Chapter 35 Chapter Seven The Eyes of Iapetus

Discovery was exactly as it had been the last time he had seen it in space.The ship was then in orbit around the moon, which was so large that it covered half the sky, or had changed slightly; Has faded from prolonged exposure. The sun is an object that is not easily recognizable by people at this time.It's still much brighter than an average star, but looking directly at its tiny golden disk isn't uncomfortable.It didn't radiate much heat either; Bowman held his ungloved hand out of the capsule window into the sunlight, and felt nothing on his skin, as if he wanted to use moonlight for warmth.This made him realize how far he was from Earth more vividly than the foreign lands not more than fifty miles below him.

He was now - perhaps for the last time - leaving the metal world he had inhabited for so many months.Even if he never came back, the spacecraft would still continue its mission, sending instrument data back to Earth, until some final catastrophic failure of the circuitry. What if he ever made it back to the ship?Well, he could live -- and even stay sane -- a few more months.That's all there is to it, because a hibernating device is useless without a computer watching over it.He couldn't live long enough for Discovery Two to rendezvous with Saturn four or five years from now. "Discovery" is still a star in the night sky.He was still following the ship by inertia during the accelerated descent, but the capsule's jet brakes would soon slow him down, and the ship would continue forward out of sight—leaving him alone in this twinkling moment. On the glowing plains, to explore its hidden mysteries.

A black mass crawled from the horizon, blocking the stars directly ahead. He used the rotating compass to turn the space compartment in a different direction, opened up the jet to stop the speed along the track, and followed a long and flat arc to land on the surface of Iapetus. On a gravitational world, such an operation would have to be a waste of fuel.But here, the capsule weighed no more than twenty pounds; he could still hover for a few minutes before desperately consuming the remaining fuel, making it impossible for him to return to Discovery, which was still in orbit.Of course, in reality there won't be much difference...

He was still almost five miles high, flying straight toward the great black plate.The plates were as perfect as geometric figures, towering over a featureless plain.Like the white ground beneath it, the plate was flat and flat; only now did he realize how big it was.There are few individual structures on earth to compare with it; carefully measured, his photographs show it rising to a height of almost two thousand feet.According to the judgment, its ratio of length, width and height is exactly the same as that of TMA-1 - 1:4:9. "I'm only three miles away now, four thousand feet off the ground. Still nothing—no response from any of the gauges. Absolutely smooth on all sides. Not a single comet scar after all these years!

"And on the—I suppose it could be called the roof, there aren't any rocks. And there's no opening. I had hoped there was some way to get in... "I'm right over it now, hovering at five hundred feet. I don't want to waste any more time, because Discovery will soon be out of reach. It's sure to be strong enough—if it doesn't, I'll be on the jet push away. "Wait a minute—that's weird..." Bowman's voice cut off abruptly in extreme surprise.He was not afraid; what he saw was indescribable. It was originally suspended on a large rectangular plane, eight hundred feet long and two hundred feet wide, which looked like a rock.But at this moment, it seemed to be falling away from him; exactly like the optical illusion, an object in a three-dimensional space can be turned inside out through subjective willpower—the far and near sides suddenly exchanged positions .

This is happening to the massive, seemingly solid structure!Impossible, almost unbelievable, it is no longer a plate towering on the ground of Pingchuan.The original roof sank to unfathomable depths; for a dizzying instant he seemed to be looking down on a shaft--a rectangular conduit whose dimensions, contrary to the laws of perspective, did not decrease as they got farther away... Iapetus' eyes blinked once, as if to dislodge an unpleasant speck of dust.David Bowman had only time to utter a stuttering sentence that was never forgotten by those waiting at Mission Command, ninety million miles away and ninety minutes with a time difference: "This thing is empty—deep. Bottomless--and--my God--full of stars!"

The "star gate" opened. The "Stargate" is closed. In an instant, too short to measure, the universe turned itself upside down. So Iapetus was once again ignored, as it had been for three million years—except for an unmanned but not yet AWOL craft still sending back telegrams to its owners that they could neither believe nor understand .