Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand
kilometers—a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe.
On February 12, 1947, another Russian city had a still narrower escape,
when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less
than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivaling
that of the newly invented uranium bomb.
In those days there was nothing that
men could do to protect themselves against the last random shots in the
cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon. The
meteorites of 1908 and 1947 had struck uninhabited wilderness; but by the
end of the twenty-first century there was no region left on Earth that
could be safely used for celestial target practice. The human race
had spread from pole to pole. And so, inevitably . . .
At 0946 GMT on the morning of September
11 in the exceptionally beautiful summer of the year 2077, most of the
inhabitants of Europe saw a dazzling fireball appear in the eastern sky.
Within seconds it was brighter than the Sun, and as it moved across the
heavens—at first in utter silence—it left behind it a churning column of
dust and smoke.
Somewhere above Austria it began to
disintegrate, producing a series of concussions so violent that more than
a million people had their hearing permanently damaged. They were
the lucky ones.
Moving at fifty kilometers a second,
a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy,
destroying in a few flaming moments the labor of centuries. The cities
of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the Earth; and the last
glories of Venice sank forever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic
came thundering landward after the hammer blow from space.
Six hundred thousand people died,
and the total damage was more than a trillion dollars. But the loss
to art, to history, to science—to the whole human race, for the rest of
time—was beyond all computation. It was as if a great war had been
fought and lost in a single morning; and few could draw much pleasure from
the fact that, as the dust of destruction slowly settled, for months the
whole world witnessed the most splendid dawns and sunsets since Krakatoa.
After the initial shock, mankind reacted
with a determination and a unity that no earlier age could have shown.
Such a disaster, it was realized, might not occur again for a thousand
years—but it might occur tomorrow. And the next time, the consequences
could be even worse.
Very well; there would be no next
time.
A hundred years earlier, a much poorer
world, with far feebler resources, had squandered its wealth attempting
to destroy weapons launched, suicidally, by mankind against itself.
The effort had never been successful, but the skills acquired then had
not been forgotten. Now they could be used for a far nobler purpose, and
on an infinitely vaster stage. No meteorite large enough to cause
catastrophe would ever again be allowed to breach the defenses of Earth.
So began Project SPACEGUARD.
Fifty years later—and in a way that none of its designers could ever have
anticipated—it justified its existence.
From Chapter #1
Rendezvous with Rama
A novel by Arthur C. Clarke
Copyright 1973
(Printed with permission from the Author)