The Story Archive

The Sentinel

Arthur C. Clarke · 1951 CE · Short Story · English · Contemporary

A geologist with a survey party crossing the Mare Crisium is frying breakfast in camp when he catches a glint high on the crater wall and decides to climb to it. What he reaches is a small polished pyramid on a plinth of rock, ringed by something that turns aside every instrument, set down and left there long before anything on Earth could have made it. Clarke wrote it for a BBC competition that turned it down; seventeen years later he and Kubrick built 2001 around this one object.

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