The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [68]
The Professor gave a rather crooked smile.
“I’m not annexing an astronomical body, remember. I’ve put in a claim for salvage, and I’ve done it in the name of the World Science Organization. If Mays takes anything out of Five, he’ll be stealing it from them. Tomorrow I’m going to explain the situation gently to him, just in case he gets any bright ideas.”
It certainly seemed peculiar to think of Satellite Five as salvage, and I could imagine some pretty legal quarrels developing when we got home. But for the present the Professor’s move should have given us some safeguards and might discourage Mays from collecting souvenirs—so we were optimistic enough to hope.
It took rather a lot of organizing, but I managed to get paired off with Marianne for several trips round the interior of Five. Mays didn’t seem to mind: there was no particular reason why he should. A space-suit is the most perfect chaperon ever devised, confound it.
Naturally enough I took her to the art gallery at the first opportunity, and showed her my find. She stood looking at the statue for a long time while I held my torch beam upon it.
“It’s very wonderful,” she breathed at last. “Just think of it waiting here in the darkness all those millions of years! But you’ll have to give it a name.”
“I have. I’ve christened it ‘The Ambassador.’ ”
“Why?”
“Well, because I think it’s a kind of envoy, if you like, carrying a greeting to us. The people who made it knew that one day someone else was bound to come here and find this place.”
“I think you’re right. ‘The Ambassador’—yes, that was clever of you. There’s something noble about it, and something very sad, too. Don’t you feel it?”
I could tell that Marianne was a very intelligent woman. It was quite remarkable the way she saw my point of view, and the interest she took in everything I showed her. But “The Ambassador” fascinated her most of all, and she kept on coming back to it.
“You know, Jack,” she said (I think this was sometime the next day, when Mays had been to see it as well) “you must take that statue back to Earth. Think of the sensation it would cause.”
I sighed.
“The Professor would like to, but it must weigh a ton. We can’t afford the fuel. It will have to wait for a later trip.”
She looked puzzled.
“But things hardly weigh anything here,” she protested.
“That’s different,” I explained. “There’s weight, and there’s inertia—two quite different things. Now inertia—oh, never mind. We can’t take it back, anyway. Captain Searle’s told us that, definitely.”
“What a pity,” said Marianne.
I forgot all about this conversation until the night before we left. We had had a busy and exhausting day packing our equipment (a good deal, of course, we left behind for future use). All our photographic material had been used up. As Charlie Ashton remarked, if we met a live Jovian now we’d be unable to record the fact. I think we were all wanting a breathing space, an opportunity to relax and sort out our impressions and to recover from our head-on collision with an alien culture.
Mays’s ship, the “Henry Luce,” was also nearly ready for take-off. We would leave at the same time, an arrangement which suited the Professor admirably as he did not trust Mays alone on Five.
Everything had been settled when, while checking through our records, I suddenly found that six rolls of exposed film were missing. They were photographs of a complete set of transcriptions in the Temple of Art. After a certain amount of thought I recalled that they had been entrusted to my charge, and I had put them very carefully on a ledge in the Temple, intending to collect them later.
It was a long time before take-off, the Professor and Ashton were canceling some arrears of sleep, and there seemed no reason why I should not slip back to collect the missing material. I knew there would be a row if it was left behind, and as I remembered exactly where it was I need be gone only thirty minutes. So I went, explaining my mission to Bill just in case of accidents.
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