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"Fishing once more? "coloring pencils coloring pencilstcoloring pencilse 128 .In using this system, absentee voters werecoloring pencils instructed to mark their ballots with number two pencils. T
"You know the risks. You know that you will be gone from Earth for at least five years. You know that you may never come back.

"If you have any mental reservations-coloring pencilsany fears which you cannot handle-you can withdraw now. No one will ever know the reason. We will have a medical cover story to protect you. Think carefully. Do you really want to go?"

The silence in the operating room stretched on and on. What thoughts, wondered Chapman with desperate anxiety, were forming in that brain hovering on the borders of sleep, in the no man's land of hypnosis? Bowman's training had cost a fortune, and though he could be replaced even now by either of his back-ups, such a move would be certain to create emotional strains and disturbances. It would be a bad start to the mission.

And, of course, there was even the remote possibility that both back-ups would take the same escape route. But that was something that did not bear thinking about....

At last Bowman spoke. For the first time there seemed a trace of emotion in his voice, as if he had long ago made up his mind, and would not be deflected or diverted by any external force.

"I . . . am . . . going . . . to . . . Jupiter," he said.

And so, each after his fashion, presently answered Whitehead and Poole and Kimball and Hunter and Kaminski. And not one of them ever knew that he had been asked.

MIDNIGHT, WASHINGTON

The reception at the Little White House, as the vice-president's mansion was invariably called, was one of the events of the season. There was much heart-burning because invitations were restricted to those associated with the project; but if this had not been done, most of official Washington would have been there. Moreover, everyone wanted to keep this as small and intimate as possible; it would be the last time all six astronauts would be gathered together on Earth, and the last opportunity for many of their friends to say farewell to them.

No one mentioned this, but everybody was aware of it. So this was no ordinary reception; there was a curious emotional atmosphere-not one of sadness or foreboding, but rather of excitement and exaltation.

"Look at them!" said Anita Andersen acoloring pencilss she and Floyd orbited togecoloring pencilsther across the dance floor. "What do you suppose they're really thinking?" She nodded her head toward the little group around the Vice-President and Mrs. Kelly; their hosts were talking to Bowman, Kaminski, Whitehead, and Poole.

"I can probably tell you," Floyd said. "By this time, I know as much about them as any of the psychologists. But why are you interested?"

His curiosity was genuine, quite unaffected by any taint of jealousy or sexual rivalry. (Besides, who could be jealous of six men about to leave Earth for years, perhaps forever?)

"It's hard for a woman to understand," Anita murmured above the background of the music, as they swirled round the little island of trees in the center of the dance floor. "Leaving all this behind, going off into space, not knowing what they're going to find, or even if they'll come

"I thought there was Viking blood in your veins," Floyd chided gently.

"I was always sorry for their women; they must have spent half their lives wondering if they were widows."

"At least we've avoided that problem here. There will be some unhappy girl friends, but that's all." He lowered his voice. "Here comes one of them."

Jack Kimball swirled by, his arms around a rather plump, vivacious blonde. As they were swept away by the other dancers, the girl suddenly began to laugh at something her consort had said.

"She certainly doesn't sound uncoloring pencilshappy," commented Anita.

"Excellent. I shouldn't tell tales, but Jack has quite a repcoloring pencilsutation. Perhaps she realized that she couldn't hold on to him, and is making the best of a bad job."

"Bowman's the one who fascinates me, I've heard such conflicting stories about him. Is he really unpopular?"

"It depends on the point of view. He's a perfectionist. He can't stand people who aren't fit, or machines that won't work-and that makes life tough for his associates. Incidentally, he also seems to be lucky-he's never been involved in an accident. Maybe he's earned his luck; either way, we want to share it."

"But his crewmates?" persisted Anita. "Do they like him?"

"They like him, otherwise, he wouldn't be there. He has that indefinable quality we call leadership-people will trust his decisions, and feel confident that he's made the correct ones. And ninety-nine percent of the time, he has. We can only hope he'll keep up that batting average, when he gets out to Jupiter."

"The one I really like," confided Anita, "is Dr. Poole. There's something warm and friendly about him-not that the others are unfriendly, of course."

"Everyone feels the same waycoloring pencils about Kelvin. He cares for people-but sometimes I wonder if he cares enough for himself."

"What do you mean by that?"

"It's hard to express, and I may be seeing things that aren'coloring pencilst there. Probably I can't understand the medical viewpoint-to an astronomer, physiology is so damn messy. But sometimes I think that Kelvin takes too many risks with himself. He's had several narrow escapes; he was nearly drowned-twice-testing artificial lungs. He's always breathing peculiar atmospheres, riding centrifuges, trying out medical gadgets. And I've lost count of the number of times he's hibernated."

"You make him sound just a little peculiar. I'm surprised he passed the psychological tests."

Floyd laughed.

"He helped to set most of them, and you know what a tight labor union the doctors have. But I don't mean that Kelvin is psychotic. I suspect he's just an unusually dedicated medical researcher, who finds that he's his own best guinea pig. Hello, Paul."

As Hunter and his companion swept past, Anita commented, "She's stunning. "Who is she?"

"Australian friend of Paul's-he has some business in Queensland."

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"So it seems."

"Darling-are we going to dance or talk? I'coloring pencilsm running out of gas."

"Mrs. Kelly seems to be signaling to us-let's break off when we reach her."

A few seconds later, a little breathless, they came to a halt at the Vice-President's group. Bowman and Poole had now disappeared, but Kaminsky and Whitehead were talking animatedly with the Kellys.

"Hello, Miss Andersen," said the Vice-President. "I hope you don't mind us interrupting for a moment."

There was the very faintest of underlining to the "Miss", the Kellys were very old-fashcoloring pencilsioned, and like the rest of Washington knew perfectly well that Floyd and his lady were not particularly interested in matrimony. But they liked Anita, even if they did not altogether approve of her.

"Mr. Whitehead was telling us about your Council's report on extraterrestrial life forms, Heywood. He says you've worked out the design of a perfectly efficient creature. Is that really true?"

"I was referring," Whitehead said hastily, "to that last Rand Corporation study. But I don't think the Vice President altogether believed me."

Everyone laughed at this, for Whitehead's hobby had been well publicized. Though he was one of the world's experts on life-support systems, and had once, by miracles of improvisation, kept a team of six men alive on Mars for a week when they had lost their oxygen reserve, he was also extraordinarily imaginative and could have earned a good living as a professional writer. That he had published some excellent science fiction under the pseudonym "Paul Black" was an open secret, and he had been responsible for negotiating the serialization, book, film, and TV rights for the mission. It often seemed that he spent most of his time in the old Life building; there were rumors that he had been observed in the picket lines protesting the demolition of that venerable antique.

It took Floyd several seconds to recall the details of the study; he must have read-or at acoloring pencilsny rate skimmed-at least a thousand reports in the last couple of years, and they tended to blur together. The Space Agency was always issuing contracts to universities, research organizations, and industrial firms for astronautical studies. Sometimes the result was a thick volume of graphs or equations, and sometimes it was what one acute congressional critic had called "high-priced science fiction."

"As I remember," he said, collecting his thoughts rapidly, "the biologists asked themselves the question, 'If we had no preconceived ideas, and were starting with a blank sheet of paper-how would we design an intelligent organism?"'

"I'm not much of an artist," Floyd apologized, after he had managed to borrow paper and pencil, "but the general conclusion was something like this."

He sketched quickly, and when he had finished Mr. Kelly said, "Ugh!"

"Well," chuckled Floyd, "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. And talking of eyes, there would be four of them, to provide all-round vision. They have to be at the highest part of the body, for good visibility-so."

He had drawn an egg-shaped torso surmounted by a coloring pencilssmall, conical head that was fused into it with no trace of a neck. Roughly sketched arms and legs were affixed at the usual places.

"Getting rid of the neck removes a fundamental weakness, we only need it because our eyes have a limited field of view, and we have to turn our heads to compensate."

"Why not a fifth eye on top, for upward vision?" asked Kaminski, in a tone of voice which showed what he, thought of the whole concept.

"Too vulnerable to falling objects. As it is, the four eyes would be recessed, and the head would probably be covered with a hard protective layer. For the brain would be somewhere in this general region-you want the shortest possible nerve connections to the eyes, because they are the most important sense organs."

"Can you be sure of that?"

"No-but it seems probable. Light is the fastest, longest-ranging carrier of information. Any sentient creature woucoloring pencilsld 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 wcoloring pencilse 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 indcoloring pencilsependent, 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 rightcoloring pencils 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 Flocoloring pencilsyd, 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.

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"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 sencoloring pencilsd 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 coloring pencilsthe 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 coloring pencilsay, 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.

As has already been indicated by the frantic entries in my log, the story line took a couple of years of hard labor to pin down. We had the beginning and (approximately) the end; it was the center portion which refused to stay in one place. I sometimes felt that we were wrestling with a powerful and uncooperative snake, anchored at both ends.

FLIGHT PAY

The six members of the crew made coloring pencilstheir departures from Earth as quietly as possible, on separate and unannounced flights-some from the Kennedy Spaceport, some from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. They had all said goodbye to their families and friends, and had given countless interviews. They wanted no publicity during their last moments on Earth, and most of them managed to avoid it.

The actual launch date was still a week ahead. They would need all that amount of time to become accustomed to working and living as a team aboard Discovery under actual flight conditions-conditions which could never be completely simulated on Earth. The "Orbital Shakedown" could be carried out safely yet realistically with Space Station One hovering only a few miles away ready to provide immediate help in case of emergency

That preflight week was also essential for medical reasons. As Dr. Poole expressed it, with concise accuracy, "It gives us a chance to share our germs." The ship would be rigorously quarantined; its inhabitants would catch no diseases from outside, and if they developed any allergies to each other, something could still be done about it.

There were countless little problems, but no major ones-at least, of a technical nature. However, Bowman was distracted from more important matters by one annoying piece of bureaucratic ineptitude

From the earliest days, the financial rewards of astronauts had always been the subject of controversy. Everyone agreed that they should be paid well-but how well?

After a long series of policy changes in which both the Space Agency and the individual astronauts had come in for much criticism, general rules had been worked out to everyone's satisfaction. On this mission, where every man except Dr. Poole was an Astronaut, First Class, all crew members would receive the standard basic pay for that grade, which worked out at $34,945 per annum. By special arrangement with the Federal Health Insurance Agency which had somehow got into the act, Dr. Poole's salary was supposed to be made up to that of his colleagues. For reasons that no one even attempted to understand, he actually received $35,105.

However-and this was where the trouble started-that was only the basic pcoloring pencilsay. On this mission there would be a flight bonus of $25,000 a year, as well as a substantial lump sum on return and provision for dependents in case of death or disablement. Bowman was just okaying the final payroll statements in the Administration Office of Space Station One when he noticed, quite by chance, that the flight bonus would not commence until the moment of injection into the transfer orbit to Jupiter.

The amount involved was only about $500 a man, but Bowman was quite sure that on earlier missions the full bonus had been paid from the beginning of the final checkout period in Earth orbit, when the full crew was assembled under captain's orders and the ship was in all respects operational - even though the flight had not actually begun. So he sent back a memorandum to Accounts, quoting precedents.

There is a type of civil servant (fortunately not as common as the critics sometimes maintain) who refuses to admit a mistake. Such a one appeared to be at the other end of the line. He refused to budge, and so did Bowman. So while the captain of the multi-billion-dollar Discovery was taking over command of his ship, he was conducting an increasingly astringent debate with an anonymous Washington bureaucrat for a $500 bonus. They were still shooting radio memos at each other when the voyage began.

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