The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [79]
He was tense but completely confident. Better brains than his—brains of metal and crystal and flashing electron streams—were in charge of the Centaurus now. If necessary, he could take command, but he had never yet lifted a ship manually and never expected to do so. If the automatics failed, he would cancel the take-off and sit here on Earth until the fault had been cleared up.
The main field went on, and weight ebbed from the Centaurus. There were protesting groans from the ship’s hull and structure as the strains redistributed themselves. The curved arms of the landing cradle were carrying no load now; the slightest breath of wind would carry the freighter away into the sky.
Control called from the tower: “Your weight now zero: check calibration.”
Saunders looked at his meters. The upthrust of the field would now exactly equal the weight of the ship, and the meter readings should agree with the totals on the loading schedules. In at least one instance this check had revealed the presence of a stowaway on board a spaceship—the gauges were as sensitive as that.
“One million, five hundred and sixty thousand, four hundred and twenty kilograms,” Saunders read off from the thrust indicators. “Pretty good—it checks to within fifteen kilos. The first time I’ve been underweight, though. You could have taken on some more candy for that plump girl friend of yours in Port Lowell, Mitch.”
The assistant pilot gave a rather sickly grin. He had never quite lived down a blind date on Mars which had given him a completely unwarranted reputation for preferring statuesque blondes.
There was no sense of motion, but the Centaurus was now falling up into the summer sky as her weight was not only neutralized but reversed. To the watchers below, she would be a swiftly mounting star, a silver globule climbing through and beyond the clouds. Around her, the blue of the atmosphere was deepening into the eternal darkness of space. Like a bead moving along an invisible wire, the freighter was following the pattern of radio waves that would lead her from world to world.
This, thought Captain Saunders, was his twenty-sixth take-off from Earth. But the wonder would never die, nor would he ever outgrow the feeling of power it gave him to sit here at the control panel, the master of forces beyond even the dreams of mankind’s ancient gods. No two departures were ever the same; some were into the dawn, some toward the sunset, some above a cloud-veiled Earth, some through clear and sparkling skies. Space itself might be unchanging, but on Earth the same pattern never recurred, and no man ever looked twice at the same landscape or the same sky. Down there the Atlantic waves were marching eternally toward Europe, and high above them—but so far below the Centaurus!—the glittering bands of cloud were advancing before the same winds. England began to merge into the continent, and the European coast line became foreshortened and misty as it sank hull down beyond the curve of the world. At the frontier of the west, a fugitive stain on the horizon was the first hint of America. With a single glance, Captain Saunders could span all the leagues across which Columbus had labored half a thousand years ago.
With the silence of limitless power, the ship shook itself free from the last bonds of Earth. To an outside observer, the only sign of the energies it was expending would have been the dull red glow from the radiation fins around the vessel’s equator, as the heat loss from the mass-converters was dissipated into space.
“14:03:45,” wrote Captain Saunders neatly in the log. “Escape velocity attained. Course deviation negligible.”
There was little point in making the entry. The modest 25,000 miles an hour that had been the most unattainable goal of the first astronauts had no practical significance now, since the Centaurus was still accelerating and would continue to gain speed for hours. But it had a profound psychological meaning. Until this moment, if power had failed, they would have fallen