The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [74]
“Well, that’s that,” he said cheerfully. “Now let’s sit down and have a drink to forget all this unpleasantness, shall we?”
I pointed indignantly at the clock.
“Have you gone crazy!” I yelled. “He’s already halfway to Jupiter!”
Professor Forster looked at me disapprovingly.
“Impatience,” he said, “is a common failing in the young. I see no cause at all for hasty action.”
Marianne spoke for the first time; she now looked really scared.
“But you promised,” she whispered.
The Professor suddenly capitulated. He had had his little joke, and didn’t want to prolong the agony.
“I can tell you at once, Miss Mitchell—and you too, Jack—that Mays is in no more danger than we are. We can go and collect him whenever we like.”
“Do you mean that you lied to me?”
“Certainly not. Everything I told you was perfectly true. You simply jumped to the wrong conclusions. When I said that a body would take ninety-five minutes to fall from here to Jupiter, I omitted—not, I must confess, accidentally—a rather important phrase. I should have added “a body at rest with respect to Jupiter.” Your friend Mr. Mays was sharing the orbital speed of this satellite, and he’s still got it. A little matter of twenty-six kilometers a second, Miss Mitchell.
“Oh yes, we threw him completely off Five and toward Jupiter. But the velocity we gave him then was trivial. He’s still moving in practically the same orbit as before. The most he can do—I’ve got Captain Searle to work out the figures—is to drift about a hundred kilometers inward. And in one revolution—twelve hours—he’ll be right back where he started, without us bothering to do anything at all.”
There was a long, long silence. Marianne’s face was a study in frustration, relief, and annoyance at having been fooled. Then she turned on Captain Hopkins.
“You must have known all the time! Why didn’t you tell me?”
Hopkins gave her a wounded expression.
“You didn’t ask me,” he said.
We hauled Mays down about an hour later. He was only twenty kilometers up, and we located him quickly enough by the flashing light on his suit. His radio had been disconnected, for a reason that hadn’t occurred to me. He was intelligent enough to realize that he was in no danger, and if his set had been working he could have called his ship and exposed our bluff. That is, if he wanted to. Personally, I think I’d have been glad enough to call the whole thing off even if I had known that I was perfectly safe. It must have been awfully lonely up there.
To my great surprise, Mays wasn’t as mad as I’d expected. Perhaps he was too relieved to be back in our snug little cabin when we drifted up to him on the merest fizzle of rockets and yanked him in. Or perhaps he felt that he’d been worsted in fair fight and didn’t bear any grudge. I really think it was the latter.
There isn’t much more to tell, except that we did play one other trick on him before we left Five. He had a good deal more fuel in his tanks than he really needed, now that his payload was substantially reduced. By keeping the excess ourselves, we were able to carry The Ambassador back to Ganymede after all. Oh, yes, the Professor gave him a check for the fuel we’d borrowed. Everything was perfectly legal.
There’s one amusing sequel I must tell you, though. The day after the new gallery was opened at the British Museum I went along to see The Ambassador, partly to discover if his impact was still as great in these changed surroundings. (For the record, it wasn’t—though it’s still considerable and Bloomsbury will never be quite the same to me again.) A huge crowd was milling around the gallery, and there in the middle of it were Mays and Marianne.
It ended up with us having a very pleasant lunch together in Holborn. I’ll say this about Mays—he