Arthur C Clarke - The Sentinel

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THE SENTINEL

Arthur C. Clarke

1951 Avon Periodicals Inc.

The next time you see the full moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let

your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a

small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain,

one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium-the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles

in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never

been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and

equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were

also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our

surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisiurn is very flat. There are none of

the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of

any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking

us wherever we wished to go.

I was geologist-or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic in charge of. the group exploring the

southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills

of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years

before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating

down the flanks of those stupendous cliff s, retreating into the empty heart of the Moon. Over the

land which we were crossing, the tideless ocean had once been half a mile deep, and now the only

trace of moisture was the hoarfrost one could sometimes find in caves which the searing sunlight

never penetrated.

We had begun our journey early in the slow lunar dawn, and still had almost a week of Earth-time

before nightfall. Half a dozen times a day we would leave our vehicle and go outside in the

spacesuits to hunt for interesting minerals, or to place markers for the guidance of future travelers.

It was an uneventful routine. There is nothing hazardous or even particularly exciting about lunar

exploration. We could live comfortably for a month in our pressurized tractors, and if we ran into

trouble we could always radio for help and sit tight until one of the spaceships came to our rescue.

I said just now that there was nothing exciting about lunar exploration, but of course that isn’t true.

One could never grow tired of those incredible mountains, so much more rugged than the gentle

hills of Earth. We never knew, as we rounded the capes and promontories of that vanished sea,

what new splendors would be revealed to us. The whole southern curve of the Mare Crisiurn is a

vast delta where a score of rivers once found their way into the ocean, fed perhaps by the torrential

rains that must have lashed the mountains in the brief volcanic age when the Moon was young.

Each of these ancient valleys was an invitation, challenging us to climb into the unknown uplands

beyond. But we had a hundred miles still to cover, and could only look longingly at the heights

which others must scale.

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Arthur C Clarke - The Sentinel

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