The Deep Range - Arthur C. Clarke [99]
The big sub, all restraint removed, began to move upward with increasing speed; Franklin felt the wash of its close passage, but was too bemused to realize what it meant. He was still struggling back into hazy consciousness; around eight hundred feet, quite abruptly, he started to react to Henson’s bullying ministrations, and, to the commander’s vast relief, began to answer him back in kind. He cursed wildly for about a hundred feet, then became fully aware of his surroundings and ground to an embarrassed halt. Only then did he realize that his mission had been successful and that the men he had set out to rescue were already far above him on their way back to the surface.
Franklin could make no such speed. A decompression chamber was waiting for him at the three-hundred-foot level, and in its cramped confines he was to fly back to Brisbane and spend eighteen tedious hours before all the absorbed gas had escaped from his body. And by the time the doctors let him out of their clutches, it was far too late to suppress the tape recording that had circulated throughout the entire bureau. He was a hero to the whole world, but if he ever grew conceited he need only remind himself that all his staff had listened gleefully to every word of Commander Henson’s fluently profane cajoling of their director.
CHAPTER XXV
PETER NEVER LOOKED back as he walked up the gangplank into the projectile from which, in little more than half an hour, he would have his first view of the receding Earth. Franklin could understand why his son kept his head averted; young men of eighteen do not cry in public. Nor, for that matter, he told himself fiercely, do middle-aged directors of important bureaus.
Anne had no such inhibitions; she was weeping steadily despite all that Indra could do to comfort her. Not until the doors of the spaceship had finally sealed and the thirty-minute warning siren had drowned all other noises did she subside into an intermittent sniffling.
The tide of spectators, of friends and relatives, of cameramen and Space Department officials, began to retreat before the moving barriers. Clasping hands with his wife and daughter, Franklin let himself be swept along with the flood of humanity. What hopes and fears, sorrows and joys surrounded him now! He tried to remember his emotions at his first takeoff; it must have been one of the great moments of his life—yet all recollection of it had gone, obliterated by thirty years of later experience.
And now Peter was setting out on the road his father had traveled half a lifetime before. May you have better luck among the stars than I did. Franklin prayed. He wished he could be there at Port Lowell when Irene greeted the boy who might have been her son, and wondered how Roy and Rupert would receive their half-brother. He was sure that they would be glad to meet him; Peter would not be as lonely on Mars as Ensign Walter Franklin had once been.
They waited in silence while the long minutes wore away. By this time, Peter would be so interested in the strange and exciting world that was to be his home for the next week that he would already have forgotten the pain of parting. He could not be blamed if his eyes were fixed on the new life which lay before him in all its unknown promise.
And what of his own life? Franklin asked himself. Now that he had launched his son into the future, could he say that he had been a success? It was a question he found very hard to answer honestly. So many things that he had attempted had ended in failure or even in disaster. He knew now that he was unlikely to rise any farther in the service of the state; he might be a hero, but he had upset too many people when he became the surprised and somewhat reluctant