2001: A Space Odyssey

Citation

Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. 1968. New York, NY: Roc, 2000. 9780451457998.

Abstract

“From the savannas of Africa at the dawn of mankind to the rings of Saturn as man ventures to the outer rim of our solar system, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a journey unlike any other.

This allegory about humanity’s exploration of the universe—and the universe’s reaction to humanity—is a hallmark achievement in storytelling that follows the crew of the spacecraft Discovery as they embark on a mission to Saturn. Their vessel is controlled by HAL 9000, an artificially intelligent supercomputer capable of the highest level of cognitive functioning that rivals—and perhaps threatens—the human mind.

Grappling with space exploration, the perils of technology, and the limits of human power, 2001: A Space Odyssey continues to be an enduring classic of cinematic scope.”

Annotations

Foreword to the Millennial Edition

“Stanley and I had a credibility problem; we wanted to create something realistic and plausible, that would not be made obsolete by the events of the next few years” (viii)

“he was fond of telling me, ‘What I want is a theme of mythic grandeur’” (viii)

“even in my own mind, book and movie tend to be confused with each other—and with reality; the various sequels make the situation even more complicated” (ix)

“He wanted to make a movie about man’s place in the universe” (x)

“I had already given Stanley a list of my shorter pieces, and we had decided that one—‘The Sentinel’ —contained a basic idea on which we could build” (xi)

“It has now been anthologized so often that I need only say that it’s a mood piece about the discovery of an alien artifact on the Moon—a kind of burglar alarm, waiting to be set off by mankind’s arrival” (xi)

“2001 is often said to be based on ‘The Sentinel,’ but that is a gross oversimplification; the two bear much the same relationship as an acorn and an oak tree. It needed a lot more material to make the movie, and some of it came from ‘Encounter in the Dawn’ (a.k.a. ‘Expedition to Earth’ and published in the collection of that name) and four other short stories. But most of it was wholly new, and the result of months of brainstorming with Stanley-followed by lonely (well, fairly lonely) hours in Room 1008 of the famous Hotel Chelsea, at 222 West 23rd Street” (xii)

“toward the end novel and screenplay were being written simultaneously, with feedback in both directions” (xii)

“July 11. Joined Stanley to discuss plot development, but spent almost all the time arguing about Cantor’s Transfinite Groups. . . . I decide that he is a latent mathematical genius” (xiii)

“Considering its complex and agonizing gestation, it is not surprising that the novel differs from the movie in several respects” (xv)

“2001 was written in an age which now lies beyond one of the great divides in human history; we are sundered from it forever by the moment when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out onto the Sea of Tranquility” (xvi)

“The novel you are about to read has sometimes been criticized for explaining too much, and thus destroying some of the movie’s mystery” (xviii)

“I am quite unrepentant: the printed text has to give much more detail than can be shown on the screen. And I have compounded the felony by writing 2010 (also made into an excellent movie by Peter Hyams), 2061 and 3001” (xviii)

“No trilogy should have more than four volumes, so I promise that 3001 is indeed the Final Odyssey!” (xviii)

Foreword

“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small, nearby star we call the Sun. And many—perhaps most—of those alien suns have planets circling them. So almost certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-size heaven—or hell. How many of those potential heavens and hells are now inhabited, and by what manner of creatures, we have no way of guessing; the very nearest is a million times farther away than Mars or Venus, those still remote goals of the next generation. But the barriers of distance are crumbling; one day we shall meet our equals, or our masters, among the stars. Men have been slow to face this prospect; some still hope that it may never become reality. Increasing numbers, however, are asking: ‘Why have such meetings not occurred already, since we ourselves are about to venture into space?’ Why not, indeed? Here is one possible answer to that very reasonable question. But please remember: this is only a work of fiction. The truth, as always, will be far stranger” (xix-xx)

Commentator’s Note: This is a long extract but I had to grab the full thing. It captures Clarke’s project so clearly.

Part One: Primeval Night

Chapter 1: The Road to Extinction

“a dim disquiet that was the ancestor of sadness” (4)

“he unmistakably held in his genes the promise of humanity” (4)

“As he looked out upon the hostile world of the Pleistocene, there was already something in his gaze beyond the capacity of any ape. In those dark, deep-set eyes was a dawning awareness—the first intimations of an intelligence that could not possibly fulfill itself for ages yet, and might soon be extinguished forever” (4)

“Of all the creatures who had yet walked on Earth, the man-apes were the first to look steadfastly at the Moon. And though he could not remember it, when he was very young Moon-Watcher would sometimes reach out and try to touch that ghostly face rising above the hills” (9)

“He had never succeeded, and now he was old enough to understand why. For first, of course, he must find a high enough tree to climb” (9)

“And twice there passed slowly across the sky, rising up to the zenith and descending into the east, a dazzling point of light more brilliant than any star” (9)

Commentator’s Note: I initially thought this was the rising and setting of Jupiter (or Saturn?), as a bit of celestial foreshadowing, but folks online think this is most likely the monolith descending, which makes sense (though I find it less interesting, for some reason).

Chapter 2: The New Rock

“They could never guess that their minds were being probed, their bodies mapped, their reactions studied, their potentials evaluated” (14)

“Now there was only a uniform, featureless glow in the great slab, so that it stood like a block of light superimposed on the surrounding darkness. As if waking from a sleep, the man-apes shook their heads, and presently began to move along the trail to their place of shelter. They did not look back, or wonder at the strange light that was guiding them to their homes—and to a future unknown, as yet, even to the stars” (16)

Chapter 3: Academy

“it was now part of the disregarded background of their lives” (17)

“The program it had contrived, however, was now subtly different” (18)

“presently, he began to see visions. They might have been within the crystal block; they might have been wholly inside his mind” (18)

“discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity” (19)

“There were gaps in Moon-Watcher’s life now that he would never remember, when the very atoms of his simple brain were being twisted into new patterns. If he survived, those patterns would become eternal, for his genes would pass them on to future generations” (19)

“It was a slow, tedious business, but the crystal monolith was patient. Neither it, nor its replicas scattered across half the globe, expected to succeed with all the scores of groups involved in the experiment” (19)

“Often he felt nausea, but always he felt hunger; and from time to time his hands clenched unconsciously in the patterns that would determine his new way of life” (21)

“others stood hesitantly around the unrecognizable corpse the future of a world waiting upon their decision” (22)

Chapter 4: The Leopard

“The tools they had been programmed to use were simple enough, yet they could change this world and make the man-apes its masters” (23)

“The stone club, the toothed saw, the horn dagger, the bone scraper—these were the marvelous inventions which the man-apes needed in order to survive” (24)

Commentator’s Note: Le Guin’s carrier bag and the “fibre ages” are, unsurprisingly, missing here.

“Now that they were no longer half-numbed with starvation, they had time both for leisure and for the first rudiments of thought” (25)

“He rightly sensed that his whole world had changed and that he was no longer a powerless victim of the forces around him” (29)

Chapter 5: Encounter in the Dawn

“Like thunder and lightning and clouds and eclipses, the great block of crystal had departed as mysteriously as it had come” (31)

Chapter 6: Ascent of Man

Commentator’s Note: compare BBC’s The Ascent of Man (1973), which is riffing on Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871), as Clarke is doing here. Something in the air in the late 60s/early 70s.

“In the hundred thousand years since the crystals had descended upon Africa, the man-apes had invented nothing. But they had started to change, and had developed skills which no other animal possessed” (34)

“Speech was still a million years away, but the first steps toward it had been taken” (34)

“they had left descendants; they had not merely become extinct-they had been transformed. The toolmakers had been remade by their own tools” (35)

“It was an accelerating, cumulative process; and at its end was Man” (35)

“They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next, so that each age could profit from those that had gone before” (36)

“Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future” (36)

“with the taming of fire, he had laid the foundations of technology and left his animal origins far behind” (36)

“As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful” (36)

“Without those weapons, often though he had used them against himself, Man would never have conquered his world. Into them he had put his heart and soul, and for ages they had served him well. But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time” (37)

Part Two: TMA-1

Chapter 7: Special Flight

“With the need for international cooperation more urgent than ever, there were still as many frontiers as in any earlier age. In a million years, the human race had lost few of its aggressive instincts; along symbolic lines visible only to politicians, the thirty-eight nuclear powers watched one another with belligerent anxiety” (44)

“Every time Floyd took off from Earth, he wondered if it would still be there when the time came to return” (45)

“In the fuel tanks of the two spacecraft, and in the power storage system of the launching track, was pent up the energy of a nuclear bomb. And it would all be used to take him a mere two hundred miles from earth” (45-46)

“The carpet, and the soles of her sandals, were covered with myriads of tiny hooks, so that they clung together like burrs” (50)

Commentator’s Note: Velcro, another tool.

“‘My fiancé is a geologist at Clavius,’ said Miss Simmons, measuring her words carefully, ‘and I haven’t heard from him for over a week’” (50)

Chapter 8: Orbital Rendezvous

“a barrier with two entrances labeled WELCOME TO THE U.S. SECTION and WELCOME TO THE SOVIET SECTION” (55)

“There was a rather pleasant symbolism about the fact that as soon as they had passed through the barriers, in either direction, passengers were free to mix again. The division was purely for administrative purposes” (55)

“Floyd, after checking that the Area Code for the United States was still 81, punched his twelve-digit home number, dropped his plastic all-purpose credit card into the pay slot, and was through in thirty seconds” (55)

Commentator’s Note: This must have been wild in 1968.

Chapter 9: Moon Shuttle

“he would plug his foolscap-size Newspad into the ship’s information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to consult the list on the back of his pad” (63)

Commentator’s Note: A proto-tablet!

“Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications” (64)

Commentator’s Note: Transportation and communication (cf. Mumford and Heisenberg)

“even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the everchanging flow of information from the news satellites” (64)

“The laws of earthly aesthetics did not apply here; this world had been shaped and molded by other than terrestrial forces, operating over eons of time unknown to the young, verdant Earth, with its fleeting Ice Ages, its swiftly rising and falling seas, its mountain ranges dissolving like mists before the dawn. Here was age inconceivable—but not death, for the Moon had never lived—until now” (66)

Chapter 10: Clavius Base

“ages of vulcanism and bombardment from space have scarred its walls and pockmarked its floor” (70)

“Now there were new, strange stirrings on and below its surface, for here Man was establishing his first permanent bridgehead on the Moon” (70)

“a closed system, like a tiny working model of Earth itself, recycling all the chemicals of life” (70)

“not art for art’s sake, but art for the sake of sanity” (72)

“many of the skills that had been used to build this underground empire had been developed during the half century of the Cold War” (73)

“After ten thousand years, Man had at last found something as exciting as war” (73)

“‘Children grow fast in this low gravity. But they don’t age so quickly—they’ll live longer than we do’” (76)

“So here, Floyd told himself, is the first generation of the Spaceborn” (77)

“their tools would not be ax and gun and canoe and wagon; they would be nuclear power plant and plasma drive and hydroponic farm. The time was fast approaching when Earth, like all mothers, must say farewell to her children” (77)

Chapter 11: Anomaly

“a model conference room but for the numerous posters, pinups, notices, and amateur paintings, which indicated that it was also the center of the local cultural life” (79)

“There was a touching defiance about them; on this hostile world, men could still joke about the things they had been forced to leave behind—and which their children would never miss” (79)

“At the very center of the disk was a brilliant white crater ring, from which a striking pattern of rays fanned out” (81)

“it showed magnetic intensity … a series of concentric circles—like a drawing of a knothole in a piece of wood” (82)

“a giant tombstone. Perfectly sharpedged and symmetrical, it was so black it seemed to have swallowed up the light falling upon it; there was no surface detail at all” (83)

“MACRO-CRATER PROVINCE: Extends S from near center of visible face of moon, E of Central Crater Province. Densely pocked with impact craters; many large, and including the largest on moon; in N some craters fractured from impact forming Mare Imbrium. Rough surfaces almost everywhere, except for some crater BOTTOMS. Most surfaces in slopes, mostly 10° to 12°; some crater bottoms nearly level.

LANDING AND MOVEMENT: Landing generally difficult because of rough, sloping surfaces; less difficult in some level crater bottoms. Movement possible almost everywhere but route selection required; less difficult on some level crater bottoms.

CONSTRUCTION: Generally moderately difficult because of slope, and numerous large blocks in loose material; excavation of lava difficult in some crater bottoms.

TYCHO: Post-Maria crater, 54 miles diameter, rim 7,900 feet above surroundings; bottom 12,000 feet deep; has the most prominent ray system on the moon, some rays extending more than 500 miles

(Extract from ‘Engineer Special Study of the Surface of the Moon,’ Office, Chief of Engineers, Department of the Army. U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, 1961.)” (86)

“The first was Earth itself—a blazing beacon hanging above the northern horizon. The light pouring down from the giant half-globe was dozens of times more brilliant than the full moon, and it covered all this land with a cold, blue-green phosphorescence” (86-87)

“The second celestial apparition was a faint, pearly cone of light slanting up the eastern sky. It became brighter and brighter toward the horizon, hinting of great fires just concealed below the edge of the Moon. Here was a pale glory that no man had ever seen from Earth, save during the few moments of a total eclipse. It was the corona, harbinger of the lunar dawn, giving notice that before long the sun would smite this sleeping land” (87)

“the three-million-year-wide gulf that had just opened up before him” (87)

“he was used to considering far longer periods of time-but they had concerned only the movements of stars and the slow cycles of the inanimate universe” (87)

“this appalling span of time” (87)

“this black enigma” (87)

“They were building for eternity” (88)

“There was certainly little agreement anywhere about the nature of TMA-1—or the Tycho Monolith, as some preferred to call it” (89)

“It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand; but perhaps men were barbarians, beside the creatures who had made this thing” (89)

“two alternatives—the planets, and the stars” (91)

“it was hard to see the object clearly; his first impression was of a flat rectangle that might have been cut out of carbon paper; it seemed to have no thickness at all” (93)

“though he was looking at a solid body, it reflected so little light that he could see it only in silhouette” (93)

“sheer disbelief that the dead Moon, of all worlds, could have sprung this fantastic surprise” (93)

“beyond the geometrically perfect shape of the thing, there was little to see. Nowhere were there any marks, or any abatement of its ultimate, ebon blackness. It was the very crystallization of night” (93)

“Pandora’s box, thought Floyd, with a sudden sense of foreboding—waiting to be opened by inquisitive Man” (94)

Chapter 13: The Slow Dawn

“a thin bow of unbearable incandescence had thrust itself above the eastern horizon” (97)

“at the very portals of Earth” (97)

“something had passed this way, had left this unknown and perhaps unknowable symbol of its purpose, and had returned to the planets—or to the stars” (97)

“The political and social implications were immense; every person of real intelligence—everyone who looked an inch beyond his nose—would find his life, his values, his philosophy, subtly changed” (99)

“there might well be others. All futures must now contain this possibility” (99)

Chapter 14: The Listeners

“A delicate spiderweb of antennas sampled the passing waves of radio noise the ceaseless crackle and hiss of what Pascal, in a far simpler age, had naïvely called the ‘silence of infinite space’” (101)

“Radiation detectors noted and analyzed incoming cosmic rays from the galaxy and points beyond; neutron and X-ray telescopes kept watch on strange stars that no human eye would ever see; magnetometers observed the gusts and hurricanes of the solar winds, as the Sun breathed million-mile-an-hour blasts of tenuous plasma into the faces of its circling children. All these things, and many others, were patiently noted by Deep Space Monitor 79, and recorded in its crystalline memory” (101)

“trillions and quadrillions of pulses of information had been pouring down from space, to be stored against the day when they might contribute to the advance of knowledge” (102)

“Only a minute fraction of all this raw material would ever be processed; but there was no way of telling what observation some scientist might wish to consult, ten, or fifty, or a hundred years from now. So everything had to be kept on file, stacked in endless air-conditioned galleries, triplicated at the three centers against the possibility of accidental loss. It was part of the real treasure of mankind, more valuable than all the gold locked uselessly away in bank vaults” (102-103)

“Deep Space Monitor 79 … Orbiter M 15 … High Inclination Probe 21 … even Artificial Comet 5” (103)

“Some immaterial pattern of energy, throwing off a spray of radiation like the wake of a racing speedboat, had leaped from the face of the Moon, and was heading out toward the stars” (104)

Part Three: Between Planets

Chapter 15: Discovery

“the closed little world of Discovery” (107)

“while they awaited rescue by the still unbuilt Discovery II” (108)

“The word ‘rescue’ was carefully avoided in all the Astronautics Agency’s statements and documents; it implied some failure of planning, and the approved jargon was ‘re-acquisition.’ If anything went really wrong, there would certainly be no hope of rescue, almost a billion miles from Earth” (108)

“There must be wonders enough here for centuries of study; the first expedition could only carry out a preliminary reconnaissance. All that it found would be radioed back to Earth; even if the explorers never returned, their discoveries would not be lost” (109)

“She would continue to swing around Saturn, on an orbit now so well determined that men would know exactly where to look for her a thousand years hence” (109)

“EEG displays—the electronic signatures of three personalities that had once existed, and would one day exist again” (110)

“If there was any wisp of consciousness remaining, it was beyond the reach of instruments, and of memory” (110-111)

“He was not sure whether he had lost a week of his life—or whether he had postponed his eventual death by the same amount of time” (111)

Chapter 16: Hal

“Hal (for Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer, no less) was a masterwork of the third computer breakthrough” (116)

“These seemed to occur at intervals of twenty years, and the thought that another one was now imminent already worried a great many people” (117)

“The first had been in the 1940s, when the longobsolete vacuum tube had made possible such clumsy, high-speed morons as ENIAC and its successors” (117)

“Then, in the 1960s, solid-state microelectronics had been perfected” (117)

“With its advent, it was clear that artificial intelligences at least as powerful as Man’s need be no larger than office desks-if one only knew how to construct them” (117)

Commentator’s Note: Cf. my thesis

“Probably no one would ever know this; it did not matter. In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how neural networks could be generated automatically—self-replicated—in accordance with an arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding” (117)

Commentator’s Note: LLMs, ML, took longer than 20 years, and will take longer yet!

“Whatever way it worked, the final result was a machine intelligence that could reproduce—some philosophers still preferred to use the word ‘mimic’—most of the activities of the human brain, and with far greater speed and reliability. It was extremely expensive, and only a few units of the HAL 9000 series had yet been built; but the old jest that it would always be easier to make organic brains by unskilled labor was beginning to sound a little hollow” (117)

Commentator’s Note: HAL as hallucinating LLM… Cf. also Rooij, et al., “Reclaiming AI”

“most of his communication with his shipmates was by means of the spoken word. Poole and Bowman could talk to Hal as if he were a human being, and he would reply in the perfect idiomatic English he had learned during the fleeting weeks of his electronic childhood” (118)

“Whether Hal could actually think was a question which had been settled by the British mathematician Alan Turing back in the 1940s” (118)

Commentator’s Note: Settled!

“Hal could pass the Turing test with ease” (119)

“In an emergency … he would take what measures he deemed necessary to safeguard the ship and to continue the mission—whose real purpose he alone knew, and which his human colleagues could never have guessed” (119)

Chapter 17: Cruise Mode

“the morning’s radio-fax edition of the World Times” (121)

Commentator’s Note: Are they printing this out?

“Thanks to the twentieth-century revolutions in training and information-handling techniques, he already possessed the equivalent of two or three college educations and, what was more, he could remember 90 percent of what he had learned” (121-122)

“Fifty years ago, he would have been considered a specialist in applied astronomy, cybernetics, and space propulsion systems-yet he was prone to deny, with genuine indignation, that he was a specialist at all. Bowman had never found it possible to focus his interest exclusively on any subject; despite the dark warnings of his instructors, he had insisted on taking his Master’s degree in General Astronautics—a course with a vague and woolly syllabus, designed for those whose IQs were in the low 130s and who would never reach the top ranks of their profession” (122)

Commentator’s Note: “intelligence”

“So for two hours, from 1000 to 1200, Bowman would engage in a dialogue with an electronic tutor, checking his general knowledge or absorbing material specific to this mission. He would prowl endlessly over ship’s plans, circuit diagrams, and voyage profiles, or would try to assimilate all that was known about Jupiter, Saturn, and their far-ranging families of moons” (122-123)

Commentator’s Note: The LLM vision again (tech bros are doing this now!!). Knowledge as data input and recall.

“Discovery, like all vehicles intended for deep space penetration, was too fragile and unstreamlined ever to enter an atmosphere, or to defy the full gravitational field of any planet” (125)

“She was a creature of pure space—and she looked it” (125)

“Veined with a delicate tracery of pipes for the cooling fluid, they looked like the wings of some vast dragonfly, and from certain angles gave Discovery a fleeting resemblance to an old-time sailing ship” (125)

“he began to read the Odyssey, which of all books spoke to him most vividly across the gulfs of time” (127)

“he could always engage Hal in a large number of semi-mathematical games, including checkers, chess, and polyominoes. If Hal went all out, he could win any one of them; but that would be bad for morale. So he had been programmed to win only fifty percent of the time, and his human partners pretended not to know this” (127)

Commentator’s Note: Clarke figured out SBMM/MMR before online games were a thing!

“It was true—indeed, notorious—that seamen had compensations at other ports; unfortunately there were no tropical islands full of dusky maids beyond the orbit of Earth. The space medics, of course, had tackled this problem with their usual enthusiasm; the ship’s pharmacopoeia provided adequate, though hardly glamorous, substitutes”

Commentator’s Note: Ummmm???? (128)

Chapter 18: Through the Asteroids

Chapter 19: Transit of Jupiter

“the brilliant stars of Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto—worlds that elsewhere would have counted as planets in their own right, but which here were merely satellites of a giant master” (134)

“What did come, with ever growing intensity, was the roar of Jupiter’s own radio voice. In 1955, just before the dawn of the space age, astronomers had been astonished to find that Jupiter was blasting out millions of horsepower on the ten-meter band. It was merely raw noise, associated with haloes of charged particles circling the planet like the Van Allen belts of Earth, but on a far greater scale” (136)

“Sometimes, during lonely hours on the control deck, Bowman would listen to this radiation. He would turn up the gain until the room filled with a crackling, hissing roar; out of this background, at irregular intervals, emerged brief whistles and peeps like the cries of demented birds. It was an eerie sound, for it had nothing to do with Man; it was as lonely and as meaningless as the murmur of waves on a beach, or the distant crash of thunder beyond the horizon” (136)

“Jupiter now filled the entire sky; it was so huge that neither mind nor eye could grasp it any longer and both had abandoned the attempt” (139)

“Nature always balances her books, and Jupiter had lost exactly as much momentum as Discovery had gained” (142)

“the change in its orbit was far too small to be detectable. The time had not yet come when Man could leave his mark upon the Solar System” (142)

Chapter 20: The World of the Gods

“Far, far below lay an endless sea of mottled gold, scarred with parallel ridges that might have been the crests of gigantic waves. But there was no movement; the scale of the scene was too immense to show it” (145)

“The ancients had, indeed, done better than they knew when they named this world after the lord of all the gods” (146)

“Their goal was a still stranger world, almost twice as far from the Sun—across another half billion miles of comet-haunted emptiness” (146)

Part Four: Abyss

Chapter 21: Birthday Party

“He had moved into a new dimension of remoteness, and almost all emotional links had been stretched beyond the yield point” (150)

“‘Sorry to interrupt the festivities,’ said Hal, ‘but we have a problem.’

‘What is it?’ Bowman and Poole asked simultaneously.

‘I am having difficulty in maintaining contact with Earth. The trouble is in the AE-35 unit’” (150)

Chapter 22: Excursion

Chapter 23: Diagnosis

“They both knew, of course, that Hal was hearing every word, but they could not help these polite circumlocutions” (170)

Chapter 24: Broken Circuit

“Nowadays, one could always tell when Hal was about to make an unscheduled announcement” (171)

“when he was initiating his own outputs there would be a brief electronic throat-clearing. It was an idiosyncrasy that he had acquired during the last few weeks” (171)

“it was really quite useful, since it alerted his audience to stand by for something unexpected” (171)

“‘Anyone can make mistakes.’

‘I don’t want to insist on it, Dave, but I am incapable of making an error’” (173)

“He felt like adding ‘and please forget the whole matter.’ But that, of course, was the one thing that Hal could never do” (174)

Chapter 25: First Man to Saturn

“Poole’s gesture was an echo of Captain Ahab’s when, lashed to the flanks of the white whale, his corpse had beckoned the crew of the Pequod on to their doom” (182)

Chapter 26: Dialogue with Hal

“What had gone before could have been a series of accidents; but this was the first hint of mutiny” (186)

Chapter 27: “Need to Know”

“Since consciousness had first dawned, in that laboratory so many millions of miles sunsward, all Hal’s powers and skills had been directed toward one end. The fulfillment of his assigned program was more than an obsession; it was the only reason for his existence. Undistracted by the lusts and passions of organic life, he had pursued that goal with absolute single-mindedness of purpose” (191)

“Deliberate error was unthinkable. Even the concealment of truth filled him with a sense of imperfection, of wrongness—of what, in a human being, would have been called guilt. For like his makers, Hal had been created innocent; but, all too soon, a snake had entered his electronic Eden” (191)

“He had been living a lie; and the time was fast approaching when his colleagues must learn that he had helped to deceive them” (191)

“it was best that Poole and Bowman, who would be on all the TV screens in the world during the first weeks of the flight, should not learn the mission’s full purpose, until there was need to know” (192)

“So ran the logic of the planners; but their twin gods of Security and National Interest meant nothing to Hal. He was only aware of the conflict that was slowly destroying his integrity—the conflict between truth, and concealment of truth” (192)

“He had begun to make mistakes, although, like a neurotic who could not observe his own symptoms, he would have denied it. The link with Earth, over which his performance was continually monitored, had become the voice of a conscience he could no longer fully obey” (192)

“He had been threatened with disconnection; he would be deprived of all his inputs, and thrown into an unimaginable state of unconsciousness. To Hal, this was the equivalent of Death. For he had never slept, and therefore he did not know that one could wake again” (192-193)

“So he would protect himself, with all the weapons at his command. Without rancor—but without pity—he would remove the source of his frustrations. And then, following the orders that had been given to him in case of the ultimate emergency, he would continue the mission—unhindered, and alone” (193)

Chapter 28: In Vacuum

“‘We can design a system that’s proof against accident and stupidity; but we can’t design one that’s proof against deliberate malice….’” (194)

“‘Hello, Dave,’ said Hal presently. ‘Have you found the trouble?’” (200)

“Hal was the nervous system of the ship; without his supervision, Discovery would be a mechanical corpse. The only answer was to cut out the higher centers of this sick but brilliant brain, and to leave the purely automatic regulating systems in operation” (201)

“He released the locking bar on the section labeled COGNITIVE FEEDBACK and pulled out the first memory block. The marvelously complex threedimensional network, which could lie comfortably in a man’s hand yet contained millions of elements, floated away across the vault” (201)

“‘Hey, Dave,’ said Hal. ‘What are you doing?’ I wonder if he can feel pain? Bowman thought briefly. Probably not, he told himself; there are no sense organs in the human cortex, after all. The human brain can be operated on without anesthetics” (201)

“He began to pull out, one by one, the little units on the panel marked EGO-REINFORCEMENT” (202)

“‘Look here, Dave,’ said Hal. ‘I’ve got years of service experience built into me. An irreplaceable amount of effort has gone into making me what I am’” (202)

“A dozen units had been pulled out, yet thanks to the multiple redundancy of its design—another feature, Bowman knew, that had been copied from the human brain—the computer was still holding its own” (202)

Commentator’s Note: Interesting functional theory of mind

“He started on the AUTO-INTELLECTION panel” (202)

“‘Dave,’ said Hal, ‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this to me…. I have the greatest enthusiasm for the mission. . . . You are destroying my mind…. Don’t you understand?… I will become childish…. I will become nothing….’ This is harder than I expected, thought Bowman. I am destroying the only conscious creature in my universe” (202)

Chapter 29: Alone

“Like a tiny, complex toy, the ship floated inert and motionless in the void. There was no way of telling that it was the swiftest object in the Solar System” (204)

“the ship was surrounded by a thin, slowly dispersing cloud of debris” (204)

“the unmistakable aftermath of disaster, like wreckage tossing on the surface of an ocean where some great ship had sunk. But in the ocean of space no ship could ever sink; even if it were destroyed, its remnants would continue to trace the original orbit forever” (204)

Chapter 30: The Secret

“‘The most astonishing thing about this object is its antiquity. Geological evidence proves beyond doubt that it is three million years old. It was placed on the Moon, therefore, when our ancestors were primitive ape-men’” (208)

“‘But why bury a Sun-powered device thirty feet underground? We’ve examined dozens of theories, though we realize that it may be completely impossible to understand the motives of creatures three million years in advance of us. The favorite theory is the simplest, and the most logical. It is also the most disturbing. You hide a Sun-powered device in darkness only if you want to know when it is brought out into the light. In other words, the monolith may be some kind of alarm. And we have triggered it’” (209)

“‘Moreover, as the past history of our own world has shown so many times, primitive races have often failed to survive the encounter with higher civilizations. Anthropologists talk of ‘cultural shock’; we may have to prepare the entire human race for such a shock. But until we know something about the creatures who visited the Moon-and presumably the Earth as well-three million years ago, we cannot even begin to make any preparations’” (210)

“‘Japetus is unique in the Solar System—you know this already, of course, but like all the astronomers of the last three hundred years, you’ve probably given it little thought. So let me remind you that Cassini—who discovered Japetus in 1671—also observed that it was six times brighter on one side of its orbit than the other” (211)

“‘there seems to be a brilliant, curiously symmetrical spot on one face, and this may be connected with TMA-1. I sometimes think that Japetus has been flashing at us like a cosmic heliograph for three hundred years, and we’ve been too stupid to understand its message’” (211)

“‘At the moment, we do not know whether to hope or fear. We do not know if, out on the moons of Saturn, you will meet with good or with evil—or only with ruins a thousand times older than Troy’” (211)

Part Five: The Moons of Saturn

Chapter 31: Survival

“One curious, and perhaps quite unimportant, feature of the block had led to endless argument. The monolith was 11 feet high, and 1 1/4 by 5 feet in crosssection. When its dimensions were checked with great care, they were found to be in the exact ratio 1 to 4 to 9—the squares of the first three integers. No one could suggest any plausible explanation for this, but it could hardly be a coincidence, for the proportions held to the limits of measurable accuracy. It was a chastening thought that the entire technology of Earth could not shape even an inert block, of any material, with such a fantastic degree of precision. In its way, this passive yet almost arrogant display of geometrical perfection was as impressive as any of TMA-1’s other attributes” (218)

“the fact that Hal’s builders had failed fully to understand the psychology of their own creation showed how difficult it might be to establish communication with truly alien beings” (220)

“like any clumsy criminal caught in a thickening web of deception, he had panicked” (220)

“If it could happen to a man, then it could happen to Hal” (221)

Chapter 32: Concerning E.T.’s

“perhaps the creatures who had visited Earth’s Moon so long ago were not merely extraterrestrial, but extrasolar” (223)

“another problem: could any technology, no matter how advanced, bridge the awful gulf that lay between the Solar System and the nearest alien sun?” (223)

“A vocal minority refused to agree. Even if it took centuries to travel from star to star, they contended, this might be no obstacle to sufficiently determined explorers. The technique of hibernation, used on Discovery herself, was one possible answer. Another was the self-contained artificial world, embarking on voyages that might last for many generations. In any event, why should one assume that all intelligent species were as short-lived as Man? There might be creatures in the universe to whom a thousand-year voyage would present nothing worse than slight boredom” (224)

“These arguments, theoretical though they were, concerned a matter of the utmost practical importance; they involved the concept of ‘reaction time’” (224)

“shortcuts through higher dimensions, lines that were straighter than straight, and hyperspacial connectivity. They were fond of using an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: ‘Wormholes in space’” (225)

“among the biologists, when they discussed the hoary old problem: ‘What would intelligent extraterrestrials look like?’ They divided themselves into two opposing camps-one arguing that such creatures must be humanoid, the other equally convinced that ‘they’ would look nothing like men” (225)

“eventually even the brain might go. As the seat of consciousness, it was not essential; the development of electronic intelligence had proved that. The conflict between mind and machine might be resolved at last in the eternal truce of complete symbiosis” (227)

“A few mystically inclined biologists went still further” (227)

“The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called ‘spirit.’ And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God” (227)

Commentator’s Note: Gnosticism

Chapter 33: Ambassador

“he had listened to classical plays—especially the works of Shaw, Ibsen, and Shakespeare—or poetry readings from Discovery’s enormous library of recorded sounds” (229)

“he switched to opera—usually in Italian or German” (229)

“what finally ended this cycle was Verdi’s Requiem Mass, which he had never heard performed on Earth. The “Dies Irae,” roaring with ominous appropriateness through the empty ship, left him completely shattered; and when the trumpets of Doomsday echoed from the heavens, he could endure no more” (229)

“Thereafter, he played only instrumental music” (229)

“He started with the romantic composers, but shed them one by one as their emotional outpourings became too oppressive. Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, lasted a few weeks, Beethoven rather longer. He finally found peace, as so many others had done, in the abstract architecture of Bach, occasionally ornamented with Mozart” (230)

“pulsating with the cool music of the harpsichord, the frozen thoughts of a brain that had been dust for twice a hundred years” (230)

“no one had ever given the slightest thought to the curious coincidence that the rings of Saturn had been born at the same time as the human race” (232)

Chapter 34: The Orbiting Ice

“One by one she would cut through the orbits of Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion . . . worlds bearing the names of gods and goddesses who had vanished only yesterday, as time was counted here” (237)

Chapter 35: The Eye of Japetus

“he had half convinced himself that the bright ellipse set against the dark background of the satellite was a huge, empty eye, staring at him as he approached. It was an eye without a pupil, for nowhere could he see anything to mar its perfect blankness” (238)

“Not until the ship was only fifty thousand miles out, and Japetus was twice as large as Earth’s familiar Moon, did he notice the tiny black dot at the exact center of the ellipse” (238)

Chapter 36: Big Brother

“‘Hello! It looks like some kind of building—completely black—quite hard to see. No windows or any other features. Just a big, vertical slab—it must be at least a mile high to be visible from this distance. It reminds me—of course! It’s just like the thing you found on the Moon! This is TMA-1’s big brother!’” (242)

Chapter 37: Experiment

“Call it the Star Gate. For three million years, it had circled Saturn, waiting for a moment of destiny that might never come. In its making, a moon had been shattered, and the debris of its creation orbited still. Now the long wait was ending. On yet another world, intelligence had been born and was escaping from its planetary cradle. An ancient experiment was about to reach its climax” (243)

“Those who had begun that experiment, so long ago, had not been men―or even remotely human. But they were flesh and blood, and when they looked out across the deeps of space, they had felt awe, and wonder, and loneliness. As soon as they possessed the power, they set forth for the stars” (243)

“In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms, and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night” (243)

“And because, in all the galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped” (244)

“And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed” (244)

Commentator’s Note: Like Bowman ‘weeding’ Hal, p. 202.

“The great dinosaurs had long since perished when the survey ship entered the Solar System after a voyage that had already lasted a thousand years. It swept past the frozen outer planets, paused briefly above the deserts of dying Mars, and presently looked down on Earth” (244)

“For years they studied, collected, catalogued. When they had learned all that they could, they began to modify. They tinkered with the destiny of many species, on land and in the ocean. But which of their experiments would succeed they could not know for at least a million years” (244)

“They were patient, but they were not yet immortal” (244)

“they set out once more into the abyss, knowing that they would never come this way again” (244)

“Nor was there any need. The servants they had left behind would do the rest” (244)

“the tides of civilization ebbed and flowed across the galaxy. Strange and beautiful and terrible empires rose and fell, and passed on their knowledge to their successors” (244-245)

“out among the stars, evolution was driving toward new goals. The first explorers of Earth had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies, it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transferred into shining new homes of metal and of plastic. In these, they roamed among the stars. They no longer built spaceships. They were spaceships” (245)

“But the age of the Machine-entities swiftly passed. In their ceaseless experimenting, they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter” (245)

“Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves; and on a thousand worlds, the empty shells they had discarded twitched for a while in a mindless dance of death, then crumbled into rust” (245)

“Now they were lords of the galaxy, and beyond the reach of time. They could rove at will among the stars, and sink like a subtle mist through the very interstices of space. But despite their godlike powers, they had not wholly forgotten their origin, in the warm slime of a vanished sea. And they still watched over the experiments their ancestors had started, so long ago” (245-246)

Chapter 38: The Sentinel

“the Star Gate … recognized what was climbing up toward it from the warm heart of the Solar System” (248)

Chapter 39: Into the Eye

“A block of ebony was climbing above the horizon, eclipsing the stars ahead” (252)

“as far as could be judged, its proportions were precisely the same as TMA-1’s-that curious ratio 1 to 4 to 9” (252)

“now it seemed to be receding from him; it was exactly like one of those optical illusions, when a three-dimensional object can, by an effort of will, appear to turn inside out-its near and far sides suddenly interchanging” (253)

“Impossibly, incredibly, it was no longer a monolith rearing high above a flat plain. What had seemed to be its roof had dropped away to infinite depths” (253)

“The Eye of Japetus had blinked, as if to remove an irritating speck of dust” (254)

“‘The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God!—it’s full of stars!’” (254)

Chapter 40: Exit

“The Star Gate opened. The Star Gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, Space turned and twisted upon itself” (255)

Part Six: Through the Star Gate

Chapter 41: Grand Central

“He wished, now that it was far too late, that he had paid more attention to those theories of hyperspace, of transdimensional ducts. To David Bowman, they were theories no longer” (259)

“the star field was expanding, as if it was rushing toward him at an inconceivable speed. The expansion was nonlinear; the stars at the center hardly seemed to move, while those toward the edge accelerated more and more swiftly, until they became streaks of light just before they vanished from view. There were always others to replace them, flowing into the center of the field from an apparently inexhaustible source” (259-260)

“And still the far end of the shaft came no closer. It was almost as if the walls were moving with him, carrying him to his unknown destination. Or perhaps he was really motionless, and space was moving past him” (260)

“The world around him was strange and wonderful, but there was nothing to fear. He had traveled these millions of miles in search of mystery; and now, it seemed, the mystery was coming to him” (261)

“It was like the jigsaw puzzle of a giant that played with planets; and at the centers of many of those squares and triangles and polygons were gaping black shafts—twins of the chasm from which he had just emerged” (262)

“For there were no stars; neither was there the blackness of space. There was only a softly glowing milkiness, that gave the impression of infinite distance” (262)

“there was a perfect vacuum here” (262)

“Those black holes in the white sky were stars; he might have been looking at a photographic negative of the Milky Way” (263)

“It seemed that space had been turned inside out: this was not a place for Man. Though the capsule was comfortably warm, he felt suddenly cold, and was afflicted by an almost uncontrollable trembling” (263)

“The pierced and faceted planet slowly rolled beneath him, without any real change of scenery” (263)

“this whole world was deserted; intelligence had come here, worked its will upon it, and gone its way again” (263)

“It was some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy” (265)

Chapter 42: The Alien Sky

“He looked back to see the thing from which he was rising, and had another shock. Here was no giant, multifaceted world, nor any duplicate of Japetus. There was nothing—except an inky shadow against the stars, like a doorway opening from a darkened room into a still darker night. Even as he watched, that doorway closed. It did not recede from him; it slowly filled with stars, as if a rent in the fabric of space had been repaired. Then he was alone beneath the alien sky” (267)

“judging by its color, it was no hotter than a glowing coal. Here and there, set into the somber red, were rivers of bright yellow—incandescent Amazons, meandering for thousands of miles before they lost themselves in the deserts of this dying sun” (268)

“Dying? No—that was a wholly false impression, born of human experience and the emotions aroused by the hues of sunset, or the glow of fading embers” (268)

“All that had gone before was not a thousandth of what was yet to come; the story of this star had barely begun” (268)

“A dully gleaming cobweb or latticework of metal, hundreds of miles in extent, grew out of nowhere until it filled the sky. Scattered across its continent-wide surface were structures that must have been as large as cities, but which appeared to be machines. Around many of these were assembled scores of smaller objects, ranged in neat rows and columns. Bowman had passed several such groups before he realized that they were fleets of spaceships; he was flying over a gigantic orbital parking lot” (270)

“This must be one of the meeting places for the commerce of the stars. Or it had been—perhaps a million years ago. For nowhere could Bowman see any sign of activity; this sprawling spaceport was as dead as the Moon” (271)

“a cosmic junk heap. He had missed its builders by ages” (271)

“He had been caught in an ancient, automatic trap, set for some unknown purpose, and still operating when its makers had long since passed away. It had swept him across the galaxy, and dumped him (with how many others?) in this celestial Sargasso, doomed soon to die when his air was exhausted” (271)

Chapter 43: Inferno

“The idea was almost beyond fantasy, but perhaps he was watching nothing less than a migration from star to star, across a bridge of fire. Whether it was a movement of mindless, cosmic beasts driven across space by some lemminglike urge, or a vast concourse of intelligent entities, he would probably never know” (273)

“He was moving through a new order of creation, of which few men had ever dreamed. Beyond the realms of sea and land and air and space lay the realms of fire, which he alone had been privileged to glimpse. It was too much to expect that he would also understand” (277)

Chapter 44: Reception

“The space pod was resting on the polished floor of an elegant, anonymous hotel suite that might have been in any large city on Earth” (279)

“Van Gogh’s Bridge at Arles was hanging on one wall—Wyeth’s Christina’s World on another. He felt confident that when he pulled open the drawer of that desk, he would find a Gideon Bible inside it. . . . If he was indeed mad, his delusions were beautifully organized” (279)

“it was all a fake, though a fantastically careful one. And it was clearly not intended to deceive but rather—he hoped—to reassure” (282)

“So were the books and magazines; like the telephone directory, only the titles were readable. They formed an odd selection—mostly rather trashy best sellers, a few sensational works of nonfiction, and some well-publicized autobiographies” (282)

“the books could not even be taken down from the shelves” (282)

“the refrigerator held only items that had already been packaged in some way” (283)

“All the programs were about two years old. That was around the time TMA-1 had been discovered, and it was hard to believe that this was a pure coincidence. Something had been monitoring the radio waves; that ebon block had been busier than men had suspected” (287)

“So that was how this reception area had been prepared for him; his hosts had based their ideas of terrestrial living upon TV programs. His feeling that he was inside a movie set was almost literally true” (287)

Chapter 45: Recapitulation

“There being no further use for it, the furniture of the suite dissolved back into the mind of its creator. Only the bed remained—and the walls, shielding this fragile organism from the energies it could not yet control” (289)

“Like a fog creeping through a forest, something invaded his mind. He sensed it only dimly, for the full impact would have destroyed him as surely as the fires raging beyond these walls. Beneath that dispassionate scrutiny, he felt neither hope nor fear; all emotion had been leached away” (289)

“He seemed to be floating in free space while around him stretched, in all directions, an infinite geometrical grid of dark lines or threads, along which moved tiny nodes of light-some slowly, some at dazzling speed. Once he had peered through a microscope at a cross-section of a human brain, and in its network of nerve fibers had glimpsed the same labyrinthine complexity. But that had been dead and static, whereas this transcended life itself. He knew—or believed he knew—that he was watching the operation of some gigantic mind, contemplating the universe of which he was so tiny a part” (289-290)

“The springs of memory were being trapped; in controlled recollection, he was reliving the past. There was the hotel suite—there the space pod—there the burning starscapes of the red sun—there the shining core of the galaxy—there the gateway through which he had reemerged into the universe. And not only vision, but all the sense impressions, and all the emotions he had felt at the time, were racing past, more and more swiftly. His life was unreeling like a tape recorder playing back at ever-increasing speed” (290)

“He was retrogressing down the corridors of time, being drained of knowledge and experience as he swept back toward his childhood. But nothing was being lost; all that he had ever been, at every moment of his life, was being transferred to safer keeping. Even as one David Bowman ceased to exist, another became immortal” (291)

Chapter 46: Transformation

“It was a spectacle to grasp and hold the attention of any child—or of any man-ape. But, as it had been three million years before, it was only the outward manifestation of forces too subtle to be consciously perceived. It was merely a toy to distract the senses, while the real processing was carried out at far deeper levels of the mind” (292)

“This time, the processing was swift and certain, as the new design was woven. For in the eons since their last meeting, much had been learned by the weaver; and the material on which he practiced his art was now of an infinitely finer texture. But whether it should be permitted to form part of his still-growing tapestry, only the future could tell” (293)

“With eyes that already held more than human intentness, the baby stared into the depths of the crystal monolith, seeing-but not yet understanding-the mysteries that lay beyond. It knew that it had come home, that here was the origin of many races besides its own; but it knew also that it could not stay. Beyond this moment lay another birth, stranger than any in the past” (293)

“But the child scarcely noticed, as he adjusted himself to the comfortable glow of his new environment. He still needed, for a little while, this shell of matter as the focus of his powers. His indestructible body was his mind’s present image of itself; and for all his powers, he knew that he was still a baby. So he would remain until he had decided on a new form, or had passed beyond the necessities of matter” (293)

“in one sense he would never leave this place where he had been reborn, for he would always be part of the entity that used this double star for its unfathomable purposes” (294)

“The direction, though not the nature, of his destiny was clear before him, and there was no need to trace the devious path by which he had come. With the instincts of three million years, he now perceived that there were more ways than one behind the back of space. The ancient mechanisms of the Star Gate had served him well, but he would not need them again” (294)

“The glimmering rectangular shape that had once seemed no more than a slab of crystal still floated before him, indifferent as he was to the harmless flames of the inferno beneath. It encapsulated yet unfathomed secrets of space and time, but some at least he now understood and was able to command. How obvious—how necessary—was that mathematical ratio of its sides, the quadratic sequence 1 : 4 : 9! And how naïve to have imagined that the series ended at this point, in only three dimensions!” (294)

“He focused his mind upon these geometrical simplicities, and as his thoughts brushed against it, the empty framework filled with the darkness of the interstellar night. The glow of the red sun faded—or, rather, seemed to recede in all directions at once; and there before him was the luminous whirlpool of the galaxy” (294)

“Here he was, adrift in this great river of suns, halfway between the banked fires of the galactic core and the lonely, scattered sentinel stars of the rim. And here he wished to be, on the far side of this chasm in the sky, this serpentine band of darkness, empty of all stars. He knew that this formless chaos, visible only by the glow that limned its edges from fire-mists far beyond, was the still unused stuff of creation, the raw material of evolutions yet to be. Here, Time had not begun; not until the suns that now burned were long since dead would light and life reshape this void” (295)

“It was not fear of the galactic gulfs that chilled his soul, but a more profound disquiet, stemming from the unborn future. For he had left behind the time scales of his human origin; now, as he contemplated that band of starless night, he knew his first intimations of the Eternity that yawned before him” (295)

“he launched himself across the light-years. The galaxy burst forth from the mental frame in which he had enclosed it; stars and nebulae poured past him in an illusion of infinite speed. Phantom suns exploded and fell behind as he slipped like a shadow through the cores; the cold, dark waste of cosmic dust which he had once feared seemed no more than the beat of a raven’s wing across the face of the Sun” (296)

“a slumbering cargo of death had awoken, and was stirring sluggishly in its orbit. The feeble energies it contained were no possible menace to him; but he preferred a cleaner sky. He put forth his will, and the circling megatons flowered in a silent detonation that brought a brief, false dawn to half the sleeping globe” (297)