The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (44 page)

‘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?’

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 statuesque 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.

‘I am sorry, Mr Prime Minister,’ he said, ‘if I’ve caused you any alarm. I will return as soon as it is convenient. Someone has to do everything for the first time, and I felt the moment had come for a member of my family to leave Earth. It will be a valuable part of my education, and will make me more fitted to carry out my duty. Goodbye.’

He dropped the microphone and walked over to the observation window—the only spaceward-looking port on the entire ship. Saunders watched him standing there, proud and lonely—but contented now. And as he saw the prince staring out at the stars which he had at last attained, all his annoyance and indignation slowly evaporated.

No one spoke for a long time. Then Prince Henry tore his gaze away from the blinding splendour beyond the port, looked at Captain Saunders, and smiled.

‘Where’s the galley, Captain?’ he asked. ‘I may be out of practice, but when I used to go scouting I was the best cook in my patrol.’

Saunders slowly relaxed, then smiled back. The tension seemed to lift from the control room. Mars was still a long way off, but he knew now that this wasn’t going to be such a bad trip after all….