The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [129]
“Of course,” Myra said, “it’s completely up to you. If you really feel you’d rather not—”
“Oh,” Natasha said, “I suppose I could try it out once or twice. As you say, it’d make Surash happy.”
When Bill returned to unite himself once more with his cluster of Grand Galactics, he wasn’t prepared for the joyous rush of feeling that came with the experience. All the time he had been detached for the running of his various errands, he had been something that was not a part of his previous life experience. He had been alone. And then, once again joined to his fellows, he wasn’t alone anymore, and he was jubilant.
It was almost difficult for him to leave the cluster again.
There wasn’t any choice, of course. The cluster had shared his concerns, and his need to be fair. Perhaps these wretched little humans no longer posed a threat to the galaxy’s peace. If so, perhaps it was unfair to wipe them out.
The Grand Galactics were always stern and sometimes ruthless. But they did not deliberately choose to be unfair.
So Bill took the jumps that returned him to the neighborhood of the little yellow sun that their planet revolved around, and sent two messages.
The first was to the One Point Five armada, now only a small fraction of a light-year from the planet it had been instructed to depopulate. “Cancel instructions for depopulation,” that message began. “Stop. Decelerate totally. Use emergency measures if necessary.”
And the second message was to the armada, but also to the Nine-Limbeds themselves. It merely ordered that no further evidence of their presence should be given to the Earth humans—
Which made a small problem for the Machine-Stored operators of the armada’s 154 ships.
They understood their orders, but those were much easier given than obeyed. In spacecraft you couldn’t just slam on the brakes. There weren’t any brakes. It was one thing to amp up the deceleration firing, which they did at once. That was terribly wasteful of electrical energy and working fluid, of course, but that didn’t matter. Those commodities, like everything else in the observable universe, did after all belong to the Grand Galactics. If they chose to waste them, that was no one’s business but their own.
No, it was the second part of their instruction that troubled the One Point Fives. They were commanded to avoid being observed by the subject species.
But never mind that the Nine-Limbeds had already blown their cover. When the One Point Fives were pouring gigajoules of energy into their exhausts, making a blazing beacon of ionized gases from 154 mammoth torches all firing at once, how could they remain unseen?
36
PREPARING FOR THE RACE
Some people might have expected that the bon voyage party for the solar-sail contestants would have been held in some giant auditorium in a city like New York, or Beijing, or Moscow. It wasn’t. True, the cameras were there, and everything that happened within their sight went out to the whole world’s screens. But the place where the cameras were was only the terminal’s little auditorium, and—counting everybody, the seven racers themselves, their handlers, their immediate families, and a very few VIP guests—there weren’t more than two hundred people in the room.
Myra had her suspicions about why. No doubt no two of the big three were willing to let the other one have the event. She said nothing, however. Then she caught a glimpse of her daughter, standing serious and tall with the other six contestants as a judge gave them a last-minute review of the rules of the race. “Doesn’t she look good?” she whispered to her husband, knowing the answer.
She got it. Ranjit had no more doubt than she that Natasha wasn’t only the smartest and best of the solar-sail pilots, but that she looked astonishingly, even a little worrisomely, mature for her sixteen years. He focused on the most worrisome part of the scene. “There’s that Brazilian, Olsos, standing right next to her,” he pointed