Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 by The Other Side of the Sky Page B

There’s no need to tell how I
juggled duty lists, cooked logs and fuel registers, and persuaded my colleagues
to cover up for me. All that matters is that, about once a week, I would climb
into my personal space suit, strap myself to the spidery framework of a Mark
III Scooter, and drift away from the station at minimum power. When I was well
clear, I’d go over to full throttle, and the tiny rocket motor would hustle me
across the nine-hundred-mile gap to the observatory.
     
                The trip took about thirty minutes,
and the navigational requirements were elementary. I could see where I was
going and where I’d come from, yet I don’t mind admitting that I often felt –
well, a trifle lonely – around the mid-point of the journey. There was no other
solid matter within almost five hundred miles – and it looked an awfully long
way down to Earth. It was a great help, at such moments, to tune the suit radio
to the general service band, and to listen to all the back-chat between ships
and stations.
     
                At midflight I’d have to spin the
scooter around and start braking, and ten minutes later the observatory would
be close enough for its details to be visible to the unaided eye. Very shortly
after that I’d drift up to a small, plastic pressure bubble that was in the
process of being fitted out as a spectroscopic laboratory – and there would be
Julie, waiting on the other side of the air lock …
     
                I won’t pretend that we confined our
discussions to the latest results in astrophysics, or the progress of the
satellite construction schedule. Few things, indeed, were further from our
thoughts; and the journey home always seemed to flash by at a quite astonishing
speed.
     
                It was around mid-orbit on one of
those homeward trips that the radar started to flash on my little control
panel. There was something large at extreme range, and it was coming in fast. A
meteor, I told myself – maybe even a small asteroid. Anything giving such a
signal should be visible to the eye: I read off the bearings and searched the
star fields in the indicated direction. The thought of a collision never even
crossed my mind; space is so inconceivably vast that I was thousands of times
safer than a man crossing a busy street on Earth.
     
                There it was – a bright and steadily
growing star near the foot of Orion. It already outshone Rigel, and seconds
later it was not merely a star, but had begun to show a visible disc. Now it
was moving as fast as I could turn my head; it grew to a tiny misshaped moon,
then dwindled and shrank with that same silent, inexorable speed.
     
                I suppose I had a clear view of it
for perhaps half a second, and that half-second has haunted me all my life. The
– object – had already vanished by the time I thought of checking the radar
again, so I had no way of gauging how close it came, and hence how large it
really was. It could have been a small object a hundred feet away – or a very
large one, ten miles off. There is no sense of perspective in space, and unless
you know what you are looking at, you cannot judge its distance.
     
                Of course, it could have been a very large and oddly shaped meteor; I can never
be sure that my eyes, straining to grasp the details of so swiftly moving an
object, were not hopelessly deceived. I may have imagined that I saw that
broken, crumpled prow, and the cluster of dark ports like the sightless sockets
of a skull. Of one thing only was I certain, even in that brief and fragmentary
vision. If it was a ship, it was not
one of ours. Its shape was utterly alien, and it was very, very old.
     
                It may be that the greatest
discovery of all time slipped from my grasp as I struggled with my thoughts
midway between the two space stations. But I had no measurements of speed or
direction; whatever it was