From the Ocean from teh Stars (36 page)

"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 preflight 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 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?"

For once, neither Mitchell nor Chambers rose to the challenge. In
deed, 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 criticize either."

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

"Control to
Centaurus.
Your flight lane clear. O.K. 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 cal
ibration."

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 under
weight, 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 unwar
ranted 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 neutralized 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 de
partures 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 land
scape 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 labored
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 ve
locity 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 accelerat
ing 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 somber 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 cere
mony had originated. Space crews had certainly been doing it for at least sixty years: perhaps it could be traced back to the legendary rocket engi
neer 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 savored 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 swiveled 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 con
clusive. 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 apologize 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 con
ducting 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 realized, 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