The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [69]
It was a natural-enough thing to pay my last respects to The Ambassador: it might be years before I saw him again, and that calmly enigmatic figure had begun to exercise an extraordinary fascination over me.
Unfortunately, that fascination had not been confined to me alone. For the chamber was empty and the statue gone.
I suppose I could have crept back and said nothing, thus avoiding awkward explanations. But I was too furious to think of discretion, and as soon as I returned we woke the Professor and told him what had happened.
He sat on his bunk rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, then uttered a few harsh words about Mr. Mays and his companions which it would do no good at all to repeat here.
“What I don’t understand,” said Searle “is how they got the thing out—if they have, in fact. We should have spotted it.”
“There are plenty of hiding places, and they could have waited until there was no one around before they took it up through the hull. It must have been quite a job, even under this gravity,” remarked Eric Fulton, in tones of admiration.
“There’s no time for post-mortems,” said the Professor savagely. “We’ve got five hours to think of something. They can’t take off before then, because we’re only just past opposition with Ganymede. That’s correct, isn’t it, Kingsley?”
Searle nodded agreement.
“Yes. We must move around to the other side of Jupiter before we can enter a transfer orbit—at least, a reasonably economical one.”
“Good. That gives us a breathing space. Well, has anyone any ideas?”
Looking back on the whole thing now, it often seems to me that our subsequent behavior was, shall I say, a little peculiar and slightly uncivilized. It was not the sort of thing we could have imagined ourselves doing a few months before. But we were annoyed and overwrought, and our remoteness from all other human beings somehow made everything seem different. Since there were no other laws here, we had to make our own . . .
“Can’t we do something to stop them from taking off? Could we sabotage their rockets, for instance?” asked Bill.
Searle didn’t like this idea at all.
“We mustn’t do anything drastic,” he said. “Besides, Don Hopkins is a good friend of mine. He’d never forgive me if I damaged his ship. There’d be the danger, too, that we might do something that couldn’t be repaired.”
“Then pinch their fuel,” said Groves laconically.
“Of course! They’re probably all asleep, there’s no light in the cabin. All we’ve got to do is to connect up and pump.”
“A very nice idea,” I pointed out, “but we’re two kilometers apart. How much pipeline have we got? Is it as much as a hundred meters?”
The others ignored this interruption as though it was beneath contempt and went on making their plans. Five minutes later the technicians had settled everything: we only had to climb into our spacesuits and do the work.
I never thought, when I joined the Professor’s expedition, that I should end up like an African porter in one of those old adventure stories, carrying a load on my head. Especially when that load was a sixth of a spaceship (being so short, Professor Forster wasn’t able to provide very effective help). Now that its fuel tanks were half empty, the weight of the ship in this gravity was about two hundred kilograms. We squeezed beneath, heaved, and up she went—very slowly, of course, because her inertia was still unchanged. Then we started marching.
It took us quite a while to make the journey, and it wasn’t quite as easy as we’d thought it would be. But presently the two ships were lying side by side, and nobody had noticed us. Everyone in the “Henry Luce” was fast asleep, as they had every reason to expect us to be.
Though I was still rather short of breath, I found a certain schoolboy amusement in the whole