The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [28]
He felt in his pockets and produced a pencil and an old envelope. Sketching rapidly while he spoke, he began:
“You know, of course, that a small flying machine, with no obvious means of propulsion, calls for me at regular intervals and takes me up to Karellen’s ship. There is only one small room in that machine, and it’s quite bare apart from a couch and table. The layout is something like this.”
He pushed the plan across to the old Welshman, but the strange eyes never turned towards it. They were still fixed on Stormgren’s face, and as he watched them something seemed to change in their depths. The room had become completely silent, but behind him he heard Joe take a sudden indrawn breath.
Puzzled and annoyed, Stormgren stared back at the other, and as he did so, understanding slowly dawned. In his confusion, he crumpled the envelope into a ball of paper and ground it underfoot.
For the man opposite him was blind.
IV
Van Ryberg had made no more attempts to contact Karellen. Much of his department’s work—the forwarding of statistical information, the abstracting of the world’s press, and the like—had continued automatically. In Paris the lawyers were still wrangling over the European Constitution, but that was none of his business for the moment. It was three weeks before the Supervisor wanted the final draft: if it was not ready by then, no doubt Karellen would act accordingly.
And there was still no news of Stormgren.
Van Ryberg was dictating when the “Emergency Only” telephone started to ring. He grabbed the receiver and listened with mounting astonishment, then threw it down and rushed to the open window. In the distance faint cries of amazement were rising from the street and the traffic had already come to a halt.
It was true: Karellen’s ship, that never-changing symbol of the Overlords, was no longer in the sky. He searched the heavens as far as he could see, but found no trace of it. Even as he was doing so, it seemed that night had suddenly fallen. Coming down from the north, its shadowed underbelly black as a thundercloud, the great ship was racing low above the towers of London. Involuntarily, van Ryberg shrank away from the on-rushing monster. He had always known how huge the ships of the Overlords really were—but it was one thing to see them far away in space, and quite another to watch them passing overhead, almost close enough to touch.
In the darkness of that partial eclipse, he watched until the ship and its monstrous shadow had moved to the south. There was no sound, not even the whisper of air; van Ryberg realized that, for all its apparent nearness, the ship was still a thousand feet or more above his head. He watched it vanish over the horizon, still large even when it dropped below the curve of the Earth.
In the office behind him all the telephones had started to ring, but van Ryberg did not move. He leaned against the balcony, still staring into the south, paralyzed by the presence of illimitable power.
As Stormgren talked, it seemed to him that his mind was operating on two levels simultaneously. On the one hand he was trying to defy the men who had captured him, yet on the other he was hoping that they might help him to unravel Karellen’s secret. He did not feel that he was betraying the Supervisor, for there was nothing here that he had not told many times before. Moreover, the thought that these men could harm Karellen in any way was fantastic.
The blind Welshman had conducted most of the interrogation. It was fascinating to watch that agile mind trying one opening after another, testing and rejecting all the theories that Stormgren himself had abandoned long ago. Presently he leaned back with a sigh and the shorthand writer laid down his stylus.
“We’re getting nowhere,” he said resignedly. “We want more facts, and that means action—not argument.” The sightless eyes seemed to stare thoughtfully at Stormgren. For a moment he tapped nervously on the table—the first sign of uncertainty that Stormgren had noticed. Then he continued: