The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [42]
He whistled as he noticed that it was a starred item, insured for a hundred thousand dollars, and he suddenly remembered hearing on the radio that the Hesperian Museum had just bought a first edition Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
A few sheets later was a very contrasting item, Miscellaneous books—25 kilos—no intrinsic value.
It had cost a small fortune to ship those books to Venus, yet they were of “no intrinsic value.” Grant let his imagination loose on the problem. Perhaps someone who was leaving Earth forever was taking with him to a new world his most cherished treasures—the dozen or so volumes that above all others had most shaped his mind.
Item 564—12 reels film.
That, of course, would be the Neronian super-epic, While Rome Burns, which had left Earth just one jump ahead of the censor. Venus was waiting for it with considerable impatience.
Medical supplies—50 kilos. Case of cigars—1 kilo. Precision instruments—75 kilos. So the list went on. Each item was something rare or something which the industry and science of a younger civilization could not yet produce.
The cargo was sharply divided into two classes—blatant luxury or sheer necessity. There was little in between. And there was nothing, nothing at all, which gave Grant the slightest hope. He did not see how it could have been otherwise, but that did not prevent him from feeling a quite unreasonable disappointment.
The reply from Venus, when it came at last, took nearly an hour to run through the recorder. It was a questionnaire so detailed that Grant wondered morosely if he’d live long enough to answer it. Most of the queries were technical ones concerning the ship. The experts on two planets were pooling their brains in the attempt to save the Star Queen and her cargo.
“Well, what do you think of it?” Grant asked McNeil when the other had finished running through the message. He was watching the engineer carefully for any further sign of strain.
There was a long pause before McNeil spoke. Then he shrugged his shoulders and his first words were an echo of Grant’s own thoughts.
“It will certainly keep us busy. I won’t be able to do all these tests in under a day. I can see what they’re driving at most of the time, but some of the questions are just plain crazy.”
Grant had suspected that, but said nothing as the other continued.
“Rate of hull leakage—that’s sensible enough, but why should anyone want to know the efficiency of our radiation screening? I think they’re trying to keep up our morale by pretending they have some bright ideas—or else they want to keep us too busy to worry.”
Grant was relieved and yet annoyed by McNeil’s calmness—relieved because he had been afraid of another scene and annoyed because McNeil was not fitting at all neatly into the mental category he had prepared for him. Was that first momentary lapse typical of the man or might it have happened to anyone?
Grant, to whom the world was very much a place of blacks and whites, felt angry at being unable to decide whether McNeil was cowardly or courageous. That he might be both was a possibility that never occurred to him.
There is a timelessness about space-flight that is unmatched by any other experience of man. Even on the Moon there are shadows that creep sluggishly from crag to crag as the sun makes its slow march across the sky. Earthward there is always the great clock of the spinning globe, marking the hours with continents for hands. But on a long voyage in a gyro-stabilized ship the same patterns of sunlight lie unmoving on wall or floor as the chronometer ticks off its meaningless hours and days.
Grant and McNeil had long since learned to regulate their lives accordingly. In deep space they moved and thought with a leisureliness that would vanish quickly enough when a voyage was nearing its end and the time for braking maneuvers had arrived. Though they were now under sentence of death, they continued along the well-worn grooves of habit.
Every day Grant carefully wrote up the log, checked the ship’s position and carried out his various routine duties.