Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (3 page)

           
The prince smiled.

           
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve often run
through them at the Palace. I think I’ve watched every incident in all the
pioneering expeditions. I was sorry to see the end of the rockets, too. But we
could never have had a spaceport here on Salisbury Plain – the vibration would
have shaken down
Stonehenge
!’

           
‘
Stonehenge
?’ queried Saunders as he held open a hatch
and let the prince through into Hold Number 3.

           
‘Ancient monument – one of the most
famous stone circles in the world. It’s really impressive, and about three
thousand years old. See it if you can – it’s only ten miles from here.’

           
Captain Saunders had some difficulty
in suppressing a smile. What an odd country this was: where else, he wondered,
would you find contrasts like this? It made him feel very young and raw when he
remembered that back home Billy the Kid was ancient history, and there was
hardly anything in the whole of
Texas
as much as five hundred years old. For the
first time he began to realise what tradition meant: it gave Prince Henry
something that he could never possess. Poise – self-confidence, yes, that was
it. And a pride that was somehow free from arrogance because it took itself so
much for granted that it never had to be asserted.

           
It was surprising how many questions
Prince Henry managed to ask in the thirty minutes that had been allotted for
his tour of the freighter. They were not the routine questions that people
asked out of politeness, quite uninterested in the answers. H.R.H. Prince Henry
knew a lot about spaceships, and Captain Saunders felt completely exhausted
when he handed his distinguished guest back to the reception committee, which
had been waiting outside the
Centaurus
with well-simulated patience.

           
‘Thank you very much, Captain,’ said
the prince as they shook hands in the air lock. ‘I’ve not enjoyed myself so
much for ages. I hope you have a pleasant stay in
England
, and a successful voyage.’ Then his retinue
whisked him away, and the port officials, frustrated until now, came aboard to
check the ship’s papers.

           
‘Well,’ said Mitchell when it was
all over, ‘what did you think of our Prince of Wales?’

           
‘He surprised me,’ answered Saunders
frankly. ‘I’d never have guessed he was a prince. I always thought they were
rather dumb. But heck, he
knew
the
principles of the
Field Drive
! Has he ever been up in space?’

           
‘Once, I think. Just a hop above the
atmosphere in a Space Force ship. It didn’t even reach orbit before it came
back again – but the Prime Minister nearly had a fit. There were questions in
the House and editorials in the
Times
.
Everyone decided that the heir to the throne was too valuable to risk in these
newfangled inventions. So, though he has the rank of commodore in the Royal
Space Force, he’s never even been to the moon.’

           
‘The poor guy,’ said Captain
Saunders.

           
He had three days to burn, since it
was not the captain’s job to supervise the loading of the ship or the preflight
maintenance. Saunders knew skippers who hung around breathing heavily on the
necks of the servicing engineers, but he wasn’t that type. Besides, he wanted
to see
London
. He had been to Mars and Venus and the
moon, but this was his first visit to
England
. Mitchell and Chambers filled him with
useful information and put him on the monorail to
London
before dashing off to see their own
families. They would be returning to the spaceport a day before he did, to see
that everything was in order. It was a great relief having officers one could
rely on so implicitly: they were unimaginative and cautious, but thoroughgoing
almost to a fault. If
they
said that
everything was shipshape, Saunders knew he could take off without qualms.

           
The sleek, streamlined cylinder
whistled across the carefully tailored landscape. It was so close to the
ground, and travelling so swiftly, that one could only gather fleeting
impressions of the towns and fields that flashed by. Everything, thought
Saunders, was so incredibly compact, and on such a Lilliputian scale. There
were no open spaces, no fields more than a mile long in any direction. It was
enough to give a Texan claustrophobia – particularly a Texan who also happened
to be a space pilot.

           
The sharply defined edge of
London
appeared like the bulwark of some walled
city on the horizon. With few exceptions, the buildings were quite low –
perhaps fifteen or twenty storeys in height. The monorail shot through a narrow
canyon, over a very attractive park, across a river that was presumably the
Thames
, and then came to rest with a steady,
powerful surge of deceleration. A loud-speaker announced, in a modest voice
that seemed afraid of being overheard: ‘This is Paddington. Passengers for the
North please remain seated.’ Saunders pulled his baggage down from the rack and
headed out into the station.

           
As he made for the entrance to the
Underground, he passed a bookstall and glanced at the magazines on display.
About half of them, it seemed, carried photographs of Prince Henry or other
members of the royal family. This, thought Saunders, was altogether too much of
a good thing. He also noticed that all the evening papers showed the prince
entering or leaving the
Centaurus
,
and bought copies to read in the subway – he begged its pardon, the ‘Tube’.

           
The editorial comments had a
monotonous similiarity. At last, they rejoiced,
England
need no longer take a back seat among the
space-going nations. Now it was possible to operate a space fleet without
having a million square miles of desert: the silent, gravity-defying ships of
today could land, if need be, in
Hyde Park
,
without even disturbing the ducks on the Serpentine. Saunders found it odd that
this sort of patriotism had managed to survive into the age of space, but he
guessed that the British had felt it pretty badly when they’d had to borrow
launching sites from the Australians, the Americans, and the Russians.

           
The London Underground was still,
after a century and a half, the best transport system in the world, and it
deposited Saunders safely at his destination less than ten minutes after he had
left Paddington. In ten minutes the
Centaurus
could have covered fifty thousand miles; but space, after all, was not quite so
crowded as this. Nor were the orbits of space craft so tortuous as the streets
Saunders had to negotiate to reach his hotel. All attempts to straighten out
London
had failed dismally, and it was fifteen
minutes before he completed the last hundred yards of his journey.

           
He stripped off his jacket and
collapsed thankfully on his bed. Three quiet, carefree days all to himself: it
seemed too good to be true.

           
It was. He had barely taken a deep
breath when the phone rang.

           
‘Captain Saunders? I’m so glad we
found you. This is the BBC. We have a programme called “In Town Tonight” and we
were wondering …’

           
The thud of the air-lock door was
the sweetest sound Saunders had heard for days. Now he was safe: nobody could
get at him here in his armoured fortress, which would soon be far out in the
freedom of space. It was not that he had been treated badly: on the contrary,
he had been treated altogether too well. He had made four (or was it five?)
appearances on various TV programmes; he had been to more parties than he could
remember; he had acquired several hundred new friends and (the way his head
felt now) forgotten all his old ones.

           
‘Who started the rumour,’ he said to
Mitchell as they met at the port, ‘that the British were reserved and
stand-offish? Heaven help me if I ever meet a
demonstrative
Englishman.’

           
‘I take it,’ replied Mitchell, ‘that
you had a good time.’

           
‘Ask me tomorrow,’ Saunders replied.
‘I may have reintegrated my psyche by then.’

           
‘I saw you on that quiz programme
last night,’ remarked Chambers. ‘You looked pretty ghastly.’

           
‘Thank you: that’s just the sort of
sympathetic encouragement I need at the moment. I’d like to see you think of a
synonym of “jejune” after you’d been up until three in the morning.’

           
‘Vapid,’ replied Chambers promptly.

           
‘Insipid,’ said Mitchell, not to be
outdone.

           
‘You win. Let’s have those overhaul
schedules and see what the engineers have been up to.’

           
Once seated at the control desk,
Captain Saunders quickly became his usual efficient self. He was home again,
and his training took over. He knew exactly what to do, and would do it with
automatic precision. To right and left of him, Mitchell and Chambers were
checking their instruments and calling the control tower.

           
It took them an hour to carry out
the elaborate pre-flight routine. When the last signature had been attached to
the last sheet of instructions, and the last red light on the monitor panel had
turned to green, Saunders flopped back in his seat and lit a cigarette. They
had ten minutes to spare before take-off.

           
‘One day,’ he said, ‘I’m going to
come back to
England
incognito to find what makes the place tick. I don’t understand how you
can crowd so many people onto one little island without it sinking.’

           
‘Huh,’ snorted Chambers. ‘You should
see
Holland
. That makes
England
look as wide open as
Texas
.’

           
‘And then there’s this royal family
business. Do you know, wherever I went everybody kept asking me how I got on
with Prince Henry – what we’d talked about – didn’t I think he was a fine guy,
and so on. Frankly, I got fed up with it. I can’t imagine how you’ve managed to
stand it for a thousand years.’

           
‘Don’t think that the royal family’s
been popular all the time,’ replied Mitchell. ‘Remember what happened to
Charles the First? And some of the things we said about the early Georges were
quite as rude as the remarks your people made later.’

           
‘We just happen to like tradition,’
said Chambers. ‘We’re not afraid to change when the time comes, but as far as
the royal family is concerned – well, it’s unique and we’re rather fond of it.
Just the way you feel about the Statue of Liberty.’

           
‘Not a fair example. I don’t think
it’s right to put human beings up on a pedestal and treat them as if they’re –
well, minor deities. Look at Prince Henry, for instance. Do you think he’ll
ever have a chance of doing the things he really wants to do? I saw him three
times on TV when I was in
London
. The first time he was opening a new school somewhere; then he was
giving a speech to the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers at the Guildhall (I
swear I’m not making
that
up), and
finally he was receiving an address of welcome from the mayor of Podunk, or
whatever your equivalent is.’ (‘
Wigan
,’
interjected Mitchell.) ‘I think I’d rather be in jail than live that sort of
life. Why can’t you leave the poor guy alone?’