Even apart from that embarrassing accident, the return to Earth had not been easy.
The first shock had come soon after revival, when Dr Rudenko had woken him from his long sleep.
Walter Curnow was hovering beside her, and even in his semi-conscious state he could tell that something
was wrong; their pleasure at seeing him awake was a little too exaggerated, and failed to conceal a sense
of strain. Not until he was fully recovered did they let him know that Dr Chandra was no longer with
them.
Somewhere beyond Mars, so imperceptibly that the monitors could not pinpoint the time, he had
simply ceased to live. His body, set adrift in space, had continued unchecked along Leonov's orbit, and
had long since been consumed by the fires of the Sun.
The cause of death was totally unknown, but Max Brailovsky expressed a view that, highly unscientific
though it was, not even Surgeon-Commander Katerina Rudenko attempted to refute.
'He couldn't live without Hal.'
Walter Curnow, of all people, added another thought.
'I wonder how Hal will take it?' he asked. 'Something out there must be monitoring all our broadcasts.
Sooner or later, he'll know.'
And now Curnow was gone too - so were they all except little Zenia. He had not seen her for twenty
years, but her card arrived punctually every Christmas. The last one was still pinned above his desk; it
showed a troika laden with gifts speeding through the snows of a Russian winter, watched by extremely
hungry-looking wolves.
Forty-five years! Sometimes it seemed only yesterday that Leonov had returned to Earth orbit, and the
applause of all mankind. Yet it had been a curiously subdued applause, respectful but lacking genuine
enthusiasm. The mission to Jupiter had been altogether too much of a success; it had opened a Pandora's
box, the full contents of which had yet to be disclosed.
When the black monolith known as Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One had been excavated on the Moon,
only a handful of men knew of its existence. Not until after Discovery's ill-fated voyage to Jupiter did the
world learn that, four million years ago, another intelligence had passed through the Solar System, and
left its calling card. The news was a revelation - but not a surprise; something of the sort had been
expected for decades.
And it had all happened long before the human race existed. Although some mysterious accident had
befallen Discovery out round Jupiter, there was no real evidence that it involved anything more than a
shipboard malfunction. Although the philosophical consequences of TMA 1 were profound, for all practical purposes mankind
was still alone in the Universe.
Now that was no longer true. Only light minutes away - a mere stone's throw in the Cosmos - was an
intelligence that could create a star, and, for its own inscrutable purpose, destroy a planet a thousand
times the size of Earth. Even more ominous was the fact that it had shown awareness of mankind,
through the last message that Discovery had beamed back from the moons of Jupiter just before the fiery
birth of Lucifer had destroyed it:
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
The brilliant new star, which had banished night except for the few months in each year when it was
passing behind the Sun, had brought both hope and fear to mankind. Fear - because the Unknown,
especially when it appeared linked with omnipotence - could not fail to rouse such primeval emotions.
Hope - because of the transformation it had wrought in global politics.
It had often been said that the only thing that could unite mankind was a threat from space. Whether
Lucifer was a threat, no-one knew; but it was certainly a challenge. And that, as it turned out, was
enough.
Heywood Floyd had watched the geopolitical changes from his vantage point on Pasteur, almost as if
he was an alien observer himself. At first, he had no intention of remaining in space, once his recovery
was complete. To the baffled annoyance of his doctors, that took an altogether unreasonable length of
time.
Looking back from the tranquillity of later years, Floyd knew exactly why his bones refused to mend.
He simply did not wish to return to Earth: there was nothing for him, down on the dazzling blue and
white globe that filled his sky. There were times when he could well understand how Chandra might have
lost the will to live.
It was pure chance that he had not been with his first wife on that flight to Europe. Now Marion was
part of another life, that might have belonged to someone else, and their two daughters were amiable
strangers with families of their own.
But he had lost Caroline through his own actions, even though he had no real choice in the matter. She
had never understood (had he really done so himself?) why he had left the beautiful home they had made
together, to exile himself for years in the cold wastes far from the Sun.
Though he had known, even before the mission was half over, that Caroline would not wait, he had
hoped desperately that Chris would forgive him. But even this consolation had been denied; his son had
been without a father for too long. By the time that Floyd returned, he had found another, in the man
who had taken his place in Caroline's life. The estrangement was complete; he thought he would never
get over it, but of course he did - after a fashion.
His body had cunningly conspired with his unconscious desires. When at last he returned to Earth, after
his protracted convalescence in Pasteur, he promptly developed such alarming symptoms - including
something suspiciously like bone necrosis - that he was immediately rushed back to orbit. And there he
had stayed, apart from a few excursions to the Moon, completely adapted to living in the zero to onesixth
gravity regime of the slowly rotating space hospital.
He was not a recluse - far from it. Even while he was convalescing, he was dictating reports, giving
evidence to endless commissions, being interviewed by media representatives. He was a famous man,
and enjoyed the experience - while it lasted. It helped to compensate for his inner wounds.
The first complete decade - 2020 to 2030 - seemed to have passed so swiftly that he now found it
difficult to focus upon it. There were the usual crises, scandals, crimes, catastrophes - notably the Great
Californian Earthquake, whose aftermath he had watched with fascinated horror through the station's
monitor screens. Under their greatest magnification, in favourable conditions, they could show individual
human beings; but from his God's-eye-view it had been impossible to identify with the scurrying dots
fleeing from the burning cities. Only the ground cameras revealed the true horror.
During that decade, though the results would not be apparent until later, the political tectonic plates
were moving as inexorably as the geological ones - yet in the opposite sense, as if time was running
backwards. For in the beginning, the Earth had possessed the single supercontinent of Pangaea, which
over the aeons had split asunder. So had the human species, into innumerable tribes and nations; now it
was merging together, as the old linguistic and cultural divisions began to blur.
Although Lucifer had accelerated the process, it had begun decades earlier, when the coming of the jet
age had triggered an explosion of global tourism. At almost the same time - it was not, of course, a
coincidence - satellites and fibre optics had revolutionized communications. With the historic abolition of
long-distance charges on 31 December 2000, every telephone call became a local one, and the human
race greeted the new millennium by transforming itself into one huge, gossiping family.
Like most families, it was not always a peaceful one, but its disputes no longer threatened the entire
planet. The second - and last - nuclear war saw the use in combat of no more bombs than the first:
precisely two. And though the kilotonnage was greater, the casualties were far fewer, as both were used
against sparsely populated oil installations. At that point the Big Three of China, the US and the USSR
moved with commendable speed and wisdom, sealing off the battle zone until the surviving combatants
had come to their senses.
By the decade of 2020-30, a major war between the Great Powers was as unthinkable as one between
Canada and the United States had been in the century before. This was not due to any vast improvement
in human nature, or indeed to any single factor except the normal preference of life over death. Much of
the machinery of peace was not even consciously planned: before the politicians realized what had
happened, they discovered that it was in place, and functioning well...
No statesman, no idealist of any persuasion invented the 'Peace Hostage' movement; the very name
was not coined until well after someone had noticed that at any given moment there were a hundred
thousand Russian tourists in the United States - and half a million Americans in the Soviet Union, most of
them engaged in their traditional pastime of complaining about the plumbing. And perhaps even more to
the point, both groups contained a disproportionately large number of highly non-expendable individuals -
the sons and daughters of wealth, privilege and political power.
And even if one wished, it was no longer possible to plan a large-scale war. The Age of Transparency
had dawned in the 1990s, when enterprising news media had started to launch photographic satellites
with resolutions comparable to those that the military had possessed for three decades. The Pentagon and
the Kremlin were furious; but they were no match for Reuters, Associated Press and the unsleeping,
twenty-four-hours-a-day cameras of the Orbital News Service.
By 2060, even though the world had not been completely disarmed, it had been effectively pacified,
and the fifty remaining nuclear weapons were all under international control. There was surprisingly little
opposition when that popular monarch, Edward VIII, was elected the first Planetary President, only a
dozen states dissenting. They ranged in size and importance from the still stubbornly neutral Swiss
(whose restaurants and hotels nevertheless greeted the new bureaucracy with open arms) to the even
more fanatically independent Malvinians, who now resisted all attempts by the exasperated British and
Argentines to foist them off on each other.
The dismantling of the vast and wholly parasitic armaments industry had given an unprecedented -
sometimes, indeed, unhealthy - boost to the world economy. No longer were vital raw materials and
brilliant engineering talents swallowed up in a virtual black hole - or, even worse, turned to destruction. Instead, they could be
used to repair the ravages and neglect of centuries, by rebuilding the world.
And building new ones. Now indeed mankind had found the 'moral equivalent of war', and a challenge
that could absorb the surplus energies of the race - for as many millennia ahead as anyone dared to
dream.
