More than once, therefore, van der Berg had been told not to waste his valuable time on research of no practical importance, when there was so much to be done on Ganymede. ('Where can we find carbon – phosphorus – nitrates for the hydroponic farms? How stable is the Barnard Escarpment? Is there any danger of more mudslides in Phrygia?' And so on and so forth...) But he had inherited his Boer ancestors' well-deserved reputation for stubbornness: even when he was working on his numerous other projects, he kept looking over his shoulder at Europa.
And one day, just a few hours, a gale from the nightside cleared the skies about Mount Zeus.
7 – Transit
'I too take leave of all 1 ever had...'
From what depths of memory had that line come swimming up to the surface? Heywood Floyd closed his eyes, and tried to focus on the past. It was certainly from a poem – and he had hardly read a line of poetry since leaving college. And little enough then, except during a short English Appreciation Seminar.
With no further clues, it might take the station computer quite a while – perhaps as much as ten minutes – to locate the line in the whole body of English literature. But that would be cheating (not to mention expensive) and Floyd preferred to accept the intellectual challenge.
A war poem, of course – but which war? There had been so many in the twentieth century.
He was still searching through the mental mists when his guests arrived, moving with the effortless, slow-motion grace of longtime one-sixth gravity residents. The society of Pasteur was strongly influenced by what had been christened 'centrifugal stratification'; some people never left the zero gee of the hub, while those who hoped one day to return to Earth preferred the almost normal-weight regime out on the rim of the huge, slowly revolving disc.