Childhood’s End

by Clarke Arthur

The ring was expanding as it climbed. It was higher than the mountain now, and its nearer arc was sweeping swiftly towards him. Surely, thought Jan, it must be a vortex of some kind — a smoke-ring already many kilometres across. But it showed none of the rotation he expected, and it seemed to grow no less solid as its size increased. Its shadow rushed past long before the ring itself had swept majestically overhead, still rising into space. He watched until it had dwindled to a thin thread of blue, hard for the eye to focus upon in the surrounding redness of the sky. When it vanished at last, it must already have been many thousands of kilometres across. And it was still growing.

He looked back at the mountain. It was golden now, and devoid of all markings. Perhaps it was imagination — he could believe anything by this time — but it seemed taller and narrower, and appeared to be spinning like the funnel of a cyclone. Not until then, still numbed and with his powers of reason almost in abeyance, did he remember his camera. He raised it to eye-level, and sighted towards that impossible, mind-shaking enigma.

Vindarten moved swiftly into his line of vision. With implacable firmness, the great hands covered the lens turret and forced him to lower the camera. Jan did not attempt to resist: it would have been useless, of course, but he felt a sudden deathly fear of that thing out there at the edge of the world, and wanted no further part of it.

There was nothing else in all his travels that they would not let him photograph, and Vindarten gave no explanations. Instead, he spent much time getting Jan to describe in minute detail what he had witnessed. It was then that Jan realized that Vindarten’s eyes had seen something totally different: and it was then that he guessed, for the first time, that the Overlords had masters, too.

Now he was coming home, and all the wonder, the fear and the mystery were far behind. It was the same ship, he believed, though surely not the same crew. However long their lives, It was hard to believe that the Overlords would willingly cut themselves off from their home for all the decades consumed on an interstellar voyage.

The Relativity time-dilation effect worked both ways, of course. The Overlords would age only four months on the round trip, but when they returned their friends would be eighty years older.

Had he wished, Jan could doubtless have stayed here for the remainder of his life. But Vindarten had warned him that there would be no other ship going to Earth for several years, and had advised him to take this opportunity. Perhaps the Overlords realized that even in this relatively short time, his mind had nearly reached the end of its resources. Or he might merely have become a nuisance, and they could spare no more time for him.

It was of no importance now, for Earth was there ahead. He had seen it thus a hundred times before, but always through the remote, mechanical eye of the television camera. Now at last he himself was out here in space, as the final act of his dream unfolded itself; and Earth spun beneath on its eternal orbit. The great blue-green crescent was in its first quarter: more than half the visible disc was still in darkness. There was little cloud — a few bands scattered along the line of the trade winds. The arctic cap glittered brilliantly, but was far outshone by the dazzling reflection of the sun in the north Pacific.

One might have thought it was a world of water: this hemisphere was almost devoid of land. The only continent visible was Australia, a darker mist in the atmospheric haze along the limb of the planet.

The ship was driving into Earth’s great cone of shadow: the gleaming crescent dwindled, shrank to a burning bow of fire, and winked out of existence. Below was darkness and night.