From the Ocean from teh Stars (35 page)

Chuck didn't reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could
just see Chuck's face, a white oval turned toward the sky.

"Look," whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven.
(There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

☆
REFUGEE

When he comes aboard," said Captain Saunders, as
he waited for the landing ramp to extrude itself, "what the devil shall I
call him?"

There was a thoughtful silence while the navigation officer and the assistant pilot considered this problem in etiquette. Then Mitchell locked
the main control panel, and the ship's multitudinous mechanisms lapsed
into unconsciousness as power was withdrawn from them.

"The correct address," he drawled slowly, "is 'Your Royal Highness.'"

"Huh!" snorted the captain. "I'll be damned if I'll call anyone
that!"

"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. Adjust
ing 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 cliches. Captain Saunders, who came from Dallas and had no inten-

tion 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 uninter
esting 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 de
fect: 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 gen
eral 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 real
ize 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 com
pletely 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 wind
jammers, 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 blast-off shook the ground for miles, and you'd be deaf for days if you were too near the launching apron. Still, you'll 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 con
trasts 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 realize 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 edito
rials 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 super
vise 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 ship
shape, 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 traveling 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 stories 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, power
ful 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 book
stall 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 en
tering or leaving the
Centaurus,
and bought copies to read in the subway
—he begged its pardon, the "Tube."

The editorial comments had a monotonous similarity. 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 B.B.C. We
have a program 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 armored 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?) appear
ances on various TV programs; 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 rumor," he said to Mitchell as they met at the port,
"that the British were reserved and standoffish? 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 program 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 for 'jejune' after
you'd been up until three in the morning."

"Vapid," replied Chambers promptly.

"Insipid," said Mitchell, not to be outdone.