2001: A Space Odyssey

Bowman drops through the shaft, but the end of it remains the same distance away throughout his descent. The star field expands. Time behaves strangely, and the display showing the passage of tenths of a second moves slowly enough that he can count them off. The experience of “calm expectation” reminds him of when the medics tested him with hallucinogenic drugs. He emerges onto what appears to be a huge world with no atmosphere, allowing him to see the details of the horizon with perfect clarity. The sky is filled with black specks—holes—in place of stars. He passes the wreck of a ship but doesn’t have time to look at it clearly. He sees what looks like a flat disk on the horizon; “only one thing about it was familiar to the human eye” (200), and that is its color. This object ignores him and drops into one of the “great slots” in the sky. Bowman has a flash of insight that he is at “some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars” (200).