October 30, 2025 • 27 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:37):
Mind Way.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to a half hour of mind Way short stories
from the world Expectacle Fiction. This is Michael Anson. The
Mindweb story Tonight comes from the book Great Science Fiction
(01:15):
by Scientists, edited by Gruff Conklin and published by Collier Books.
This is Summertime on Icarus by Arthur C.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Clark.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
When Colin Gerard opened his eyes after the crash, he
could not imagine where he was. He seemed to be
lying trapped in some kind of vehicle on the summit
of a rounded hill which sloped steeply away in all directions.
Its surface was seared and blackened. He was nearer to
the Sun than any man had ever been. His damage
(02:05):
space pot, a miniature.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Or space ship only ten feet long, was lying.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
On no hill but the steeply curving surface of a
world only two miles in diameter. That brilliant star sinking
swiftly in the west twas the light of Prometheus, the
ship that had brought him here across so many millions
of miles of space. She was hanging up there among
the stars, wondering why his pot had not returned, like
(02:30):
a homing pigeon to its roost in a few minutes.
She would have passed from sight, dropping below the horizon
in her perpetual game of hide and seek with the Sun.
That was a game that he had lost. He was
still on the night side of the asteroid, in the
cool safety of its shadow, but the short night would
be ending soon. The four hour day of Vicarus was
(02:52):
spinning him swiftly towards that dreadful dawn, when a sun
thirty times larger than ever shone upon Earth would last
these rocks with fire. Chivard knew all too well. By
everything around him was burned and blackened. Icarus was still
a weak from perihelium, but the temperature at noon had
(03:13):
already reached a thousand degrees fahrenheit. Though this was no
time for humor, he suddenly remembered Captain mc clellan's description
of Icarus the hottest piece of real estate in the
Solar system, and the truth of that jest had been
proved only a few days before by one of those
simple and unscientific experiments that are so much more impressive
(03:36):
than any number of graphs and instrument readings. Just before daybreak,
someone had propped a piece of wood when the summit
of one of the tiny hills Chivard had been watching
from the safety of the night's side when the first
rays of the rising sun.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Had touched the hilltop.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
When his eyes had adjusted to the sudden detonation of light,
he saw that the wood was already beginning to blacken
and char Had there been an act atmosphere here, the
stick would have burst into flames.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Such was dawn upon Icarus.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yet it had not been impossibly hot at the time
of their first landing. When they were passing the orbit
of Venus five weeks ago, Prometheus had overtaken the asteroid
as it was beginning its plunge towards the Sun, had
matched speed with a little world and had touched down
upon its surface as lightly as a snowflake. A snowflake
on Icarus, that was quite a thought. And then the
(04:31):
scientists had fanned out across the fifteen square miles of
jagged nickel iron that covered most of the asteroids surface,
setting up their instruments and checkpoints, collecting samples and making
endless observations. There had been plenty of time to set
up the instruments and make the surveys before Prometheus had
to take off and seek.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
The permanent shade of night.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Even then, it was still possible for men in the
tiny self propelled space pods to work on the night's
side for an hour or so, as long as they
were not overtaken by the advancing line of sunrise. That
had seemed a simple enough condition to meet on a
world where dawn marched forward at only a mile an hour,
but Gerard had failed to meet it, and the penalty
(05:15):
was death. He was still not quite sure what had happened.
The task had taken little more than twenty minutes, and
then the radio seismograph was on the air again, monitoring
the tiny quakes and shutters that racked Icarus and ever
increasing numbers as the asteroid approached the sun. It was
small satisfaction to know that he had now made a
(05:37):
king sized addition to the record. When he had checked
the signals, he had carefully replaced the sunscreens around the instrument.
It was hard to believe that two flimsy sheets of
polished metal foil no thicker than paper could turn aside
a flood of radiation that would melt lead or tin
(05:57):
within seconds. But the first screen reflected more than ninety
percent of the sunlight falling upon its mirror. Surface, and
the second turned back most of the rest so that
only a harmless fraction of the heat passed through.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
He had reported completion of the job.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Received an acknowledgment from the ship, and prepared to head
for home. He had aimed the pod with its guy
rose and set the rear jets as strength to and
pressed the firing buttons. There had been a violent explosion
somewhere in the vicinity of his feet, and he had
soared away from Michrius, but not towards the ship. Something
(06:35):
was horribly wrong. He was tossed to one side of
the vehicle, unable to reach the controls. Only one of
the jets was firing, and he was spin wheeling across
the sky, spinning faster and faster under the off balanced drive.
He tried to find the cutoff, but the spin had
completely disorientated him. When he was able to locate the controls,
(06:57):
his first reaction made matters worse. He pushed the trottle
over to full, like a nervous driver's stepping on the
accelerator instead of the brake. It took only a second
to correct the mistake and kill the jet, but by
then he was spinning so rapidly that the stars were
wheeling around in circles. Everything had happened so quickly that
there was no time for fear, no time even to
(07:20):
call the ship and report what was happening. He took
his hands away from the controls. To touch them now
would only make matters worse. It would take two or
three minutes of cautious jockeying to unravel his spin, and
from the flickering glimpses of the approaching rocks, it was
obvious that he did not have as many seconds. Gerard
(07:41):
remembered a piece of advice at the front of the
spaceman's manual. When you don't know what to do, do nothing.
He was still doing it when Nicaras fell upon him
and the stars went out. It had been a miracle
that the pod was unbroken, that he was not breathing
space thirty minutes from now he might be glad to
(08:04):
do so. And the capsule's heat installation began to fail.
There had been some damage, of course. The rearview mirrors
just outside the dome of transparent plastic and closed his head,
were both snapped off, so that he could no longer
see what lay behind him without twisting his neck This
was a trivial mishap. Far more serious was the fact
(08:24):
that his radio antennae had been torn away by the impact.
He could not call the ship, and the ship could
not call him. All that came over the radio was
a faint crackling, probably produced inside the set itself. He
was absolutely alone, cut off from the rest of the
human race. It was a desperate situation, but there was
(08:49):
one faint ray of hope. He was, not, after all,
completely helpless, even if he could not use the POD's rockets.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
He gasped that.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
The starboard motor had blown black and ruptured a fuel line,
something the designer said was impossible. Even so, he was
still able to move. He had his arms, but which
way should he crawl? He had lost all sense of location,
for though he had taken off from Mount Everest, he
might now be thousands of.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Feet away from it.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
There were no recognizable landmarks in this tiny world. The
rapidly sinking star of Prometheus was his best guide, and
if he could keep the ship in view, he would
be safe. It would be only a matter of minutes
before his absence was noted, if indeed it had not
been discovered already yet. Without radio it might take his
(09:40):
colleagues a long time to find him. Small, though Icarus was,
it's fifteen square miles of fantastically rugged no man's land
could provide an effective hiding place for a ten foot cylinder.
It might take an hour to locate him, which meant
that he would have to keep ahead of the murderous sunrise.
(10:01):
He slipped his fingers into the controls that worked his
mechanical limbs outside the pod. In the hostile vacuum that
surrounded him, His substitute arms.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Came to life when he reached.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Down, thrust against the iron surface of the asteroid, and
levered the pod from the ground. Gerard flexed than the
capsule jerked forward like some weird two legged insect, first.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
The right arm, then the left, then the right.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
It was less difficult than he had feared, and for
the first time he felt his confidence return. Though his
mechanical arms had been designed for light precision work, a
very little pull was needed to set the capsule moving
in this weightless environment. The gravity of Vicarus was ten
thousand times weaker than Earth's. Gerard and his space pod
(10:53):
weighed less than an ounce. Here, and once he had
set himself in motion. He floated forward with an effortless
like ease. Yet that very effortlessness had its dangers.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
He had traveled several.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Hundred yards and was rapidly overhauling the sinking star of
the Prometheus when over confidence betrayed him. Strange quickly the
mind could switch from one extreme to the other. A
few minutes ago, he had been stealing himself to face death.
Now he was wondering if he'd be late for dinner.
Perhaps the novelty of the movement, so unlike anything he
(11:30):
had ever attempted before, was responsible for the catastrophe, or
perhaps he was still suffering from the after effects of
the crash. Like all astronauts, Cherrard had learned to orientate
himself in space and had grown accustomed to living and
working when the earthly conceptions of up and down were meaningless.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
On a world such.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
As Icarus, it was necessary to pretend that there was
a real, honest to goodness planet beneath your feet, that
when you moved, you were traveling over a horizontal plane.
This innocent self deception failed, you were heading to a
space vertigo. The attack came without warning, as it usually did,
(12:17):
quite suddenly. Icarus no longer seemed to be beneath him,
the stars no longer above. The universe tilted through a
right angle, and.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
He was moving straight up a.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Vertical cliff, like a mountaineer scaling the rock face. And
though Gerard's reason told him that this was pure illusion,
all his senses screamed that it was true. In a moment,
gravity must drag him off the sheer wall, and he
would drop down, down, down, mile upon endless mile until
(12:48):
he smashed into oblivion. Worse was to come. The false
vertical was still swinging like a compass needle that had
lost the pole. Now he was on the underside of
an immense rocky roof, like a fly clinging to a ceiling.
In another moment, it would have become a wall again,
(13:09):
but this time he would be moving straight down it
instead of up. He had lost all control over the pod,
and the clammy sweat that had begun to do his
brow warned him that he would soon lose control over
his body. There was only one thing to do. He
clenched his eyes tightly shut, squeezed as far back as
possible into the tiny, closed world of the capsule, and
(13:32):
pretended with all his might. But the universe outside did
not exist. He did not even allow the slow, gentle
crunch of his second crash to interfere with his self hypnosis.
When he again dared to look outside, he found that
the pod had come to rest against a large bull
Der's mechanical arms had broken the force of the impact,
(13:55):
but at a cost that was more than he could
afford to pay. Though the capsule Woo was virtually weightless here,
it still possessed its normal five hundred pounds of inertia,
and it had been moving at perhaps four miles an hour.
The momentum had been too much for the metal arms
to absorb. One had snapped and the other was hopelessly bent.
(14:16):
When he saw what had happened, Shirerard's first reaction was
not despair but anger. He had been so certain of
success when the pot had started its glide across the
barren face of Icarus, and now this all through a
moment of physical weakness. But space made no allowance for
human frailties or emotions, and a man who did not
(14:40):
accept that fact had no right to be here. At least,
he had gained precious time in his pursuit of the ship.
He had put an extra ten minutes, if not more,
between himself and dawn. Whether that ten minutes would merely
prolong the agony, or whether it would give his ship
(15:00):
mates the extra time they needed to find him, he
would soon know where were they. Surely they had started
the search by now. He strained his eyes towards the
brilliant star of the ship, hoping to pick out the
fainter lights of space pods moving towards him. But nothing
else was visible against the slowly turning vault of heaven.
(15:23):
He had better look to his own resources, slender though
they were. Only a few minutes were left before the
Prometheus under trailing lights would sink below the edge of
the asteroid and leave him in darkness. It was true
that the darkness would be all too brief, But before
it fell upon him, he might find some shelter against
the coming day. This rock into which he had crashed,
(15:46):
for example, Yes, it would give some shade until the
sun was half way up the sky. Nothing could protect
him if it passed right overhead. But it was just
possible that he might be in latitude where the sun
never rose far above the horizon. At this season of
Icarus's four hundred nine day year. Then he might survive
(16:08):
the brief period of daylight. That was his only hope
if the rescuers did not find him before dawn. Reaching
up above the horizon behind him, spreading across the stars
like a milky mist, was a faint and ghostly cone
of phosphorescence.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
It was the herald of the Sun.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
The beautiful, pearly phantom of the Corona, visible on Earth
only during the rare moments of the total eclipse. When
the corona was rising, the Sun would not be far
behind desmite. This little lamb fury Chiarad made good use
of the warning. Now he could judge with some accuracy
(16:52):
the exact point where the sun would rise. Crawling slowly
and clumsily on the broken stumps of his metal arms,
he dragged the capsule round to the side of the
boulder that should give the greatest shade. He had barely
reached it when the sun was upon him like a
beast of prey, and his tiny world exploded into light.
(17:16):
He raised the dark filters inside his helmet, one thickness
after another until he could endure the glare. Except where
the broad shadow the boulder lay across the asteroid. It
was like looking into a furnace. Every detail of the
desolate land around him was revealed by that merciless light.
There were no grays, only blinding whites and impenetrable blacks.
(17:40):
All the shadowed cracks and hollows were pools of ink,
while the higher ground already seemed to be on fire.
Yet it was only a minute after dawn. Now Shierrard
could understand how the scorching heat of a billion summers
had turned Icarus into a cosmic sinne, baking the rocks
(18:01):
until the last traces of gas.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Had bubbled out of them.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Why should men travel, he asked himself, bitterly, across the
Gulf of Stars, at such extreme risk and expense, merely
to land on a spinning slag heap, for the same
reason he knew that they had once struggled to reach
Everest in the poles in the far places of Earth,
(18:26):
for the excitement of the body that was adventure, and
the more enduring excitement of the mind that was discovery.
It was an answer that gave him little consolation now
that he was about to be grilled like a joint
on the turning spit of Icarus. Already he could feel
the first breath of heat upon his face. The boulder
(18:48):
against which he was lying gave him protection from direct sunlight,
but the glare reflected back at him from those blazing
rocks only a few yards away, was striking through the
transparent plastic of the dome.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
It would grow swiftly more.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Intense as the sun rose higher. He had even less
time than he had thought, and with the knowledge came
a kind of numb resignation.
Speaker 4 (19:11):
That was beyond fear. He would wait, if he.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Could, until the sunrise engulfed him in the capsule's cooling
that gave up the unequal struggle. Then he would crack
the pod and let the air gush out into the
vacuum of space. Nothing to do but to sit and think.
In the minutes that were left with him before his
pool of shadow contracted, he did not try to direct
(19:36):
his thoughts, but let them wander where they willed. How
strange that he should be dying now, because back in
the nineteen forties, years before he was born, a man
at Palomar had spotted a streak of light on a
photographic plate and had named it so appropriately after the
boy who flew too near the sun One day one
(20:01):
day they would build a monument here for him, on
this blistered plane. What would they inscribe upon it? Ere
died Colin Girard, astronics engineer in the cause of science,
And that would be funny, for he had never understood
half the things that the scientists were.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Trying to do.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Even at this moment, as the incandescent line of sunlight
came closer, this was a thought that stirred his mind.
What Chirard was lying upon was the core of a world,
perhaps a world that had once known life. In a strange,
irrational way, it comforted him to know that his might
(20:41):
not be the only ghost to Haunticarus until the end
of time. The helmet was missing up, and that could
mean only that the cooling unit was about to fail.
It had done its work well even now, though the
rocks only a few yards away must be glowing a
sullen red, the heat inside the capsule was not unm durable.
When failure came, it would be sudden and catastrophic. He
(21:06):
reached for the red lever that would rob the sun
of its prey, but before he pulled it, he would
look for the last time upon her. Cautiously, he lowered
the dark fields, adjusting them so that they still cut
out the glare from the rocks, but no longer blocked
his view of space.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
The stars were.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Faint, now dimmed by the advancing globe of the corona,
and just visible over the boulder whose shield would soon
fail him, was a stub of crimson flame, a crooked
finger of fire jutting from the edge of the sun itself.
He had only seconds left. There was the Earth, there
(21:47):
was the moon. Goodbye to them, both, to his friends
and loved ones, on each children. While he was looking
at the sky, the sunlight had begun to lick the
base of the capsule, and he felt the first touch
of fire. In a reflex as automatic as it was useless,
he drew up his legs, trying to escape the advancing
(22:07):
wave of heat.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
What was that?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
A brilliant flash of light, infinitely brighter than any of
the stars, had suddenly exploded overhead. Miles above him, A
huge mirror was sailing across the sky, reflecting the sunlight
as it slowly turned through space. Such a thing was
utterly impossible. He was beginning to suffer from hallucinations, and
(22:32):
it was time he took his leave. Already the sweat
was pouring from his body, and in a few seconds
the capsule would be a furnace. He waited no longer,
but pulled on the emergency, released with all his waning strength,
bracing himself at the same moment to face the end.
Speaker 4 (22:51):
Nothing happened. The lever would not move.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
He tugged again and again before he realized that it
was hopelessly jammed. There was no easy way out for him,
no merciful death. As the air gushed from his lungs.
It was then, as the true terror of his situation
struck home to him, that his nerve finally broke, and
he began to scream like a trapped animal. When he
(23:19):
heard Captain mc clellan's voice speaking to him, thin but clear,
he knew that it must be another hallucination. Yet some
last remnant of discipline and self control checked his screaming.
He clenched his teeth and listened to that familiar commanding voice.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Sure, hold on, man, we got to fix on you.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
But keep shouting.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Here I am, here, I am, he tried, here I am,
But hurry, for God's sake, I'm burning deep down in
what was left of his rational mind, he realized what
had happened. Some feeble the boast of a signal was
leaking through the broken stubs of his antennae, and the
searchers had heard his screams as he was hearing their voices,
(24:08):
and that meant they must be very close indeed, and
the knowledge gave him sudden strength. He stared through the
streaming plastic of the dome, looking once more for that
impossible mirror in the sky. There it was again, and
now he realized that the baffling perspectives of space had
tricked his senses. The mirror was not miles away, nor
(24:34):
was it huge. It was almost on top of him,
and it was moving fast. He was still shouting when
it slid across the face of the rising sun, and
its blessed shadow fell upon him like a cool wind
that had blown out of the heart of winter over
leagues of snow and ice. Now that it was so close,
(24:56):
he recognized it at once. It was merely alarmed bridge
metal foil radiation screen, no doubt hastily snatched from one
of the instrument sites in the safety of its shadow.
His friends had been searching for him. A heavy duty
to man capsule was hovering overhead, holding the glittering shield
(25:18):
and one set of arms, and reaching for him for
the other. Even through the misty dome and the haze
of heat that still sapped his senses, he recognized Captain
McClellan's anxious face looking down at him from the other pod.
So this was what birth was like, For truly he
(25:40):
had been reborn. He was too exhausted for gratitude that
would come later. But as he rose from the burning rocks,
his eyes sought and found the bright star of Earth.
Here I am, he said, silently, Here I am.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
I'm coming back.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Back to enjoy and cherish all the beauties of the
world he had thought was lost forever. No, not all
of them. He would never enjoy summer again. You have
(26:55):
heard Summertime on Icarus, a story by Arthur C.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Clark, which appears.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
In the book Great Science Fiction by Scientists, edited by
Gruff Conklin and published by Collier. This is Michael Hansen
technical operation for this broadcast by Bob cham. Mindwebs is
a production of w h A Radio in Madison, a
service of the University of Wisconsin Extension
Mind Way.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to a half hour of mind Way short stories
from the world Expectacle Fiction. This is Michael Anson. The
Mindweb story Tonight comes from the book Great Science Fiction
(01:15):
by Scientists, edited by Gruff Conklin and published by Collier Books.
This is Summertime on Icarus by Arthur C.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Clark.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
When Colin Gerard opened his eyes after the crash, he
could not imagine where he was. He seemed to be
lying trapped in some kind of vehicle on the summit
of a rounded hill which sloped steeply away in all directions.
Its surface was seared and blackened. He was nearer to
the Sun than any man had ever been. His damage
(02:05):
space pot, a miniature.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Or space ship only ten feet long, was lying.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
On no hill but the steeply curving surface of a
world only two miles in diameter. That brilliant star sinking
swiftly in the west twas the light of Prometheus, the
ship that had brought him here across so many millions
of miles of space. She was hanging up there among
the stars, wondering why his pot had not returned, like
(02:30):
a homing pigeon to its roost in a few minutes.
She would have passed from sight, dropping below the horizon
in her perpetual game of hide and seek with the Sun.
That was a game that he had lost. He was
still on the night side of the asteroid, in the
cool safety of its shadow, but the short night would
be ending soon. The four hour day of Vicarus was
(02:52):
spinning him swiftly towards that dreadful dawn, when a sun
thirty times larger than ever shone upon Earth would last
these rocks with fire. Chivard knew all too well. By
everything around him was burned and blackened. Icarus was still
a weak from perihelium, but the temperature at noon had
(03:13):
already reached a thousand degrees fahrenheit. Though this was no
time for humor, he suddenly remembered Captain mc clellan's description
of Icarus the hottest piece of real estate in the
Solar system, and the truth of that jest had been
proved only a few days before by one of those
simple and unscientific experiments that are so much more impressive
(03:36):
than any number of graphs and instrument readings. Just before daybreak,
someone had propped a piece of wood when the summit
of one of the tiny hills Chivard had been watching
from the safety of the night's side when the first
rays of the rising sun.
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Had touched the hilltop.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
When his eyes had adjusted to the sudden detonation of light,
he saw that the wood was already beginning to blacken
and char Had there been an act atmosphere here, the
stick would have burst into flames.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Such was dawn upon Icarus.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
Yet it had not been impossibly hot at the time
of their first landing. When they were passing the orbit
of Venus five weeks ago, Prometheus had overtaken the asteroid
as it was beginning its plunge towards the Sun, had
matched speed with a little world and had touched down
upon its surface as lightly as a snowflake. A snowflake
on Icarus, that was quite a thought. And then the
(04:31):
scientists had fanned out across the fifteen square miles of
jagged nickel iron that covered most of the asteroids surface,
setting up their instruments and checkpoints, collecting samples and making
endless observations. There had been plenty of time to set
up the instruments and make the surveys before Prometheus had
to take off and seek.
Speaker 4 (04:50):
The permanent shade of night.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Even then, it was still possible for men in the
tiny self propelled space pods to work on the night's
side for an hour or so, as long as they
were not overtaken by the advancing line of sunrise. That
had seemed a simple enough condition to meet on a
world where dawn marched forward at only a mile an hour,
but Gerard had failed to meet it, and the penalty
(05:15):
was death. He was still not quite sure what had happened.
The task had taken little more than twenty minutes, and
then the radio seismograph was on the air again, monitoring
the tiny quakes and shutters that racked Icarus and ever
increasing numbers as the asteroid approached the sun. It was
small satisfaction to know that he had now made a
(05:37):
king sized addition to the record. When he had checked
the signals, he had carefully replaced the sunscreens around the instrument.
It was hard to believe that two flimsy sheets of
polished metal foil no thicker than paper could turn aside
a flood of radiation that would melt lead or tin
(05:57):
within seconds. But the first screen reflected more than ninety
percent of the sunlight falling upon its mirror. Surface, and
the second turned back most of the rest so that
only a harmless fraction of the heat passed through.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
He had reported completion of the job.
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Received an acknowledgment from the ship, and prepared to head
for home. He had aimed the pod with its guy
rose and set the rear jets as strength to and
pressed the firing buttons. There had been a violent explosion
somewhere in the vicinity of his feet, and he had
soared away from Michrius, but not towards the ship. Something
(06:35):
was horribly wrong. He was tossed to one side of
the vehicle, unable to reach the controls. Only one of
the jets was firing, and he was spin wheeling across
the sky, spinning faster and faster under the off balanced drive.
He tried to find the cutoff, but the spin had
completely disorientated him. When he was able to locate the controls,
(06:57):
his first reaction made matters worse. He pushed the trottle
over to full, like a nervous driver's stepping on the
accelerator instead of the brake. It took only a second
to correct the mistake and kill the jet, but by
then he was spinning so rapidly that the stars were
wheeling around in circles. Everything had happened so quickly that
there was no time for fear, no time even to
(07:20):
call the ship and report what was happening. He took
his hands away from the controls. To touch them now
would only make matters worse. It would take two or
three minutes of cautious jockeying to unravel his spin, and
from the flickering glimpses of the approaching rocks, it was
obvious that he did not have as many seconds. Gerard
(07:41):
remembered a piece of advice at the front of the
spaceman's manual. When you don't know what to do, do nothing.
He was still doing it when Nicaras fell upon him
and the stars went out. It had been a miracle
that the pod was unbroken, that he was not breathing
space thirty minutes from now he might be glad to
(08:04):
do so. And the capsule's heat installation began to fail.
There had been some damage, of course. The rearview mirrors
just outside the dome of transparent plastic and closed his head,
were both snapped off, so that he could no longer
see what lay behind him without twisting his neck This
was a trivial mishap. Far more serious was the fact
(08:24):
that his radio antennae had been torn away by the impact.
He could not call the ship, and the ship could
not call him. All that came over the radio was
a faint crackling, probably produced inside the set itself. He
was absolutely alone, cut off from the rest of the
human race. It was a desperate situation, but there was
(08:49):
one faint ray of hope. He was, not, after all,
completely helpless, even if he could not use the POD's rockets.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
He gasped that.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
The starboard motor had blown black and ruptured a fuel line,
something the designer said was impossible. Even so, he was
still able to move. He had his arms, but which
way should he crawl? He had lost all sense of location,
for though he had taken off from Mount Everest, he
might now be thousands of.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Feet away from it.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
There were no recognizable landmarks in this tiny world. The
rapidly sinking star of Prometheus was his best guide, and
if he could keep the ship in view, he would
be safe. It would be only a matter of minutes
before his absence was noted, if indeed it had not
been discovered already yet. Without radio it might take his
(09:40):
colleagues a long time to find him. Small, though Icarus was,
it's fifteen square miles of fantastically rugged no man's land
could provide an effective hiding place for a ten foot cylinder.
It might take an hour to locate him, which meant
that he would have to keep ahead of the murderous sunrise.
(10:01):
He slipped his fingers into the controls that worked his
mechanical limbs outside the pod. In the hostile vacuum that
surrounded him, His substitute arms.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
Came to life when he reached.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Down, thrust against the iron surface of the asteroid, and
levered the pod from the ground. Gerard flexed than the
capsule jerked forward like some weird two legged insect, first.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
The right arm, then the left, then the right.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
It was less difficult than he had feared, and for
the first time he felt his confidence return. Though his
mechanical arms had been designed for light precision work, a
very little pull was needed to set the capsule moving
in this weightless environment. The gravity of Vicarus was ten
thousand times weaker than Earth's. Gerard and his space pod
(10:53):
weighed less than an ounce. Here, and once he had
set himself in motion. He floated forward with an effortless
like ease. Yet that very effortlessness had its dangers.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
He had traveled several.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Hundred yards and was rapidly overhauling the sinking star of
the Prometheus when over confidence betrayed him. Strange quickly the
mind could switch from one extreme to the other. A
few minutes ago, he had been stealing himself to face death.
Now he was wondering if he'd be late for dinner.
Perhaps the novelty of the movement, so unlike anything he
(11:30):
had ever attempted before, was responsible for the catastrophe, or
perhaps he was still suffering from the after effects of
the crash. Like all astronauts, Cherrard had learned to orientate
himself in space and had grown accustomed to living and
working when the earthly conceptions of up and down were meaningless.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
On a world such.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
As Icarus, it was necessary to pretend that there was
a real, honest to goodness planet beneath your feet, that
when you moved, you were traveling over a horizontal plane.
This innocent self deception failed, you were heading to a
space vertigo. The attack came without warning, as it usually did,
(12:17):
quite suddenly. Icarus no longer seemed to be beneath him,
the stars no longer above. The universe tilted through a
right angle, and.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
He was moving straight up a.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
Vertical cliff, like a mountaineer scaling the rock face. And
though Gerard's reason told him that this was pure illusion,
all his senses screamed that it was true. In a moment,
gravity must drag him off the sheer wall, and he
would drop down, down, down, mile upon endless mile until
(12:48):
he smashed into oblivion. Worse was to come. The false
vertical was still swinging like a compass needle that had
lost the pole. Now he was on the underside of
an immense rocky roof, like a fly clinging to a ceiling.
In another moment, it would have become a wall again,
(13:09):
but this time he would be moving straight down it
instead of up. He had lost all control over the pod,
and the clammy sweat that had begun to do his
brow warned him that he would soon lose control over
his body. There was only one thing to do. He
clenched his eyes tightly shut, squeezed as far back as
possible into the tiny, closed world of the capsule, and
(13:32):
pretended with all his might. But the universe outside did
not exist. He did not even allow the slow, gentle
crunch of his second crash to interfere with his self hypnosis.
When he again dared to look outside, he found that
the pod had come to rest against a large bull
Der's mechanical arms had broken the force of the impact,
(13:55):
but at a cost that was more than he could
afford to pay. Though the capsule Woo was virtually weightless here,
it still possessed its normal five hundred pounds of inertia,
and it had been moving at perhaps four miles an hour.
The momentum had been too much for the metal arms
to absorb. One had snapped and the other was hopelessly bent.
(14:16):
When he saw what had happened, Shirerard's first reaction was
not despair but anger. He had been so certain of
success when the pot had started its glide across the
barren face of Icarus, and now this all through a
moment of physical weakness. But space made no allowance for
human frailties or emotions, and a man who did not
(14:40):
accept that fact had no right to be here. At least,
he had gained precious time in his pursuit of the ship.
He had put an extra ten minutes, if not more,
between himself and dawn. Whether that ten minutes would merely
prolong the agony, or whether it would give his ship
(15:00):
mates the extra time they needed to find him, he
would soon know where were they. Surely they had started
the search by now. He strained his eyes towards the
brilliant star of the ship, hoping to pick out the
fainter lights of space pods moving towards him. But nothing
else was visible against the slowly turning vault of heaven.
(15:23):
He had better look to his own resources, slender though
they were. Only a few minutes were left before the
Prometheus under trailing lights would sink below the edge of
the asteroid and leave him in darkness. It was true
that the darkness would be all too brief, But before
it fell upon him, he might find some shelter against
the coming day. This rock into which he had crashed,
(15:46):
for example, Yes, it would give some shade until the
sun was half way up the sky. Nothing could protect
him if it passed right overhead. But it was just
possible that he might be in latitude where the sun
never rose far above the horizon. At this season of
Icarus's four hundred nine day year. Then he might survive
(16:08):
the brief period of daylight. That was his only hope
if the rescuers did not find him before dawn. Reaching
up above the horizon behind him, spreading across the stars
like a milky mist, was a faint and ghostly cone
of phosphorescence.
Speaker 4 (16:27):
It was the herald of the Sun.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
The beautiful, pearly phantom of the Corona, visible on Earth
only during the rare moments of the total eclipse. When
the corona was rising, the Sun would not be far
behind desmite. This little lamb fury Chiarad made good use
of the warning. Now he could judge with some accuracy
(16:52):
the exact point where the sun would rise. Crawling slowly
and clumsily on the broken stumps of his metal arms,
he dragged the capsule round to the side of the
boulder that should give the greatest shade. He had barely
reached it when the sun was upon him like a
beast of prey, and his tiny world exploded into light.
(17:16):
He raised the dark filters inside his helmet, one thickness
after another until he could endure the glare. Except where
the broad shadow the boulder lay across the asteroid. It
was like looking into a furnace. Every detail of the
desolate land around him was revealed by that merciless light.
There were no grays, only blinding whites and impenetrable blacks.
(17:40):
All the shadowed cracks and hollows were pools of ink,
while the higher ground already seemed to be on fire.
Yet it was only a minute after dawn. Now Shierrard
could understand how the scorching heat of a billion summers
had turned Icarus into a cosmic sinne, baking the rocks
(18:01):
until the last traces of gas.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Had bubbled out of them.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Why should men travel, he asked himself, bitterly, across the
Gulf of Stars, at such extreme risk and expense, merely
to land on a spinning slag heap, for the same
reason he knew that they had once struggled to reach
Everest in the poles in the far places of Earth,
(18:26):
for the excitement of the body that was adventure, and
the more enduring excitement of the mind that was discovery.
It was an answer that gave him little consolation now
that he was about to be grilled like a joint
on the turning spit of Icarus. Already he could feel
the first breath of heat upon his face. The boulder
(18:48):
against which he was lying gave him protection from direct sunlight,
but the glare reflected back at him from those blazing
rocks only a few yards away, was striking through the
transparent plastic of the dome.
Speaker 4 (19:00):
It would grow swiftly more.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Intense as the sun rose higher. He had even less
time than he had thought, and with the knowledge came
a kind of numb resignation.
Speaker 4 (19:11):
That was beyond fear. He would wait, if he.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
Could, until the sunrise engulfed him in the capsule's cooling
that gave up the unequal struggle. Then he would crack
the pod and let the air gush out into the
vacuum of space. Nothing to do but to sit and think.
In the minutes that were left with him before his
pool of shadow contracted, he did not try to direct
(19:36):
his thoughts, but let them wander where they willed. How
strange that he should be dying now, because back in
the nineteen forties, years before he was born, a man
at Palomar had spotted a streak of light on a
photographic plate and had named it so appropriately after the
boy who flew too near the sun One day one
(20:01):
day they would build a monument here for him, on
this blistered plane. What would they inscribe upon it? Ere
died Colin Girard, astronics engineer in the cause of science,
And that would be funny, for he had never understood
half the things that the scientists were.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
Trying to do.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Even at this moment, as the incandescent line of sunlight
came closer, this was a thought that stirred his mind.
What Chirard was lying upon was the core of a world,
perhaps a world that had once known life. In a strange,
irrational way, it comforted him to know that his might
(20:41):
not be the only ghost to Haunticarus until the end
of time. The helmet was missing up, and that could
mean only that the cooling unit was about to fail.
It had done its work well even now, though the
rocks only a few yards away must be glowing a
sullen red, the heat inside the capsule was not unm durable.
When failure came, it would be sudden and catastrophic. He
(21:06):
reached for the red lever that would rob the sun
of its prey, but before he pulled it, he would
look for the last time upon her. Cautiously, he lowered
the dark fields, adjusting them so that they still cut
out the glare from the rocks, but no longer blocked
his view of space.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
The stars were.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
Faint, now dimmed by the advancing globe of the corona,
and just visible over the boulder whose shield would soon
fail him, was a stub of crimson flame, a crooked
finger of fire jutting from the edge of the sun itself.
He had only seconds left. There was the Earth, there
(21:47):
was the moon. Goodbye to them, both, to his friends
and loved ones, on each children. While he was looking
at the sky, the sunlight had begun to lick the
base of the capsule, and he felt the first touch
of fire. In a reflex as automatic as it was useless,
he drew up his legs, trying to escape the advancing
(22:07):
wave of heat.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
What was that?
Speaker 2 (22:11):
A brilliant flash of light, infinitely brighter than any of
the stars, had suddenly exploded overhead. Miles above him, A
huge mirror was sailing across the sky, reflecting the sunlight
as it slowly turned through space. Such a thing was
utterly impossible. He was beginning to suffer from hallucinations, and
(22:32):
it was time he took his leave. Already the sweat
was pouring from his body, and in a few seconds
the capsule would be a furnace. He waited no longer,
but pulled on the emergency, released with all his waning strength,
bracing himself at the same moment to face the end.
Speaker 4 (22:51):
Nothing happened. The lever would not move.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
He tugged again and again before he realized that it
was hopelessly jammed. There was no easy way out for him,
no merciful death. As the air gushed from his lungs.
It was then, as the true terror of his situation
struck home to him, that his nerve finally broke, and
he began to scream like a trapped animal. When he
(23:19):
heard Captain mc clellan's voice speaking to him, thin but clear,
he knew that it must be another hallucination. Yet some
last remnant of discipline and self control checked his screaming.
He clenched his teeth and listened to that familiar commanding voice.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Sure, hold on, man, we got to fix on you.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
But keep shouting.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
Here I am, here, I am, he tried, here I am,
But hurry, for God's sake, I'm burning deep down in
what was left of his rational mind, he realized what
had happened. Some feeble the boast of a signal was
leaking through the broken stubs of his antennae, and the
searchers had heard his screams as he was hearing their voices,
(24:08):
and that meant they must be very close indeed, and
the knowledge gave him sudden strength. He stared through the
streaming plastic of the dome, looking once more for that
impossible mirror in the sky. There it was again, and
now he realized that the baffling perspectives of space had
tricked his senses. The mirror was not miles away, nor
(24:34):
was it huge. It was almost on top of him,
and it was moving fast. He was still shouting when
it slid across the face of the rising sun, and
its blessed shadow fell upon him like a cool wind
that had blown out of the heart of winter over
leagues of snow and ice. Now that it was so close,
(24:56):
he recognized it at once. It was merely alarmed bridge
metal foil radiation screen, no doubt hastily snatched from one
of the instrument sites in the safety of its shadow.
His friends had been searching for him. A heavy duty
to man capsule was hovering overhead, holding the glittering shield
(25:18):
and one set of arms, and reaching for him for
the other. Even through the misty dome and the haze
of heat that still sapped his senses, he recognized Captain
McClellan's anxious face looking down at him from the other pod.
So this was what birth was like, For truly he
(25:40):
had been reborn. He was too exhausted for gratitude that
would come later. But as he rose from the burning rocks,
his eyes sought and found the bright star of Earth.
Here I am, he said, silently, Here I am.
Speaker 4 (25:57):
I'm coming back.
Speaker 2 (26:01):
Back to enjoy and cherish all the beauties of the
world he had thought was lost forever. No, not all
of them. He would never enjoy summer again. You have
(26:55):
heard Summertime on Icarus, a story by Arthur C.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
Clark, which appears.
Speaker 2 (27:01):
In the book Great Science Fiction by Scientists, edited by
Gruff Conklin and published by Collier. This is Michael Hansen
technical operation for this broadcast by Bob cham. Mindwebs is
a production of w h A Radio in Madison, a
service of the University of Wisconsin Extension
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