Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (104 page)

‘In these progressive days,’ put in Chambers helpfully, ‘I believe that “Sir” is quite sufficient. But there’s no need to worry if you forget: it’s been a long time since anyone went to the Tower. Besides, this Henry isn’t as tough a proposition as the one who had all the wives.’

‘From all accounts,’ added Mitchell, ‘he’s a very pleasant young man. Quite intelligent, too. He’s often been known to ask people technical questions that they couldn’t answer.’

Captain Saunders ignored the implications of this remark, beyond resolving that if Prince Henry wanted to know how a field Compensation Drive Generator worked, then Mitchell could do the explaining. He got gingerly to his feet – they’d been operating on half a gravity during flight, and now they were on Earth, he felt like a ton of bricks – and started to make his way along the corridors that led to the lower air lock. With an oily purring, the great curving door side-stepped out of his way. Adjusting his smile, he walked out to meet the television cameras and the heir to the British throne.

The man who would, presumably, one day be Henry IX of England was still in his early twenties. He was slightly below average height, and had fine-drawn, regular features that really lived up to all the genealogical clichés. Captain Saunders, who came from Dallas and had no intention of being impressed by any prince, found himself unexpectedly moved by the wide, sad eyes. They were eyes that had seen too many receptions and parades, that had had to watch countless totally uninteresting things, that had never been allowed to stray far from the carefully planned official routes. Looking at that proud but weary face, Captain Saunders glimpsed for the first time the ultimate loneliness of royalty. All his dislike of that institution became suddenly trivial against its real defect: what was wrong with the Crown was the unfairness of inflicting such a burden on any human being….

The passageways of the
Centaurus
were too narrow to allow for general sight-seeing, and it was soon clear that it suited Prince Henry very well to leave his entourage behind. Once they had begun moving through the ship, Saunders lost all his stiffness and reserve, and within a few minutes was treating the prince exactly like any other visitor. He did not realise that one of the earliest lessons royalty has to learn is that of putting people at their ease.

‘You know, Captain,’ said the prince wistfully, ‘this is a big day for us. I’ve always hoped that one day it would be possible for spaceships to operate from England. But it still seems strange to have a port of our own here, after all these years. Tell me – did you ever have much to do with rockets?’

‘Well, I had some training on them, but they were already on the way out before I graduated. I was lucky: some older men had to go back to school and start all over again – or else abandon space completely if they couldn’t convert to the new ships.’

‘It made as much difference as that?’

‘Oh yes – when the rocket went, it was as big as the change from sail to steam. That’s an analogy you’ll often hear, by the way. There was a glamour about the old rockets, just as there was about the old windjammers, which these modern ships haven’t got. When the
Centaurus
takes off, she goes up as quietly as a balloon – and as slowly, if she wants to. But a rocket blastoff shook the ground for miles, and you’d be deaf for days if you were too near the launching apron. Still, you know all that from the old news recordings.’

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?’