“Can you be sure of that?”
“No-but it seems probable. Light is the fastest, longest-ranging carrier of information. Any sentient creature would surely take advantage of it. On our planet, eyes have evolved quite independently, over and over again, in completely separate species, and the end results have been almost identical.”
“I agree,” said Whitehead. “Look at the eye of an octopus-it’s uncannily human. Yet we aren’t even remote cousins.”
“But where’s the thing’s nose and mouth?” asked Mrs. Kelly.
“Ah,” said Floyd mischievously, “that was one of the most interesting conclusions of the study. It pointed out the utter absurdity of our present arrangements. Fancy combining gullet and windpipe in one tube and then running that through the narrow flexible column of the neck! It’s a marvel we don’t all choke to death every time we eat or drink, since food and air go down the same way.”
Mrs. Kelly, who had been sipping at a highball, rather hastily put it down on the buffet table behind her.
“The oxygen and food intakes should be quite independent, and in the logical places. Here.”
Floyd sketched in what appeared to be, from their position, two oversized nipples.
“The nostrils,” he explained. “Where you want them- beside the lungs. There would be at least two, well apart for safety.”
“And the mouth?”
“Obviously-at the front door of the stomach. Here.”
The ellipse that Floyd sketched was too big to be a navel, though it was in the right place, and he quickly destroyed any lingering resemblance by insetting it with teeth.
“As a matter of fact,” he added, “I doubt if a really advanced creature would have teeth. We’re rapidly losing ours, and it’s much too primitive to waste energy grinding and tearing tissues when we have machines that will do the job more efficiently.”
At this point, the Vice-President unobtrusively abandoned the canape he had been nibbling with relish.
“No,” continued Floyd remorselessly. “Their food intake would probably be entirely liquid, and their whole digestive apparatus far more efficient and compact than our primitive plumbing.”
“I’m much too terrified to ask,” said Vice-President Kelly, “how they would reproduce. But I’m relieved to see that you’ve given them two arms and legs, just like us.”
“Well, from an engineering viewpoint it is quite hard to make a major improvement here. Too many limbs get in each other’s way; tentacles aren’t much good for precision work, though they might be a useful extra. Even five fingers seems about the optimum number; I suspect that hands will look very much the same throughout the universe even if nothing else does.”
“And I suspect,” said Kaminski, “that the people who designed our friend here failed to think far enough ahead. What’s the purpose of food and oxygen? Why, merely combustion, to produce energy-at a miserable few percent efficiency. This is what our really advanced extraterrestrial will look like. May I?”
He took the pen and pad from Floyd, and rapidly shaded the egg-shaped body until the air and food intakes were no longer visible. Then, at waist level, he sketched in an electric power point-and ran a long cable to a socket a few feet away.
There was general laughter, in which Kaminski did not join, though his eyes twinkled.
“The cyborg-the electromechanical organism. And even he-it is only a stepping stone to the next stage-the purely electronic intelligence, with no flesh and-blood body at all. The robot, if you like-though I prefer to call it the autonomous computer.”
“And what would that look like?” asked the vice-president.
Before Kaminski could answer, Whitehead annexed his sketchpad and started to draw swiftly.
“It could look just like one of our present computers,” he said. “On the other hand-it could be this.”
He handed the pad to Mr. Kelly. It showed a simple, unadorned tetrahedron.
“I see-TMA-l itself.”
“Exactly, sir. There may be no pyramid-builders-there may only be pyramids. They may be our super-intelligences.”
“That would be disappointing,” said the Vice-President. “I don’t know what I expect you to find out on Jupiter, but I hope it’s more exciting than that.”
“l don’t,” interjected Mrs. Kelly. Then she began to laugh.
After a while she pulled herself together, obviously with an effort.
“I’ve just had the most hilarious idea,” she said. “Suppose you’re right, and they send back an ambassador. Can you imagine that welcoming parade down Fifth Avenue- and the President sharing his Cadillac with a large, black pyramid?”
The Vice-President began to grin, and very quickly the grin spread right across his face. He made no comment, but everyone remembered the stories of his occasional disagreements with the Chief Executive.
It was quite obvious that he could imagine that parade; and that, on the whole, he rather liked the idea.
It was a glorious night; there had been rain earlier in the day, and the freshly washed sky was unusually dark. Bowman had never seen so many stars above Washington; and now, soon after midnight, the brightest of them all was rising in the east.
“Look, Mr. Vice-President,” he said, as they took their final leave. “Our target-eight months from now.”
They all stood in thoughtful silence, wholly forgetting the other guests, not even hearing the soft background of music from the band inside the house. Around them was the sleeping city, dominated by the floodlit bubble of the Capitol dome. And over that ghostly white hemisphere, Jupiter was rising.
MISS0N TO JUPITER
Like everything else in 2001, the good ship Discovery passed through many transformations before it reached its final shape. Obviously, it could not be a conventional chemically propelled vehicle, and there was little doubt that it would have to be nuclear-powered for the mission we envisaged. But how should the power be applied? There were several alternatives-electric thrusters using charged particles (the ion drive); jets of extremely hot gas (plasma) controlled by magnetic fields, or streams of hydrogen expanding through nozzles after they had been heated in a nuclear reactor. All these ideas have been tested on the ground, or in actual spaceflight; all are known to work.
The final decision was made on the basis of aesthetics rather than technology; we wanted Discovery to look strange yet plausible, futuristic but not fantastic. Eventually we settled on the plasma drive, though I must confess that there was a little cheating. Any nuclear-powered vehicle must have large radiating surfaces to get rid of the excess heat generated by the reactors-but this would make Discovery look somewhat odd. Our audiences already had enough to puzzle about; we didn’t want them to spend half the picture wondering why spaceships should have wings. So the radiators came off.
There was also a digression-to the great alarm, as already mentioned, of the Art Department-into a totally different form of propulsion. During the late 1950’s, American scientists had been studying an extraordinary concept (“Project Orion”) which was theoretically capable of lifting payloads of thousands of tons directly into space at high efficiency. It is still the only known method of doing this, but for rather obvious reasons it has not made much progress.
Project Orion is a nuclear-pulse system-a kind of atomic analog of the wartime V-2 or buzz- bomb. Small (kiloton) fission bombs would be exploded, at the rate of one every few seconds, fairly close to a massive pusherplate which would absorb the impulse from the explosion; even in the vacuum of space, the debris from such a mini-bomb can produce quite a kick.
The plate would be attached to the spacecraft by a shock-absorbing system that would smooth out the pulses, so that the intrepid passengers would have a steady, one gravity ride-unless the engine started to knock.
Although Project Orion sounds slightly unbelievable, extensive theoretical studies, and some tests using conventional explosives, showed that it would certainly work- and it would be many times cheaper than any other method of space propulsion. It might even be cheaper, per passenger seat, than conventional air transport-if one was thinking in terms of million-ton vehicles. But the whole project was grounded by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and in any case it will be quite a long time before NASA, or anybody else, is thinking on such a grandiose scale. Still, it is nice to know that the possibility exists, in case the need ever arises for a lunar equivalent of the Berlin Airlift….
When we started work on 2001, some of the Orion documents had just been declassified, and were passed on to us by scientists indignant about the demise of the project. It seemed an exciting idea to show a nuclear-pulse system in action, and a number of design studies were made of it; but after a week or so Stanley decided that putt-putting away from Earth at the rate of twenty atom bombs per minute was just a little too comic. Moreover- recalling the finale of Dr. Strangelove-it might seem to a good many people that he had started to live up to his own title and had really learned to Love the Bomb. So he dropped Orion, and the only trace of it that survives in both movie and novel is the name.