Clarke, Arthur C - SSC 04 Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 almost 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 back to
Earth. But now gravity could never recapture them: they had achieved the
freedom of space, and could take their pick of the planets. In practice, of
course, there would be several kinds of hell to pay if they did not pick Mars
and deliver their cargo according to plan. But Captain Saunders, like all
spacemen, was fundamentally a romantic. Even on a milk run like this he would
sometimes dream of the ringed glory of Saturn or the sombre Neptunian wastes,
lit by the distant fires of the shrunken sun.
     
                An hour after take-off, according to
the hallowed ritual, Chambers left the course computer to its own devices and
produced the three glasses that lived beneath the chart table. As he drank the
traditional toast to Newton , Oberth, and Einstein, Saunders wondered how this little ceremony had
originated. Space crews had certainly been doing it for at least sixty years:
perhaps it could be traced back to the legendary rocket engineer who made the
remark, ‘I’ve burned more alcohol in sixty seconds than you’ve ever sold across
this lousy bar.’
     
                Two hours later, the last course
correction that the tracking stations on Earth could give them had been fed
into the computer. From now on, until Mars came sweeping up ahead, they were on
their own. It was a lonely thought, yet a curiously exhilarating one. Saunders
savoured it in his mind. There were just the three of them here – and no one
else within a million miles.
     
                In the circumstances, the detonation
of an atomic bomb could hardly have been more shattering than the modest knock
on the cabin door….
     
                Captain Saunders had never been so
startled in his life. With a yelp that had already left him before he had a
chance to suppress it, he shot out of his seat and rose a full yard before the
ship’s residual gravity field dragged him back. Chambers and Mitchell, on the
other hand, behaved with traditional British phlegm. They swivelled in their
bucket seats, stared at the door, and then waited for their captain to take
action.
     
                It took Saunders several seconds to
recover. Had he been confronted with what might be called a normal emergency,
he would already have been halfway into a space suit. But a diffident knock on
the door of the control cabin, when everybody else in the ship was sitting
beside him, was not a fair test.
     
                A stowaway was simply impossible.
The danger had been so obvious, right from the beginning of commercial space
flight, that the most stringent precautions had been taken against it. One of
his officers, Saunders knew, would always have been on duty during loading; no
one could possibly have crept in unobserved. Then there had been the detailed preflight
inspection, carried out by both Mitchell and Chambers. Finally, there was the
weight check at the moment before take-off; that was conclusive. No, a stowaway was totally …
     
                The knock on the door sounded again.
Captain Saunders