The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [49]
Nothing else whatsoever happened for twenty-three days.
The captain of the Hercules turned to his mate with a sigh of relief.
“I was afraid he couldn’t do it. It must have been a colossal job to break his orbit single-handed—and with the air as thick as it must be by now. How soon can we get to him?”
“It will take about an hour. He’s still got quite a bit of eccentricity but we can correct that.”
“Good. Signal the Leviathan and Titan that we can make contact and ask them to take off, will you? But I wouldn’t drop any tips to your news commentator friends until we’re safely locked.”
The mate had the grace to blush. “I don’t intend to,” he said in a slightly hurt voice as he pecked delicately at the keys of his calculator. The answer that flashed instantly on the screen seemed to displease him.
“We’d better board and bring the Queen down to circular speed ourselves before we call the other tugs,” he said, “otherwise we’ll be wasting a lot of fuel. She’s still got a velocity excess of nearly a kilometer a second.”
“Good idea—tell Leviathan and Titan to stand by but not to blast until we give them the new orbit.”
While the message was on its way down through the unbroken cloudbanks that covered half the sky below, the mate remarked thoughtfully, “I wonder what he’s feeling like now?”
“I can tell you. He’s so pleased to be alive that he doesn’t give a hoot about anything else.”
“Still, I’m not sure I’d like to have left my shipmate in space so that I could get home.”
“It’s not the sort of thing that anyone would like to do. But you heard the broadcast—they’d talked it over calmly and the loser went out of the airlock. It was the only sensible way.”
“Sensible perhaps—but it’s pretty horrible to let someone else sacrifice himself in such a cold-blooded way so that you can live.”
“Don’t be a ruddy sentimentalist. I’ll bet that if it happened to us you’d push me out before I could even say my prayers.”
“Unless you did it to me first. Still, I don’t think it’s ever likely to happen to the Hercules. Five days out of port’s the longest we’ve ever been, isn’t it? Talk about the romance of the spaceways!”
The captain didn’t reply. He was peering into the eyepiece of the navigating telescope, for the Star Queen should now be within optical range. There was a long pause while he adjusted the vernier controls. Then he gave a little sigh of satisfaction.
“There she is—about ninety-five kilometers away. Tell the crew to stand by—and send a message to cheer him up. Say we’ll be there in thirty minutes even if it isn’t quite true.”
Slowly the thousand-meter nylon ropes yielded beneath the strain as they absorbed the relative momentum of the ships, then slackened again as the Star Queen and the Hercules rebounded toward each other. The electric winches began to turn and, like a spider crawling up its thread, the Hercules drew alongside the freighter.
Men in space-suits sweated with heavy reaction units—tricky work, this—until the airlocks had registered and could be coupled together. The outer doors slid aside and the air in the locks mingled, fresh with foul. As the mate of the Hercules waited, oxygen cylinder in hand, he wondered what condition the survivor would be in. Then the Star Queen’s inner door slid open.
For a moment the two men stood looking at each other across the short corridor that now connected the two airlocks. The mate was surprised and a little disappointed to find that he felt no particular sense of drama.
So much had happened to make this moment possible that its actual achievement was almost an anticlimax, even in the instant when it was slipping into the past. He wished—for he was an incurable romantic—that he could think of something memorable to say, some “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” phrase that would pass into history.
But all he actually said was, “Well, McNeil, I’m pleased to see you.”
Though he was considerably thinner and somewhat haggard, McNeil