The city streets were empty and traffic stilled, in a way not seen since England fought Germany in the World Cup Final. Once NASA boot-prints scarred lunar dust, would the memory of these shadow-pioneers fade? Clarke, still alive to see how close his guesses would turn out, did not seem unduly concerned he was about to be out of a job. Clarke’s Heywood Floyd on a Pan-Am lunar shuttle. Wells’ First Men in the Moon in a diving bell coated with anti-gravity paint, Hergé‘s Tintin in a red-and-white chequered rocket and Arthur C. Robots had been there, and Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 had orbited the moon, but-until today-manned expeditions to the moon had been taken only in fancy: Lucian on a waterspout, Francis Godwin’s Gonsales in a chariot pulled by geese, Cyrano de Bergerac on a firework, Baron Münchausen on a silver hatchet, Edgar Allan Poe’s Hans Pfaal in a balloon, Jules Verne’s Baltimore Gun Club in a capsule fired from a giant cannon, H.G. Richard had heard Took-Flemyng’s argument before. ‘It’s curtains for Dan Dare and Jet Morgan,’ said the Major. After a turn and a half around the world, the S-IVB third stage engine would fire, setting Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins on course for the moon. Richard had opted to nip out to Crank’s in Seven Dials for a salad.Ī BBC commentator, in tones of muted enthusiasm usually heard during orchestra tuning of a mid-season proms concert, informed viewers that Apollo 11 would enter Earth orbit in twelve minutes. Like the Major, he’d recently sat in silence to a heavy meal in the club’s famously unpleasant restaurant room. The ostentatious 22-inch screen showed a Saturn V rocket, rising over the coastal swamps of Florida on a column of white smoke. It would never be tuned to ITV, lest the sanctum be violated by the Devil’s adverts. Several OMs had resigned over the appearance of ‘this infernal contraption’, and a vote of the full membership was necessary each time it was switched on. It’s wireless with lantern slides.’Ī newly-purchased colour television stood in the hearth of the Informal Room, replacing the grate removed after the 1956 Clean Air Act abolished London’s poisonous yellow fog. ‘So this is the teleovision, eh?’ muttered the Bishop of Brichester. They radiated unwelcome and disapproval with such wattage the casual visitor-not that there were many-was dissuaded from wondering whether the musty, cavernous building in Pall Mall was home to Great Britain’s most secret intelligence agency. For over a century, OMs had filled capacious armchairs, as much a part of the decor as the cushions under their bottoms and the pipe-fumes above their heads. If they noticed the comings and goings of Extraordinary Members, they never mentioned it. OMs were selected for lack of perspicacity and absence of curiosity. He was an Ordinary Member, one of a necessary rump of blimps who camouflaged the Diogenes Club as a refuge for the hidebound and unsociable. The Major quaffed from a brandy balloon the size of a honeydew melon. London: about half past one in the afternoon Cape Kennedy: oh-nine-thirty-two hundred hours. Richard Jeperson glanced away from the television set. ‘Tell you one thing,’ said Major Gilbert Took-Flemyng, ‘this will bloody kill science fiction stone dead.’
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |