Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 (4 page)

           
For once, neither Mitchell nor
Chambers rose to the challenge. Indeed, they maintained a somewhat frigid
silence. That’s torn it, thought Saunders. I should have kept my big mouth
shut; now I’ve hurt their feelings. I should have remembered that advice I read
somewhere: ‘The British have two religions – cricket and the royal family.
Never attempt to criticise either.’

           
The awkward pause was broken by the
radio and the voice of the spaceport controller.

           
‘Control to
Centaurus
. Your flight lane clear. OK to lift.’

           
‘Take-off program starting –
now
!’ replied Saunders, throwing the
master switch. Then he leaned back, his eyes taking in the entire control
panel, his hands clear of the board but ready for instant action.

           
He was tense but completely
confident. Better brains than his – brains of metal and crystal and flashing
electron streams – were in charge of the
Centaurus
now. If necessary, he could take command, but he had never yet lifted a ship
manually and never expected to do so. If the automatics failed, he would cancel
the take-off and sit here on Earth until the fault had been cleared up.

           
The main field went on, and weight
ebbed from the
Centaurus
. There were
protesting groans from the ship’s hull and structure as the strains
redistributed themselves. The curved arms of the landing cradle were carrying
no load now; the slightest breath of wind would carry the freighter away into
the sky.

           
Control called from the tower: ‘Your
weight now zero: check calibration.’

           
Saunders looked at his meters. The
upthrust of the field would now exactly equal the weight of the ship, and the
meter readings should agree with the totals on the loading schedules. In at
least one instance this check had revealed the presence of a stowaway on board
a spaceship – the gauges were as sensitive as that.

           
‘One million, five hundred and sixty
thousand, four hundred and twenty kilograms,’ Saunders read off from the thrust
indicators. ‘Pretty good – it checks to within fifteen kilos. The first time
I’ve been underweight, though. You could have taken on some more candy for that
plump girl friend of yours in Port Lowell, Mitch.’

           
The assistant pilot gave a rather
sickly grin. He had never quite lived down a blind date on Mars which had given
him a completely unwarranted reputation for preferring statesque blondes.

           
There was no sense of motion, but
the
Centaurus
was now falling up into
the summer sky as her weight was not only neutralised but reversed. To the
watchers below, she would be a swiftly mounting star, a silver globule climbing
through and beyond the clouds. Around her, the blue of the atmosphere was
deepening into the eternal darkness of space. Like a bead moving along an
invisible wire, the freighter was following the pattern of radio waves that
would lead her from world to world.

           
This, thought Captain Saunders, was
his twenty-sixth take-off from Earth. But the wonder would never die, nor would
he ever outgrow the feeling of power it gave him to sit here at the control
panel, the master of forces beyond even the dreams of mankind’s ancient gods.
No two departures were ever the same: some were into the dawn, some toward the
sunset, some above a cloud-veiled Earth, some through clear and sparkling
skies. Space itself might be unchanging, but on Earth the same pattern never
recurred, and no man ever looked twice at the same landscape or the same sky.
Down there the Atlantic waves were marching eternally toward
Europe
, and high above them – but so far below the
Centaurus
! – the glittering bands of
cloud were advancing before the same winds.
England
began to merge into the continent, and the
European coast line became foreshortened and misty as it sank hull down beyond
the curve of the world. At the frontier of the west, a fugitive stain on the
horizon was the first hint of
America
. With a single glance, Captain Saunders
could span all the leagues across which
Columbus
had laboured half a thousand years ago.

           
With the silence of limitless power,
the ship shook itself free from the last bonds of Earth. To an outside
observer, the only sign of the energies it was expending would have been the
dull red glow from the radiation fins around the vessel’s equator, as the heat
loss from the mass-converters was dissipated into space.

           
‘
14:03:45
,’ wrote Captain Saunders neatly in the log.
‘Escape velocity attained. Course deviation negligible.’

           
There was little point in making the
entry. The modest 25,000 miles an hour that had been the almost unattainable
goal of the first astronauts had no practical significance now, since the
Centaurus
was still accelerating and
would continue to gain speed for hours. But it had a profound psychological
meaning. Until this moment, if power had failed, they would have fallen back to
Earth. But now gravity could never recapture them: they had achieved the
freedom of space, and could take their pick of the planets. In practice, of
course, there would be several kinds of hell to pay if they did not pick Mars
and deliver their cargo according to plan. But Captain Saunders, like all
spacemen, was fundamentally a romantic. Even on a milk run like this he would
sometimes dream of the ringed glory of Saturn or the sombre Neptunian wastes,
lit by the distant fires of the shrunken sun.

           
An hour after take-off, according to
the hallowed ritual, Chambers left the course computer to its own devices and
produced the three glasses that lived beneath the chart table. As he drank the
traditional toast to
Newton
, Oberth, and Einstein, Saunders wondered how this little ceremony had
originated. Space crews had certainly been doing it for at least sixty years:
perhaps it could be traced back to the legendary rocket engineer who made the
remark, ‘I’ve burned more alcohol in sixty seconds than you’ve ever sold across
this lousy bar.’

           
Two hours later, the last course
correction that the tracking stations on Earth could give them had been fed
into the computer. From now on, until Mars came sweeping up ahead, they were on
their own. It was a lonely thought, yet a curiously exhilarating one. Saunders
savoured it in his mind. There were just the three of them here – and no one
else within a million miles.

           
In the circumstances, the detonation
of an atomic bomb could hardly have been more shattering than the modest knock
on the cabin door….

           
Captain Saunders had never been so
startled in his life. With a yelp that had already left him before he had a
chance to suppress it, he shot out of his seat and rose a full yard before the
ship’s residual gravity field dragged him back. Chambers and Mitchell, on the
other hand, behaved with traditional British phlegm. They swivelled in their
bucket seats, stared at the door, and then waited for their captain to take
action.

           
It took Saunders several seconds to
recover. Had he been confronted with what might be called a normal emergency,
he would already have been halfway into a space suit. But a diffident knock on
the door of the control cabin, when everybody else in the ship was sitting
beside him, was not a fair test.

           
A stowaway was simply impossible.
The danger had been so obvious, right from the beginning of commercial space
flight, that the most stringent precautions had been taken against it. One of
his officers, Saunders knew, would always have been on duty during loading; no
one could possibly have crept in unobserved. Then there had been the detailed preflight
inspection, carried out by both Mitchell and Chambers. Finally, there was the
weight check at the moment before take-off;
that
was conclusive. No, a stowaway was totally …

           
The knock on the door sounded again.
Captain Saunders clenched his fists and squared his jaw. In a few minutes, he
thought, some romantic idiot was going to be very, very sorry.

           
‘Open the door, Mr Mitchell,’
Saunders growled. In a single long stride, the assistant pilot crossed the
cabin and jerked open the hatch.

           
For an age, it seemed, no one spoke.
Then the stowaway, wavering slightly in the low gravity, came into the cabin.
He was completely self-possessed, and looked very pleased with himself.

           
‘Good afternoon, Captain Saunders,’
he said, ‘I must apologise for this sudden intrusion.’

           
Saunders swallowed hard. Then, as
the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place, he looked first at Mitchell, then at
Chambers. Both of his officers stared guilelessly back at him with expressions
of ineffable innocence. ‘So
that’s
it,’ he said bitterly. There was no need for any explanations: everything was
perfectly clear. It was easy to picture the complicated negotiations, the
midnight
meetings, the falsification of records, the
off-loading of nonessential cargoes that his trusted colleagues had been
conducting behind his back. He was sure it was a most interesting story, but he
didn’t want to hear about it now. He was too busy wondering what the
Manual of Space Law
would have to say
about a situation like this, though he was already gloomily certain that it
would be of no use to him at all.

           
It was too late to turn back, of
course: the conspirators wouldn’t have made an elementary miscalculation like
that. He would just have to make the best of what looked to be the trickiest
voyage in his career.

           
He was still trying to think of
something to say when the PRIORITY signal started flashing on the radio board.
The stowaway looked at his watch.

           
‘I was expecting that,’ he said.
‘It’s probably the Prime Minister. I think I’d better speak to the poor man.’

           
Saunders thought so too.

           
‘Very well, Your Royal Highness,’ he
said sulkily, and with such emphasis that the title sounded almost like an
insult. Then, feeling much put upon, he retired into a corner.

           
It was the Prime Minister all right,
and he sounded very upset. Several times he used the phrase ‘your duty to your
people’ and once there was a distinct catch in his throat as he said something
about ‘devotion of your subjects to the Crown’. Saunders realised, with some
surprise, that he really meant it.

           
While this emotional harangue was in
progress, Mitchell leaned over to Saunders and whispered in his ear:

           
‘The old boy’s on a sticky wicket,
and he knows it. The people will be behind the prince when they hear what’s
happened. Everybody knows he’s been trying to get into space for years.’

           
‘I wish he hadn’t chosen
my
ship,’ said Saunders. ‘And I’m not
sure that this doesn’t count as mutiny.’

           
‘The heck it does. Mark my words –
when this is all over you’ll be the only Texan to have the Order of the Garter.
Won’t that be nice for you?’

           
‘Shush!’ said Chambers. The prince
was speaking, his words winging back across the abyss that now sundered him
from the island he would one day rule.