[Chills]

giant asteroid the size of three football pitches will make the closest flyby of Earth in recorded history for an object of its size, scientists said.

It will pass between the Earth and the Moon and will even come closer than the orbit of many telecommunications satellites, although astronomers insisted that there is little chance of a collision with the massive rock.

Anxious Earthlings need not worry too much for another 24 years, however, because asteroid 2004 MN4 is not due to make its closest approach to Earth until approximately 10pm London time on Friday 13th April 2029.

The latest calculations of the rock's orbit suggest that it will come so close that it will probably be visible to the naked eye from Britain. It will shine in the sky as a dim, fast-moving star - the first asteroid in modern times to be clearly visible from Earth without the aid of a telescope or binoculars.

The asteroid was first discovered in June 2004 and calculations of its orbit made by astronomers last Christmas Eve suggested that there was a one in 60 chance of it colliding with the Earth. However, within a week this was revised down to virtually zero probability of a collision.

If it did collide it would cause an explosion equivalent to several hydrogen bombs being detonated simultaneously, turning vast areas of land into desert or generating a giant tsunami if it landed in the ocean.

The latest revisions of the calculations have refined the asteroid's orbital path to suggest that it will pass our planet by the relative whisper of 36,350 km - well within the orbit of geostationary satellites and about a tenth of the distance to the Moon.

This is by far the largest of the top ten closest asteroids recorded by astronomers. Only two others have come closer and both were much smaller objects - tens of yards wide instead of the 320 metres of asteroid 2004 MN4.

Professor Mark Bailey, director of the Armagh Observatory, said that there is little danger from the asteroid even though it will come close enough for its orbit to be directly affected by the Earth's gravity - causing the path of the space rock to swing away.

"I think everyone is saying that it's going to miss. It'll pass so close though that you'll be able to see it with a small telescope and even with the naked eye," Professor Bailey said.

"It's like being on a train station platform and watching an express train go by three feet away. You're close, but it's not dangerous," he said.

Large asteroids have frequently collided with the Earth in the past and some of the larger ones have caused massive devastation on a global scale. They can send huge plumes of dust and debris into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight for several years and causing the environmental equivalent of a "nuclear winter".

Last autumn a much bigger asteroid called Toutatis, which is about 2.9 miles long and 1.5 miles wide, made its closest flyby to Earth but its distance was still four times greater than that separating the Moon and the Earth.

Unlike asteroid 2004 MN4 and despite its size, Toutatis was not visible to the naked eye.

Steve Chesley, of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said that asteroid 2004 MN4 is unusual because so much is known about its orbit before it makes its closest approach in 24 years time.

"All the others in the top ten were discovered during the close approach, whereas for 2004 MN4 the close approach is predicted well in advance," Dr Chesley said.

Scientists estimate that on average an asteroid of this size would be expected to pass this close to Earth about once in every 1,300 years.

Asteroid 2004 MN4 circles the Sun, but unlike most asteroids that reside in a belt between Mars and Jupiter, the 323-day orbit of the asteroid lies mostly within the orbit of the Earth, making further encounters likely.

"However, our current risk analysis for 2004 MN4 indicates that no subsequent Earth encounters for the 21st Century are of concern," said Dr Chesley and his colleagues at JPL.
LINK HERE (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10011159)

[Ought Six]

LOL! The critical date is Friday the 13th. How is *that* for irony. :ironic:

[Chills]

I will probably be gone by then....and if still around too blind to see it.. :(

[H2O]

Deep Impact project July 4th 2005, Comet still has NO TAIL ?
Think !


Project Lucifer...
Cassini 72lbs Plutonium

To crash into Saturn in (( JULY ))
Ancient Summerian tablets depict not Planet X , But Old Saturn also know as Chronos, which is the time keeper.. Also many other names.

NASA SECRET PROJECT to tera form mooms, And turn Saturn into a new SUN..

Movie to mimick real life 2010 ( something Wonderful is going to happen )
Ya my foot !

And a third of the trees were burned up and All green grass's
And he brought down fire from heaven in the sight of Man..

Some of you will know whats up with this..

Wait and see time ! :)

http://watch.pair.com/cosmic2.html




=============WebSite==DOWN===Cashed==Snipet==========

3001 The final Odissey



Arthur C. Clarke



For Cherene, Tamara and Melinda - may you be happy in a far better century than mine



PROLOGUE



The Firstborn



Call them the Firstborn. Though they were not remotely human, they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they felt awe, and wonder - and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they began to seek for fellowship among the stars.

In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night.

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.

And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.

The great dinosaurs had long since passed away, their morning promise annihilated by a random hammerblow from space, when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth.

Spread out beneath them, the explorers saw a world swarming with life. For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all that they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destiny of many species, on land and in the seas. But which of their experiments would bear fruit, they could not know for at least a million years.

They were patient, but they were not yet immortal. There was so much to do in this universe of a hundred billion suns, and other worlds were calling. So they set out once more into the abyss, knowing that they would never come this way again. Nor was there any need: the servants they had left behind would do the rest.

On Earth, the glaciers came and went, while above them the changeless Moon still carried its secret from the stars. With a yet slower rhythm than the polar ice, the tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the Galaxy. Strange and beautiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge to their successors.

And now, out among the stars, evolution was driving towards new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and gemstone. In these, they roamed the Galaxy. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships.

But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light.

Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into dust.

Now they were Lords of the Galaxy, and could rove at will among the stars, or sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. Though they were freed at last from the tyranny of matter, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And their marvellous instruments still continued to function, watching over the experiments started so many ages ago.

But no longer were they always obedient to the mandates of their creators; like all material things, they were not immune to the corruption of Time and its patient, unsleeping servant, Entropy.

And sometimes, they discovered and sought goals of their own.



I
STAR CITY



1
Comet Cowboy



Captain Dimitri Chandler [M2973.04.21/93.106//Mars//I SpaceAcad3005] - or 'Dim' to his very best friends - was understandably annoyed. The message from Earth had taken six hours to reach the space-tug Goliath, here beyond the orbit of Neptune; if it had arrived ten minutes later he could have answered 'Sorry - can't leave now - we've just started to deploy the sun-screen.'

The excuse would have been perfectly valid: wrapping a comet's core in a sheet of reflective film only a few molecules thick, but kilometres on a side, was not the sort of job you could abandon while it was half-completed.

Still, it would be a good idea to obey this ridiculous request: he was already in disfavour sunwards, through no fault of his own. Collecting ice from the rings of Saturn, and nudging it towards Venus and Mercury, where it was really needed, had started back in the 2700s - three centuries ago. Captain Chandler had never been able to see any real difference in the 'before and after' images the Solar Conservers were always producing, to support their accusations of celestial vandalism. But the general public, still sensitive to the ecological disasters of previous centuries, had thought otherwise, and the 'Hands off Saturn!' vote had passed by a substantial majority. As a result, Chandler was no longer a Ring Rustler, but a Comet Cowboy.

So here he was at an appreciable fraction of the distance to Alpha Centauri, rounding up stragglers from the Kuiper Belt. There was certainly enough ice out here to cover Mercury and Venus with oceans kilometres deep, but it might take centuries to extinguish their hell-fires and make them suitable for life. The Solar Conservers, of course, were still protesting against this, though no longer with so much enthusiasm. The millions dead from the tsunami caused by the Pacific asteroid in 2304 - how ironic that a land impact would have done much less damage! - had reminded all future generations that the human race had too many eggs in one fragile basket.

Well, Chandler told himself, it would be fifty years before this particular package reached its destination, so a delay of a week would hardly make much difference. But all the calculations about rotation, centre of mass, and thrust vectors would have to be redone, and radioed back to Mars for checking. It was a good idea to do your sums carefully, before nudging billions of tons of ice along an orbit that might take it within hailing distance of Earth.

As they had done so many times before, Captain Chandler's eyes strayed towards the ancient photograph above his desk. It showed a three-masted steamship, dwarfed by the iceberg that was looming above it - as, indeed, Goliath was dwarfed at this very moment.

How incredible, he had often thought, that only one long lifetime spanned the gulf between this primitive Discovery and the ship that had carried the same name to Jupiter! And what would those Antarctic explorers of a thousand years ago have made of the view from his bridge? They would certainly have been disoriented, for the wall of ice beside which Goliath was floating stretched both upwards and downwards as far as the eye could see. And it was strange-looking ice, wholly lacking the immaculate whites and blues of the frozen Polar seas. In fact, it looked dirty - as indeed it was. For only some ninety per cent was water-ice: the rest was a witch's brew of carbon and sulphur compounds, most of them stable only at temperatures not far above absolute zero. Thawing them out could produce unpleasant surprises: as one astrochemist had famously remarked, 'Comets have bad breath'.

'Skipper to all personnel,' Chandler announced. 'There's been a slight change of programme. We've been asked to delay operations, to investigate a target that Spaceguard radar has picked up.'

'Any details?' somebody asked, when the chorus of groans over the ship's intercom had died away.

'Not many, but I gather it's another Millennium Committee project they've forgotten to cancel.'

More groans: everyone had become heartily sick of all the events planned to celebrate the end of the 2000s. There had been a general sigh of relief when 1 January 3001 had passed uneventfully, and the human race could resume its normal activities.

'Anyway, it will probably be another false alarm, like the last one. We'll get back to work just as quickly as we can. Skipper out.'

This was the third wild-goose-chase, Chandler thought morosely, he'd been involved with during his career. Despite centuries of exploration, the Solar System could still produce surprises, and presumably Spaceguard had a good reason for its request. He only hoped that some imaginative idiot hadn't once again sighted the fabled Golden Asteroid. If it did exist - which Chandler did not for a moment believe - it would be no more than a mineralogical curiosity: it would be of far less real value than the ice he was nudging sunwards, to bring life to barren worlds.

There was one possibility, however, which he did take quite seriously. Already, the human race had scattered its robot probes through a volume of space a hundred light-years across - and the Tycho Monolith was sufficient reminder that much older civilizations had engaged in similar activities. There might well be other alien artefacts in the Solar System, or in transit through it. Captain Chandler suspected that Spaceguard had something like this in mind: otherwise it would hardly have diverted a Class I space-tug to go chasing after an unidentified radar blip.

Five hours later, the questing Goliath detected the echo at extreme range; even allowing for the distance, it seemed disappointingly small. However, as it grew clearer and stronger, it began to give the signature of a metallic object, perhaps a couple of metres long. It was travelling on an orbit heading out of the Solar System, so was almost certainly, Chandler decided, one of the myriad pieces of space-junk that Mankind had tossed towards the stars during the last millennium and which might one day provide the only evidence that the human race had ever existed.

Then it came close enough for visual inspection, and Captain Chandler realized, with awed astonishment, that some patient historian was still checking the earliest records of the Space Age. What a pity that the computers had given him the answer, just a few years too late for the Mifiermium celebrations!

'Goliath here,' Chandler radioed Earthwards, his voice tinged with pride as well as solemnity. 'We're bringing aboard a thousand-year-old astronaut. And I can guess who it is.'



2
Awakening



Frank Poole awoke, but he did not remember. He was not even sure of his name.

Obviously, he was in a hospital room: even though his eyes were still closed, the most primitive, and evocative, of his senses told him that. Each breath brought the faint and not unpleasant tang of antiseptics in the air, and it triggered a memory of the time when - of course! - as a reckless teenager he had broken a rib in the Arizona Hang-gliding Championship.

Now it was all beginning to come back. I'm Deputy Commander Frank Poole, Executive Officer, USSS Discovery, on a Top Secret mission to Jupiter - It seemed as if an icy hand had gripped his heart. He remembered, in slow-motion playback, that runaway space-pod jetting towards him, metal claws outstretched. Then the silent impact - and the not-so-silent hiss of air rushing out of his suit. After that - one last memory, of spinning helplessly in space, trying in vain to reconnect his broken air-hose.

Well, whatever mysterious accident had happened to the space-pod controls, he was safe now. Presumably Dave had made a quick EVA and rescued him before lack of oxygen could do permanent brain damage.

Good old Dave! He told himself. I must thank - just a moment! - I'm obviously not aboard Discovery now - surely I haven't been unconscious long enough to be taken back to Earth!

His confused train of thought was abruptly broken by the arrival of a Matron and two nurses, wearing the immemorial uniform of their profession. They seemed a little surprised: Poole wondered if he had awakened ahead of schedule, and the idea gave him a childish feeling of satisfaction.

'Hello!' he said, after several attempts; his vocal cords appeared to be very rusty. 'How am I doing?'

Matron smiled back at him and gave an obvious 'Don't try to talk' command by putting a finger to her lips. Then the two nurses fussed swiftly over him with practised skill, checking pulse, temperature, reflexes. When one of them lifted his right arm and let it drop again, Poole noticed something peculiar It fell slowly, and did not seem to weigh as much as normal. Nor, for that matter, did his body, when he attempted to move.

So I must be on a planet, he thought. Or a space-station with artificial gravity. Certainly not Earth - I don't weigh enough.

He was about to ask the obvious question when Matron pressed something against the side of his neck; he felt a slight tingling sensation, and sank back into a dreamless sleep. Just before he became unconscious, he had time for one more puzzled thought.

How odd - they never spoke a single word - all the time they were with me.



3
Rehabilitation



When he woke again, and found Matron and nurses standing round his bed, Poole felt strong enough to assert himself.

'Where am I? Surely you can tell me that!' The three women exchanged glances, obviously uncertain what to do next. Then Matron answered, enunciating her words very slowly and carefully: 'Everything is fine, Mr Poole. Professor Anderson will be here in a minute He will explain.'

Explain what? thought Poole with some exasperation. But at least she speaks English, even though I can't place her accent.

Anderson must have been already on his way, for the door opened moments later - to give Poole a brief glimpse of a small crowd of inquisitive onlookers peering in at him. He began to feel like a new exhibit at a zoo.

Professor Anderson was a small, dapper man whose features seemed to have combined key aspects of several races - Chinese, Polynesian, Nordic - in a thoroughly confusing fashion. He greeted Poole by holding up his right palm, then did an obvious double-take and shook hands, with such a curious hesitation that he might have been rehearsing some quite unfamiliar gesture.

'Glad to see you're looking so well, Mr Poole... We'll have you up in no time.'

Again that odd accent and slow delivery - but the confident bedside manner was that of all doctors, in all places and all ages.

'I'm glad to hear it. Now perhaps you can answer a few questions...'

'Of course, of course. But just a minute.'

Anderson spoke so rapidly and quietly to the Matron that Poole could catch only a few words, several of which were wholly unfamiliar to him. Then the Matron nodded at one of the nurses, who opened a wall-cupboard and produced a slim metal band, which she proceeded to wrap around Poole's head.

'What's that for?' he asked - being one of those difficult patients, so annoying to doctors, who always want to know just what's happening to them. 'EEC readout?'

Professor, Matron and nurses looked equally baffled. Then a slow smile spread across Anderson's face.

'Oh - electro... enceph .. alo... gram,' he said slowly, as if dredging the word up from the depth of memory, 'You're quite right. We just want to monitor your brain functions.'

My brain would function perfectly well if you'd let me use it, Poole grumbled silently. But at least we seem to be getting somewhere - finally.

'Mr Poole,' said Anderson, still speaking in that curious stilted voice, as if venturing in a foreign language, 'you know, of course, that you were - disabled - in a serious accident, while you were working outside Discovery.'

Poole nodded agreement.

'I'm beginning to suspect,' he said dryly, 'that "disabled" is a slight understatement.'

Anderson relaxed visibly, and a slow smile spread across his face.

'You're quite correct. Tell me what you think happened.'

'Well, the best case scenario is that, after I became unconscious, Dave Bowman rescued me and brought me back to the ship. How is Dave? No one will tell me anything!'

'All in due course... and the worst case?'

It seemed to Frank Poole that a chill wind was blowing gently on the back of his neck. The suspicion that had been slowly forming in his mind began to solidify.

'That I died, but was brought back here - wherever "here" is - and you've been able to revive me. Thank you...'

'Quite correct. And you're back on Earth. Well, very near it.'

What did he mean by 'very near it'? There was certainly a gravity field here - so he was probably inside the slowly turning wheel of an orbiting space-station. No matter: there was something much more important to think about.

Poole did some quick mental calculations. If Dave had put him in the hibernaculum, revived the rest of the crew, and completed the mission to Jupiter - why, he could have been 'dead' for as much as five years!

'Just what date is it?' he asked, as calmly as possible.

Professor and Matron exchanged glances. Again Poole felt that cold wind on his neck.

'I must tell you, Mr Poole, that Bowman did not rescue you. He believed - and we cannot blame him - that you were irrevocably dead. Also, he was facing a desperately serious crisis that threatened his own survival...'

'So you drifted on into space, passed through the Jupiter system, and headed out towards the stars. Fortunately, you were so far below freezing point that there was no metabolism - but it's a near-miracle that you were ever found at all. You are one of the luckiest men alive. No - ever to have lived!'

Am I? Poole asked himself bleakly. Five years, indeed! It could be a century - or even more.

'Let me have it,' he demanded.

Professor and Matron seemed to be consulting an invisible monitor: when they looked at each other and nodded agreement, Poole guessed that they were all plugged into the hospital information circuit, linked to the headband he was wearing.

'Frank,' said Professor Anderson, making a smooth switch to the role of long-time family physician, 'this will be a great shock to you, but you're capable of accepting it - and the sooner you know, the better.'

'We're near the beginning of the Fourth Millennium. Believe me - you left Earth almost a thousand years ago.'

'I believe you,' Poole answered calmly. Then, to his great annoyance, the room started to spin around him, and he knew nothing more.



When he regained consciousness, he found that he was no longer in a bleak hospital room but in a luxurious suite with attractive - and steadily changing - images on the walls. Some of these were famous and familiar paintings, others showed land and sea-scapes that might have been from his own time. There was nothing alien or upsetting: that, he guessed, would come later.

His present surroundings had obviously been carefully programmed: he wondered if there was the equivalent of a television screen somewhere (how many channels would the Fourth Millennium have?) but could see no sign of any controls near his bed. There was so much he would have to learn in this new world: he was a savage who had suddenly encountered civilization.

But first, he must regain his strength - and learn the language; not even the advent of sound recording, already more than a century old when Poole was born, had prevented major changes in grammar and pronunciation. And there were thousands of new words, mostly from science and technology, though often he was able to make a shrewd guess at their meaning.

More frustrating, however, were the myriad of famous and infamous personal names that had accumulated over the millennium, and which meant nothing to him. For weeks, until he had built up a data bank, most of his conversations had to be interrupted with potted biographies. As Poole's strength increased, so did the number of his visitors, though always under Professor Anderson's watchful eye. They included medical specialists, scholars of several disciplines, and - of the greatest interest to him - spacecraft commanders.

There was little that he could tell the doctors and historians that was not recorded somewhere in Mankind's gigantic data banks, but he was often able to give them research shortcuts and new insights about the events of his own time. Though they all treated him with the utmost respect and listened patiently as he tried to answer their questions, they seemed reluctant to answer his. Poole began to feel that he was being over-protected from culture shock, and half-seriously wondered how he could escape from his suite. On the few occasions he was alone, he was not surprised to discover that the door was locked.

Then the arrival of Doctor Indra Wallace changed everything. Despite her name, her chief racial component appeared to be Japanese, and there were times when with just a little imagination Poole could picture her as a rather mature Geisha Girl. It was hardly an appropriate image for a distinguished historian, holding a Virtual Chair at a university still boasting real ivy.

She was the first visitor with a fluent command of Poole's own English, so he was delighted to meet her.

'Mr Poole,' she began, in a very business-like voice, 'I've been appointed your official guide and - let's say - mentor. My qualifications - I've specialized in your period - my thesis was "The Collapse of the Nation-State, 2000-50". 1 believe we can help each other in many ways.'

'I'm sure we can. First I'd like you to get me out of here, so I can see a little of your world.'

'Exactly what we intend to do. But first we must give you an Ident. Until then you'll be - what was the term? -a non-person. It would be almost impossible for you to go anywhere, or get anything done. No input device would recognize your existence.'

'Just what I expected,' Poole answered, with a wry smile. 'It was starting to get that way in my own time - and many people hated the idea.'

'Some still do. They go off and live in the wilderness - there's a lot more on Earth than there was in your century! But they always take their compaks with them, so they can call for help as soon as they get into trouble. The median time is about five days.'

'Sorry to hear that. The human race has obviously deteriorated.'

He was cautiously testing her, trying to find the limits of her tolerance and to map out her personality. It was obvious that they were going to spend much time together, and that he would have to depend upon her in hundreds of ways. Yet he was still not sure if he would even like her: perhaps she regarded him merely as a fascinating museum exhibit.

Rather to Poole's surprise, she agreed with his criticism.

'That may be true - in some respects. Perhaps we're physically weaker, but we're healthier and better adjusted than most humans who have ever lived. The Noble Savage was always a myth'.

She walked over to a small rectangular plate, set at eye-level in the door. It was about the size of one of the countless magazines that had proliferated in the far-off Age of Print, and Poole had noticed that every room seemed to have at least one. Usually they were blank, but sometimes they contained lines of slowly scrolling text, completely meaningless to Poole even when most of the words were familiar. Once a plate in his suite had emitted urgent beepings, which he had ignored on the assumption that someone else would deal with the problem, whatever it was. Fortunately the noise stopped as abruptly as it had started.

Dr Wallace laid the palm of her hand upon the plate, then removed it after a few seconds. She glanced at Poole, and said smilingly: 'Come and look at this.'

The inscription that had suddenly appeared made a good deal of sense, when he read it slowly:WALLACE, INDRA [F2970.03.11 :31.885 / /HIST.OXFORD] 'I suppose it means Female, date of birth 11 March 2970 - and that you're associated with the Department of History at Oxford. And I guess that 31.885 is a personal identification number. Correct?'

'Excellent, Mr Poole. I've seen some of your e-mail addresses and credit card numbers - hideous strings of alpha-numeric gibberish that no one could possibly remember! But we all know our date of birth, and not more than 99,999 other people will share it. So a five-figure number is all you'll ever need... and even if you forget that, it doesn't really matter. As you see, it's a part of you.'

'Implant?'

'Yes - nanochip at birth, one in each palm for redundancy. You won't even feel yours when it goes in. But you've given us a small problem...'

'What's that?'

'The readers you'll meet most of the time are too simple-minded to believe your date of birth. So, with your permission, we've moved it up a thousand years.'

'Permission granted. And the rest of the Ident?'

'Optional. You can leave it empty, give your current interests and location - or use it for personal messages, global or targeted.'

Some things, Poole was quite sure, would not have changed over the centuries. A high proportion of those 'targeted' messages would be very personal indeed.

He wondered if there were still self or state-appointed censors in this day and age - and if their efforts at improving other people's morals had been more successful than in his own time.

He would have to ask Dr Wallace about that, when he got to know her better.



4
A Room with a View



'Frank - Professor Anderson thinks you're strong enough to go for a little walk.'

'I'm very pleased to hear it. Do you know the expression "stir crazy"?'

'No - but I can guess what it means.'

Poole had so adapted to the low gravity that the long strides he was taking seemed perfectly normal. Half a gee, he had estimated - just right to give a sense of well-being. They met only a few people on their walk, all of them strangers, but every one gave a smile of recognition. By now, Poole told himself with a trace of smugness, I must be one of the best-known celebrities in this world. That should be a great help - when I decide what to do with the rest of my life. At least another century, if I can believe Anderson.

The corridor along which they were walking was completely featureless apart from occasional numbered doors, each bearing one of the universal recog panels. Poole had followed Indra for perhaps two hundred metres when he came to a sudden halt, shocked because he had not realized something so blindingly obvious.

'This space-station must be enormous!' he exclaimed. Indra smiled back at him.

'Didn't you have a saying - "You ain't seen anything yet"?'

'"Nothing",' he corrected, absent-mindedly. He was still trying to estimate the scale of this structure when he had another surprise. Who would have imagined a space-station large enough to boast a subway - admittedly a miniature one, with a single small coach capable of seating only a dozen passengers.

'Observation Lounge Three,' ordered Indra, and they drew silently and swiftly away from the terminal.

Poole checked the time on the elaborate wrist-band whose functions he was still exploring. One minor surprise had been that the whole world was now on Universal Time: the confusing patchwork of Time Zones had been swept away by the advent of global communications There had been much talk of this, back in the twenty-first century, and it had even been suggested that Solar should be replaced by Sidereal Time. Then, during the course of the year, the Sun would move right round the clock: setting at the time it had risen six months earlier.

However, nothing had come of this 'Equal time in the Sun' proposal - or of even more vociferous attempts to reform the calendar. That particular job, it had been cynically suggested, would have to wait for somewhat major advances in technology. Some day, surely, one of God's minor mistakes would be corrected, and the Earth's orbit would be adjusted, to give every year twelve months of thirty exactly equal days.

As far as Poole could judge by speed and elapsed time, they must have travelled at least three kilometres before the vehicle came to a silent stop, the doors opened, and a bland autovoice intoned, 'Have a good view. Thirty-five per cent cloud-cover today.'

At last, thought Poole, we're getting near the outer wall. But here was another mystery - despite the distance he had gone, neither the strength nor the direction of gravity had altered! He could not imagine a spinning space-station so huge that the gee-vector would not be changed by such a displacement... could he really be on some planet after all? But he would feel lighter - usually much lighter - on any other habitable world in the Solar System.

When the outer door of the terminal opened, and Poole found himself entering a small airlock, he realized that he must indeed be in space. But where were the spacesuits? He looked around anxiously: it was against all his instincts to be so close to vacuum, naked and unprotected. One experience of that was enough...

'We're nearly there,' said Indra reassuringly.

The last door opened, and he was looking out into the utter blackness of space, through a huge window that was curved both vertically and horizontally. He felt like a goldfish in its bowl, and hoped that the designers of this audacious piece of engineering knew exactly what they were doing. They certainly possessed better structural materials than had existed in his time.

Though the stars must be shining out there, his light-adapted eyes could see nothing but black emptiness beyond the curve of the great window. As he started to walk towards it to get a wider view, Indra restrained him and pointed straight ahead.

'Look carefully,' she said 'Don't you see it-'

Poole blinked, and stared into the night. Surely it must be an illusion - even, heaven forbid, a crack in the window...

He moved his head from side to side. No, it was real. But what could it be? He remembered Euclid's definition 'A lie has length, but no thickness'.

For spanning the whole height of the window, and obviously continuing out of sight above and below, was a thread of light quite easy to see when he looked for it, yet so one-dimensional that the word 'thin' could not even be applied. However, it was not completely featureless; there were barely visible spots of greater brilliance at irregular intervals along its length, like drops of water on a spider's web.

Poole continued walking towards the window, and the view expanded until at last he could see what lay below him. It was familiar enough: the whole continent of Europe, and much of northern Africa, just as he had seen them many times from space. So he was in orbit after all - probably an equatorial one, at a height of at least a thousand kilometres.

Indra was looking at him with a quizzical smile.

'Go closer to the window,' she said, very softly. 'So that you can look straight down. I hope you have a good head for heights.'

What a silly thing to say to an astronaut! Poole told himself as he moved forward. If I ever suffered from vertigo, I wouldn't be in this business...

The thought had barely passed through his mind when he cried 'My God!' and involuntarily stepped back from the window, Then, bracing himself, he dared to look again.

He was looking down on the distant Mediterranean from the face of a cylindrical tower, whose gently curving wall indicated a diameter of several kilometres. But that was nothing compared with its length, for it tapered away down, down, down - until it disappeared into the mist somewhere over Africa. He assumed that it continued all the way to the surface.

'How high are we?' he whispered.

'Two thousand kay. But now look upwards.'

This time, it was not such a shock: he had expected what he would see. The tower dwindled away until it became a glittering thread against the blackness of space, and he did not doubt that it continued all the way to the geostationary orbit, thirty-six thousand kilometres above the Equator. Such fantasies had been well known in Poole's day: he had never dreamed he would see the reality - and be living in it.

He pointed towards the distant thread reaching up from the eastern horizon.

'That must be another one.'

'Yes - the Asian Tower. We must look exactly the same to them.'

'How many are there?'

'Just four, equally spaced around the Equator. Africa, Asia, America, Pacifica. The last one's almost empty - only a few hundred levels completed. Nothing to see except water...'

Poole was still absorbing this stupendous concept when a disturbing thought occurred to him.

'There were already thousands of satellites, at all sorts of altitudes, in my time. How do you avoid collisions?'

Indra looked slightly embarrassed.

'You know - I never thought about that - it's not my field.' She paused for a moment, clearly searching her memory. Then her face brightened.

'I believe there was a big clean-up operation, centuries ago. There just aren't any satellites, below the stationary orbit.'

That made sense, Poole told himself. They wouldn't be needed - the four gigantic towers could provide all the facilities once provided by thousands of satellites and space-stations.

'And there have never been any accidents - any collisions with spaceships leaving earth, or re-entering the atmosphere?'

Indra looked at him with surprise.

'But they don't, any more,' She pointed to the ceiling. 'All the spaceports are where they should be - up there, on the outer ring. I believe it's four hundred years since the last rocket lifted off from the surface of the Earth.'

Poole was still digesting this when a trivial anomaly caught his attention. His training as an astronaut had made him alert to anything out of the ordinary: in space, that might be a matter of life or death.

The Sun was out of view, high overhead, but its rays streaming down through the great window painted a brilliant band of light on the floor underfoot. Cutting across that band at an angle was another, much fainter one, so that the frame of the window threw a double shadow.

Poole had to go almost down on his knees so that he could peer up at the sky. He had thought himself beyond surprise, but the spectacle of two suns left him momentarily speechless.

'What's that?' he gasped, when he had recovered his breath.

'Oh - haven't you been told? That's Lucifer.'

'Earth has another sun?'

'Well, it doesn't give us much heat, but it's put the Moon out of business... Before the Second Mission went there to look for you, that was the planet Jupiter.'

I knew I would have much to learn in this new world, Poole told himself. But just how much, I never dreamed.



5
Education



Poole was both astonished and delighted when the television set was wheeled into the room and positioned at the end of his bed. Delighted because he was suffering from mild information starvation - and astonished because it was a model which had been obsolete even in his own time.

'We've had to promise the Museum we'll give it back,' Matron informed him. 'And I expect you know how to use this,'

As he fondled the remote-control, Poole felt a wave of acute nostalgia sweep over him. As few other artefacts could, it brought back memories of his childhood, and the days when most television sets were too stupid to understand spoken commands.

'Thank you, Matron. What's the best news channel?'

She seemed puzzled by his question, then brightened.

'Oh - I see what you mean. But Professor Anderson thinks you're not quite ready yet. So Archives has put together a collection that will make you feel at home.'

Poole wondered briefly what the storage medium was in this day and age. He could still remember compact disks, and his eccentric old Uncle George had been the proud possessor of a collection of vintage videotapes. But surely that technological contest must have finished centuries ago - in the usual Darwinian way, with the survival of the fittest.

He had to admit that the selection was well done, by someone (Indra?) familiar with the early twenty-first century. There was nothing disturbing - no wars or violence, and very little contemporary business or politics, all of which would now be utterly irrelevant. There were some light comedies, sporting events (how did they know that he had been a keen tennis fan?), classical and pop music, and wildlife documentaries.

And whoever had put this collection together had a sense of humour, or they would not have included episodes from each Star Trek series. As a very small boy, Poole had met both Patrick Stewart and Leonard Nimoy: he wondered what they would have thought if they could have known the destiny of the child who had shyly asked for their autographs.

A depressing thought occurred to him, soon after he had started exploring - much of the time in fast-forward - these relics of the past. He had read somewhere that by the turn of the century - his century! - there were approximately fifty thousand television stations broadcasting simultaneously. If that figure had been maintained and it might well have increased - by now millions of millions of hours of TV programming must have gone on the air. So even the most hardened cynic would admit that there were probably at least a billion hours of worthwhile viewing... and millions that would pass the highest standards of excellence. How to find these few - well, few million - needles in so gigantic a haystack?

The thought was so overwhelming - indeed, so demoralizing - that after a week of increasingly aimless channel-surfing Poole asked for the set to be removed.

Perhaps fortunately, he had less and less time to himself during his waking hours, which were steadily growing longer as his strength came back.

There was no risk of boredom, thanks to the continual parade not only of serious researchers but also inquisitive - and presumably influential - citizens who had managed to filter past the palace guard established by Matron and Professor Anderson. Nevertheless, he was glad when, one day, the television set reappeared, he was beginning to suffer from withdrawal symptoms - and this time, he resolved to be more selective in his viewing.

The venerable antique was accompanied by Indra Wallace, smiling broadly.

'We've found something you must see, Frank. We think it will help you to adjust - anyway, we're sure you'll enjoy it.'

Poole had always found that remark a recipe for guaranteed boredom, and prepared for the worst. But the opening had him instantly hooked, taking him back to his old life as few other things could have done. At once he recognized one of the most famous voices of his age, and remembered that he had seen this very programme before. Could it have been at its first transmission? No, he was only five then: must have been a repeat...

'Atlanta, 2000 December 31.'

'This is CNN International, five minutes from the dawn of the New Millennium, with all its unknown perils and promise...'

'But before we try to explore the future, let's look back a thousand years, and ask ourselves: could any persons living in Ad. 1000 even remotely imagine our world, or understand it, if they were magically transported across the centuries?'

'Almost the whole of the technology we take for granted was invented near the very end of our Millennium - the steam engine, electricity, telephones, radio, television, cinema, aviation, electronics. And, during a single lifetime, nuclear energy and space travel - what would the greatest minds of the past have made of these? How long could an Archimedes or a Leonardo have retained his sanity, if suddenly dumped into our world?'

'It's tempting to think that we would do better, if we were transported a thousand years hence. Surely the fundamental scientific discoveries have already been made, though there will be major improvements in technology, will there be any devices, anything as magical and incomprehensible to us as a pocket calculator or a video camera would have been to Isaac Newton?'

'Perhaps our age is indeed sundered from all those that have gone before. Telecommunications, the ability to record images and sounds once irrevocably lost, the conquest of the air and space - all these have created a civilization beyond the wildest fantasies of the past. And equally important, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin and Einstein have so changed our mode of thinking and our outlook on the universe that we might seem almost a new species to the most brilliant of our predecessors.'

'And will our successors, a thousand years from now, look back on us with the same pity with which we regard our ignorant, superstitious, disease-ridden, short-lived ancestors? We believe that we know the answers to questions that they could not even ask: but what surprises does the Third Millennium hold for us?'

'Well, here it comes -'

A great bell began to toll the strokes of midnight. The last vibration throbbed into silence...

'And that's the way it was - good-bye, wonderful and terrible twentieth century...'

Then the picture broke into a myriad fragments, and a new commentator took over, speaking with the accent which Poole could now easily understand, and which immediately brought him up to the present.

'Now, in the first minutes of the year three thousand and one, we can answer that question from the past...'

'Certainly, the people of 2001 who you were just watching would not feel as utterly overwhelmed in our age as someone from 1001 would have felt in theirs. Many of our technological achievements they would have anticipated; indeed, they would have expected satellite cities, and colonies on the Moon and planets. They might even have been disappointed, because we are not yet immortal, and have sent probes only to the nearest stars...'

Abruptly, Indra switched off the recording.

'See the rest later, Frank: you're getting tired. But I hope it will help you to adjust.'

'Thank you, Indra. I'll have to sleep on it. But it's certainly proved one point.'

'What's that?'

'I should be grateful I'm not a thousand-and-oner, dropped into 2001. That would be too much of a quantum jump: I don't believe anyone could adjust to it. At least I know about electricity, and won't die of fright if a picture starts talking at me.'

I hope, Poole told himself, that confidence is justified. Someone once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Will I meet magic in this new world - and be able to handle it?



6
Braincap



'I'm afraid you'll have to make an agonizing decision,' said Professor Anderson, with a smile that neutralized the exaggerated gravity of his words.

'I can take it, Doctor. Just give it to me straight.'

'Before you can be fitted with your Braincap, you have to be completely bald. So here's your choice. At the rate your hair grows, you'd have to be shaved at least once a month. Or you could have a permanent.'

'How's that done?'

'Laser scalp treatment. Kills the follicles at the root.'

'Hmm... is it reversible?'

'Yes, but that's messy and painful, and takes weeks.'

'Then I'll see how I like being hairless, before committing myself. I can't forget what happened to Samson.'

'Who?'

'Character in a famous old book. His girl-friend cut off his hair while he was sleeping. When he woke up, all his strength had gone.'

'Now I remember - pretty obvious medical symbolism!'

'Still, I wouldn't mind losing my beard. I'd be happy to stop shaving, once and for all.'

'I'll make the arrangements. And what kind of wig would you like?'

Poole laughed.

'I'm not particularly vain - think it would be a nuisance, and probably won't bother. Something else I can decide later.'

That everyone in this era was artificially bald was a surprising fact that Poole had been quite slow to discover; his first revelation had come when both his nurses removed their luxuriant tresses, without the slightest sign of embarrassment, just before several equally bald specialists arrived to give him a series of micro-biological checks. He had never been surrounded by so many hairless people, and his initial guess was that this was the latest step in the medical profession's endless war against germs.

Like many of his guesses, it was completely wrong, and when he discovered the true reason he amused himself by seeing how often he would have been sure, had he not known in advance, that his visitors' hair was not their own. The answer was: seldom with men, never with women; this was obviously the great age of the wig-maker.

Professor Anderson wasted no time: that afternoon the nurses smeared some evil-smelling cream over Poole's head, and when he looked into the mirror an hour later he did not recognize himself. Well, he thought, perhaps a wig would be a good idea, after all...

The Braincap fitting took somewhat longer. First a mould had to be made, which required him to sit motionless for a few minutes until the plaster set. He fully expected to be told that his head was the wrong shape when his nurses - giggling most unprofessionally - had a hard time extricating him. 'Ouch that hurt!' he complained.

Next came the skull-cap itself, a metal helmet that fitted snugly almost down to the ears, and triggered a nostalgic thought - wish my Jewish friends could see me now! After a few minutes, it was so comfortable that he was unaware of its presence.

Now he was ready for the installation - a process which, he realized with something akin to awe, had been the Rite of Passage for almost all the human race for more than half a millennium.

'There's no need to close your eyes,' said the technician, who had been introduced by the pretentious title of 'Brain Engineer' - almost always shortened to 'Brainman' in popular usage. 'When Setup begins, all your inputs will be taken over. Even if your eyes are open, you won't see anything.'

I wonder if everyone feels as nervous as this, Poole asked himself. Is this the last moment I'll be in control of my own mind? Still, I've learned to trust the technology of this age; up to now, it hasn't let me down. Of course, as the old saying goes, there's always a first time...

As he had been promised, he had felt nothing except a gentle tickling as the myriad of nanowires wormed their way through his scalp. All his senses were still perfectly normal; when he scanned his familiar room, everything was exactly where it should be.

The Brainman - wearing his own skull-cap, wired, like Poole's, to a piece of equipment that could easily have been mistaken for a twentieth-century laptop computer - gave him a reassuring smile.

'Ready?' he asked.

There were times when the old cliche´s were the best ones.

'Ready as I'll ever be,' Poole answered.

Slowly, the light faded - or seemed to. A great silence descended, and even the gentle gravity of the Tower relinquished its hold upon him. He was an embryo, floating in a featureless void, though not in complete darkness. He had known such a barely visible, near ultra-violet tenebrosity, on the very edge of night, only once in his life when he had descended further than was altogether wise down the face of a sheer cliff at the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef. Looking down into hundreds of metres of crystalline emptiness, he had felt such a sense of disorientation that he experienced a brief moment of panic, and had almost triggered his buoyancy unit before regaining control. Needless to say, he had never mentioned the incident to the Space Agency physicians...

From a great distance a voice spoke out of the immense void that now seemed to surround him. But it did not reach him through his ears: it sounded softly in the echoing labyrinths of his brain.

'Calibration starting. From time to time you will be asked questions - you can answer mentally, but it may help to vocalize. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' Poole replied, wondering if his lips were indeed moving. There was no way that he could tell.

Something was appearing in the void - a grid of thin lines, like a huge sheet of graph paper. It extended up and down, right and left, to the limits of his vision. He tried to move his head, but the image refused to change.

Numbers started to flicker across the grid, too fast for him to read - but presumably some circuit was recording them. Poole could not help smiling (did his cheeks move?) at the familiarity of it all. This was just like the computer-driven eye examination that any oculist of his age would give a client.

The grid vanished, to be replaced by smooth sheets of colour filling his entire field of view. In a few seconds, they flashed from one end of the spectrum to the other. 'Could have told you that,' Poole muttered silently. 'My colour vision's perfect. Next for hearing, I suppose.'

He was quite correct. A faint, drumming sound accelerated until it became the lowest of audible Cs, then raced up the musical scale until it disappeared beyond the range of human hearing, into bat and dolphin territory.

That was the last of the simple, straightforward tests. He was briefly assailed by scents and flavours, most of them pleasant but some quite the reverse. Then he became, or so it seemed, a puppet on an invisible strig.

He presumed that his neuromuscular control was being tested, and hoped that there were no external manifestations, if there were, he would probably look like someone in the terminal stages of St Vitus's Dance. And for one moment he even had a violent erection, but was unable to give it a reality check before he fell into a dreamless sleep.

Or did he only dream that he slept? He had no idea how much time had elapsed before he awoke. The helmet had already gone, together with the Brainman and his equipment.

'Everything went fine,' beamed Matron. 'It will take a few hours to check that there are no anomalies. If your reading's KO - I mean OK - you'll have your Braincap tomorrow.'

Poole appreciated the efforts of his entourage to learn archaic English, but he could not help wishing that Matron had not made that unfortunate slip-of-the-tongue.

When the time came for the final filling, Poole felt almost like a boy again, about to unwrap some wonderful new toy under the Christmas free.

'You won't have to go through all that setting-up again,' the Brainman assured him. 'Download will start immediately. I'll give you a five-minute demo. Just relax and enjoy.'

Gentle, soothing music washed over him; though it was something very familiar, from his own time, he could not identify it. There was a mist before his eyes, which parted as he walked towards it...

Yes, he was walking! The illusion was utterly convincing; he could feel the impact of his feet on the ground, and now that the music had stopped he could hear a gentle wind blowing through the great trees that appeared to surround him. He recognized them as Californian redwoods, and hoped that they still existed in reality, somewhere on Earth.

He was moving at a brisk pace - too fast for comfort, as if time was slightly accelerated so he could cover as much ground as possible. Yet he was not conscious of any effort; he felt he was a guest in someone else's body. The sensation was enhanced by the fact that he had no control over his movements. When he attempted to stop, or to change direction, nothing happened. He was going along for the ride.

It did not matter; he was enjoying the novel experience - and could appreciate how addictive it could become. The 'dream machines' that many scientists of his own century had anticipated - often with alarm - were now part of everyday life. Poole wondered how Mankind had managed to survive: he had been told that much of it had not. Millions had been brain-burned, and had dropped out of life.

Of course, he would be immune to such temptations! He would use this marvellous tool to learn more about the world of the Fourth Millennium, and to acquire in minutes new skills that would otherwise take years to master. Well - he might, just occasionally, use the Braincap purely for fun...

He had come to the edge of the forest, and was looking out across a wide river. Without hesitation, he walked into it, and felt no alarm as the water rose over his head. It did seem a little strange that he could continue breathing naturally, but he thought it much more remarkable that he could see perfectly in a medium where the unaided human eye could not focus. He could count every scale on the magnificent trout that went swimming past, apparently oblivious to this strange intruder...

Then, a mermaid- Well he had always wanted to meet one, but he had assumed that they were marine creatures. Perhaps they occasionally came upstream - like salmon, to have their babies? She was gone before he could question her, to confirm or deny this revolutionary theory.

The river ended in a translucent wall; he stepped through it on to the face of a desert, beneath a blazing sun. Its heat burned him uncomfortably - yet he was able to look directly into its noonday fury. He could even see, with unnatural clarity, an archipelago of sunspots near one limb. And - this was surely impossible - there was the tenuous glory of the corona, quite invisible except during total eclipse, reaching out like a swan's wings on either side of the Sun.

Everything faded to black: the haunting music returned, and with it the blissful coolness of his familiar room. He opened his eyes (had they ever been closed?) and found an expectant audience waiting for his reaction.

'Wonderful!' he breathed, almost reverently. 'Some of it seemed - well, realer than real!'

Then his engineer's curiosity, never far from the surface, started nagging him.

'Even that short demo must have contained an enormous amount of information. How's it stored?'

'In these tablets - the same your audio-visual system uses, but with much greater capacity.'

The Brainman handed Poole a small square, apparently made of glass, silvered on one surface; it was almost the same size as the computer diskettes of his youth, but twice the thickness. As Poole tilted it back and forth, trying to see into its transparent interior, there were occasional rainbow-hued flashes, but that was all.

He was holding, he realized, the end product of more than a thousand years of electro-optical technology - as well as other technologies unborn in his era. And it was not surprising that, superficially, it resembled closely the devices he had known. There was a convenient shape and size for most of the common objects of everyday life -knives and forks, books, hand-tools, furniture... and removable memories for computers.

'What's its capacity?' he asked. 'In my time, we were up to a terabyte in something this size. I'm sure you've done a lot better.'

'Not as much as you might imagine - there's a limit, of course, set by the structure of matter. By the way, what was a terabyte? Afraid I've forgotten.'

'Shame on you! Kilo, mega, giga, tera... that's ten to the twelfth bytes. Then the petabyte - ten to the fifteenth - that's as far as I ever got.'

'That's about where we start. It's enough to record everything any person can experience during one lifetime.'

It was an astonishing thought, yet it should not have been so surprising. The kilogram of jelly inside the human skull was not much larger than the tablet Poole was holding in his hand, and it could not possibly be as efficient a storage device - it had so many other duties to deal with.

'And that's not all,' the Brainman continued. 'With some data compression, it could store not only the memories - but the actual person.'

'And reproduce them again?'

'Of course; straightforward job of nanoassembly.'

So I'd heard, Poole told himself - but I never really believed it.

Back in his century, it seemed wonderful enough that the entire lifework of a great artist could be stored on a single small disk. And now, something no larger could hold - the artist as well.



7
Debriefing



'I'm delighted,' said Poole, 'to know that the Smithsonian still exists, after all these centuries.'

'You probably wouldn't recognize it,' said the visitor who had introduced himself as Dr Alistair Kim, Director of Astronautics. 'Especially as it's now scattered over the Solar System - the main off-Earth collections are on Mars and the Moon, and many of the exhibits that legally belong to us are still heading for the stars. Some day we'll catch up with them and bring them home. We're particularly anxious to get our hands on Pioneer 10 - the first manmade object to escape from the Solar System.'

'I believe I was on the verge of doing that, when they located me.'

'Lucky for you - and for us. You may be able to throw light on many things we don't know.'

'Frankly, I doubt it - but I'll do my best. I don't remember a thing after that runaway space-pod charged me. Though I still find it hard to believe, I've been told that Hal was responsible.'

'That's true, but it's a complicated story. Everything we've been able to learn is in this recording - about twenty hours, but you can probably Fast most of it.'

'You know, of course, that Dave Bowman went out in the Number 2 Pod to rescue you - but was then locked outside the ship because Hal refused to open the pod-bay doors.'

'Why, for God's sake?'

Dr Kim winced slightly. It was not the first time Poole had noticed such a reaction.

(Must watch my language, he thought. 'God' seems to be a dirty word in this culture - must ask Indra about it.)

'There was a major programming error in Hal's instructions - he'd been given control of aspects of the mission you and Bowman didn't know about, it's all in the recording...

'Anyway, he also cut off the life-support systems to the three hybernauts - the Alpha Crew - and Bowman had to jettison their bodies as well.'

(So Dave and I were the Beta Crew - something else I didn't know...)

'What happened to them?' Poole asked. 'Couldn't they have been rescued, just as I was?'

'I'm afraid not: we've looked into it, of course. Bowman ejected them several hours after he'd taken back control from Hal, so their orbits were slightly different from yours. Just enough for them to burn up in Jupiter - while you skimmed by, and got a gravity boost that would have taken you to the Orion Nebula in a few thousand more years...'

'Doing everything on manual override - really a fantastic performance! - Bowman managed to get Discovery into orbit round Jupiter. And there he encountered what the Second Expedition called Big Brother - an apparent twin of the Tycho Monolith, but hundreds of times larger.'

'And that's where we lost him. He left Discovery in the remaining space-pod, and made a rendezvous with Big Brother. For almost a thousand years, we've been haunted by his last message: "By Deus - it's full of stars!"

(Here we go again! Poole told himself. No way Dave could have said that... Must have been 'My God - it's full of stars!')

'Apparently the pod was drawn into the Monolith by some kind of inertial field, because it - and presumably Bowman - survived an acceleration which should have crushed them instantly. And that was the last information anyone had, for almost ten years, until the joint US-Russian Leonov mission...'

'Which made a rendezvous with the abandoned Discovery so that Dr Chandra could go aboard and reactivate Hal. Yes, I know that.'

Dr Kim looked slightly embarrassed.

'Sorry - I wasn't sure how much you'd been told already Anyway, that's when even stranger things started to happen.'

'Apparently the arrival of Leonov triggered something inside Big Brother. If we did not have these recordings, no one would have believed what happened. Let me show you... here's Dr Heywood Floyd keeping the midnight watch aboard Discovery, after power had been restored. Of course you'll recognize everything.'

(Indeed I do: and how strange to see the long-dead Heywood Floyd, sitting in my old seat with Hal's unblinking red eye surveying everything in sight. And even stranger to think that Hal and I have both shared the same experience of resurrection from the dead...)

A message was coining up on one of the monitors, and Floyd answered lazily, 'OK, Hal. Who is calling?'

NO IDENTIFICATION.

Floyd looked slightly annoyed.

'Very well. Please give me the message.'

IT IS DANGEROUS TO REMAIN HERE. YOU MUST LEAVE WITHIN FIFTEEN DAYS.

'That is absolutely impossible. Our launch window does not open until twenty-six days from now. We do not have sufficient propellant for an earlier departure.'

I AM AWARE OF THESE FACTS. NEVERTHELESS YOU MUST LEAVE WITHIN FWFEEN DAYS.

'I cannot take this warning seriously unless I know its origin... who is speaking to me?'

I WAS DAVID BOWMAN. IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU BELIEVE ME. LOOK BEHIND YOU.

Heywood Floyd slowly turned in his swivel chair, away from the banked panels and switches of the computer display, towards the Velcro-covered catwalk behind.

('Watch this carefully,' said Dr Kim.

As if I needed telling, thought Poole...)

The zero-gravity environment of Discovery's observation deck was much dustier than he remembered it: he guessed that the air-filtration plant had not yet been brought on line. The parallel rays of the distant yet still brilliant Sun, streaming through the great windows, lit up a myriad of dancing motes in a classic display of Brownian movement.

And now something strange was happening to these particles of dust; some force seemed to be marshalling them, herding them away from a central point yet bringing others towards it, until they all met on the surface of a hollow sphere. That sphere, about a metre across, hovered in the air for a moment like a giant soap bubble. Then it elongated into an ellipsoid, whose surface began to pucker, to form folds and indentations. Poole was not really surprised when it started to assume the shape of a man.

He had seen such figures, blown out of glass, in museums and science exibitions. But this dusty phantom did not even approximate anatomical accuracy; it was like a crude clay figurine, or one of the primitive works of art found in the recesses of Stone Age caves. Only the head was fashioned with care; and the face, beyond all shadow of doubt, was that of Commander David Bowman.

HELLO, DR FLOYD. NOW DO YOU BELIEVE ME?

The lips of the figure never moved: Poole realized that the voice - yes, certainly Bowman's voice - was actually coming from the speaker grille.

THIS IS VERY DIFFICULT FOR ME, AND I HAVE LIITLE TIME. I HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO GIVE THIS WARNING. YOU HAVE ONLY FIFFEEN DAYS.

'Why - and what are you?'

But the ghostly figure was already fading, its grainy envelope beginning to dissolve back into the constituent particles of dust.

GOOD-BYE, DOCTOR FLOYD. WE CAN HAVE NO FURTHER CONTACT. BUT THERE MAY BE ONE MORE MESSAGE, IF ALL GOES WELL.

As the image dissolved, Poole could not help smiling at that old Space Age cliche´. 'If all goes well' - how many times he had heard that phrase intoned before a mission!

The phantom vanished: only the motes of dancing dust were left, resuming their random patterns in the air. With an effort of will, Poole came back to the present.

'Well, Commander - what do you think of that?' asked Kim.

Poole was still shaken, and it was several seconds before he could reply.

'The face and the voice were Bowman's - I'd swear to that. But what was it?'

'That's what we're still arguing about. Call it a hologram, a projection - of course, there are plenty of ways it could be faked if anyone wanted to - but not in those circumstances! And then, of course, there's what happened next.'

'Lucifer?'

'Yes. Thanks to that warning, the Leonov had just sufficient time to get away before Jupiter detonated.'

'So whatever it was, the Bowman-thing was friendly and trying to help.'

'Presumably. And it may have been responsible for that "one more message" we did receive - it was sent only minutes before the detonation. Another waning.'

Dr Kim brought the screen to life once more. It showed plain text: ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE. The same message was repeated about a hundred times, then the letters became garbled.

'And we never have tried to land there?' asked Poole.

'Only once, by accident, thirty-six years later - when the USSS Galaxy was hijacked and forced down there, and her sister ship Universe had to go to the rescue. It's all here -with what little our robot monitors have told us about the Europans.'

'I'm anxious to see them.'

'They're amphibious, and come in all shapes and sizes. As soon as Lucifer started melting the ice that covered theirt whole world, they began to emerge from the sea. Since then, they've developed at a speed that seems biologically impossible.'

'From what I remember about Europa, weren't there lots of cracks in the ice? Perhaps they'd already started crawling through and having a look round.'

'That's a widely accepted theory. But there's another, much more speculative, one. The Monolith may have been involved, in ways we don't yet understand. What triggered that line of thought was the discovery of TMA ZERO, right here on Earth, almost five hundred years after your time. I suppose you've been told about that?'

'Only vaguely - there's been so much to catch up with! I did think the name was ridiculous - since it wasn't a magnetic anomaly - and it was in Africa, not Tycho!'

'You're quite right, of course, but we're stuck with the name. And the more we learn about the Monoliths, the more the puzzle deepens. Especially as they're still the only real evidence for advanced technology beyond the Earth.'

'That's surprised me. I should have thought that by this lime we'd have picked up radio signals from somewhere. The astronomers started searching when I was a boy!'

'Well, there is one hint - and it's so terrifying that we don't like to talk about it. Have you heard of Nova Scorpio?'

'I don't believe so.'

'Stars go nova all the time, of course - and this wasn't a particularly impressive one. But before it blew up, N Scorp was known to have several planets.'

'Inhabited?'

'Absolutely no way of telling; radio searches had picked up nothing. And here's the nightmare...'

'Luckily, the automatic Nova Patrol caught the event at the very beginning. And it didn't start at the star. One of the planets detonated first, and then triggered its sun.'

'My Gah... sorry, go on.'

'You see the point. It's impossible for a planet to go nova - except in one way.'

'I once read a sick joke in a science-fiction novel - "supernovae are industrial accidents".'

'It wasn't a supernova - but that may be no joke. The most widely accepted theory is that someone else had been tapping vacuum energy - and had lost control.'

'Or it could have been a war.'

'Just as bad; we'll probably never know. But as our own civilization depends on the same energy source, you can understand why N Scorp sometimes gives us nightmares.'

'And we only had melting nuclear reactors to worry about!'

'Not any longer, thank Deus. But I really wanted to tell you more about TMA ZERO's discovery, because it marked a turning point in human history.'

'Finding TMA ONE on the Moon was a big enough shock, but five hundred years later there was a worse one. And it was much nearer home - in every sense of the word. Down there in Africa.'



8

[H2O]

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