21. History Lesson
Of all the old cities, it was generally agreed that Paris and Washington offered the best combination of beauty, culture, history—and convenience. Unlike such largely random aggregations as London and Rome, which had defied millennia of planning, they had been adapted fairly easily to automatic transportation. Could he have risen from his tomb in Arlington, the luckless Pierre Charles L’Enfant would have been proud indeed to have discovered how well he had laid the ground for a technology centuries in his future.
Though an official car was available whenever he wished, Duncan preferred to be as independent as possible. Coming from an aggressively egalitarian society, he never felt quite happy when he was afforded special privileges—except, of course, those he had earned himself. Now that his sprained ankle was no longer paining him he had no excuse for using personal transport, and one could never know a city until one had explored it on foot.
Like any ordinary tourist—and Washington expected the incredible total of five million before the end of July—Duncan rode the glideways and autojitneys, gaping at the famous buildings and remembering the great men who had lived and worked here for half a thousand years. In the five-kilometer-long rectangle from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol, and from the Washington Monument to the White House, no changes had been permitted for more than a century. To ride the shuttle from Constitution Avenue and back along Independence, on the south side of the Mall, was to take a journey through time.
And time was the problem, for Duncan could spare only an hour or two a day for sightseeing. His planned schedule had already been wrecked by a factor that he had refused to take seriously, despite numerous warnings. Instead of his usual six, he needed no fewer than ten hours of sleep every day. This was yet another side effect of the increased gravity, and there was nothing he could do about it; his body stubbornly insisted on the additional time, to overcome the extra wear and tear. Eventually, he knew, he would make a partial adaptation, but he could hardly hope to manage with less than eight hours. It was maddening to have come all this way, to one of the most fascinating places on Earth, and to be compelled to waste more than forty percent of his life in unconsciousness.
As with most off-worlders, his first target had been the National Museum of Astronautics on the Mall, because it was here that his own history had begun, that day in July 1969. He had walked past the flimsy and improbable hardware of the early Space Age, and had taken his seat with several hundred other visitors in the Apollo Rotunda just before the beginning of the half-hourly show.
There was nothing he had not seen many times before, yet the old drama still gripped him. Here were the faces of the first men to ride these crazy contraptions into space, and the sound of their actual voices—sometimes emotionless, sometimes full of excitement—as they spoke to their colleagues on the receding Earth. Now the air shook with the crackling roar of a Saturn launch, magically re-created exactly as it had taken place on that bright Florida morning, three hundred and seven years ago—and still, in many ways, the most impressive spectacle ever staged by man.
The Moon drew closer—not the busy world that Duncan knew, but the virgin Moon of the twentieth century. Hard to imagine what it must have meant to the peoples of that time, to whom the Earth was not only the center of the Universe, but—even to the most sophisticated—still the whole of creation...
Now Man’s first contact with another world was barely minutes ahead. It seemed to Duncan that he was floating in space, only meters away from the spidery Lunar Module, bristling with antennas and wrapped in multicolored metal foil. The simulation was so perfect that he had an involuntary urge to hold his breath, and found himself clutching the handrail, seeking reassurance that he was still on Earth.
“Two minutes, twenty seconds, everything looking good. We show altitude about 47,000 feet...” said Houston to the waiting world of 1969, and to the centuries to come. And then, cutting across the voice of Mission Control, making a montage of conflicting accents, was a speaker whom for a moment Duncan could not identify, though he knew the voice...
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Even back in 1969, that was already a voice from the grave; the President who had launched Apollo in that speech to Congress had never lived to see the achievement of his dream.
“We’re now in the approach phase, everything looking good. Altitude 5,200 feet.”
And once again that voice, silenced six years earlier in Dallas:
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people...”
“Roger. Go for landing. 3,000 feet. We’re go. Hang tight. We’re go. 2,000 feet. 2,000 feet...”
“And why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal...? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? WE CHOOSE TO GO TO THE MOON!”
“200 feet, 4½ down, 5½ down, 160, 6½ down, 5½ down, 9 forward, 120 feet, 100 feet, 3½ down, 9 forward, 75 feet, thing still looking good...”
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept, one that we are unwilling to postpone, and one that we intend to win!”
“Forward, forward 40 feet, down 2½, kicking up some dust, 30 feet, 2½ down, faint shadow, 4 forward, 4 forward, drifting to the right a little... Contact light. O.K. engine stopped, descent engine command override off... Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”
The music rose to a crescendo. There before his eyes, on the dusty Lunar plain, history had lived again. And presently he saw the clumsy, spacesuited figures climb down the ladder, cautiously test the alien soil, and utter the famous words:
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
As always, Duncan listened for that missing “a” before the word “man,” and as always, he was unable to detect it. A whole book had been written about that odd slip of the tongue, using as its starting point Neil Armstrong’s slightly exasperated “That’s what I intended to say, and that’s what I thought I said.”
All this, of course, was simulation—utterly convincing, and apparently life-sized by the magic of holography—but actually contrived in some studio by patient technicians, two centuries after the events themselves. There was Eagle, glittering in the fierce sunlight, with the Stars and Stripes frozen motionless beside it, just as it must have appeared early in the Lunar morning of that first day. Then the music became quiet, mysterious... something was about to happen. Even though he knew what to expect, Duncan felt his skin crawling in the ancient, involuntary reflex which Man had inherited from his hirsute ancestors.
The image faded, dissolved into another—similar, yet different. In a fraction of a second, three centuries had dropped away.
They were still on the Moon, viewing the Sea of Tranquility from exactly the same vantage point. But the direction of the light had changed, for the sun was now low and the long shadows threw into relief all the myriads of footprints on the trampled ground. And there stood all that was left of Eagle—the slightly peeled and blistered descent stage, standing on its four outstretched legs like some abandoned robot.
He was seeing Tranquility Base as it was at this instant—or, to be precise, a second and a quarter ago, when the video signals left the Moon. Again, the illusion was perfect; Duncan felt that he could walk out into that shining silence and feel the warm metal beneath his hands. Or he could reach down into the dust and lift up the flag, to end the old debate that he reerupted in the Centennial Year. Should the Stars and Stripes be left where the blast of the takeoff had thrown it, or should it be erected again? Don’t tamper with history, said some. We’re only restoring it, said others...