Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (151 page)

‘I don’t like fish,’ complained Susan. ‘When do we get to the snakes?’

‘Presently,’ he said. ‘But what’s the hurry? There’s plenty of time.’

The words slipped out before he realised it. He checked his step, while the children ran on ahead. Then he smiled, without bitterness. For in a sense, it was true enough. There
was
plenty of time. Each day, each hour could be a universe of experience, if one used it properly. In the last weeks of his life, he would begin to live.

As yet, no one at the office suspected anything. Even his outing with the children had not caused much surprise; he had done such things before, suddenly cancelling his appointments and leaving his staff to pick up the pieces. The pattern of his behaviour had not yet changed, but in a few days it would be obvious to all his associates that something had happened. He owed it to them – and to the party – to break the news as soon as possible; there were, however, many personal decisions he had to make first, which he wished to settle in his own mind before he began the vast unwinding of his affairs.

There was another reason for his hesitancy. During his career, he had seldom lost a fight, and in the cut and thrust of political life he had given quarter to none. Now, facing his ultimate defeat, he dreaded the sympathy and the condolences that his many enemies would hasten to shower upon him. The attitude, he knew, was a foolish one – a remnant of his stubborn pride which was too much a part of his personality to vanish even under the shadow of death.

He carried his secret from committee room to White House to Capitol, and through all the labyrinths of Washington society, for more than two weeks. It was the finest performance of his career, but there was no one to appreciate it. At the end of that time he had completed his plan of action; it remained only to dispatch a few letters he had written in his own hand, and to call his wife.

The office located her, not without difficulty, in Rome. She was still beautiful, he thought, as her features swam on to the screen; she would have made a fine First Lady, and that would have been some compensation for the lost years. As far as he knew, she had looked forward to the prospect; but had he ever really understood what she wanted?

‘Hello, Martin,’ she said, ‘I was expecting to hear from you. I suppose you want me to come back.’

‘Are you willing to?’ he asked quietly. The gentleness of his voice obviously surprised her.

‘I’d be a fool to say no, wouldn’t I? But if they don’t elect you, I want to go my own way again. You must agree to that.’

‘They won’t elect me. They won’t even nominate me. You’re the first to know this, Diana. In six months, I shall be dead.’

The directness was brutal, but it had a purpose. That fraction-of-a-second delay while the radio waves flashed up to the communication satellites and back again to Earth had never seemed so long. For once, he had broken through the beautiful mask. Her eyes widened with disbelief, her hand flew to her lips.

‘You’re joking!’

‘About
this
? It’s true enough. My heart’s worn out. Dr Jordan told me, a couple of weeks ago. It’s my own fault, of course, but let’s not go into that.’

‘So that’s why you’ve been taking out the children: I wondered what had happened.’

He might have guessed that Irene would have talked with her mother. It was a sad reflection on Martin Steelman, if so commonplace a fact as showing an interest in his own grandchildren could cause curiosity.

‘Yes,’ he admitted frankly. ‘I’m afraid I left it a little late. Now I’m trying to make up for lost time. Nothing else seems very important.’

In silence, they looked into each other’s eyes across the curve of the Earth, and across the empty desert of the dividing years. Then Diana answered, a little unsteadily, ‘I’ll start packing right away.’

Now that the news was out, he felt a great sense of relief. Even the sympathy of his enemies was not as hard to accept as he had feared. For overnight, indeed, he had no enemies. Men who had not spoken to him in years, except with invective, sent messages whose sincerity could not be doubted. Ancient quarrels evaporated, or turned out to be founded on misunderstandings. It was a pity that one had to die to learn these things …

He also learned that, for a man of affairs, dying was a full-time job. There were successors to appoint, legal and financial mazes to untangle, committee and state business to wind up. The work of an energetic lifetime could not be terminated suddenly, as one switches off an electric light. It was astonishing how many responsibilities he had acquired, and how difficult it was to divest himself of them. He had never found it easy to delegate power (a fatal flaw, many critics had said, in a man who hoped to be Chief Executive), but now he must do so, before it slipped forever from his hands.

It was as if a great clock was running down, and there was no one to rewind it. As he gave away his books, read and destroyed old letters, closed useless accounts and files, dictated final instructions, and wrote farewell notes, he sometimes felt a sense of complete unreality. There was no pain; he could never have guessed that he did not have years of active life ahead of him. Only a few lines on a cardiogram lay like a roadblock across his future – or like a curse, written in some strange language the doctors alone could read.

Almost every day now Diana, Irene, or her husband brought the children to see him. In the past he had never felt at ease with Bill, but that, he knew, had been his own fault. You could not expect a son-in-law to replace a son, and it was unfair to blame Bill because he had not been cast in the image of Martin Steelman, Jr. Bill was a person in his own right; he had looked after Irene, made her happy, and fathered her children. That he lacked ambition was a flaw – if flaw indeed it was – that the Senator could at last forgive.

He could even think, without pain or bitterness, of his own son, who had travelled this road before him and now lay, one cross among many, in the United Nations cemetery at Capetown. He had never visited Martin’s grave; in the days when he had the time, white men were not popular in what was left of South Africa. Now he could go if he wished, but he was uncertain if it would be fair to harrow Diana with such a mission. His own memories would not trouble him much longer, but she would be left with hers.

Yet he would like to go, and felt it was his duty. Moreover, it would be a last treat for the children. To them it would be only a holiday in a strange land, without any tinge of sorrow for an uncle they had never known. He had started to make the arrangements when, for the second time within a month, his whole world was turned upside down.

Even now, a dozen or more visitors would be waiting for him each morning when he arrived at his office. Not as many as in the old days, but still a sizable crowd. He had never imagined, however, that Dr Harkness would be among them.

The sight of that thin, gangling figure made him momentarily break his stride. He felt his cheeks flush, his pulse quicken at the memory of ancient battles across committee-room tables, of angry exchanges that had reverberated along the myriad channels of the ether. Then he relaxed; as far as he was concerned, all that was over.

Harkness rose to his feet, a little awkwardly, as he approached. Senator Steelman knew that initial embarrassment – he had seen it so often in the last few weeks. Everyone he now met was automatically at a disadvantage, always on the alert to avoid the one subject that was taboo.

‘Well, Doctor,’ he said. ‘This is a surprise – I never expected to see
you
here.’

He could not resist that little jab, and derived some satisfaction at watching it go home. But it was free from bitterness, as the other’s smile acknowledged.

‘Senator,’ replied Harkness, in a voice that was pitched so low that he had to lean forward to hear it, ‘I’ve some extremely important information for you. Can we speak alone for a few minutes? It won’t take long.’

Steelman nodded; he had his own ideas of what was important now, and felt only a mild curiosity as to why the scientist had come to see him. The man seemed to have changed a good deal since their last encounter, seven years ago. He was much more assured and self-confident, and had lost the nervous mannerisms that had helped to make him such an unconvincing witness.

‘Senator,’ he began, when they were alone in the private office, ‘I’ve some news that may be quite a shock to you. I believe that you can be cured.’

Steelman slumped heavily in his chair. This was the one thing he had never expected; from the first, he had not encumbered himself with the burden of vain hopes. Only a fool fought against the inevitable, and he had accepted his fate.

For a moment he could not speak; then he looked up at his old adversary and gasped: ‘Who told you that? All my doctors—’

‘Never mind them; it’s not their fault they’re ten years behind the times. Look at this.’

‘What does it mean? I can’t read Russian.’

‘It’s the latest issue of the USSR
Journal of Space Medicine
. It arrived a few days ago, and we did the usual routine translation. This note here – the one I’ve marked – refers to some recent work at the Mechnikov Station.’

‘What’s that?’

‘You don’t
know
? Why, that’s their Satellite Hospital, the one they’ve built just below the Great Radiation Belt.’

‘Go on,’ said Steelman, in a voice that was suddenly dry and constricted. ‘I’d forgotten they’d called it that.’ He had hoped to end his life in peace, but now the past had come back to haunt him.

‘Well, the note itself doesn’t say much, but you can read a lot between the lines. It’s one of those advance hints that scientists put out before they have time to write a full-fledged paper, so they can claim priority later. The title is: “Therapeutic Effects of Zero Gravity on Circulatory Diseases”. What they’ve done is to induce heart disease artificially in rabbits and hamsters, and then take them up to the space station. In orbit, of course, nothing has any weight; the heart and muscles have practically no work to do. And the result is exactly what I tried to tell you, years ago. Even extreme cases can be arrested, and many can be cured.’

The tiny, panelled office that had been the centre of his world, the scene of so many conferences, the birthplace of so many plans, became suddenly unreal. Memory was much more vivid: he was back again at those hearings, in the fall of 1969, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s first decade of activity had been under review – and, frequently, under fire.

He had never been chairman of the Senate Committee on Astronautics, but he had been its most vocal and effective member. It was here that he had made his reputation as a guardian of the public purse, as a hardheaded man who could not be bamboozled by utopian scientific dreamers. He had done a good job; from that moment, he had never been far from the headlines. It was not that he had any particular feeling for space and science, but he knew a live issue when he saw one. Like a tape-recorder unrolling in his mind, it all came back …

‘Dr Harkness, you are Technical Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration?’

‘That is correct.’

‘I have here the figures for NASA’s expenditure over the period 1959–69; they are quite impressive. At the moment the total is $82,547,450,000, and the estimate for fiscal 69–70 is well over ten billions. Perhaps you could give us some indication of the return we can expect from all this.’

‘I’ll be glad to do so, Senator.’

That was how it had started, on a firm but not unfriendly note. The hostility had crept in later. That it was unjustified, he had known at the time; any big organisation had weaknesses and failures, and one which literally aimed at the stars could never hope for more than partial success. From the beginning, it had been realised that the conquest of space would be at least as costly in lives and treasure as the conquest of the air. In ten years, almost a hundred men had died – on Earth, in space, and upon the barren surface of the Moon. Now that the urgency of the early sixties was over, the public was asking ‘Why?’ Steelman was shrewd enough to see himself as mouthpiece for those questioning voices. His performance had been cold and calculated; it was convenient to have a scapegoat, and Dr Harkness was unlucky enough to be cast for the role.

‘Yes, Doctor, I understand all the benefits we’ve received from space research in the way of improved communications and weather forecasting, and I’m sure everyone appreciates them. But almost all this work has been done with automatic, unmanned vehicles. What I’m worried about – what many people are worried about – is the mounting expense of the Man-in-Space programme, and its very marginal utility. Since the original Dyna-Soar and Apollo projects, almost a decade ago, we’ve shot billions of dollars into space. And with what result? So that a mere handful of men can spend a few uncomfortable hours outside the atmosphere, achieving nothing that television cameras and automatic equipment couldn’t do – much better and cheaper. And the lives that have been lost! None of us will forget those screams we heard coming over the radio when the X-21 burned up on re-entry. What right have we to send men to such deaths?’

He could still remember the hushed silence in the committee chamber when he had finished. His questions were very reasonable ones, and deserved to be answered. What was unfair was the rhetorical manner in which he had framed them and, above all, the fact that they were aimed at a man who could not answer them effectively. Steelman would not have tried such tactics on a von Braun or a Rickover; they would have given him at least as good as they received. But Harkness was no orator; if he had deep personal feelings, he kept them to himself. He was a good scientist, an able administrator – and a poor witness. It had been like shooting fish in a barrel. The reporters had loved it; he never knew which of them coined the nickname ‘Hapless Harkness’.