The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [38]
The story caused one friendly critic to remark that I was apparently aspiring to the “Kipling of the spaceways”—a noble but (at least in 1948)—somewhat premature ambition. And on going through my records I am Thrilled and Startled to see that it was sold to CBS in 1955. I wonder if it was ever used . . .
GRANT WAS WRITING UP the Star Queen’s log when he heard the cabin door opening behind him. He didn’t bother to look around—it was hardly necessary for there was only one other man aboard the ship. But when nothing happened, and when McNeil neither spoke nor came into the room, the long silence finally roused Grant’s curiosity and he swung the seat round in its gimbals.
McNeil was just standing in the doorway, looking as if he had seen a ghost. The trite metaphor flashed into Grant’s mind instantly. He did not know for a moment how near the truth it was. In a sense McNeil had seen a ghost—the most terrifying of all ghosts—his own.
“What’s the matter?” said Grant angrily. “You sick or something?”
The engineer shook his head. Grant noticed the little beads of sweat that broke away from his forehead and went glittering across the room on their perfectly straight trajectories. His throat muscles moved, but for a while no sound came. It looked as though he was going to cry.
“We’re done for,” he whispered at last. “Oxygen reserve’s gone.”
Then he did cry. He looked like a flabby doll, slowly collapsing on itself. He couldn’t fall, for there was no gravity, so he just folded up in mid-air.
Grant said nothing. Quite unconsciously he rammed his smoldering cigarette into the ash tray, grinding it viciously until the last tiny spark had died. Already the air seemed to be thickening around him as the oldest terror of the spaceways gripped him by the throat.
He slowly loosed the elastic straps which, while he was seated, gave some illusion of weight, and with an automatic skill launched himself toward the doorway. McNeil did not offer to follow. Even making every allowance for the shock he had undergone, Grant felt that he was behaving very badly. He gave the engineer an angry cuff as he passed and told him to snap out of it.
The hold was a large hemispherical room with a thick central column which carried the controls and cabling to the other half of the dumbbell-shaped spaceship a hundred meters away. It was packed with crates and boxes arranged in a surrealistic three-dimensional array that made very few concessions to gravity.
But even if the cargo had suddenly vanished Grant would scarcely have noticed. He had eyes only for the big oxygen tank, taller than himself, which was bolted against the wall near the inner door of the airlock.
It was just as he had last seen it, gleaming with aluminum paint, and the metal sides still held the faint touch of coldness that gave the only hint of the contents. All the piping seemed in perfect condition. There was no sign of anything wrong apart from one minor detail. The needle of the contents gauge lay mutely against the zero stop.
Grant gazed at the silent symbol as a man in ancient London, returning home one evening at the time of the Plague, might have stared at a rough cross newly scrawled upon his door. Then he banged half a dozen times on the glass in the futile hope that the needle had stuck—though he never really doubted its message. News that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own guarantee of truth. Only good reports need confirmation.
When Grant got back to the control room, McNeil was himself again. A glance at the opened medicine chest showed the reason for the engineer’s rapid recovery. He even assayed a faint attempt at humor.
“It was a meteor,” he said. “They tell us a ship this size should get hit once a century. We seem to have jumped the gun