was once more On that -98 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

lonely, wind-swept peak@.  The one spot on Earth where Dr. Elwin
could never stand. . . .
     But the scientist did not appear to have noticed-or else he wa I
s so used to such unthinking tactlessness that it no longer bothered
him.  Why, wondered Harper, was he so interested in Everest?
Probably because of that very inaccessibility; it stood for all that
had been denied to him by the accident of birth.

     Yet now, only three years later, George Harper paused a bare
hundred feet from the summit and drew in the, nylon rope as the
Doctor caught up with him.  Though nothing had 0  1Ver been said
about it, he knew that the scientist wished to be the first to the top. 
He deserved the @ honor, and the younger man Would do nothing
to rob him of it.
     "Everything MM" he asked as Dr. Elwin drew abreast of bjMr The
question was quite unnecessary, but Harper feltan argent need to
challenge the great loneliness that now surrounded them.  They mi
ght have been the only men in A the A
     nowhere

world,           amid this white wilderness of peaks was them any
sign that the human race existed.
Ehda did not answer, but gave an absent-minded nod w he shining
eyes fixed upon the summit.  He wac curiously stiff-logged gait,.and
his feet =&impression in the snow.  And as he walkg4 there came
a faint but unmistakable whine from the bulky backpack he was
carrying on his shoulders.
     That pack, indeed, was carrying him--or thriwquarters of him.  As
he forged steadily along the last few feet to his and all his
equipment if that was still too much, he d weigh no thing at WI.
Himalayas was the greatest secret of the twenty-fint century.  In all
the world

                                             , there were onlyfive of these
experimental Elwin Levitators, and two of them were here on
Everest

Even though he had known about them for two                 a

yeam
understood something of their basic theory, the "LevviW-49 they had
soon been christened at the lab-still seemed Mm magic to Harper. 
Their power-packs stored enough e ectrica energy to lift a two-
hundred-and-fifty-pound weight through a vertical distance of ten
miles, which gave an ample safety factor for this mission.  The lift-
and-descend cycle could -be repeated almost indefinitely as the
units reacted against the gravitational field.  On the way up, the
battery &or

                                            The Cruel Sky 99

charged; on the way down, it was charged again.  Since no
mechanical process is completely efficient, there was a slight loss
of energy on each cycle, but it could be repeated at least a hundred
times before the units were exhausted.
     Climbing the mountain with most of their weight neutralized had
been an exUarating experience.  The vertical tug of the harness
made it feel that they were hanging from invisible balloons, whose
buoyancy could be adjusted at will.  They needed 6, certain amount
of weight in order to get traction on the ground, and after some
experimenting had settled on twenty-live per cent.  With this, it was
as easy to ascend a one-in-one slope as to walk normally on the
level.
     ,Several times they had cut their weight almost to zero to rise
hand over hand up vertical rock faces.  Ibis had been the strangest
experience of all, demanding complete faith in their equipment.  To
hang suspended in mid-air, apparently supported by nothing but a
box of gently humming electronicgear, required a considerable
effort of will.  But after a few minubw the sense of power and
freedom overcame all fear, for These indeed was the re-gli-tion of
one of marVs oldest dreams.
     A few weeks ago one of the library staff had found a line from
an early.twentieth-century poem that described thek adhievenient
perfectly: 'To ride _ secure the cruet sky." Not cm birds had ever
possessed such freedom of the third diniinsion; this was the real
conquest of space.  The Levitater would open up the mountains and
the high places of the world, as a lifetime ago the aquahmg had
opened up the SO a-.  Once these units had passed their tests and
were mass-mv-i@ duood cheaply, every aspect of human civilization
woula be' charged, Transport would be revolutionid.  Space travd,
' would be no more expensive than ordinary flying; all mankind
would take to the air.  What had happened a hundred years earlier
with the invention of the automobile was only@ a mm foretaste of
the staggering social and political changes that .must now come.
     But Dr. Elwin, Harper felt mm, was thinking Of none of these in
his lonely moment of triumph.  Later, he would receive the world's
applause (and perhaps its curses), yet ft would not mean as much
to him as standing here on Earth's highest point.  This was truly a
victory of mind over matter, of sheer intelligence over a frail and
crippled body.  All the rest would be anticlimax.
     When Harper joined the scientist on the flattened snowcovered
'Pyram4 they shook hands with rather formal

100 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

stiffness, because that seemed the right thing to do.  But they said
nothing; the wonder of their achievement, and the panorama of
peaks that stretched as far as the eye could see in every direction,
had robbed them of words.
     Harper relaxed in the buoyant support of his harness and slowly
scanned the circle of the sky.  As he recognized them, he mentally
called off the names of the surrounding gianb:Makalu, Lhotse,
Baruntse, Cho Oyu, Kanchenjunga. . . . Even now scores of these
peaks had never been climbed.  Well, the Levvies would soon
change that.
     There were many, of course.' who would disapprove.  But back
mi the twentieth century there had also been mountaineers who
thought it was "cheating" to use oxygen.  It was hard to believe that,
even after weeks of acclimatization, men had once attempted to
reach these heights with no artificial aids at all.  Harper
remembered Mallory and Irvine, whose bodies still lay undiscovered
perhaps within a mile of this very spot.
     Behind him, Dr. Elwin cleared his throat.
     "Let's go, George," he said- quietly, his voice muffled by the
oxygen filter.  "We must get back before they start looking for ULIS
     With a silent farewell to all those who had stood bore before
them, they turned away from the summit and started down the
gentle slope.  The night, which had been brilliantly clear until now,
was becoming darker; some high clouds wen ftping across the face
of the Moon so rapidly that its light switched on and off in a manner
that sometimes made it hard to, see the route.  Harper did not like
the look of the weather and began. mentally to rearrange their
plans.  Perhaps it would' be better to aim for the shelter on the
South Col, rather than attempt to reach the lodge.  But he said
nothing to Dr. Elwin, not,wishing to raise any false alarms.
     Now they were moving along a knife edge of rock, with utter
darkness on one side and a faintly glimmering snowscape on the
other.  This would be a terrible place, Harper could not help
thinking, to he caught by a storm.
     He had barely shaped the thought when the gale was upoa
them.  From out of nowhere, it seemed, came a shrieking blast of
air, as if the mountain had been husbanding its strength, for this
moment.  There was no time to do anything; even had they
possessed normal weight, they would have been swept pff their
feet.  In seconds, the wind had tossed them out over shadowed,
empty blackness.

                                            The Chiel Sky 101

     It was Impossible to judge the depths beneath them; when
Harper forced himself to glance down, he could see nothing. 
Though the wind seemed -to be carrying him almost horizon. tally,
he knew that, he must be falling.  His residual weight would be
taking him downward at a quarter of the normal speed.  But that
would be- ample- if they fell four thousand -feet, it would be poor
consolation to know that It would seem only one thousand.
     He had not yet had time for fear-that would come later, if he
survived-and his main worry, absurdly enough, was that the
expensive Levitator might be damaged.  He had completely
forgotten his partner, for in such a crisis the mind can hold only one
idea at a time.  The sudden jerk on the nylon TOM filled him with
puzzled alarm.  Then he saw Dr. Ewin sloQj revolving around him
at the end of the line, like a planet Curling a sun.
     The sight snapped him back to reality, and to a conscious. ness
of what must be done.  His paralysis had probably lasted only a
fraction of a second.  He, shouted across the wind: "Doctorl Use
emergency MI"
     As he spoke, he fumbled for the seal on his control Wd4 tore it
open, and pressed the button.
     At once, the pack began to hum like a hive of angry bear He felt
the harness tugging at his body as it tried to drag him up into the
sky, away from the invisible death below.  M* simple arithmetic of
the IS-th's ViMtational lield blazed in his mind, as if written in letters
of fire.  One kilowatt could lift a hundred kilograms through a meter
every second, and the packs could convert energy at a maximum
rate of ten kilowatts-though they could not keep this UP for more
than a minute.  So allowing for his initial weight reduction, he
should lift at well over a hundred feet a second.
     1here was a violent jerk on the rope as the slack between them
was taken up.  Dr. Elwin had been slow to punch the, emergency
button, but at last he, too, was ascending.  It would be a race
between the lifting power of their units and the w1nd that was-
sweeping them toward the icy face of Lhotse, now scarcely a
thousand feet away.
I That wan Of snow-streaked rock loomed above them hi the,
moonfight, a frozen wave of stone.  It was impossible to judge their
speed accurately, but they could hardly be moving at less than fifty
miles an hour.  Even if they survived the impact, they could not
expect to escape serious injury; and injury here would be as good
as death.

102 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     Then, just when it seemed that a collision was unavoidable, the
current of air suddenly shot skyward, dragging them with it. They
cleared the ridge of rock with a comfortable fifty feet to spare.  It
seemed like a miracle, but,_ after a dizzying moment of relief,
Harper realized that what had saved them was only simple
aerodynamics.  The wind had to rise in order to clear the mountain;
on the other side, it would descen&' again.  But that no longer
mattered, for the sky ahead was empty.
     Now they were moving quietly beneath the broken clouds. 
Though their speed had not slackened, the roar of the wind had
suddenly died away, for they were traveling with it through
emptiness.  They could even converse comfortably, across the thirty
feet of space that still separated them.
."Dr.  Elwin," Harper called, "are you O.K'.?"
     "Yes, George," said the scientist, perfectly calmly.  "Now what do
we do?'
     must stop lifting.  If we go any higher, we won't be able to
breathe-even with the filters."
          "You're right.  Let's get back into balance."
     Tho angry humming of the packs died to a barely audible elec@
whine as they cut out the emergency circuits.  For a -few minutes
they yo-yoed up and down on their nylon rope-first one uppermost,
then the other-until they managed to get mito trim.  When they had
finally stabilized, they wpm drifting at a little below thirty thousand
feet.  Unless the Levvies failed-which, after their overload, was quite

                                                       PO$-sible-
                                                       they were
                                                       out of
                                                       inunediate
                                                       danger.
     Their troubles would start when they tried to return to EardL

     No 'Men in all history had ever greeted a stranger dawiL Though
they were tired and stiff and cold, and the dryness 4 the thin air
made every breath rasp in their throats, they forgot all these
discomforts as the first dim glow spread along the jagged eastern
horizon.  The stars faded one by one; last to go, only minutes
before the moment of daybreak, was the most brilliant of all the
space stations-Pacific Number Three, hovering twenty-two thousand
miles above HawaiL Then the sun lifted above a sea of nameless
peaks, and the Himalayan day had dawned.
     It was like watching sunrise on the Moon.  At first, only the
highest mountains caught the slanting rays, while the surroundfag
valleys remained flooded with inky shadows.  But slowly

                                            The Cruet Sky 103,

the line of light marched down the rocky slopes, and more and
more of this harsh, forbidding land climbed into the new -day.
     Now, if one looked hard enough, it was possible to see signs
of human life.  There were a few narrow roads,, thin col of smoke
from lonely villages, glints of reflected sunlight from monastery
roofs.  The world below was waking, wholly unaware of the two
spectators poised so magically fifteen thousand feet above.
     During the night, the wind must have changed direction several
Cam, and Harper had no idea where they were' He could not
recognize a single landmark.  They could have been anywhere over
a fivehundred-mile-long strip of Nepal and Mbet.
     TW Immediate problem was to choose a landing place-and that
soon, for they were drifting rapidly toward a jumble of peaks and
glaciers where they could hardly expect to fio help.  The wind was
carrying them in a northeasterly direptio%. toward China.  If they
Boated over the mountains and land#&@ there, it might be weeks
before they could get in contact with, one of the U.N. Famine Relief
Centers and find their way home.  They might even be in some
personal danger, if they descended out of the sky in an area where
there was only an illiterate and superstitious peasant population.
     'We'd better, get down quickly," said Harper.  "I dont 08 the look
of those mountains." His words seemed utterly Icais the void around
them Although Dr. Ehvm was only ten feet away, it was easy to
imagine that his companion could not hear anything he said.  But
at last the Doctor nodded his hem4 in almost reluctant agreement.
     "I'm. afraid you're right-but rin not sure we can make, it, with this
wind.  Remember-we Can't go down as quickly as wb can rise."
     That was low enough; the power-packs could be charged 4 only
a tenth of their discharge rate.  If they lost altitude aa&
pumpedgravitational energy back into them too fast, the cells Would
overheat and probably explode.  The startled Tibetans (or
Nepalese?) would think that a larger meteorite had, detonated in
their sky.  And no one would ever know exactly" what had happened
to Dr. Jules Ewin and his promising young assistant.
     Five thousand feet above the ground, Harper began to expect
the explosion at any moment.  They were falling swftly, but not
swiftly enough; very soon they would have to

104 THE VAM FROM THE SUN

decelerate, lest they hit at too high a speed.  To make matters
worse, they had completely miscalculated the air speed at ground
level.  That infernal, unpredictable wind was blowing a near-gale
once more.  They could see streamers of snow, torn from exposed
ridges, waving like ghostly banners beneath them.  While they
hadbeen moving with the wind, they were unaware of its power;
now they must once again make the dangerous transition between
stubborn rock and softly yielding sky.
     The air current was funneling them into the mouth of a canyon. 
There was no chance of lifting above it.  They were committed, and
would have to choose the best landing place they could find.
     7be canyon was narrowing at a fears ' ome rate.  Now it was
little more than a vertical cleft, and the, rocky walls were sliding pan
at thirty or forty miles an hour.  From tirne to time random eddies
would swing them to the right, then the left often they missed
collisions by only a few feet Once, when they were sweeping scant
yards above a ledgethickly covered with snow, Harper was tempted
to pull the quick-relea" that would jettison the Levitator.  But that
would be jumping from the frying pan into the fire: they might get
safely back onto firm ground only to find themselves napped
unknc4n miles from all possibility of help.,
     Yet even at this moment of renewed peril, he felt very little fear. 
It was all like an exciting dream--a dream from which he would.
presently wake up to, find himself safely in his own bed.  This
fantastic adventure could not really be happening to him.,
     "boost" shouted the Doctor.  'Noves our chance-If we can snag
that boulderl" -     I They had -ordy seconds in which to act.  At
once, -they both began to play out the nylon rope, until it hung in a
great loop beneath them its lowest portion only a yard above the
racing ground.  A large rock, some,twenty feet high, lay exactly in
their line. of flight; beyond it, a wide patch of snow gave promise of
a reasonably soft 14nding.
     7be rope skittered over -the lower curves of the boulder, seemed
about to slip clear, then caught beneath an overhang.  Harper felt
the sudden jerk.  He was swung around like a stone on the end of
a sling.
     I never thought that snow could be so hard, he told himself. 
After that there was a brief and brilliant explosion of light; dM
vothin& -                                   The Cntel Sky 105

     He was back at the university, in the lecture room.  One of the
professors was talking, in a voice that was familiar, yet somehow
did not seem to belong here.  In a sleepy, halfhearted fashion, he
ran through the names of his college instructors.  No, it was
certainly none of them.  Yet he knew the voice so well, and it was
undoubtedly lecturing to someone.
     ". . . still quite young when I realized that there was something
wrong with Einstein's Theory of Gravitation.  In particular, here
seemed to be a fallacy underlying the Principle of Equivalence. 
According to this, there is no way of distinguishing between the
effects produced by gravitation and those of acceleration.
     "But this is clearly false.  One can create a uniform acceleration;
but a uniform gravitational field is impossible, since it obeys an
inverse square law, and therefore must vary even over quite short
distances.  So tests can easily be devised to distinguish between
the two cases, and this made, me wonder if . . ."
     The softly spoken words - left no more impression on Harper's
mind than if they were in a foreign language.  He'. realized dimly
that he should understand all this, but it was too much trouble to
look for the meaning.  Anyway, the first problem was to decide
where he was.
     Unless there was something wrong with his eyes, he was in
complete darkness.  He blinked, and the effort brought on such a
splitting headache that he gave a cry of pain.
     "George! Are you all right?"
     Of course! That had been Dr. Elwin's voice, talking softly there
in the darkness.  But talking to whom?
     "I've got alerrible headache.  And there's a pain in my side when
I try to move.  What's happened? Why is it dark?"
     "You've had concussion-and I think you've cracked a rib.  Don't
do any unnecessary talking.  You've been unconscious all day.  It's
night again, and we're inside the tent.  I'm saving our batteries."
     The glare from the flashlight was almost blinding when Dr. Elwin
switched it on, and Harper saw the walls of the tiny tent around
them.  How lucky that they had brought full mountaineering
equipment, just in case they got trapped on Everest.  But perhaps
it would only prolong the agony....
     He was surprised that the crippled scientist had managed,
without any assistance, to unpack all their gear, erect the tent, and
drag him inside.  Everything was laid out neatly: the first-aid kit, the
concentrated-food cans, the water containers,

106 THE WM FROM THE SUN

the tiny red gas cylinders for the portable stove.  Only the bulky
Levitator units were missing; presumably they had been left outside
to give more room.
     "You were talking to someone when I woke up," Harper said.  "Or
was I dreaming7" Though the indirect light reflected from the walls
of the tent made it hard to read the other's expression, he could see
that Elwin was embarrassed.  Instantly, he knew why, and wished
that he had never asked the question.
     The scientist did not believe that they would survive.  He had
been recording his notes, in case their bodies were ever
discovered.  Harper wondered bleakly if he had already recorded
his last will and testament.
     Before Elwin could answer, he quickly changed the subject.
     "Have you called Lifeguard?"
     "I've been trying every half hour, but I'm afraid were shielded by
the mountains.  I can hear them, but they don't receive us."
     Dr. Elwin picked up the little recorder-transceiver, which he had
unstrapped from its normal place on his wrist, and switched it on.
     'vMs is Lifeguard Four," said a faint mechanical voice, "listening
out now."
     During the five-second pause, Elwin pressed the SOS button,
then waited,
          'M is Lifeguaid Four, listening out now."
     They waited for a full minute, but there was no acknowledgment
of their call.  Well, Harper told himself grimly, it's too late to start
blaming each other now.  Several times while they had been drifting
above the mountains they had debated whether to call the global
rescue service, but had decided against it, partly because there
seemed no point in doing so while they were still air-borne,'partly
because of the unavoidable publicity that would follow.  It was easy
to be wise after the event: who would have dreamed that they would
land in one of the few places beyond Lifeguard's reach?
     Dr. Elwin switched off -the transceiver, and the only sound in the
little tent was the faint moaning of the wind along the mountain
walls within which they were doubly trappedbeyond escape, beyond
communication.
     "Don't worry," he said at last.  "By morning, well think of a way
out.  There's nothing we can do until dawn-except make ourselves
comfortable.  So drink some of this hot soup."

                                            The Cruel Sky 107

     Several hours later, the headache no longer bothered Harper. 
Though he suspected that a rib was indeed cracked, he had found
a position that was comfortable as long as he did not move, and he
felt almost at peace with the world.
     He had passed through successive phases of despair, anger at
Dr. Elwin, and self-recrimination at having become involved in such
a crazy enterprise.  Now he was calm again, though his mind,
searching for ways of escape, was too active to allow sleep.
     Outside the tent, the wind had almost died away, and the night
was very still.  It was no longer completely dark, for the Moon had
risen.  Though its direct rays would never reach them here, there
must be some reflected light from the snows above.  Harper could
just make out a dim glow at the very threshold of vision, seeping
through the translucent heat-retaining walls of the tent.
     First of all, he told himself, they were in no immediate danger. 
Ile food would last for at least a week; there was plenty of snow that
could be melted to provide water.  In a day or two, if his rib
behaved itself, they nuight be able to take off again-this time, he
hoped, with happier results.
     From not far away there came a curious, soft thud, which
puzzled Harper until he realized that a mass of snow must have
fallen somewhere.  The night was now so extraordinarily quiet that
he almost imagined he could hear his own heartbeat; every breath
of his sleeping companion seemed unnaturally loud.
     Curious, how the mind was distracted by trivialitiesl Me turned
his thoughts back to the problem of survival.  Even if he was not fit
enough to move, the Doctor could attempt the flight by himself. 
This was a case.where one man would have just as good a chance
of success as two.
     There was another of those soft thuds, slightly louder this time. 
It was a little odd, Harper thought fleetingly, for snow to move in the
cold stillness of the night.  He hoped that there was no risk of a
slide; having had no time for a clear view of their landing place, he
could not assess the danger.  He wondered if he should awaken the
Doctor, who must have had a good look around before he erected
the tent, Then, fatalistically, he decided against it; if there was an
impending avalanche, it was not likely that they could do much to
escape.
     Back to problem number one.  Here was an interesting solution
well worth considering.  They could attach the trans-108 THE V9" FROM THE SUN

ceiver to one of the Levvies and send the whole thing aloft The
signal would be picked up as soon as the unit left the canyon, and
Lifeguard would find them within a few hoursor, at the very most, a
few days.
     Of course, it would mean sacrificing one of the Levvies, and if
nothing came of it, they would be in an even worse plight.  But all
the same ...
     What was that? This was no soft thudding of loose snow.  It was
a faint but unmistakable "click," as of one pebble knocking against
another.  And pebbles did not move themselves.
     You're imagining things, Harper told himself.  '17he idea of
anyone, or anything, moving around one of the high Himalayan
passes in the middle of the night was completely ridiculous.  But his
throat became suddenly dry, and he felt the flesh crawl at the back
of his neck.  He had heard something, and it was impossible to
argue it away.
     Damn the Doctor's breathing; it was so noisy that it was hard to
focus on any sounds from outside.  Did this mean that Dr. Elwin,
fast asleep though he was, had also been alerted by his ever-
watchful subconscious? He was being fanciful
again. . . .
     Click.
     Perhaps it was a little closer.  It certainly came from a different
direction.  It was almost as if something-moving with uncanny but
not complete silence-was slowly circling the tent.
     This was the moment when George Harper devoutly wished he
had never heard of the Abominable Snowman.  It was true that he
knew little enough about it, but that little was far too much.
     He remembered that the Yeti, as the Nepalese called it, had
been a persistent Himalayan myth for more than a hundred years. 
A dangerous monster larger than a man, it had never been
captured, photographed, or even described by reputable witnesses. 
Most Westerners were quite certain that it was pure fantasy, and
were totally unconvinced by the scanty evidence of tracks in the
snow, or patches of skin preserved in obscure monasteries.  The
mountain tribesmen knew better.  And now Harper was afraid that
they were right.
     Then, when nothing more happened for long seconds, his fears
began slowly to dissolve.  Perhaps his overwrought imagination had
been playing tricks; in the circumstances, that would hardly be
surprising.  With a deliberate and determined,

                                            The Cruel Sky 109

     effort of will, he turned his thoughts once more toward the
problem of rescue.  He was making fair progress when something
bumped into the tent.
     Only the fact that his throat muscles were paralyzed from sheer
fright prevented him from yelling.  He was utterly unab to move. 
Then, in the darkness beside him, he heard Dr. Elwin begin to stir
deeply.
     "What is it?" muttered the scientist.  "Are you all right?' Harper
felt his companion turn over and knew that he was groping for the
flashlight.  He wanted to whisper: "For God's sake, keep quiet!" but
no words could escape his parched lips.  There was a click, and the
beam of the flashlight formed a brilliant circle on the wall of the
tent.
     That ' wall was now bowed in toward them as if a heavy weight
was resting upon it.  And in the center of the bulge was a
completely unmistakable pattern: the imprint of a distorted hand or
claw.  It was only about two feet from the ground; whatever was
outside seemed to be kneeling, as it fumbled at the fabric of the
tent.
     The light must have disturbed it, for the imprint abruptly
vanished, and the tent wall sprang flat once more.  There was a low,
snarling growl; then, for a long time, silence.
     Harper found that he was breathing again.  At any moment he
had expected the tent to tear open, and some unimaginable horror
to come rushing in upon them.  Instead, almost anticlimactically,
there was only a faint and far-off wailing from a transient gust of
wind in the mountains high above.  He felt himself shivering
uncontrollably; it had nothing to do with the temperature, for it was
comfortably warm in their little insulated world.
     Then there came a familiar-indeed, almost friendlysound.  It was
the metallic ring of an empty can striking on stone, and it somehow
relaxed the tension a little.  For the first time, Harper found himself
able to speak, or at least to whisper.
     "It's found our food containers.  Perhaps it'll go away now.'
Almost as if in reply, there was a low snarl that seemed to convey
anger -and disappointment, then the sound of a blow, and the
clatter of cans rolling away into the darkness.  Harper suddenly
remembered that all the food was here in the tent; only the
discarded empties were outside.  That was not a cheerful thought. 
He wished that, like superstitious tribesmen, they had left an
offering for whatever gods or demons the mountains could conjure
forth.

110 THEVIMFROMTHESUN

     What happened next was so sudden, so utterly unexpected, that
it was all over before he had time to react.  There was a scuffling
sound, as of something being banged against rock; then a familiar
electric whine; then a startled grunt.
     And then, a heart-stopping scream of rage and frustration that
turned swiftly to sheer terror and began to dwindle away at ever-
increasing speed, up, up, into the empty sky.
     The fading sound triggered the one appropriate memory in
Harper's mind.  Once he had seen an early-twentieth-cefitury movie
on the history of flight, and it had contained a ghastly sequence
showing a dirigible launching.  Some of the ground crew had hung
on to the mooring lines just a few seconds too long, and the airship
had dragged them up into the sky, dangling helplessly beneath it. 
Then, one by one, they had lost their hold and dropped back to the
earth.
     Harper waited for a distant thud, but it never came.  Then he
realized that the Doctor was saying, over and over again: 'I left the
two units tied together.  I left the two units tied together."
     He was still in too much of a state of shock for even that
information to worry him.  Instead, all he felt was a detached and
admirably scientific sense of disappointment.
     Now he would never know what it was that had been prowling
around their tent, in the lonely hours before the Himalayan dawn.

     One of the mountain rescue helicopters, flown by a skeptical
Sikh who still wondered if the whole thing was an elaborate joke,
came nosing down the canyon in the late afternoon.  By the time the
machine had landed in a flurry of snow, Dr. Elwin was already
waving frantically with one arm and supporting himself on the tent
framework with the other.
     As he recognized the crippled scientist, the helicopter pilot felt
a sensation of almost superstitious awe.  So the report must be
true; there was no other way in which Elwin could possibly have
reached this place.  And that meant that everything flying in and
above the skies of Earth was, from this moment, as obsolete as an
ox-cart.
     "Thank God you found us," said the Doctor, with heartfelt
gratitude.  "How did you get here so quickly?"
     "You can thank the radar tracking networks, and the telescopes
in the orbital met stations.  We'd have been here, earlier, but at first
we thought it was all a hoax."
     "I don't understand."

                                            The Cruel Sky 1 1 1

     "What would you have said, Doctor. if someone reported a 'Very
dead Himalayan snow leopard mixed up in a tangle of straps and
boxes-and holding constant altitude at ninety thousand,feetT'
     Inside the tent, George Harper started to laugh, despite the pain
it caused.  The Doctor put his head through the flap and asked
anxiously: "What's the matter?"
     "Nothing--ouch.  But I was wondering how we are going to get
the poor beast down, before it's a menace to navigation."
     "Oh, someone will have to go up with another Levvy and press
the buttons.  Maybe we should have a radio control on all units...."
     Dr. Elwin's voice faded out in mid-sentence.  Already he was far
away, lost in dreams that would change the face of many worlds.
     In a little while he would come down from the mountains, a later
Moses bearing the laws of a new civilization.  For he would give
back to all mankind the freedom lost so long ago, when the first
amphibians left their weightless home beneath the waves.
     The biflion-year battle against the force of gravity was over.

                                             November 1966

Neutron Tide




"In deference to the next of kin," Commander Cummerbund
explained with morbid relish,- "the full story of the supercruiser
Flatbush's last mission has never been revealed.  You know, of
course, that she was lost during the war against the Mucoids."
     We all shuddered.  Even now, the very name of the gelatinous
monsters who had come slurping Earthward from the general
direction of the Coal Sack aroused vomitive memories.
     "I knew her skipper well-Captain Karl van Rinderpest, hero of the
final assault on the unspeakable, but not unshriekable, IlYeetch."

     He paused politely to let us unplug our ears and mop up our
spilled drinks.

     "Flatbush had just launched a salvo of probability inverters
against the Mucoid home planet and was heading back toward deep
space in formation with three destroyers-the Russian Viutenant
Kizhe, the Israeli Chutzpah, and Her Majesty's Insugerable.  They
were still accelerating when a fantastically unlikely accident
occurred.  Flatbush ran straight into the gravity well of a neutron
star."
     When our expressions of horror and incredulity had subsided,
he continued gravely.
     "Yes-a sphere of ultimately condensed matter, only ten miles
across, yet as massive as a sun-and hence with a surface gravity
one hundred billion times that of Earth.
     "The other ships were lucky.  They only skirted the outer fringe
of the field and managed to escape, though their orbits were
deflected almost a hundred and eighty degrees.  But Flatbush, we
calculated later, must have passed within a few dozen miles of that
unthinkable concentration of mass, and so experienced the full
violence of its tidal forces.
     "Now in any reasonable gravitational field--even that of a White
Dwarf, which may run up to a million Earth g's-you 112

                                            Neutron Tide 113

just swing around the center of attraction and head on out into
space again, without feeling a thing.  At the closest point you could
be accelerating at hundreds or thousands of g's-but you're still in
free fall, so there are no physical effects.  Sorry if I'm laboring the
obvious, but I realize that everyone here isn't technically orientated."
     If this was intended as a crack at Fleet Paymaster General
"Sticky Fingers" Geldclutch, he never noticed, being wen into his
fifth beaker of Martian Joy Juice.
     "For a neutron star, however, this is no longer true.  Near the
center of mass the gravitational gradient-that is, the rate at which
the field changes with distance-is so enormous that even across the
width of a small body like a spaceship there can be a difference of
a hundred thousand g's.  I need hardly tell you what that sort of
field can do to any material object.
     "Flatbush must have been tom to pieces almost instantly, and
the pieces themselves must have Rowed like liquid during the few
seconds they took to swing around the star.  Then the fragments
headed on out into space again.
     "Months later a radar sweep by the Salvage Corps located some
of the debris.  I've seen it-surrealistically shaped lumps of the
toughest metals we possess twisted together like taffy.  And there
was only one item that could even be recognizedit must have come
from some unfortunate engineer's tool kit"
     The Commander's voice dropped almost to inaudibility, and he
dashed away a manly tear.
     "I really hate to say this." He sighed.  "But the only identifiable
fragment of the pride of the United States Space Navy was --- one
star-mangled spanner."

                                                  January 1970

Transit of Earth




Testing, one, two, three, four, five ...
     Evans speaking.  I will continue to record as long as possible. 
This is a two-hour capsule, but I doubt if III fill it.

     That photograph has haunted me all my life; now, too late, I
know why. (But would it have made any difference if I had known?
That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the
mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a
broken tooth.)
     I've not seen it for years, but I've only to close my eyes and rm
back in a landscape almost as hostile-and as beautifulas this one. 
Fifty million miles sunward, and seventy-two years in the past, five
men face the camera amid the antarctic, snows.  Not even the bulky
furs can hide the exhaustion and defeat that mark every line of their
bodies; and their faces are already touched by Death.
     @ There were five of them.  There were five of us, and of course
we also took a group photograph.  But everything else was
different.  We were smiling-cbeerful, confident.  And our picture was
on all the screens of Earth within ten minutes.  It was months before
their camera was found and brought back to civilization.
     And we die in comfort, with all modem conveniences-including
many that Robert Falcon Scott could never have imagined, when he
stood at the South Pole in 1912.

     Two hours later.  I'll start giving exact times when it becomes
important.
     AU the facts are in the log, and by now the whole world knows
them.  So I guess I'm doing this largely to settle my mind-to talk
myself into facing the inevitable.  The trouble is, I'm not sure what
subjects to avoid, and which to tackle head on. Well, there's only
one way to find out.
     The Ant item: in twenty-four hours, at the very most, all 114

                                            Transit of Earth 115

the oxygen will be gone.  That leaves me with the three Classical
choices.  I can let the carbon dioxide build up until I become
unconscious.  I can step outside and crack the suit, leaving Mars to
do the job in about two minutes.  Or I can use one of the tablets in
the med kit.
     C02 build-up.  Everyone says that's quite easy@just like going
to sleep.  I've no doubt that's true; unfortunately, in my case it's
associated with nightmare number one....
     I wish I'd never come across that damn book True Stories of
World War Two, or whatever it was called.  There was one chapter
about a German submarine, found and salvaged after the war.  The
crew was still inside it-two men per bunk.  And between each pair
of skeletons, the single respirator set they'd been sharing....
     Well, at least that won't happen here.  But I know, with a deadly
certainty, that as soon as I find it hard to breathe, 12 be back in that
doomed U-boat.
     So what about the quicker way? When you're exposed to
vacuum, you're unconscious in ten or fifteen seconds, and people
whove been through it say it's not painful-just peculiar.  But trying
to breathe something that isn't there brings me altogether too neatly
to nightmare number two.
     This time, it's a personal experience.  As a kid, I used to do a lot
of skin diving, when my family went to the Caribbean for vacations. 
There was an old freighter that had sunk twenty years before, out
on a reef, with its deck only a couple of yards below the surface. 
Most of the hatches were open, so it was easy to get inside, to look
for souvenirs and hunt the big fish that like to shelter in such
places.
     Of course it was dangerous if you did it without scuba Sear.  So
what boy could resist the challenge?
     My favorite route involved diving into a hatch on the foredeck,
swimming about fifty feet along a passageway dimly lit by portholes
a few yards apart, then angling up a short fight of stairs and
emerging through a door in the battered superstructure.  The whole
trip took less than a minute-an easy dive for anyone in good
condition.  There was even time to do some sight-seeing, or to play
with a few fish along the route.  And sometimes, for a change, I'd
switch directions, going in the door and coming out again through
the hatch.
     That was the way I did it the last time.  I hadn't dived for a week-
there had been a big storm, and the sea was too rough-so I was
impatient to get going.
I deep-breathed on the surface for about two minutes, until

116 THE VAND FROM THE SUN

I felt the tingling in my finger tips that told me it was time to stop. 
Then I jackknifed and slid gently down toward the black rectangle
of the open doorway.
     It always looked ominous and menacing-that was part of the
thrill.  And for the first few yards I was almost completely blind; the
contrast between the tropical glare above water and the gloom
between decks was so great that it took quite a while for my eyes
to adjust.  Usually, I was halfway along the corridor before I could
see anything clearly.  Then the iflumination would steadily increase
as I approached the open hatch, where a shaft of sunlight would
paint a dazzling rectangle on the rusty, barnacled metal floor.
     I'd almost made it When I realized that, this time, the light wasn't
getting better.  There was no slanting column of sunlight ahead of
me, leading up to the world of air and life.
     I had a second of baffled confusion, wondering if I'd lost my
way.  Then I knew what had happened-and confusion turned into
sheer panic.  Sometime during the storm, the hatch must have
slammed shut.  It weighed at least a quarter of a ton.
     I don't remember making a U turn; the next thing I recall is
swimming quite slowly back along the passage and telling myself:
Don't hurry; your air will last longer if you take it easy.  I could see
very well now, because my eyes had had plenty of time to become
dark-adapted.  There were lots of ,details I'd never noticed before,
like the red squirrelfish lurking in the shadows, the green fronds
and algae growing in the little patches of light around the portholes,
and even a single rubber boot, apparently in excellent condition,
lying where someone must have kicked it off.  And once, out of a
side corridor, I noticed a big grouper staring at me with bulbous
eyes, his thick lips half parted, as if he was astonished at my
intrusion.
     The band around my chest was getting tighter and tighter.  It
was impossible to hold my breath any longer.  Yet the stairway still
seemed an infinite distance ahead.  I let some bubbles of air dribble
out of my mouth.  That improved matters for a moment, but, once
I had exhaled, the ache in my lungs became even more
unendurable.
     Now there was no point in conserving strength by Kippering
along. with that steady, unhurried stroke.  I snatched the ultimate
few cubic inches of air from my face mask-feeling it flatten against
my nose as I did so-and swallowed them

                                            Transit of Earth 117

     down into my starving lungs.  At the same time, I shifted gear
and drove forward with every last atom of strength....
     And that's all I remember until I found myself spluttering and
coughing in the daylight, clinging to the broken stub of the mast. 
The water around me was stained with blood, and I wondered why. 
Then, to my great surprise, I noticed a deep gash in my right calf. 
I must have banged into some sharp obstruction, but I'd never
noticed it and even then felt no pain.
     That was the end of my skin diving until I started astronaut
training ten years later and went into the underwater zefo-gee
simulator.  Then it was different, because I was using scuba gear. 
But I had some nasty moments that I was afraid the psychologists
would notice, and I always made sure that I got nowhere near
emptying my tank.  Having nearly suffocated once, I'd no intention
of risking it again....
     I know exactly what it will feel like to breathe the freezing wisp
of near-vacuum that passes for atmosphere on Mars.  No thank you.
     So what's wrong with poison? Nothing, I suppose.  The stuff
we'vegot takes only fifteen seconds, they told us.  But all my
instincts are against it, even when there's no sensible alternative.
     Did Scott have poison with him? I doubt it.  And if he did, rin
sure he never used it.
     I'm not going to replay this.  I hope it's been of some use, but
I can't be sure.

     The radio has just printed out a message from Earth, reminding
me that transit starts in two hours.  As if I'm likely to forget-when
four men have already died so that I can be the first human being
to see it.  And the only one, for exactly -a hundred years.  It isn't
often that Sun, Earth, and Mars line up neatly like this; the last time
was in 1905, when poor old Lowell was still writing his beautiful
nonsense about the canals and the great dying civilization that had
built them.  Too bad it was all delusion.
     I'd better check the telescope and the timing equipment.

     'Me Sun is quiet today-as it should be, anyway, near the middle
of the cycle.  Just a few small spots, and some minor areas of
disturbance around them.  The solar weather is set calm for months
to come.  That's one thing the others won!t have to worry about, on
their way home.

118 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     I think that was the worst moment, watching Olympus lift off
Phobos and head back to Earth.  Even though we'd known for
weeks that nothing could be done, that was the final closing of the
door.
     It was night, and we could see everything perfectly.  Phobos had
come leaping up out of the west a few hours earlier, and was doing
its mad backward rush across the sky, growing from a tiny crescent
to a half-moon; before it reached the zenith it would disappear as
it plunged into the shadow of Mars and became eclipsed.
     We'd been listening to the countdown, of course, trying to go
about our normal work.  It wasn't easy, accepting at last the fact
that fifteen of us had come to Mars and only ten would return.  Even
then, I suppose there were minions back on Earth- who still could
not understand.  Tney must have found it impossible to believe that
Olympus couldn't descend a mere four thousand miles to pick us
up.  The Space Administration had been bombarded with crazy
rescue schemes; heaven knows, we'd thought of enough ourselves. 
But when the permafrost under Landing Pad Three finally gave way
and Pegasus toppled, that was that.  It stiff seems a miracle that the
ship didn't blow up when the propellant tank ruptured....
     I'm wandering again.  Back to Phobos and the countdown.
     On the telescope monitor, we could clearly see the fissured
plateau where Olympus had touched down after we'd separated and
begun our own descent.  Though our friends would never land on
Mars, at least they'd had a little world of their own to explore; even
for a satellite as small as Phobos, it worked out at thirty square
miles per man.  A lot of territory to search for strange minerals and
debris from space-or to carve your name so that future ages would
know that you were the first of all men to come this way.
     The ship was clearly visible as a stubby, bright cylinder against
the dull-gray rocks; from time to time some flat surface would catch
the light of the swiftly moving sun, and would flash with mirror
brilliance.  But about five minutes before lift-off, the picture became
suddenly pink, then crimson-then vanished completely as Phobos
rushed into eclipse.
     The countdown was still at ten seconds when we were -startled
by a blast of light.  For a moment, we wondered if Olympus had
also met with catastrophe.  Then we realized that someone was
filming the take-off, and the external floodlights had been switched
on.
     During those last few seconds, I think we all forgot our

                                            Tramdt of Earth 119

own predicament; we were up there aboard Olympus, willing the
thrust to build up smoothly and lift the ship out of the tiny
gravitational field of Phobos, and then away from Mars for the long
fall sunward.  We heard Commander Richmond say "Ignition," there
was a brief burst of interference, and the patch of light began to
move in the field of the telescope.
     That was all.  There was no blazing column of fire, because-, of
course, there's really no ignition when a nuclear rocket lights up. 
"Lights up" indeed! That's another hangover from the old chemical
technology.  But a hot hydrogen blast is completely invisible; it
seems a pity that we'll never again see anything so spectacular as
a Saturn or a Korolov blast-off.
     Just before the end of the burn, Olympus left the shadow of
Mars and burst out into sunlight again, reappearing almost instantly
as a brilliant, swiftly moving star.  The blaze of light must have
startled them aboard the ship, because we heard someone call out:
"Cover that windowl" Then, a few seconds later, Richmond
announced: "Engine cutoff.' Whatever bap. pened, Olympus was
now irrevocably headed back to Earth.
     A voice I didn't recognize-though it must have been the
Commander's--said "Good-by, Pegasus," and the radio trans.
mission switched off.  There was, of course, no point in saying
'@Good luck." That had all been settled weeks ago.

     I've just played this back.  Talking of luck, theres been one
compensation, though not for us.  With a crew of only tq% Olympus
has been able to dump a third of her expendables and lighten
herself by several tons.  So now she'll get -home a month ahead of
schedule.
     Plenty of things could have gone wrong in that month; we may
yet have saved the expedition.  Of course, well never know-but it's
a nice thought

     I've been playing a lot of music, full blast-now that theres no one
else to be disturbed.  Even if there were any Martians, I don't
suppose this ghost of an atmosphere can carry the sound more
than a few yards.
     We have a fine collection, but I have to choose carefully. 
Nothing downbeat and nothing that demands too much
concentration.  Above all, nothing with human voices.  So I restrict
myself to the lighter orchestral classics; the "New World" symphony
and Grieg's piano concerto fill the bill perfectly.  At the moment I'm
listenmg to Rachmaninoirs

120 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

"Rhapsody on a Theme of -Paganini," but now I must switch off and
get down to work.
     There, are only five minutes to go.  AU the equipment is in
perfect condition.  The telescope is tracking the Sun, the video
recorder is standing by, the precision timer is running.
     These observations will be as accurate as I can make thenL I
owe it to my lost comrades, whom I'll soon be joining.  They gave
me their oxygen, so that I can still be alive at this moment.  I hope
you remember that, a hundred or a thousand years from now,
whenever you crank these figures into the computers....
     Only a minute to go; getting down to business.  For the record:
year 1984; month, May; day, 11, coming up to four hours thirty
minutes Ephemeris Time . . . now.
     Half a minute to contact.  Switching recorder and timer to high
speed.  Just rechecked position angle to make sure I'm looking at
the right spot on the Sun's limb.  Using power of Irve hundred-
image perfectly steady even at this low elevation.
     Four thirty-two.  Any moment now ...
     There it is ... there it isl I can hardly believe itl A tiny black dent
in the edge of the Sun ... growing, growin&

groHweilnlog, -i.-@rth. Look up at me, the brightest star in your sky,
straight overhead at midnight. . . .
     Recorder back to slow.
     Four thirty-five.  It's as if a thumb is pushing into the SWs edge,
deeper and deeper.... Fascinating to watch ...
     Four forty-one.  Exactly halfway.  The Earth's a perfect black
semicircles clean bite out of the Sun.  As if some disease is eating
it away. . .
     Four forty-eight.  Ingress three-quarters complete.
     Four hours forty-nine minutes thirty seconds.  Recorder on high
speed again.
     The line of contact with the Sun's edge is shrinking fast.  Now
it's a barely visible black thread.  In a few seconds, the whole Earth
will be superimposed on the Sun.
     Now I can see the effects of the atmosphere.  There's a thin halo
of light surrounding that black hole in the Sun.  Strange to think that
I'm seeing the glow of all the sunsets-and all the sunrises-that are
taking place around the whole Earth at this very moment....
     Ingress complete-four hours fifty minutes five seconds.  The
whole world has moved onto the face of the Sun.  A

                                            Trawlt of Earth 121

perfectly circular black disc silhouetted against that inferno ninety
million miles below.  It looks bigger than I expected; one could
easily mistake it for a fair-sized sunspot.
     Nothing more to see now for six hours, when the Moon appears,
trailing Earth by half the Sun's width.  I'll beam the recorder data
back to Lunacom, then try to get some sleep.
     My very last sleep.  Wonder if I'll need drugs.  It seems a pity to
waste these last few hours, but I want to conserve my strength-and
my oxygen.
     I think it was Dr. Johnson who said that nothing settles a man's
mind so wonderfully as the knowledge that he'll be hanged in the
morning.  How the hell did he know?

  Ten hours thirty minutes Ephemeris Mune.  Dr. Johnson was
eight.  I had only one pill, and don't remember any dreams.
     The condemned man also ate a hearty breakfast.  Cut that out
...
     Back at the telescope.  Now the Earth's halfway across the disc,
passing well north of center.  In ten minutes, I should see the Moon.
     rve just switched to the highest power of the telescopetwo
thousand.  The image is slightly fuzzy, but still fairly good;
atmospheric halo very distinct.  I'm hoping to see the cities on the
dark side of Earth....
     No luck.  Probably too many clouds.  A pity; it's theoretically
possible, but we never succeeded.  I wish ... never mind.

     Ten hours forty minutes.  Recorder on slow speed.  Hope Im
looking at the right spot.
          Fifteen seconds to go.  Recorder fast.
     Damn-missed it.  Doesn't matter-the recorder will have caught
the exact moment.  'Mere's a little black notch already in the side of
the Sun.  First contact must have been about ten hours forty-one
minutes twenty seconds ET.
     What a long way it is between Earth and Moon; there's half the
width of the Sun between them.  You wouldn't think the two bodies
had anything to do with each other.  Makes you realize just how big
the Sun really is....
     Ten hours forty-four minutes.  The Moon's exactly half-way over
the edge.  A very small, very clear-cut semicircular bite out of the
edge of the Sun.
     Ten hours forty-seven minutes five seconds.  Internal contact. 
The Moon's clear of the edge, entirely inside the Sun.

122 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

Don't suppose I can see anything on the night side, but IT increase
the power.
That's funny.
     Well, well.  Someone must be trying to talk to me; there's a tiny
light pulsing away there on the darkened face of the moon. 
Probably the laser at Imbrium Base.
     Sorry, everyone.  I've said all my good-byes, and don't want to
go through that again.  Nothing can be important now.
     Stiff, iVs almost hypnotic-that flickering point of light, coming out
of the face of the Sun itself.  Hard to believe that, even after it's
traveled all this distance, the beam is only a hundred miles wide. 
Limacom's going to all this trouble to aim it exactly at me, and I
suppose I should feel guilty at ignoring it, But I don't.  I've nearly
finished my work, and the things of Earth are no longer any concern
of mine.
     Ten hours fifty minutes.  Recorder off.1hat's it-until the end of
Earth transit, two hours from now.

     I've had a snack and am taking my last look at the view from the
observation bubble.  The Sun's stiff high, so there's not much
contrast, but the light brings out all the colors vividly-the countless
varieties of red and pink and crimson, so startling against the deep
blue of the sky.  How different from the Moon-though that, too, has
its own beauty.
     It's strange how surprising the obvious can be.  Everyone knew
that Mars was red.  But we didn't really expect the red of rust, the
red of blood.  Like the Painted Desert of Arizona; after a while, the
eye longs forgreen.
     To the north, there is one welcome change of color; the cap of
carbon-dioxide snow on Mount Burroughs is a dazzling white
pyramid.  That's another surprise.  Burroughs is twentyfive
thousand feet above Mean Datum; when I was a boy, there weren't
supposed to be any mountains on Mars....
     The nearest sand dune is a quarter of a mile away, and it, too,
has patches of frost on its shaded slope.  During the last storm, we
thought it moved a few feet, but we couldn't be sure.  Certainly the
dunes are moving, like those on Earth.  One day, I suppose, this
base will be covered--only to reappear again in a thousand years. 
Or ten thousand.
     That strange group of rocks-the Elephant, the Capitol, the
Bishop--still holds its secrets, and teases me with the memory of
our first big disappointment.  We could have sworn that they were
sedimentary; how eagerly we rushed out to look for fou-silsIlEven
now, we don't know what formed that outcrop-Trandt of Earth 123

ping.  The geology of Mars is still a mass of contradictions and
enigmas....
     We have passed on enough problems to the future, and those
who come after us will find many more.  But there's one mystery we
never reported to Earth, or even entered in the log....
     The first night after we landed, we took turns keeping watch. 
Brennan was on duty, and woke me up soon after midnight.  I was
annoyed-it was ahead of time-and then he told me that he'd seen a
light moving around the base of the Capitol.
     We watched for at least an hour, until it was my turn to take
over.  But we saw nothing; whatever that light was, it never
reappeared.
     Now Brennan was as levelheaded and unimaginative as they
come; if he said he saw a light, thenhe saw one.  Maybe it was
some kind of electric discharge, or the reflection of Phobos on a
piece of sand-polished rock.  Anyway, we decided not to mention
it to Lunacom, unless we saw it again.
     Since I've been alone, I've often awakened in the night and
looked out toward the rocks.  In the feeble illumination of Phobos
and Deimos, they remind me of the skyline of a darkened city.  And
it has always remained darkened.  No lights have ever appeared for
me....

     Twelve hours forty-nine minutes Ephemeris Time.  The lastact's
about to begin.  Earth has nearly reached the edge of the Sun.  The
two narrow horns of light that stiff embrace it are barely touching...
          Recorder on fast.
     Contactl Twelve hours fifty minutes sixteen seconds.  The
crescents of light no longer meet.  A tiny black spot has appeared
at the edge of the Sun, as the Earth begins to cross it It's growing
longer, longer....
     Recorder on slow.  Eighteen minutes to wait before Earth finally
clears the face of the Sun.
     71e Moon still has more than halfway to go; it's not yet reached
the mid-point of its transit.  It looks like a little round blob of ink,
only a quarter the size of Earth.  And there's no light flickering there
any more.  Lunacom must have given up.
     Well, I have just a quarter of an hour left, here in my last home. 
Time seems to be accelerating the way it does in the final minutes
before a lift-off.  No matter; I have everything worked out now.  I can
even relax.

124 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     Already, I feel part of history.  I am one with Captain Cook, back
in Tahiti in 1769, watching the transit of Venus.  Except'for that
image of the Moon trailing along behind, it must have looked just
like this....
     What would Cook have thought, over two hundred years ago, if
he'd known that one day a man would observe the whole Earth in
transit from an outer world? I'm sure he would have been
astonished-and then delighted....
     But I feel a closer identity with a man not yet bom.  I hope you
hear these words, whoever you may be.  Perhaps you will be
standing on this very spot, a hundred years from now, when the
next transit occurs.
     Greetings to 2084, November 101 I wish you better luck than we
had.  I suppose you will have come here on a luxury liner.  Or you
may have been born on Mars, and be a stranger to Earth.  You will
know things that I cannot imagine.  Yet somehow I don't envy you. 
I would not even change places with you if I could.
     For you will remember my name, and know that I was the first of
all mankind ever to see a transit of Earth.  And no one will
seeanother for a hundred years.   -     Twelve hours fifty-nine
minutes. ixactly halfway through egress.  The Earth is a perfect
semicircles black shadow on the face of the Sun.  I still can't
escape from the impression that something has taken a big bite out
of that golden disc. la nine minutes it will be gone, and the Sun will
be whole again.
          Thirteen hours seven minutes.  Recorder on fast.
     Earth has almost 'gone.  There's just a shallow black dimple at
the edge of the Sun.  You could easily mistake it for a small spot,
going over the limb.
     Thirteen hours eight.
     Good-by, beautiful Earth.
     Going, going, going, Good-by, good-     I'm O.K. again now. 
     The timings have all been sent home on the beam.  In five
     minutes, they'll join the accumulated wisdom of mankind.  And
     Lunacom will know that I stuck to my post.
     But I'm not sending this.  I'm going to leave it here, for the next
expedition-whenever that may be.  It could be ten or twenty years
before anyone comes here again.  No point in going back to an old
site when there's a whole world waiting to be explored....

                                            Transit of Earth 125

     So this capsule will stay here, as Scott's diary remained in his
tent, until the next visitors find it.  But they won't find me.
     Strange how hard it is to get away from Scott I think he gave me
the idea.
     For his body will not lie frozen forever in the Antarctic, isolated
from the great cycle of life and death.  Long ago, that lonely tent
began its march to the sea.  Within a few years, it was buried by the
falling snow and had become part of the glacier that crawls
eternally away from the Pole.  In a few brief centuries, the sailor will
have returned to the sea.  He will merge once more into the pattern
of living things-the plankton, the seals, the penguins, the whales, all
the multitudinous fauna of the Artarctic Ocean.
     There are no oceans here on Mars, nor have there been for at
least five billion years.  But there is life of some kind, down there in
the badlands of Chaos 11, which we never had time to explore.
     Those moving patches on the orbital photographs.  The
evidence that whole areas of Mars have been swept clear of craters,
by forces other -than erosion.  The long-chain, optically active
carbon molecules picked up by the atmospheric samplers.
I And, of course, the mystery of Viking 6. Even now, no one has
been able to make any sense of those last instrument readings,
before something large and heavy crushed the probe in the stiff,
cold depths of the Martian night. . . .
     And don't talk to me about primitive life forms in a place like
this! Anything that's survived here will be so sophisticated that we
may look as clumsy ns dinosaurs.
     There's still enough propellant in the ship's tanks to drive the
Mars car clear around the planet.  I have three hours of daylightleft-
plenty of time to get down into the valleys and well out into Chaos. 
After sunset, I'll still be able to make good speed with the
headlights.  It will be romantic, driving at night under the moons of
Mars....
     One thing I must fix before I leave.  I don't like the way Sam's
lying out there.  He was always so poised, so graceful.  It doesn't
seem right that he should look so awkward now.  I must do
something about it.
     I wonder if I could have covered three hundred feet without a
suit, walking slowly, steadily-the way he did, to the very end.
     I must try not to look at his face.

126 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     Tbat's it.  Everything shipshape and ready to go.
     The therapy has worked.  I feel perfectly at ease-even contented,
now that I know exactly what I'm going to do.  The old nightmares
have lost their power.
     It is true: we all die alone.  It makes no difference at the end,
being fifty million miles from home.
     rm going to enjoy the drive through that lovely painted
landscape.  I'll be thinking of all those who dreamed about Mars-
Wells and Lowell and Burroughs and Weinbaurn and Bradbury. 
They all guessed wrong-but the reality is just as strange, just as
beautiful, as they imagined.
     I don't know what's waiting for me out there, and IT probably
never see it.  But on this starveling world, it must be desperate for
carbon, phosphorus, oxygen, calcium.  It can use me.
     And when my oxygen alarm gives its final "ping," somewhere
down there in that haunted wilderness, I'm going to finish in style. 
As soon as I have difficulty in breathing, rll get off the Mars car and
start walking-with a playback unit plugged into my helmet and going
full blast.
     For sheer, triumphant power and glory there's nothing in the
whole of music to match the Toccata and Fugue in D. I won't have
time to hear all of it; that doesn*t matter.
Johann Sebastian, here I come.

                                             February 1970

A Meeting with Medusa




1. A DAY TO ]REMEMBER

The Queen Elizabeth was over three miles above the Grand Canyon,
dawdling along at a comfortable hundred and eighty, when Howard
Falcon spotted the camera platform closing in from the right.  He
had been expecting it-nothing else was cleared to By at this
altitude-but he was not too happy to have company.  Although he
welcomed any signs of public interest, he also wanted as much
empty sky as he could get.  After all, he was the first man in history
to navigate a ship three-tenths of a mile long. . . .
     So far, this first test flight had gone perfectly; ironically enough,
the only problem had been the century-old aircraft carrier Chairman
Mao, borrowed from the San Diego Naval Museum for support
operations.  Only one of Mao's four nuclear reactors was still
operating, and the old battlewagon's top speed was barely thirty
knots.  Luckily, wind speed at sea level had been less than half this,
so it had not been too difficult to maintain still air on the flight deck. 
Though there had been a few anxious moments during gusts, when
the mooring fines had been dropped, the great dirigible had risen
smoothly, straight up into the sky, as if on an invisible elevator.  If
all went well, Queen Elizabeth IV would not meet Chairman Mao
again for another week.
     Everything was under control; all test instruments gave normal
readings.  Commander Falcon decided to go upstairs and watch the
rendezvous.  He handed over to his second officer, and walked out
into the transparent tubeway that led through the heart of the ship. 
There, as always, he was overwhelmed by the spectacle of the
largest single space ever enclosed by man.
     The ten spherical gas cells, each more than a hundred feet
across, were ranged one behind the other like a line of Sigimfic
soap bubbles.  Ile tough plastic was so clear that he
                         127

128 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

could see through the whole length of the array, and make out
details of the elevator mechanism, more than a third of a mile from
his vantage point.  All around him, like a three-dimensional maze,
was the structural framework of the ship-the great longitudinal
girders running from nose to tail, the fifteen hoops that were the
circular ribs of this sky-borne colossus, and whose varying sizes
defined its graceful, streamlined profile.
     At this low speed, there was little sound-merely the soft rush of
wind over the envelope and an occasional creak of metal as the
pattern of stresses changed.  The shadowless light from the rows
of lamps far overhead gave the whole scene a curiously submarine
quality, and to Falcon this was enhanced by the spectacle of the
translucent gasbags.  He had once encountered a squadron of large
but harmless jellyfish, pul i their mindless way above a shallow
tropical reef, and, the plastic bubbles that gave Queen Elizabeth her
lift often reminded him of these-especially when changing pressures
made them crinkle and scatter new patterns of reflected light.
     He walked down the axis of the ship until he came to the
forward elevator, between gas cells one and two.  Riding up to the
Observation Deck, he noticed that it was uncomfortably hot, and
dictated a brief memo to himself on his pocket recorder.  The
Queen obtained almost a quarter of her buoyancy from the
unlimited amounts of waste heat produced by her fusion power
plant.  On this lightly loaded flight, indeed, only six of the ten gas
cells contained helium; the remaining four were full of air.  Yet she
still carried two hundred tons of water as ballast.  However, running
the cells at high temperatures did produce problems in refrigerating
the access ways; it was obvious that a little more work would have
to be done there.
     A refreshing blast of cooler air hit him in the face when he
stepped out onto the Observation Deck and into the dazzling
sunlight streaming through the plexiglass roof.  Half a dozen
workmen, with an equal number of superchimp assistants, were
busily laying the partly completed dance floor, while others were
installing electric wiring and fixing furniture.  R was a scene of
controlled chaos, and Falcon found it hard to believe that everything
would be ready for the maiden voyage, only four weeks ahead. 
Well, that was not his problem, thank goodness.  He was merely the
Captain, not the Cruise Director.

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 129

     The human workers waved to him, and the "simps" flashed
toothy smiles, as he walked through the confusion, into the already
completed Skylounge.  This was his favorite place in the whole
ship, and he knew that once she was operating he would never
again have it all to himself.  He would allow himself just five
minutes of private enjoyment.
     He called the bridge, checked that everything was still in order,
and relaxed into one of the comfortable swivel chairs.  Below, in a
curve that delighted the eye, was the unbroken silver sweep of the
ship's envelope.  He was perched at the highest point, surveying
the whole immensity of the largest vehicle ever built.  And when he
had tired of that-all the way out to the horizon was the fantastic
wilderness carved by the Colorado River in half a billion years of
time.
     Apart from the camera platform (it had now fallen back and was
filming from amidships) he had the sky to himself.  It was blue and
empty, clear down to the horizon.  In his grandfather's day, Falcon
knew, it would have been streaked with vapor trails and stained with
smoke.  Both had gone: the aerial garbage had vanished with the
primitive technologies that spawned it, and the long-distance
transportation of this age arced too far beyond the stratosphere for
any sight or sound of it to reach Earth.  Once again, the lower
atmosphere belonged to the birds and the clouds-and now to Queen
Elizabeth V.
     It was true, as the old pioneers had said at the beginning of the
twentieth century: this was the only way to travel-in silence and
luxury, breathing the air around you and not cut off from it, near
enough to the surface to watch the everchanging beauty of land and
sea.' The subsonic jets of the 1980's, packed with hundreds of
passengers seated ten abreast, could not even begin to match such
comfort and spaciousness.
     Of course, the Queen would never be an economic proposition,
and even if her projected sister ships were built, only, a few of the
world's quarter of a billion inhabitants would ever enjoy this silent
gliding through the sky.  But a secure and prosperous global
society could afford such follies and indeed needed them for their
novelty and entertainment.  There were at least a million men on
Earth whose discretionary income exceeded a thousand new dollars
a year, so the Queen would not lack for passengers.
     Falcon's pocket communicator beeped.  The copilot was calling
from the bridge.

130 THE VVIND FROM THE SUN

     "O.K. for rendezvous, Captain? We've got all the data we need
from this run, and the TV people are getting impatient."
     Falcon glanced at the camera platform, now matching his speed
a tenth of a mile away.
     "O.K.," he replied.  "Proceed as arranged.  I'll watch from here."
     He walked back through the busy chaos of the Observation
Deck so that he could have a better view amidships.  As he did so,
he could feel the change of vibration underfoot; by the time he had
reached the rear of the lounge, the ship had come to rest.  Using
his master key, he lethimself out onto the small external platform
flaring from the end of the deck; half a dozen people could stand
here, with only low guardrails separating them from the vast sweep
of the envelope-ind from the ground, thousands of feet below.  It
was an exciting place to be, and perfectly safe even when the ship
was traveling at speed, for it was in the dead air behind the huge
dorsal blister of the Observation Deck.  Nevertheless, it was not
intended that the passengers would have access to it, the view was
a little too vertiginous.
     The covers of the forward cargo hatch had already opened like
giant trap doors, and the camera platform was hovering above
them, preparing to descend.  Along this route, mi the years to come,
would travel thousands of passengers and tons of supplies.  Only
on rare occasions would the Queen drop down to sea level and
dock with her floating base.
     A sudden gust of cross wind slapped Falcon's check,. and he
tightened his grip on the guardrail.  The Grand Canyon was a bad
place for turbulence, though he did not expect much at this altitude. 
Without any real anxiety, he focused his attention on the
descending platform, now about a hundred and fifty feet above the
ship.  He knew, that the highly skilled operator who was flying the
remotely controlled vehicle had performed this simple maneuver a
dozen times already; it was inconceivable that he would have any
difficulties.
     Yet he seemed to be reacting rather sluggishly.  That last gust
had drifted the platform almost to the edge of the open hatchway. 
Surely the pilot could have corrected before this. . . . Did he have
a control problem? It was very unlikely; these remotes had multiple-
redundancy, fail-safe takeovers, and any number of backup
systems.  Accidents were almost unheard of.
     But there he went again, off to the left.  Could the pilot be
dnmk? Improbable though that seemed, Falcon considered it

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 131

seriously for a moment.  Then he reached for his microphone
switch. ,
     Once again, without warning, he was slapped violently in the
face.  He hardly felt it, for he was staring in horror at the camera
platform.  The distant operator was fighting for control, trying to
balance the craft on its jets-but he was only making matters worse. 
The oscillations increased-twenty degrees, forty, sixty, ninety....
     "Switch to automatic, you fooll" Falcon shouted uselessly into
his microphone.  "Your manual control's not working!"
     The platform flipped over on its back.  The jets no longer
supported it, but drove it swiftly downward.  They had suddenly
become allies of the gravity they had fought until this moment.
     @Falcon never heard the crash, though he felt it; he was already
inside the Observation Deck, racing for the elevator that would take
him down to the bridge.  Workmen shouted at him anxiously, asking
what had happened.  It would be many months before he knew the
answer to that question.
     Just as he was stepping into the elevator cage, he changed his
mind.  What if there was a power failure? Better be on the safe side,
even if it took longer and time was the essence.  He began to run
down the spiral stairway enclosing the shaft.
     Halfway down he paused for a second -to inspect the damage. 
That damned platform had gone clear through the ship, rupturing
two of the gas @ells as it did so.  They were still collapsing slowly,
in great falling veils of plastic.  He was not worried about the loss
of lift-the ballast could easily take care of that, as long as eight cells
remained intact.  Far more serious was the possibility of structural
damage.  Already he could hear the great latticework around him
groaning and protesting under its abnormal loads.  It was not
enough to have sufficient lift; unless it was properly distributed, the
ship would break her back.
     He was just resuming his descent when a superchimp, shrieking
with fright, came racing down the elevator shaft, moving with
incredible speed, hand over hand, along the outside of the
latticework.  In its terror, the poor beast had torn off its company
uniform, perhaps- in an unconscious attempt to regain the freedom
of its ancestors.
     Falcon, still descending as swiftly as he could, watched its
approach with some alarm.  A distraught simp was a powerful and
potentially dangerous animal, especially if fear over-came its
conditioning.  As it overtook him, it started to call out a

132 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only
one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated 'boss."
Even now, Falcon realized, it looked toward humans for guidance. 
He felt sorry for the creature, involved in a man-made disaster
beyond its comprehension, and for which it bore no responsibility.
     It stopped opposite him, on the other side of the lattice; there
was nothing to prevent it from coming through the open framework
if it wished.  Now its face was only inches from his, and he was
looking straight into the terrified eyes.  Never before had he been
so close to a simp, and able to study its features in such detail.  He
felt that strange mingling of kinship and discomfort that all men
experience when they gaze thus into the mirror of time.
     His presence seemed to have calmed the creature.  Falcon
pointed up the shaft, back toward the Observation Deck, and said
very clearly and precisely: "Boss-boss-go." To hit relief, the simp
understood; itgave him a grimace that might have been a smile, and
at once started to race back the way, it had come.  Falcon had given
it the best advice he could.  If any safety remained aboard the
Queen, it was in that direction.  But his duty lay in the other.
     He had almost completed his descent when, with a sound of
rending metal, the vessel pitched nose down, and the lights went
out.  But he could still see quite well, for a shaft of sunlight
streamed through the open hatch and the huge tear in the envelope. 
Many years ago he had stood in a great ,cathedral nave watching
the light pouring through the stained-glass windows and forming
pools of multicolored radiance on the ancient flagstones.  The
dazzling shaft of sunlight through the ruined fabric high above
reminded him of that moment.  He was in a cathedral of metal,
falling down the sky.
     When he reached the bridge, and was able for the first time to
look outside, he was horrified to see how close the ship was to the
ground.  Only three thousand feet below were the beautiful and
deadly pinnacles of rock and the red rivers of mud that were still
carving their way down into the past.  There was no level area
anywhere in sight where a ship as large as the Queen could come
to rest on an even keel.
     A glance at the display board told him that all the ballast had -
gone.  However, rate of descent had been reduced to a few yards
a second; they still had a fighting chance.
     Without a word, Falcon eased himself into the pilot's seat

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 133

and took over such control as still remained.  The instrument board
showed him everything he wished to know; speech was
superfluous.  In the background, he could hear the Communications
Officer giving a running report over the radio.  By this time, all the
news channels of Earth would have been preempted, and he could
imagine the utter frustration of the program controllers.  One of the
most spectacular wrecks in history was occurring-without a single
camera to record it.  The last moments of the Queen would never fill
millions with awe and terror, as had those of the Hindenburg, a
century a4d a half before.
     Now the ground was only about seventeen hundred feet -away,
still coming up slowly.  Though he had full thrust, he had not dared
to use it, lest the weakened structure collapse; but now he realized
that he had no choice.  The wind was taking them toward a fork in
the canyon, where the river was split by a wedge of rock like the
prow of some gigantic@ fossilized ship of stone.  If she continued
on her present course, the Queen would straddle that triangular
plateau and come to rest with at least a third of her length jutting
out over nodLinpess; she would snap like a rotten stick.
     Far away, above the sound of straining metal and escaping gas,
came the familiar whistle of the jets as Falcon opened up the lateral
thrusters.  The ship staggered, and began to slew to port.  The
shriek of tearing metal was now almost continuous--and the rate of
descent had started to increase ominously.  A glance at the
damage-control board showed that cell number five had just gone.
     The ground was only yards away.  Even now, he could not tell
whether his maneuver would succeed or fail.  He switched the
thrust vectors over to vertical, giving maximum lift to reduce the
force of impact.
     The crash seemed to last forever.  It was not violentmerely
prolonged, and irresistible.  It seemed that the whole universe was
falling about them.
     The sound of crunching metal came nearer, as if some great
beast were eating its way through the dying ship.
     Then floor and ceiling closed upon him like a vise.

2.   "BECAUSE IT'S THERE"

     "Why do you want to go to JupiterTI
     "As Springer said when he lifted for Pluto-because it's

there.9

134 THE Va" FROM THE SLIN

     "Thanks.  Now we've got that out of the way-the real reason."
     Howard Falcon smiled, though only those who knew him well
could have interpreted the slight, leathery grimace.  Webster was
one of them; for more than twenty years they had shared triumphs
and disasters-including the greatest disaster of all.
     "Well, Springer's clich6 is still valid.  We've landed on an the
terrestrial planets, but none of the gas giants.  They are the only
real challenge left in the solar system."
          "An expensive one.  Have you worked out the cost?"
     "As well as I can; here are the estimates.  Remember, though-
this isn't a one-shot mission, but a transportation system.  Once
it's proved out, it can be used over and over again.  And it will
open up not merely Juipter, but all thegiants."
          Webster looked at the figures, and whistled.
     "Why not start with an easier planet-Uranus, for example? Half
the gravity, and less than half the escape velocity.  Quieter weather,
too-if that's the right word for it."
     Webster had certainly done his homework.  But that, of course,
was why he was head of Long-Range Planning.
     "There's very little saving-when you allow for the extra distance
and the logistics problems.  For Jupiter, we can use the facilities of
Ganymede.  Beyond Saturn, we'd have to establish a new supply
base."
     Logical, thought Webster; but he was sure that it was not the
important reason.  Jupiter was lord of the solar system; Falcon
would be interested in no lesser challenge.
     "Besides," Falcon continued, "Jupiter is a major scientific
scandal.  It's more than a hundred years since its radio storms were
discovered, but we i still don't know what causes them--and the
Great Red Spot is as big a mystery as ever.  'Mat's why I can get
matching funds from the Bureau of Astronautics.  Do you know how
many probes they have dropped into that atmosphere?"
          "A couple of hundred, I believe."
     "Three hundred and twenty-six, over the last fifty yearsabout a
quarter of them total failures.  Of course, they've learned a hell of
a lot, but they've barely scratched the planet.  Do you realize how
big it is?"
"More than ten times the size of Earth."
"Yes, yes-but do you know what that really means?"

                                       A Meeting with Medusa
                                        135

     Falcon pointed to the large globe in the comer of Webstees
office.
     "Look at rndia-how small it seems.  Well, if you skinned Earh and
spread it out on the surface of Jupiter, it would look about as big as
India does here."
     There was a long silence while Webster contemplated the
equation: Jupiter is to Earth as Earth is to India.  Falcon had-
deliberately, of course-chosen the best possible example....
     Was it already ten years ago? Yes, it must have been.  The crash
lay seven years in the past (that date was engraved on his heart).,
and those initial tests had taken place th ' ree years before the first
and last flight of the Queen Elizabeth.
     Ten years ago, then, Commander (no, Lieutenant) Falcon had
invited him to a preview-a three-day drift across the northern plains
of India, within sight of the Himalayas.  "Perfectly ode," he had
promised.  "It will get you away from the office-and will teach you
what this whole thing is about.' Webster had not been disappointed. 
Next to his first journey to the Moon, it had been the mosf
memorable experience of his life. -And yet, as Falcon had assured
him, it had been perfectly safe, and quite uneventful.
     lbey had taken off from Srinagar just before dawn, with the huge
silver bubble of the balloon already catching the first light of the
Sun.  The ascent had been made in total silence; -there were none
of the roaring propane burners that had lifted the hot-air balloons
of an earlier age.  AD the beat they needed came from the little
pulsed-fusion reactor, weighing only about two hundred and twenty
pounds, hanging in the open mouth of the envelope.  While they
were climbing, its laser was zapping ten times a second, igniting the
merest whiff of deuterium fuel.  Once they had reached altitude, it
would fire only a few times a minute, making up for the heat lost
through the great gasbag overhead.
     And so, even while they were almost a mile above the ground,
they could hear dogs barking, people shouting, bells ringing. 
Slowly the vast, Sun-smitten landscape expanded around them. 
Two hours later, they had leveled out at three miles and were taking
frequent draughts of oxygen.  They could relax and admire the
scenery; the on-board instrumentation was doing all the work-
gathering the information that would be required by the designers
of the still-unnamed liner of the skies.
It was a perfect day.  The southwest monsoon would not

136 THE VaND FROM THE SUN

break for another month, and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. 
Time seemed to have come to a stop; they resented the hourly radio
reports which interrupted their reverie.  And an around, to the
horizon and far beyond, was that infinite. ancient landscape,
drenched with history-a patchwork of villages, fields, temples, lakes,
irrigation canals....
     With a real effort, Webster broke the hypnotic spell of that ten-
year-old memory.  It had converted him to lighter-than-air flight-and
it had made him realize the enormous size of India, even in a world
that could be circled within ninety minutes.  And yet, he repeated to
himself, Jupiter is to Earth as Earth is to India....
     "Granted your argument," he said, "and supposing the funds are
available, there's another question you have, to answer.  Why
should you do better than the-what is it-three hundred and twenty-
six robot probes that have already made the trip?"
     "I am better qualified than they were-as an observer, and as a
pilot.  Especially as a pilot.  Don't forget-I've more experience of
lighter-than-air flight than anyone in the world."
     "You could still serve as controller, and sit safely on Ganymede."
     "But thaes just the point! They've already done that Don!t you
remember what killed the Queen?"

     Webster knew perfectly Well; but he merely answered: "Go on."

     "Time lag-time lagi That idiot of a platform controller thought he
was using a local radio circuit.  But he'd been accidentally switched
through a satellite-oh, maybe it wasn't his fault, but he should have
noticed.  That's a half-second time lag for the round trip.  Even then
it wouldn't have mattered flying in calm air.  It was the turbulence
over the Grand Canyon that did it.  When the platform tipped, and
he corrected for that-it had already tipped the other way.  Ever tried
to drive a car over a bumpy road with a half-second delay in the,
steering?"
     "No, and I don't intend to try.  But I can imagine it.99 'Well,
Ganymede is a million kilometers from Jupiter.  That means a
round-trip delay of six seconds.  No, you need a controller on the
spot-to handle emergencies in real time.  Let me show you
something- Mind if I use thisT' "Go ahead."
     Falcon picked up a postcard that was lying on Webster's desk;
they were almost obsolete on Earth, but this one showed

                                  A Meeting with Medum 137

a 3-D view of a Martian landscape, and was decorated with exotic
and expensive stamps.  He held it so that it dangled vertically.
     "Ms is an old trick, but helps to make my point.  Place your
thumb and finger on either side, not quite touching.  That's right."
     Webster put out his hand, almost but not quite gripping the card.
          "Now catch it."
     Falcon waited for a few seconds; then, without warning, he let
go of the card.  Webster's thumb and finger closed on empty air.
     "I'll @ do it again, just to show there's no deception.  You see?"
     Once again, the falling card had slipped through Webster's
fingers.
     "Now you try it on me.'
     This time, Webster 'grasped the card and dropped it without
warning.  It had scarcely moved before Falcon had caught iL
Webster almost imagined he could bear a click, so swift was the
other's reaction.
     "When they put me together agai i n," Falcon remarked in an
expressionless voice, "the surgeons made some improvements. 
This is one of them-and there are others.  I want to make the most
of them.  Jupiter is the place where I can do it."
     Webster stared for long seconds at the fallen card, absorbing
the improbable colors of the Trivium Charontis Escarpment.  Then
he said quietly: "I understand.  How long do you think it will take?"
     "With your help, plus the Bureau, plus all the science foundation
we can drag in---oh, three years.  Then a year for trials-we'll have to
send in at least two test models.  So, with luck-five years."
     "That's about what I thought.  I hope you get your luck; you've
earned it.  But there's one thing I won't do."
     "What's thatT'
     "Next time you go ballooning, don't expect me as passenger."


3. THE woRLD or Tm ooDs

     The fall from Jupiter V to Jupiter itself takes only three and a
half hours.  Few men could have slept on so awesome a

138 THE VA" FROM THE SUN

journey.  Sleep was a weakness that Howard Falcon hated, and the
little he still required brought dreams that time had not yet been
able to exorcise.  But he could expect no rest in the three days that
lay ahead, and must seize what he could during the long fall down
into that ocean, of clouds, some sixty thousand miles below.
     As soon as Kon-Tik! had entered her transfer orbit and all the
computer checks were satisfactory, he prepared for the last sleep
he might ever know.  It seemed appropriate that at almost the same
moment Jupiter eclipsed the bright and tiny Sun as he swept into
the monstrous shadow of the planet.  For a few minutes a strange
golden twilight enveloped the ship; then a quarter of the sky
became an utterly black hole in space, while the rest was a blaze of
stars.  No matter how far one traveled across -the solar system,
they never changed; -the-se same constellations now shone on
Earth, millions of miles away.  The only novelties here were the
small, pale crescents of Callisto and Ganymede; doubtless there
were,a dozen other moons up there in the sky, but they were aff
much too tiny, and too distant, for the unaided eye to pick them out.
     "Closing down for two hours," he reported to the mother ship,
hanging almost a thousand miles above the desolate rocks of
Jupiter V, in the radiation shadow of the tiny satellite.  If it never
served any other useful purpose, Jupiter V was cosmic bulldozer
perpetually sweeping up the charged a (

particles that made it unhealthy to linger close to Jupiter.  Its wake
was almost free of radiation, and there a ship could park in perfect
safety, while death sleeted invisibly all around.
     Falcon switched on the sleep inducer, and consciousness faded
swiftly out as the electric pulses surged gently through his brain. 
While Kon-Tiki fell toward Jupiter, gaining speed second by second
in that enormous gravitational field, he slept without dreams.  They
always came when he awoke; and he had brought his nightmares
with him from Earth.
     Yet he never dreamed of the crash itself, though he often found
himself again face to face with that terrified superchimp, as he
descended the spiral stairway between the collapsing gasbags. 
None of the simps had survived; those that were not killed outright
were so badly injured that they had been painlessly "euthed." He
sometimes wondered why he dreamed only of this doomed
creature-which he had never met before the last minutes of its life-
and not of the friends and colleagues he had lost aboard the dying
Queen.

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 139

     The dreams he feared most always began with his first return to
consciousness.  'Mere had been little physical pain; in fact, there
had been no sensation of any kind.  He was in darkness and
silence, and did not even seem to be breathing.  And-strangest of
all-he could not locate his limbs.  He could move neither his hands
nor his feet, because he did not know where they were.
     The silence had been the first to yield.  After hours, or days, he
had become aware of a faint throbbing, and eventually, after long
thought, he deduced that this was the beating of his own heart. 
That was the first of his many mistakes.
     Then there had been faint pinpricks, sparkles of light, ghosts of
pressures upon still-unresponsive limbs.  One by one his senses
had returned, and pain had come with them.  He had had to learn
everything anew, recapitulating infancy and babyhood.  Though his
memory was unaffected, and he could understand words that were
spoken to him, it was months before he was able to answer except
by the Ricker of an eyelid.  He could remember the moments of
triumph when he had spoken the first word, turned the page of a
book-and, finally, learned to move under his own power.  That was
a victory indeed, and it had taken him almost two yeari to prepare
for it.  A hundred Aimes he had envied that dead superchimp, but
he had been given no choice.  The doctors had made their decision-
and now, twelve years later, he was where no human being had
ever traveled before, and moving faster than any man in history.
     Kon-Tiki was just emerging from shadow, and the Jovian dawn
bridged the sky ahead in a titanic bow of light, when the persistent
buzz of the alarm dragged Falcon up from sleep.  The inevitable
nightmares (he had been trying to summon a nurse, but did not
even have the strength to push the button) swiftly faded from
consciousness.  The greatest-and perhaps last-adventure of his life
was before him.
     He called Mission Control, now almost sixty thousand miles
away and falling swiftly below the curve of Jupiter, to report that
everything was in order.  His velocity had just passed thirty-one
miles a second (that was one for the books) and in half an hour
Kon-Tiki would hit the outer fringes of the atmosphere, as he started
on the most difficult re-entry in the entire solar system.  Although
scores of probes had survived this flaming ordeal, they had been
tough, solidly packedmmes of instrumentation, able to withstand
several hundred

140 THE VMID FROM THE SUN

gravities of drag.  Kon-Tiki would hit peaks of thirty g's, and would
average more than ten, before she came to rest in the upper
reaches of the Jovian atmosphere.  Very carefully and thoroughly,
Falcon began to attach the elaborate system of restraints that would
anchor him to the walls of the cabin.  When he had finished, he was
virtually a part of the ship's structure.
     The clock was counting backward; one hundred- seconds to re-
entry.  For better or worse, he was committed.  In a minute and a
half, he would graze the Jovian atmosphere, and would be caught
irrevocably in the grip of the giant.
     The countdown was three seconds late-not at all bad,
considering the unknowns involved.  From beyond the walls of the
capsule came a ghostly sighing, which rose steadily to a high-
pitched, screaming roar.  The noise was quite different from that of
a re-entry on Earth or Mars; in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen
and helium, all sounds were trans@ formed a couple of octaves
upward.  On Jupiter, even thunder would have falsetto overtones.
     With the rising scream came mounting weight; within seconds
he was completely immobilized.  His field of vision ;Wnt;Z;e@ until
it embraced only the clock and the accelerometer; fifteen g, and
four hundred and eighty seconds to
90....
     He never lost consciousness; but then, he had not expected to.
Kon-Tiki's trail through the Jovian atmosphere must be really
spectacular-by this time, thousands of miles long.  Five hundred
seconds after entry, the drag began to taper off: ten g, five g, two.
... Then weight vanished almost completely.  He was falling free, all
his enormous orbital velocity destroyed.
     @ There was a sudden jolt as the incandescent remnants of the
heat shield were jettisoned.  It had done its work and would not be
needed again; Jupiter could have it now.  He released all but two of
the restraining buckles, and waited for the automatic sequencer to
start the next, and most critical, series of events.
     He did not see the first drogue parachute pop out, but he could
feel the slight jerk, and the rate of fall diminished immediately.  Kon-
Tiki had lost all her horizontal speed and was going straight down
at almost a thousand miles an hour.  Everything depended on what
happened in the next sixty seconds.

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 141

     There went the second drogue.  He looked up through the
overhead window and saw, to his immense relief, that clouds of
glittering foil were billowing out behind the falling ship.  ILike a
great flower unfurling, the thousands of cubic yards of the balloon
spread out across the sky, scooping up the thin gas until it was fully
inflated.  Kon-Tiki's rate of fall dropped to a few miles an hour and
remained constant.  Now there was plenty of time; it would take him
days to fall all the way down to the surface of Jupiter.
     But he would get there eventually, even if he did nothing about
it.  The balloon overhead was merely acting as an efficient
parachute.  It was providing no lift; nor could it do so, while the gas
inside and out was the same.
     With its characteristic and rather disconcerting crack the fusion
reactor started up, pouring torrents of heat into the envelope
overhead.  Within five minutes, the rate of fall had become zero;
within six, the ship had started to rise.  According to the radar
altimeter, it had leveled out at about two hundred and sixty-seven
miles above the surface--or whatever' passed for a surface on
Jupiter.
     Only one kind of balloon will work in an atmosphere of
hydrogen, which is the lightest of all gases-and that is a hot-
hydrogen balloon.  As long as the fuser kept ticking over, Falcon
could remain aloft, drifting across a world that could hold a hundred
Pacifics'.  After traveling over three hundred million miles, Kon-TLki
had at last begun to justify her name.  She was an aerial raft, adrift
upon the currents of the Jovian atmosphere.

     Though a whole new world was lying around him, it'was more
than an hour before Falcon could exan-dne the view.  First he had
to check all the capsule's systems and test its response to the
controls.  He had to learn how much extra heat was necessary to
produce a desired rate of ascent, and how much gas he must vent
in order to descend.  Above all there was the question of stability. 
He must adjust the len;@ of the cables attaching his capsule to the
huge, pear-shaped balloon, to damp out vibrations and get the
smoothest possible ride.  Thus far, he was lucky; at this level, the
wind was steady, and the Doppler reading on the invisible surface
gave him a ground speed of two hundred seventeen and a half
miles an hour.  For Jupiter, that was modest; winds of up to a
thousand had been observed.  But mere speed was, of course,

142 THE VAM FROM THE SUN

unimportant; the real danger was turbulence.  If he ran into that,
only skill and experience and swift reaction could save him-and
these were not matters that could yet be programed into a
computer.
     Not until he was satisfied that he had got the feel of his strange
craft did Falcon pay any attention to Mission Control's pleadings. 
Then he deployed the booms carrying the instnunentation and the
atmospheric samplers.  The capsule now resembled a rather untidy
Christmas tree, but still rode smoothly down the Jovian winds while
it radioed its torrents of information to the recorders on the ship
miles above.  And now, at last, he could look around....
     His first impression was unexpected, and even a little
disappointing.  As far as the scale of things was concerned, he
might have been ballooning over an ordinary cloudscape on Earth. 
'The horizon seemed at a normal distance; there was no feeling at
all that he was on a world eleven times the diameter of his own. 
Then he looked at the infrared radar, sounding the layers of
atmosphere beneath him-and knew how badly his ey es had been
deceived.
     That layer of clouds apparently about three miles away was
really more than thirty-seven miles below.  And the horizon, whose
distance he would have guessed at about one hundred and twenty-
five, was actually eighteen hundred miles from the ship.
     The crystalline clarity of the hydiohelium. atmosphere and the
enormous curvature of the planet had fooled him completely.  It was
even harder to judge distances here than on the Moon; everything
he saw must be multiplied by at least ten.
     It was a simple matter, and he should have been prepared for it. 
Yet somehow, it disturbed him profoundly.  He did not feel that
Jupiter was huge, but that he had shrunk-to a tenth of his normal
size.  Perhaps, with time, he would grow accustomed to the
inhuman scale of this world; yet as he stared toward that
unbelievably distant horizon, he felt as if a wind colder than the
atmosphere around him was blowing through his soul.  Despite all
his arguments, this might never be a place for man.  He could well
be both the first and the last to descend through the clouds of
Jupiter.
     The sky above was almost black, except for a few wisps of
ammonia cirrus perhaps twelve miles overhead.  It was cold up
there, on the fringes of space, but both pressure and temperature
increased rapidly with depth.  At the level where Kon-Tild

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 143

was drifting now, it was fifty below zero, and the pressure was five
atmospheres.  Sixty-five miles farther down, it would be as warm as
equatorial Earth, and the pressure about the same as at the bottom
of one of the shallower seas.  Ideal conditions for life....
     A quarter of the brief Jovian day had already gone; the stm was
halfway up the sky, but the light on the unbroken doudscape below
had a curious mellow quality.  That extra three hundred million
miles had robbed the Sun of all its power.  Though the sky was
clear, Falcon found himself continually thinking that it was a heavily
overcast day.  When night fell, the onset of darkness would be swift
indeed; though it was still morning, there was a sense of autumnal
twilight in the air.  But autumn, of course, was something that never
came to Jupiter.  There were no seasons here.
     Kon-Tiki had come down in the exact center of the equatorial
zone-the least colorful part of the planet.  The 9" of clouds that
stretched out to the horizon was tinted a pale salmon; there were
none of the yellows and pinks and even reds that banded Jupiter at
higher altitudes.  The Great Red Spot itself-most spectacular of all
of the planet's features -lay thousands of miles to the south.  It had
been a temptation to descend there, but the south tropical
disturbance was unusually active, with currents reaching over nine
hundred miles an hour.  It would have been asking for trouble to
head into that maelstrom of unknown forces.  The Great Red Spot
and its mysteries would have to wait for future expeditions.
     The Sun, moving across the sky twice as swiftly as it did on
Earth, was now nearing the zenith and had become eclipsed by the
great silver canopy of the balloon.  Kon-Tiki was still drifting swiftly
and smoothly westward at a steady two hundred and seventeen and
a half, but only the radar gave any indication of this.  Was it always
as calm here? Falcon asked himself.  The scientists who had talked
learnedly of the Jovian doldrums, and bad predicted that the
equator would be the quietest place, seemed to know what they
were talking about, after all.  He had been profoundly skeptical of
all such forecasts, and had agreed with one unusually modest
researcher who had told him bluntly: "There are no experts on
Jupiter." Well, there would be at least one by the end of this day.
     If he managed to survive until then.

144 THE WIND FROM THE SUN


4. nM VOICES OF TM DEEP

     That first day, the Father of the Gods smiled upon him.  It was
as calm and peaceful here on Jupiter as it had been, years ago,
when he was drifting with Webster across the plains of northern
India.  Falcon had time to master his new skiffs, until Kon-Tiki
seemed an extension of his own body.  Such luck was more than he
had dared to hope for, and he began to wonder what price he might
have to pay for it.
     The five hours of daylight were almost over; the clouds -below
were full of shadows, which gave them a massive solidity they had
not possessed when the Sun was higher.  Color was swiftly draining
from the sky, except in the West itself, where a band of deepening
purple lay along the horizon.  Above this band was the thin crescent
of a closer moon, pate and bleached against the utter blackness
beyond.
     With a speed perceptible to the eye, the Sun went straight down
over the edge of Jupiter, over eighteen hundred miles away.  The
stars came out in their legions-and there was the beautiful evening
star of Earth, on the very frontier of twilight, reminding him how far
he was from home.  It followed the Sun down into the west.  Man's
first night on Jupiter had begun.
     With the onset of darkness, Kon-Tiki started to sink. ne balloon
was no longer heated by the feeble sunlight and was losing a small
part of its buoyancy.  Falcon did nothing to increase lift; he had
expected this and was planning to descend.
     The invisible cloud deck was still over thirty miles below, and he
would reach it about midnight.  It showed up clearly on the infrared
radar, which also reported that it contained a vast array of complex
carbon compounds, as well as the usual hydrogen, helium, and
ammonia.  Ile chemists were dying for samples of that fluffy, pinkish
stuff; though some atmospheric probes had already gathered a few
grams, that had only whetted their appetites.  Half the basic
molecules of life were here, floating high above the surface of
Jupiter.  And where there was food, could life be far away? That
was the question that, after more than a hundred years, no one had
been able to answer.
     The infrared was blocked by the clouds, but the microwave radar
sliced right through and showed layer after layer, all the

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 145

way down to the hidden surface almost two hundred and fifty
miles below.  That was barred to him by enormous pressures and
temperatures; not even robot probes had ever reached it intact. 
It lay in tantalizing inaccessibility at the bottom of the radar
screen, slightly fuzzy, and showing a curious granular structure
that his equipment could not resolve.
     An hour after sunset, he dropped his first probe.  It fell swiftly
for about sixty miles, then began to float in the denser
atmosphere, sending back torrents of radio signals, which he
relayed to Mission Control.  Then there was nothing else to do
until sunrise, except to keep an eye on the rate of descent,
monitor the instruments, and answer occasional queries.  While
she was drifting in this steady current, Kon-        i coul after
herself.
     Yust before midnight, a woman controller came on watch and
introduced herself with the usual pleasantries.  Ten minutes later
she called again, her voice at once serious and excited.
          "Howardl Usten in on channel forty-six-high pin."
     Channel forty-six? There were so many telemetering cir. cuits
that he knew the numbers of only those that were critical; but as
soon as he threw the switch, he recognized this one.  He was
plugged in to the microphone on the probe, floating more than
eighty miles below him in an atmosphere now almost as dense as
water.
     At first, there was only a soft hiss of whatever strange winds
stirred down in the darkness of that unimaginable world.  And then,
out of the background noise, there slowly emerged a booming
vibration that grew louder and louder, like the beating of a gigantic
drum.  It was so low that it was felt as much as heard, and the beats
steadily increased their tempo, though the pitch never changed. 
Now it was a swift, almost infrasonic throbbing.  Then, suddenly, in
mid-vibration, it stopped--so abruptly that the mind could not accept
the silence, but memory continued to manufacture a ghostly echo
in the deepest caverns of the brain.
     It was the most extraordinary sound- that Falcon had ever heard,
even among the multitudinous noises of Earth.  He co ' uld think of
no natural phenomenon that could have caused it; nor was it like
the cry of any animal, not even one of the great whales....
     It came again, following exactly the same pattern.  Now that he
wad prepared for it, he estimated the length of the

146 THE WIND FROM nM SUN

sequence; from first faint throb to final crescendo, it lasted just over
ten seconds.
     And this time there was a real echo, very faint and far away. 
Perhaps it came from one of the many reflecting layers, deeper in
this stratified atmosphere; perhaps it was another, more distant
source.  Falcon waited for a second echo, but it never came.
     Mission Control reacted quickly and asked him to drop another
probe at once.  With two microphones operating, it would be
possible to find the approximate location of the sources.  Oddly
enough, none of Kon-Tiki's own external mikes could detect
anything except wind noises.  The boomings, whatever they were,
must have been trapped and channeled beneath an atmospheric
reflecting layer far below.
     They were coming, it was soon discovered, from a cluster of
sources about twelve hundred miles away.  The distance gave no-
indication of their power; in Earth's oceans, quite feeble sounds
could travel equally far.  And as for the obvious assumption that
living creatures were responsible, the Chief Exobiologist quickly
ruled that out.
     "I'll be very disappointed," said Dr. Brenner, "if there are no
microorganisms or plants here.  But nothing like animals, because
' there's no free oxygen.  All biochemical reactions o ' n Jupiter
must be low-energy ones-there's just no way an active creature
could generate enough power to function."
     Falcon wondered if this was true; he had heard the argument
before, and reserved judgment.
     'In any case," continued Brenner, "some of those sound waves
are a hundred yards long! Even an animal as big as a whale
couldn't produce them.  They must have a natural Origin."
     Yes, that seemed, plausible, and probably the physicists would
be able to come up with an explanation.  What would a blind alien
make, Falcon wondered, of the sounds he might hear when
standing beside a stormy sea, or a geyser, or a volcano, or a
waterfall? He might well attribute them to some huge beast.
     About an hour before sunrise the voices of the deep died away,
and Falcon began to busy himself with preparation for the dawn of
his second day.  Kon-TW was now only three miles above the
nearest cloud layer; the external pressure had risen to ten
atmospheres, and the temperature was a tropical thirty degrees.  A
man could be comfortable here with no

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 147

more equipment than a breathing mask and the right grade of heliox
mixture.
     "We've some good news for you,' Mission Control reported,
soon after dawn.  "The cloud layer's breaking up, Youll have partial
clearing in an hour-but watch out for turbulence.91
     "I've already noticed some," Falcon answered.  "How far down
will I be able to see?"
     "At least twelve miles, down to the second thermocline.  That
cloud deck is solid-it never breaks."
     And it's out of my reach, Falcon told himself; the temperature
down there must be over a hundred degrees.  This was the first
time that any balloonist had ever had to worry, not about his ceiling,
but about his basements
     Ten minutes later he could see what Mission Control had
already observed from its superior vantage point.  There was a
,change in color near the horizon, and the cloud layer had become
ragged and humpy, as if something had tom it open.  He turned up
his little nuclear furnace and gave Kon-Tiki another three miles of
altitude, so that he-could get a better view.
     The sky below was clearing rapidly, completely, as if something
was dissolving the solid overcast.  An abyss was opening before
his eyes.  A moment later he sailed out over the edge of a cloud
canyon about twelve miles deep and six hundred miles wide.
     A new world lay spread beneath him; Jupiter had stripped away
one of its many veils.  The second layer of clouds, unattainably far
below, was much darker in color than the first.  It was almost
salmon pink, and curiously mottled with little islands of brick red. 
They were all oval-shaped, with their long axes pointing east-west,
in the direction of the prevailing wind.  There were hundreds of
them, all about the same size, and they reminded Falcon of puffy
little cumulus clouds in the terrestrial sky.
     He reduced buoyancy, and Kon-Tiki began to drop down the
face of the dissolving cliff.  It was then that he noticed the snow.
     White flakes were forming i@ the air and drifting slowly
downward.  Yet it was much too warm for snow-and, in any event,
there was scarcely a trace of water at this altitude.  Moreover, there
was noglitter or sparkle about these flakes as they went cascading
down into the depths.  When, presently, a few landed on an
instrument boom outside the main viewing

148 THE WIND FROM THE SUN
port, he saw that they were a duU, opaque white--not crystalline at
all-and quite large-several inches across.  They looked like wax, and
Falcon guessed that this was precisely what they were.  Some
chemical reaction was taking place in the atmosphere around him,
condensing out the hydrocarbons floating in the Jovian air.
     About sixty miles ahead, a disturbance was taking place in the
cloud layer.  The little red ovals were being jostled around, and
were beginning to form a spiral-the familiar cyclonic pattern so
common in the meteorology of Earth.  The vortex was emerging with
astonishing speed; if that was a storm ahead, Falcon told himself,
he was in big trouble.
     And then his concern changed to wonder-and to fear.  What was
developing in his line of flight was not a storm at O. Something
enormous-something scores of miles across =was rising through
the clouds.
     The reassuring thought that it, too, might be a clouds
thunderhead boiling up from the lower levels of the atmosphere-
lasted only a few seconds.  No; this was solid.  R shouldered its
way through the pink-and-salmon overcast like an iceberg rising
from the deeps.
     An iceberg floating on hydrogen? That was impossible, of
course; but perhaps it was not too remote an analogy.  As soon as
he focused the telescope upon the enigma, Falcon saw that it was
a whitish, crystalline mass, threaded with streaks of red and brown. 
It must be, he decided, the same stuff as the 61 snowflakes" falling
around him-a mountain range of Wax.  And it was not, he soon
realized, as solid as he had thought; around the edges it was
continually crumbling and reforming....
     "I know what it is," he radioed Mission Control, which for the last
few minutes had been asking anxious questions.  "It's a mass of
bubbles--some kind of foam.  Hydrocarbon froth.  Get the chemists
working on ... Just a minutel"
          "What is it?" called Mission Control.  "What is it?"
     He ignored the frantic pleas from space and concentrated all his
mind upon the image in the telescope field.  He had to be sure; if
he made a mistake, he would be the laughingstock of the solar
system.
     Then he relaxed, glanced at the clock, and switched off the
nagging voice from Jupiter V.
     "Hello, Mission Control," he said, very formally.  "This is Howard
Falcon aboard Kon-Tiki.  Ephemeris Time nineteen hours twenty-one
minutes fifteen seconds.  Latitude zero de.
                                  A Meeting with Medusa 149

grees five minutes North.  Longitude one hundred five degrees
forty-two minutes, System One.
     'Tell Dr. Brenner that there is -life on Jupiter.  And ies big...


S. THE WHEELS OF POSEMON

     'I!m very happy to be proved wrong," Dr. Brenner radioed back
cheerfully.  "Nature always.has something up her sleev Keep the
long-focus camera on target and give us steadiest pictures you
can."
     The things moving up and down those waxen slopes were still
too far away for Falcon to make out many details, and they must
have been very.large to be visible at all at such a distance.  Almost
black, and shaped like arrowheads, they maneuvered by slow
undulations of their entire bodies, so that they looked rather like
giant manta rays, swimming above some tropical reef.
     Perhaps they were sky-borne cattle, browsing on the cloud
pastures of Jupiter, for they seemed to be feeding along the dark,
red-brown streaks that ran like dried-u river beds down . p
the flanlre of the floating cliffs.  Occasionally, one of them would
dive headlong into the mountain of foam and disappear completely
from sight.
     Kon-Tiki was moving only slowly with respect to the cloud layer
below; it would be at least three hours before she was above those
ephemeral hills.  She was in a race with the Sun.  Falcon hoped that
darkness would not fall before he could get a good view of the
mantas, as he had christened them, as well as the fragile landscape
over which they flapped their way.
     It was a long three hours.  During the whole time, he kept the
external microphones on full gain, wondering if here was the source
of that booming in the night.  The mantas were certainly large
enough to have produced it; when he could get an@ accurate
measurement, he discovered that they were almost a hundred yards
across the wings.  That was three times the length of the largest
whale-though he doubted if they could weigh more, than a few tons.
     Half an hour before sunset, Kon-Tiki was almost above the
'mountains."
     "No," said Falcon, answering Mission Control's repeated
questions about the mantas, "they're still showing no reaction to
me.  I don't think they're intelligent-they look like harm-150 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

less vegetarians.  And even if they try to chase me, I'm sure they
can't reach my altitude."
     Yet he was a little disappointed when the mantas showed not the
slightest interest in him as he sailed high above their feeding
ground.  Perhaps they had no way of detecting his presence.  When
he examined and photographed them through the telescope, he
could see no signs of any sense organs.  The creatures were simply
huge black deltas, rippling over hills and valleys that, in reality,
were little more substantial than the clouds of Earth.  Though they
looked solid, Falcon knew that anyone who stepped on those white
mountains would go crashing through them as if they were made of
tissue paper. ,
     At close quarters he could see the myriads of cellules -or
bubbles from which they were formed.  Some of these were quite
large-a yard or so in diameter-and Falcon wondered in what
witches' cauldron of hydrocarbons they had been brewed.  There
must be enough petrochemicals deep down in the atmosphere of
Jupiter to supply all Earth's needs for a million years.
     The short day had almost gone when he passed over the crest
of the waxen hills, and the light was fading rapidly along their lower
slopes.  There were no mantas on this western side, and for some
reason the topography was very different.  The foam was sculptured
into long, level terraces, like the interior of a lunar crater.  He could
almost imagine that they were giganic steps leading down to the
hidden surface of the planet.
     And on the lowest of those steps, just clear of the swirling
clouds that the mountain had displaced when it came surging
skyward, was a roughly oval mass, one or two miles across.  It was
difficult to see, since it was only a little darker than the gray-white
foam on which it rested.  Falcon's first thought was that he was
looking at a forest of pallid trees, like giant mushrooms that had
never seen the Sun,
     Yes, it must be a forest-he could see hundreds of thin trunks,
springing from the white waxy froth in which they were rooted.  But
the trees were packed astonishingly close together; there was
scarcely any space between them.  Perhaps it was not a forest, after
all, but a single enormous tree-like one of the giant multi-trunked
banyans of the East.  Once he had seen a banyan tree in Java that
was over six hundred and fifty yards across; this monster was,at
least ten times that size.
     The,light had almost gone.  The cloudscape had turned purple
with refracted sunlight, and in a few seconds that, too,

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 151

would have vanished.  In the last light of his second day on Jupiter,
Howard Falcon saw-or thought he saw-something that cast the
gravest doubts on his interpretation of the white oval.
     Unless the dim light had totally deceived him, those hundreds
of thin trunks were beating back and forth, in perfect synchronism,
like fronds of kelp rocking in the surge.
     And the tree was no longer in the place where he had first seen
it

     'Sorry about this," said Mission Control, soon after sunset, "but
we think Source Beta is going to blow within the next hour. 
Probability seventy per cent."
     Falcon glanced quickly at the chart.  Beta-Jupiter latitude one
hundred and forty degrees-was over eighteen thousand six hundred
miles away and well below his horizon.  Even though major
eruptions ran as high as ten megatons, he was much too far away
for the shock wave to be a serious danger.  The radio storm that it
would trigger was, however, quite a different matter.
     The decameter outbursts that sometimes made Jupiter the most
powerful radio source in the whole sky had been discovered back
in the 1950's, to the utter astonishment of the astronomers.  Now,
more than a century later, their real cause was still a mystery.  Only
the symptoms were understood; the explanation was completely
unknown.
     IMe "volcano" theory had best stood the test of time, although
no one imagined that this word had the same meaning on Jupiter
as on Earth.  At frequent intervals-often several find a day-titanic
eruptions occurred in the lower depths of the atmosphere, probably
on the hidden surface of the planet itself.  A great column of gas,
more than six hundred miles high, would start boiling upward as if
determined to escape into space.
     Against the most powerful gravitational field of all the planets,
it had no chance.  Yet some traces-a mere few million tons-usually
managed to reach the Jovian ionosphere; and when they did, all
hell broke loose.
     , The radiation belts surrounding Jupiter completely dwarf the
feeble Van Allen belts of Earth.  When they are short-circuited by an
ascending column of gas, the result is an electrical discharge
millions of times more powerful than any terrestrial Ruh of lightning;
it sends a colossal thunderclap of

152 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

radio noise flooding across the entire solar system and on out to
the stars.
     It had been discovered that these radio outbursts came from
four main areas of the planet.  Perhaps there were weaknesses
there that allowed the fires of the interior to break out from time to
time.  The scientists on Ganymede, largest of Jupiter's many
moons, now thought that they could -predict the onset of a
decameter storm; their accuracy was about as good as a weather
forecaster's of the early 1900's.
     Falcon did not know whether to welcome or to fear a radio
storm; it would certainly add to the value of the mission-if he
survived it.  His course had been planned to keep as far as possible
from the main centers of disturbance, especially the most active
one, Source Alpha.  As luck would have it, the threatening Beta was
the closest to him.  He hoped that the distance, almost three-fourths
the circumference of Earth, was safe enough.
     "Probability ninety per cent," said Mission Control with a distinct
note of urgency.  "And forget that hour.  Ganymede says it may be
any moment."
     The radio had scarcely fallen silent when the reading on the
magnetic field-strength meter started to shoot upward.  Before it
could go off scale, it reversed and began to drop as rapidly as it
had risen.  Far away and thousands of miles below, something had
given the planet's molten core a titanic jolt.
"There she blowsl" called Mission Control.
"Thanks, I already know.  When will the storm hit mer,
"You can expect onset in five minutes.  Peak in ten."
     Far around the curve of Jupiter, a funnel of gas as wide as the
Pacific Ocean was climbing spaceward at thousands of miles an
hour.  Already, the thunderstorms of the lower atmosphere would
be raging around it-but they were nothing compared with the fury
that would explode when the radiation belt was reached and began
dumping its surplus electrons onto the planet.  Falcon began to
retract all the instrument booms that were extended out from the
capsule.  There were no other precautions he could take.  It would
be four hours before the atmospheric shock wave reached him-but
the radio blast, traveling at the speed of light, would be here in a
tenth of a second, once the discharge had been triggered.
     The radio monitor, scanning back and forth across the spectrum,
still showed nothing unusual, just the normal mush of background
static.  Then Falcon noticed that the noise level

                                  A Meeting with Medum 153

was slowly creeping upward.  Ile explosion was gathering its
strength..
     At such a distance he had never expected to see anything.  But
suddenly a flicker as of far-off heat lightning danced along the
eastern horizon.  Simultaneously, half the circuit breakers jumped
out of the main switchboard, the lights failed, and all
communications channels went dead.
     He tried to move, but was completely unable to do so.  The
paralysis that gripped him was not merely psychological; he
seemed to have lost all control of his limbs and could feel a painful
tingling sensation over his entire body.  It was impossible that the
electric field-could have penetrated this shielded cabin.  Yet there
was a flickering glow over the instrument board, and he could hear
the unmistakable crackle of a brush discharge.
     With a series of sharp bangs, the emergency systems went into
operation, and the overloads reset themselves.  The lights flickered
on again.  And Falcon's paralysis disappeared as swiftly as it had
come.
     After glancing at the board to make sure that all circuits were
back to normal, he moved quickly to the viewing ports.
     There was no need to switch on the inspection lamps-the cables
supporting the capsule seemed to be on fire.  Lines of light glowing
an electric blue against the darkness stretched upward from the
main lift ring to the equator of the gaint balloon; and rolling slowly
along several of them were dazzling balls -of fire.
     The sight was so strange and so beautiful that it was hard to
read any.menace in it.  Few people, Falcon knew, had ever seen
ball lightning from such close quarters-and ce none had survived
if they were riding a hydrogen-filled balloon back in the
atmosphere of Earth.  He remembered the flaming death of the
Hindenburg, destroyed by a stray spark when she docked at
Lakehurst in 1937; as it had done so often in the past, the
horrifying old newsreel film flashed through his mind.  But at
least that could not happen here, though there was more
hydrogen above his head than had ever filled the last of the
Zeppelins.  It would be a few billion years yet, before anyone
could light a fire in the atmosphere of Jupiter.
     With a sound like briskly frying bacon, the speech circuit came
back to life.
     '@Hvllo, Kon-liki-are you receiving? Are you,receiving?'

154 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     Ile words were chopped and badly distorted, but intet. ligible. 
Falcon's spirits lifted; he had resumed contact with the world of
men.
     "I receive you," he said.  "Quite an electrical display, but no
damage--so far."
     '11anks-thought we'd lost you.  Please check telemetry channels
three, seven, twenty-six.  Also gain on camera two.  And we don't
quite believe the readings on the external ionization probes. . . ."
     Reluctantly Falcon tore his gaze away from the fascinating
pyrotechnic display around Kon-Tiki, though from time to time he
kept glancing out of the windows.  The ball lightning disappeared
first, the fiery globes slowly expanding until they reached a critical
size, at which they vanished in a gentle explosion.  But even an
hour later, there were still faint glows around all the exposed metal
on the outside of the capsule; and the radio circuits remained noisy
until well after mid. night.
     'Me remaining hours of darkness were completely uneventful-
until just before dawn.  Because it came from the east, Falcon
assumed that he was seeing the first faint hint of sunrise.  Then he
realized that it was twenty minutes too wly for this-and the glow that
had appeared along the horizon was moving toward him even as he
watched.  It swiftly de. tached itself from the arch of stars that
marked the invisible edge of the planet, and he saw that it was a
relatively narrow band, quite sharply defined.  The beam of an
enormous searchlight appeared to be swinging beneath the clouds.
     Perhaps sixty miles behind the first racing bar of light came
another, parallel to it and moving at the same speed.  And beyond
that another, and another-until all the sky ffickemd with alternating
sheets of light and darkness.
     By this time, Falcon thought, he had been inured to wonders,
and it seemed impossible that this display of pure, soundless
luminosity could present the slightest danger.  But it was so
astonishing, and so inexplicable, that he felt cold, naked fear
gnawing at his self-control.  No man could look upon such a sight
without feeling like a helpless pygmy in the presence of forces
beyond his comprehension.  Was it possible that, after all, Jupiter
carried not only life but also intelligence? And, perhaps, an
intelligence that only now was beginning to react to his alien
presence?
     "Yes, we see it," said Mission Control, in a voice that

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 155

echoed his own awe.  "We've no idea what it is.  Stand by, we're
calling Ganymede."
     The display was slowly fading; the bands racing in from the far
horizon were much fainter, as if the energies that powered them
were becoming exhausted.  In five minutes it was all over; the last
faint pulse of light ffickered along the western sky and then was
gone.  Its passing,left Falcon with an overwhelming sense of relief. 
The sight was so hypnotic, and so disturbing, that it was not good
for any man's peace of mind to contemplate it too long.
     He was more shaken than he cared to adn-dt.  The electrical
storm was something that he could understand; but this was totally
incomprehensible.
     Mission Control was still silent.  He knew that the information
banks up on Ganymede were now being searched as men and
computers turned their minds to@ the problem.  If no answer could
be found there, it would be necessary to call Earth; that would mean
a delay of almost an hour.  The possibility that even Earth might be
unable to help was one that Falcon did not care to contemplate. .
He had never before been so glad to hear the voice of Mission
Control as when Dr. Brenner finally came on the circuit.  The
biologist sounded relieved, yet subdued-like a man who has just
come through some great intellectual crisis.
     "Hello, Kon-Tiki.  We've solved your problem, but we can stiff
hardly believe it.
     "What you've been seeing is bioluminescence, very similar to
that produced by microorganisms in the tropical seas of Earth. 
Here they're in the atmosphere, not the ocean, but the principle is
the same."
     "But the pattern," protested Falcon, "was so regular-so artificiaL
And it was hundreds of miles across!'
     "It was even larger than you imagine; you observed only a small
part of it.  The whole pattern was over three thousand miles wide
and looked like a revolving wheel.  You merely saw the spokes,
sweeping past you at about six-tenths of a mile a second. . . ."
     "A secondl" Falcon could not help interjecting.  "No animals
could move that fast!"
     "Of course not.  Let me explain.  What you saw was triggered by
the shock wave from Source Beta, moving at the speed of sound."
     "But what about the pattern?" Falcon insisted.

156 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

     "Ibat's the surprising part.  It's a very rare phenomenon, but
identical wheels of light-except that they're a thousand times
smaller-have been observed in the Persian Gulf and the Indian
Ocean.  Listen to this: British India Company's Patna, Persian Gulf,
May 1880, 11:30 P.M.-an enormous luminous wheel, whirling round,
the spokes of which appeared to brush the ship along.  The spokes
were 200 or 300 yards long ... each wheel contained about sixteen
spokes. ...' And here's one from the Gulf of Omar, dated May 23,
1906: qbe intensely bright luminescence approached us rapidly,
shooting sharply defined light rays to the west in rapid succession,
like the beam from the searchlight of a warship. . . . To the left of
us, a gigantic fiery wheel formed itself, with spokes that reached as
far as one could see.  The whole wheel whirled around for two or
three minutes. . . .' The archive computer on Ganymede'dug up
about five hundred cases.  It would have printed out the lot if we
hadn't stopped it in time."
          "I'm convinced-but still baffled."
     "I don't blame you.  The full explanation wasn't worked out until
late in the twentieth century.  It seems that these luminous wheels
are the results of submarine earthquakes, and always occur in
shallow watem where the shock waves can be reflected and cause
standing wave patterns.  Sometimes bars, sometimes rotating
wheels-the 'Wheels of Poseidon,' they've been called.  The theory
was finally proved by making underwater explosions and
photographing the results'from a satellite.  No wonder sailors used
to be superstitious.  Who would have believed a thing like this?"
     So that was it, Falcon told himself.  When Source Beta blew its
top, it must have sent shock waves in all directionsthrough the
compressed gas of the lower atmosphere, through the solid body
of Jupiter itself.  Meeting and crisscrossing, those waves must have
canceled here, reinforced there; the whole planet must have rung
like a bell.
     Yet the explanation did not destroy the sense of wonder and
awe; he would never be able to forget those flickering bands of
light, racing through the unattainable depths of the Jovian
atmosphere.  He felt that he was not merely on a strange planet, but
in some magical realm between myth and reality.
     This was a world where absolutely anything could happen., and
no man could possibly guess what the future would bring.
And he still had a whole day to go.

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 157


6. mEDusA

     When the true dawn finally arrived, it brought a sudden change
of weather.  Kon-Tiki was moving through a blizzard; waxen
snowflakes were falling so thickly that visibility was reduced to
zero.  Falcon began to worry about the wel         that might be
accumulating on the envelope.  Then he noticed that any Bakes
settling outside the windows quickly disappeared; Kon-Tiki's
continual outpouring of heat was evaporating them as swiftly as
they arrived.   -     If he had been ballooning on Earth, he would
also have worried about the possibility of collision.  At least that
was no danger here; any Jovian mountains were several hundred
miles below him.  And as for the floating islands of foam, hitting
them would probably be like plowing into slightly hardened
soapbubbles.
I Nevertheless, he switched on the horizontal radar, which until now
had been completely useless; only the vertical beam, giving his
distance from the invisible surface, had thus far been of any value. 
Then he had another surprise.
     Scattered across a huge sector of the sky ahead were dozens
of large and brilliant echoes.  They were completely isolated from
one another and apparently hung unsupported in space.  Falcon
remembered a phrase the earliest aviators had used to describe
one of the hazards of their profession: "clouds stuffed with rocks."
1bat was a perfect description of what seemed to lie in the track of
Kon-Tiki.
     It was a disconcerting sight; then Falcon again reminded himself
that nothing really solid could possibly hover in this atmosphere. 
Perhaps it was some strange meteorological phenomenon.  In any
case, the nearest echo was about a hundred and twenty-five miles.
     He reported to Mission Control, which could provide no
explanation.  But it gave the welcome news that he would be clear
of the blizzard in another thirty minutes.
     It did not wam him, however, of the violent cross wind that
abruptly grabbed Kon-Tiki and swept it almost at right angles to its
previous track.  Falcon needed all his skill and the maximum use of
what little control he had over his ungainly vehicle to prevent it from
being capsized.  Within minutes he was racing northward at over
three hundred miles an hour. lben, as suddenly as it had started,
the turbulence ceased; he was still moving at high speed, but in
smooth air.  He

158 THE WM FROM THE SUN

wondered if he had been caught in the Jovian equivalent of a jet
stream.
     The snow storm dissolved; and he saw what Jupiter had been
preparing for him.
     Kon-Tiki had entered the funnel of a gigantic whirlpools some
six hundred miles across.  The balloon was being swept along a
curving wall of cloud.  Overhead, the sun was shining, in a clear
sky; but far beneath, this great hole in the atmosphere drilled down
to unknown depths until it reached a misty floor where lightning
flickered almost continuously.
     Though the vessel was being dragged downward so slowly that
it was in no immediate danger, Falcon increased the now of heat
into the envelope until Kon-Tiki hovered at a constant altitude.  Not
until then did he abandon the fantastic spectacle outside and
consider again the problem of the radar.
     The nearest echo was now only about twenty-five miles away. 
AD of them, he quickly realized, were distributed along the wall of
the vortex, and were moving with it, apparently caught in the
whirlpool like Kon-Tiki itself.  He aimed, the telescope along the
radar bearing and found himself looking at a curious mottled cloud
that almost filled the field of view.
     It was not easy to see, being only a little darker than the whirling
wall of mist that formed its background.  Not until he had been
staring for several minutes did Falcon realize that he had met it
once before.
     The first time it had been crawling across the drifting mountains
of foam, and he had mistaken it for a giant, many-trunked tree.  Now
at last he could appreciate its real size and complexity and could
give it a better name to fix its image in his mind.  It did not resemble
a tree at all, but a jellyfish-a medusa, such as might be met trailing
its tentacles as it drifted along the warm eddies of the Gulf Stream.
     This medusa was more than a mile across and its scores of
dangling tentacles were hundreds of feet long.  They swayed slowly
back and forth in perfect unison, taking more than a minute for each
complete undulation-almost as if the creature was clumsily rowing
itself through the sky.
     The other echoes were more distant medusae.  Falcon focused
the telescope on half a dozen and could see no variations in shape
or size.  They all seemed to be of the same species, and he
wondered just why they were drifting lazily, around in this six-
hundred-mile orbit.  Perhaps they were feeding upon the aerial
plankton sucked in by the whirlpool, as Kon-Tik! itself had been.

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 159

     "Do you realize, Howard," said Dr. Brenner, when he had
recovered from his initial astonishment, "that this thing is about a
hundred thousand times as large as the biggest whale? And even
if it's only a gasbag, it must still weigh a million tonsl I can't even
guess at its metabolism.  It must generate megawatts of heat to
maintain its buoyancy."
     "But if it's just a gasbag, why is it such a damn good radar
reflector?"
          "I haven't the faintest idea.  Can you get any closer?"
     Brenner's question was not an idle one.  If he changed altitude
to take advantage of the differing wind velocities, Falcon could
approach the medusa as closely as he wished.  At the moment,
however, he preferred his present twenty-five miles and said so,
firmly.
     "I see what you mean," -Brenner answered, a little reluctantly. 
"Let's stay where we are for the present." That "we" gave Falcon a
certain wry amusement; an extra sixty thou. sand miles made a
considerable difference in one's point of view.
     For the next two hours Kon-Tiki drifted uneventfully in the gyre
of the great whirlpool, while Falcon experimented with filters and
camera contrast, trying to get a clear view of the medusa.  He
began to wonder if its elusive coloration was some kind of
camouflage; perhaps, like many animals of Earth, it was trying to
lose itself against its background.  That was a trick used by both
hunters and hunted.
     In which category was the medusa? That was a question he
could hardly expect to have answered in the short time that was left
to him.  Yet just before noon, without the slightest warning, the
answer came....
     Like a squadron of antique jet fighters, five mantas came
sweeping through the wall of mist that formed the funnel of the
vortex.  'Tbey were flying in a V formation directly toward the pallid
gray cloud of the medusa; and there was no doubt, in'Falcon's
mind, that they were'on the attack.  He had been quite wrong to
assume that they were harmless vegetarians.
     Yet everything happened at such a leisurely pace that it was like
watching a slow-motion film.  The mantas undulated along at
perhaps thirty miles an. hour; it seemed ages before they reached
the medusa, which continued to paddle imperturbably along at an
even slower speed.  Huge though they were, the mantas looked tiny
beside the monster they were approaching.  When they flapped
down on its back, they appeared about as large as birds landing on
a whale,

160 THE Va" FROM THE SUN

     Could the medusa defend itself, Falcon wondered.  He did not
see how the attacking mantas could be in danger as long as they
avoided those huge clumsy tentacles.  And perhaps their host was
not even aware of them; they could be insignificant parasites,
tolerated as arefleas upon a dog.
     But now it was obvious that the medusa was in distress.  With
agonizing slowness, it began to tip over like a capsizing ship.  After
ten minutes it had tilted forty-five degrees; it was also rapidly losing
altitude.  It was impossible not to feel a sense of pity for the
beleaguered monster, and to Falcon the sight brought bitter
memories.  In a grotesque way, the fall of the medusa was almost
a parody of the dying Queen's last moments.
     Yet he knew that his sympathies were on the wrong side.  Ifigh
intelligence could develop only among predators-not among the
drifting browsers of either sea or air.  The ma6tas were far closer to
him than was this monstrous bag of gas.  And anyway, who could
really-sympathize with a creature a hundred thousand times larger
than a whale?
     Then he noticed that the medusa's tactics seemed to be having
some effect.  The mantas had been disturbed by its slow roll and
were flapping heavily away from its back--like gorged vultures
interrupted at mealtime.  But they did not move very far, continuing
to hover a few yards from the still-capsizing monster.
     There was a sudden, blinding flash of light synchronized with a
crash of static over the radio.  One of the mantas, slowly twisting
end over end, was plummeting straight downward.  As it fell, a
plume of black smoke trailed behind it.  The resemblance to an
aircraft going down in flames was quite uncanny.
     In unison, the remaining mantas dived steeply away -from the
medusa, gaining speed by losing altitude.  They had, within -
minutes, vanished back into the wall of cloud from which they had
emerged.  And the medusa, no longer falling, began to roll back
toward the horizontal.  Soon it was sailing along once more on an
even keel, as if nothing had happened.
     "Beautiful!" said Dr. Brenner, after a moment of stunned silence. 
"It's developed electric defenses, like some of our eels and rays. 
But that must have been about a million volts! Can you see any
organs that might produce the discharge? Any. thing looking like
electrodes?"
     "No," Falcon answered, after switching to the highest power of
the telescope.  "But here's something odd.  Do you

                                  A Meeting with Medum 161

see this pattern? Check back on the earlier 4nages.  I'm sure it
wasn't there before.'
     A broad, mottled band had appeared along the side of the
medusa.  It formed a startlingly regular checkerboard, each square
of which was itself speckled in a complex subpattern. of short
horizontal lines.  They were spaced at equal distances in a
geometrically perfect array of rows and columns.
     "You're right," said Dr. Brenner, with something very much like
awe in his voice.  "That's just appeared.  And I'm afraid to tell you
what I think it is."
     ,,well, I have no reputation to lose-at least as a biologist Shall I
give my guess?"
     "Go ahead."
     "That's a large meter-band radio array.  The sort of thing they
used back at the beginning of the twentieth century."
     "I was afraid you7d say that.  Now we know why it gave such a
massive echo."
"But why has it just appeared?'
'Probably an aftereffect of the discharge.'
"I've just had another thought," said Falcon, rather slowly.
"Do you suppose it's listening to usT'
"On this frequency? I doubt it.  Those are meter-no, decameter
antennas-judging by their size.  Hmm ... that's an

     Dr. Brenner fell silent, obviously contemplating some new fine
of thought.  Presently he continued: "I bet they're tuned to the radio
outbursts! That's something nature never got around to doing on
Earth.... We have anirnals with sonar and even electric senses, but
nothing ever developed a radio sense.  Why bother where there was
so much light?
     "But its different here.  Jupiter is drenched with radio energy. 
It's worth while using it-maybe even tapping it.  That thing could be
a floating power pland"
          A new voice cut into the conversation.
     "Mission Commander here.  This is all very interesting, but
there's a much more important matter to settle.  Is it intelligent? If
so, we've got to consider the First Contact directives."
     "Until I came here," said Dr. Brenner, somewhat ruefully, "I would
have sworn that anything that could make a shortwave antenna
system must be intelligent.  Now, I'm not sure.  This could have
evolved naturally.  I suppose it's no more fantastic than the human
eye."
     "11an we have to play safe and assume intelligence.  For

162 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

the present, therefore, this expedition comes under all the clauses
of the Prime directive."
     There was a long silence while everyone on the radio circuit
absorbed the implications of this.  For the first time in the history of
space flight, the rules that had been established through more than
a century of argument might have to be applied.  Man had-it was
hoped-profited from his mistakes on Earth.  Not only moral
considerations, but also his own self-interest demanded that he
should not repeat them among the planets.  It could be disastrous
to treat a superior intelligence as the American settlers had treated
the Indians, or as. almost everyone had treated the Africans....
     The first rule was: keep your distance.  Make no attempt to
approach, or even to communicate, until "they" have had plenty of
time to study you.  Exactly what was meant by "plenty of time," no
one had ever been able to decide.  It was left to the discretion of
the man on the spot.
     A responsibility of which he had never dreamed had descended
upon Howard Falcon.  In the few hours that remained to him on
Jupiter, he might become the first ambassador of the human race.
     And that was an irony so delicious that he almost wished the
surgeons had restored to him the power of laughter.

7. PRMM DmEcTrvE

     It was growing darker, but Falcon scarcely noticed as he
strained his eyes toward that living cloud in the field of the
telescope.  The wind that was steadily sweeping Kon-Tiki around
the funnel of the great whirlpool had now brought him within twelve
miles of the creature.  If he got much closer than six, he would take
evasive action.  Though he felt certain that the inedusa's electric
weapons were short ranged, he did not wish to put the matter to the
test.  That would be a problem for future explorers, and he wished
them luck.
     Now it was quite dark in the capsule.  That was strange,
because sunset was stiff hours away.  Automatically, he glanced at
the horizontally scanning radar, as he had done every few minutes. 
Apart from the medusa he was studying, there was no other object
within about sixty miles of him.
     Suddenly, with startling power, he heard the sound that had
come booming out of the Jovian night-the throbbing beat that Srew
more and more rapid, then stopped in mid-dre-A Meeting with Medusa 163

scendo. ne whole capsule vibrated with it like a pea in a kettledrum.
     Falcon realized two things almost simultaneously during the
sudden, aching silence.  This time the sound was not coming from
thousands of miles away, over a radio circuit.  It was in the very
atmosphere around him.
     no second thought was even more disturbing.  He bad quite
forgotten-it was inexcusable, but there had been other apparently
more important -things on his mind-that most of the sky above him
was completely blanked out by KonTiki's gasbag.  Being lightly
silvered to conserve its heat, the great balloon was an effective
shield both to radar and to vision.
     He had known this, of course; it had been a minor defect of the
design, tolerated because it did not appear important.  It seemed
very important to Howard Falcon now-as he saw that fence of
gigantic tentacles, thicker than the trunks of any tree, descending
all around the capsule.
     He heard Brenner yelling: "Remember the Prime directivel Don't
alarm RV' Before he could make an appropriate answer that
overwhelming drumbeat started again and drowned all other
sounds.
     The sign of a really skilled test pilot is how he reacts not to
foreseeable emergencies, but to ones that nobody could have
anticipated.  Falcon did not hesitate for more than a second to
analyze the situation.  In a lightning-swift movement, he puffed the
rip cord.
     nat word was an archaic survival from the days of the Arst
hydrogen balloons; on Kon-Tiki, the rip cord did not tear open the
gasbag, but merely operated a set of louvers around the upper
curve of the envelope.  At once the hot gas started to rush out; Kon-
Tiki, deprived of her lift, began to fall swiftly in this gravity field two
and a half times as strong as Earth's.
     Falcon had a momentary glimpse of great tentacles whip. ping
upward and away.  He had just time to note that they were studded
with large bladders or sacs, presumably to give them buoyancy, and
that they ended in multitudes of thin feelers like the roots of a plant. 
He half expected a bolt of lightning-but nothing happened.
     His precipitous rate of descent was slackening as the
atmosphere thickened and the deflated envelope acted as a
parachute.  When Kon-Tiki had dropped about two miles, he -felt *t
it was safe -to close the louvers again.  By the time he

164 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

had restored buoyancy and was in equilibrium once more, he had
lost another mile of altitude and was getting dangerously near his
safety limit.
     He peered anxiously through the overhead windows, though he
did not expect to see anything except the obscuring bulk of the
balloon.  But he had Aideslipped during his descent, and part of the
medusa was just visible a couple of miles above him.  It was much
closer than he expected-and it was still coming down, faster than he
would have believed possible.
     Mission Control was calling anxiously.  He shouted: -rm O.K.-but
it's still coming after me.  I can't go any deeper."
     That was not quite true.  He could go a lot deeper-about one
hundred and eighty miles.  But it would be a one-way trip, and most
of the journey would be of little interest to hinL Then, to his great
relief, he saw that the medusa was leveling off, not quite a mile
above him.  Perhaps it had decided to approach this strange
intruder with caution; or perhaps it, too, found this deeper layer
uncomfortably hot.  The temperature was over fifty degrees
centigrade, and Falcon wondered how much longer his life-support
system could handle matters.
     Dr. Brenner was back on the circuit, still worrying about the
Prime directive.
     "Remember-it may only be inquisitive" he cried, without much
conviction.  "Try not to frighten it!"
     Falcon was getting rather tired of this advice and recalled a TV
discussion he had once seen between a space lawyer-and an
astronaut.  After the full implications of the Prime directive had been
carefully spelled out, the incredulous spacer had exclaimed: "Then
if there was no alternative, I must sit still and let myself be eaten?"
The lawyer had not even cracked a smile when he answered: "That's
an excellent summing up.' It had seemed funny at the time; it was
not at all amusing now.
     And then Falcon saw something that made him even more
unhappy.  The medusa was still hovering about a mile above him-
but one of its tentacles was becoming incredibly elongated, and
was stretching down toward Kon-Tiki, thinning out at the same time. 
As a boy he had once seen the funnel of a tornado descending from
a storm cloud over the Kansas plains.  The, thing coming toward
him now evoked vivid memories of that black, twisting snake in the
sky.
     "I'm rapidly running out of options," he reported to Mission
Control.  "I now -have only a choice between frighten-A Meeting with Medusa 165

ing it-and giving it a bad stomach-ache.  I don't think it will find Kon-
Tiki very digestible, if that's what it has in mind."
     He waited for comments from Brenner, but the biologist
remained silent.
     'Very well.  It's twenty-seven minutes ahead of time, but Im
starting the ignition sequencer.  I hope I'll have enough reserve to
correct my orbit later."
     He could no longer see the medusa; once more it was directly
overhead.  But he knew that the descending tentacle must now be
very close to the balloon.  It would take almost five minutes to bring
the reactor up to full thrust. . . .
     The fuser was primed.  The orbit computer had not rejected the
situation as wholly impossible.  The air scoops were open, ready to
gulp in tons of the surrounding hydrohelium on demand.  Even
under optimum conditions, this would have been the moment of
truth-for there had been no way of testing how a nuclear ramjet
would really work in the strange atmosphere of Jupiter.
     Very gently something rocked Kon-Tiki.  Falcon tried to ignore
it.
     Ignition had been planned at six miles higher, in an atmosphere
of less than a quarter of the density and thirty degrees cooler.  Too
bad.
     What was the shallowest dive he could get away with, for the air
scoops to work? When the ram ignited, he'd be heading toward
Jupiter withtwo, and a half g's to help him get there.  Could he
possibly pull out in time?
     A large, heavy hand patted the balloon.  The whole vessel
bobbed up and down, like one of the Yo-yo's that had just become
the craze on Earth.
     Of course, Brenner might be perfectly right.  Perhaps it was just
trying to be friendly.  Maybe he should try to talk to it over the
radio.  VA!& should it be: "Pretty pussy "? "Down, Fido"? Or "Take
me to your leader"?
     The tritium-deuterium ratio was correct.  He was ready to light
the candle, with a hundred-million-degree match.
     The thin tip of the tentacle came slithering around the edge of
the balloon some sixty yards away.  It was about the size of an
elephants trunk, and by the delicate way it was moving appeared to
be almost as sensitive.  There were little palps at its end, like
questing mouths.  He was sure that Dr. Brenner would be
fascinated.
. This seemed about as good a time as any.  He gave a swift wan of
the entire control board, started the find four-second

166 THE WIND FROM THE SUN

ignition count, broke the safety seal, and pressed the YEmsoN
switch.
     There was a sharp explosion and an instant loss of weight.  Kon-
Tik! was falling freely, nose down.  Overhead, the discarded balloon
was racing upward, dragging the inquisitive tentacle with it.  Falcon
had no time to see if the gasbag actually hit the medusa, because
at that moment the ramjet fired and he had other matters to think
about.
     A roaring column of hot hydrohelium was pouring out of the
reactor nozzles, swiftly building up thrust-but toward Jupiter, not
away from it.  He could not pull out yet, for vector control was too
sluggish.  Unless he could gain complete control and achieve
horizontal flight within the next five seconds, the vehicle would dive
too deeply into the atmosphere and would be destroyed.
     With agonizing slowness-those five seconds seemed like fifty-he
managed to flatten out, then pull the nose upward.  He glanced
back only once and caught a final glimpse of -the medusa, many
miles away.  Kon-Tiki's discarded gasbag had apparently escaped
from its grasp, for he could see no sign of it.
     Now he was master once more-no longer drifting I@elplessly on
the winds of Jupiter, but riding his own column of atomic fire back
to the stars.  He was confident that the ramjet would steadily give
him velocity and altitude until he had reached near-orbital speed at
the fringes of the amosphere.  Then, with a brief burst of pure
rocket power, he would regain the freedom of space.
     Halfway to orbit, he looked south and saw the tremendous
enigma of the Great Red Spot-that floating island twice the size of
Earth--coming up over the horizon.  He stared into its mysterious
beauty until the computer warned him that conversion to rocket
thrust was only sixty seconds ahead.  He tore his gaze reluctantly
away.
     "Some other time," he murmured.
     'What's that?" said Mission Control.  "What did you say?' 'It
     doesn't matter," he replied.

S. 13ETWEEN TWO WORLDS

     "You're a hero now, Howard," said Webster, "not just a celebrity. 
You!ve given them something to think about-injected some
excitement into their lives.  Not one in a million

                                  A Meeting with Medusa 167

will actually travel to the Outer Giants, but the whole human race
will go in imagination.  And that's what counts."
     "I'm glad to have made your job a little easier."
     Webster was too old a friend to take offense at the note of irony. 
Yet it surprised him.  And this was not the first change in Howard
that he had noticed since the return from Jupiter.
     The Administrator pointed to the famous sign on his desk,
borrowed from an impresario of an earlier age: ASTONISH ME1 "I'm
not ashamed of my job.  New knowledge, new resourc08--they're all
very well.  But men also need novelty and excitement.  Space travel
has become routine; you've made it a Smat adventure once more. 
It will be a long, long time before we, get Jupiter pigeonholed.  And
maybe longer still before we understand those medusae.  I still
think that one knew where your blind spot was.  Anyway, have you
decided on your next move? Saturn, Uranus, Neptune-you name it."
     "I don't know.  I've thought about Saturn, but rm not really
needed there.  It's only one gravity, not two and a half like Jupiter:
So men can handle it."
     Men, thought Webster.  He said "men." Hes never done that
before.  And when did I last hear him use the word "we'7 He's
changing, slipping away from us....
     'Wall," he said aloud, rising from his chair to conceal his slight
uneasiness, "let's get the conference started.  Tbe cameras are all
set up and everyone's waiting.  You'll meet a lot of old friends."
     He stressed the last word, but Howard showed no response. 
The leather mask of his face was becoming more and more difficult
to read.  Instead, he rolled back from the Administrator's desk,
unlocked his undercarriage so that it no longer formed a chair, and
rose on his hydraulics to his full seven -feet of height.  It had been
good psychology on the part of the surgeons to give him that extra
twelve inches, to compensate somewhat for aff that he had lost
when the Queen had crashed.
     Falcon waited until Webster had opened the door, then pivoted
neatly on his balloon tires and headed for it at a smooth and silent
twenty miles an hour.  The display of speed and precision was not
flaunted arrogantly; rather, it had become quite unconscious.
     Howard Falcon, who had once been a man and could still pass
for one over a voice circuit, felt a calm sense of achievement-and,
for the first time in years, something like

168 THE Va" FROM THE SUN

peace of mind.  Sincehis return from Jupiter, the nightmares had
ceased.  He had found his role at last.
     He now knew why he had dreamed about that superchimp
aboard the doomed Queen Elizabeth.  Neither man nor beast, it was
between two worlds; and so was he.
     He alone could travel unprotected on the lunar surface.  The fife-
support system inside the metal cylinder that had replaced his
fragile body functioned equally wen in space or under water. 
Gravity fields ten times that of Earth were an inconvenience, but
nothing more.  And no gravity was best of all.
     The human race was becoming more remote, the ties of kinship
more tenuous.  Perhaps these air-breathing, radiationsensitive
bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right beyond the
atmosphere; they should stick to their natural homes-Earth, Moon,
Mars.
     Some day the real masters of space would be machines, not
ifien---and he was neither.  Already conscious of his destiny, he
took a somber pride in his unique loneliness-the first ininiortal
midway between two orders of creation.
     He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the
new-between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal
who must one day supersede them.
     Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay
ahead.

                                             February 1971

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