The Sentinel Page 16

  Yet at first diplomatic relations were smooth enough. The Professor had hit upon the bright idea of pairing each of us with one of Mays’s team, so that we acted simultaneously as guides and supervisors. Doubling the number of investigating groups also greatly increased the rate at which we could work. It was unsafe for anyone to operate by himself under these conditions, and this had handicapped us a great deal.

  The Professor outlined his policy to us the day after the arrival of Mays’s party.

  “I hope we can get along together,” he said a little anxiously. “As far as I’m concerned they can go where they like and photograph what they like, as long as they don’t take anything, and as long as they don’t get back to Earth with their records before we do.”

  “I don’t see how we can stop them,” protested Ashton.

  “Well, I hadn’t intended to do this, but I’ve now registered a claim to Five. I radioed it to Ganymede last night, and it will be at The Hague by now.”

  “But no one can claim an astronomical body for himself. That was settled in the case of the Moon, back in the last century.”

  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.

  The floodlight was no longer working, of course, and the darkness inside the shell of Five was somewhat oppressive. But I left a portable beacon at the entrance, and dropped freely until my hand torch told me it was time to break the fall. Ten minutes later, with a sigh of relief, I gathered up the missing films.

  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.”<
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  “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 adventure as Searle and Fulton drew the refueling pipeline out of our airlock and quietly coupled up to the other ship.

  “The beauty of this plan,” explained Groves to me as we stood watching, “is that they can’t do anything to stop us, unless they come outside and uncouple our line. We can drain them dry in five minutes, and it will take them half that time to wake up and get into their spacesuits.”

  A sudden horrid fear smote me.

  “Suppose they turned on their rockets and tried to get away?”

  “Then we’d both be smashed up. No, they’ll just have to come outside and see what’s going on. Ah, there go the pumps.”

  The pipeline had stiffened like a fire-hose under pressure, and I knew that the fuel was pouring into our tanks. Any moment now the lights would go on in the “Henry Luce” and her startled occupants would come scuttling out.

  It was something of an anticlimax when they didn’t. They must have been sleeping very soundly not to have felt the vibration from the pumps, but when it was all over nothing had happened and we just stood round looking rather foolish. Searle and Fulton carefully uncoupled the pipeline and put it back into the airlock.

  “Well?” we asked the Professor.

  He thought things over for a minute.

  “Let’s get back into the ship,” he said.

  When we had climbed out of our suits and were gathered together in the control room, or as far in as we could get, the Professor sat down at the radio and punched out the “Emergency” signal. Our sleeping neighbors would be awake in a couple of seconds as their automatic receiver sounded the alarm.

  The TV screen glimmered into life. There, looking rather frightened, was Randolph Mays.

  “Hello, Forster,” he snapped. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Nothing wrong here,” replied the Professor in his best deadpan manner, “but you’ve lost something important. Look at your fuel gauges.”

  The screen emptied, and for a moment there was a confused mumbling and shouting from the speaker. Then Mays was back, annoyance and alarm competing for possession of his features.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded angrily. “Do you know anything about this?”

  The Prof let him sizzle for a moment before he replied.

  “I think you’d better come across and talk things over,” he said. “You won’t have far to walk.”

  Mays glared back at him uncertainly, then retorted, “You bet I will!” The screen went blank.

  “He’ll have to climb down now!” said Bill gleefully. “There’s nothing else he can do!”

  “It’s not so simple as you think,” warned Fulton. “If he really wanted to be awkward, he could just sit tight and radio Ganymede for a tanker.”

  “What good would that do him? It would waste days and cost a fortune.”

  “Yes, but he’d still have the statue, if he wanted it that badly. And he’d get his money back when he sued us.”

  The airlock light flashed on and Mays stumped into the room. He was in a surprisingly conciliatory mood; on the way over, he must have had second thoughts.

  “Well, well,” he said affably. “What’s all this nonsense in aid of?”

  “You know perfectly well,” the Professor retorted coldly. “I made it quite clear that nothing was to be taken off Five. You’ve been stealing property that doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Now, let’s be reasonable. Who does it belong to? You can’t claim everything on this planet as your personal property.”

  “This is not a planet—it’s a ship and the laws of salvage operate.”

  “Frankly, that’s a very debatable point. Don’t you think you should wait until you get a ruling from the lawyers?”

  The Professor was being icily polite, but I could see that the strain was terrific and an explosion might occur at any moment.

  “Listen, Mr. Mays,” he said with ominous calm. “What you’ve taken is the most important single find we’ve made here. I will make allowances for the fact that you don’t appreciate what you’ve done, and don’t understand the viewpoint of an archaeologist like myself. Return that statue, and we’ll pump your fuel back and say no more.”

  Mays rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

  “I really don’t see why you should make such a fuss about one statue, when you consider all the stuff that’s still here.”

  It was then that the Professor made one of his rare mistakes.

  “You talk like a man who’s stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre and argues that nobody will miss it because of all the other paintings. This statue’s unique in a way that no terrestrial work of art can ever be. That’s why I’m determined to get it back.”

  You should never, when you’re bargaining, make it obvious that you want something really badly. I saw the greedy glint in Mays’s eye and said to myself, “Uh-huh! He’s going to be tough.” And I remembered Fulton’s remark about calling Ganymede for a tanker.

  “Give me half an hour to think it over,” said Mays, turning to the airlock.

  “Very well,” replied the Professor stiffly. “Half an hour—no more.”

  I must give Mays credit for brains. Within five minutes we saw his communications aerial start slewing round until it locked on Ganymede. Naturally we tried to listen in, but he had a scrambler. These newspaper men must trust each other.

  The reply came back a few minutes later; that was scrambled, too. While we were waiting for the next development, we had another council of war. The Professor was now entering the stubborn, stop-at-nothing stage. He realized he’d miscalculated and that had made him fighting mad.

  I think Mays must have been a little apprehensive, because he had reinforcements when he returned. Donald Hopkins, his pilot, came with him, looking rather uncomfortable.

  “I’ve been able to fix things up, Professor,” he said smugly. “It will take me a little longer, but I can get back without your help if I have to. Still, I must admit that it will save a good deal of time and money if we can come to an agreement. I’ll tell you what. Give me back my fuel and I’ll return the other—er—souvenirs I’ve collected. But I insist on keeping Mona Lisa, even if it means I won’t get back to Ganymede until the middle of next week.”

  The Professor then uttered a number of what are usually called deep-space oaths, though I can assure you they’re much the same as any other oaths. That seemed to relieve his feelings a lot and he became fiendishly friendly.

  “My dear Mr. Mays,” he said, “You’re an unmitigated crook, and accordingly I’ve no compunction left in dealing with you. I’m prepared to use force, knowing that the law will justify me.”

  Mays looked slightly alarmed, though not unduly so. We had moved to strategic positions round the door.

  “Please don�
�t be so melodramatic,” he said haughtily. “This is the twenty-first century, not the Wild West back in 1800.”

  “1880,” said Bill, who is a stickler for accuracy.

  “I must ask you,” the Professor continued, “to consider yourself under detention while we decide what is to be done. Mr. Searle, take him to Cabin B.”

  Mays sidled along the wall with a nervous laugh.

  “Really, Professor, this is too childish! You can’t detain me against my will.” He glanced for support at the Captain of the “Henry Luce.”

  Donald Hopkins dusted an imaginary speck of fluff from his uniform.

  “I refuse,” he remarked for the benefit of all concerned, “to get involved in vulgar brawls.”

  Mays gave him a venomous look and capitulated with bad grace. We saw that he had a good supply of reading matter, and locked him in.

  When he was out of the way, the Professor turned to Hopkins, who was looking enviously at our fuel gauges.

  “Can I take it, Captain,” he said politely, “that you don’t wish to get mixed up in any of your employer’s dirty business?”

  “I’m neutral. My job is to fly the ship here and take her home. You can fight this out among yourselves.”

  “Thank you. I think we understand each other perfectly. Perhaps it would be best if you returned to your ship and explained the situation. We’ll be calling you in a few minutes.”

  Captain Hopkins made his way languidly to the door. As he was about to leave he turned to Searle.

  “By the way, Kingsley,” he drawled. “Have you thought of torture? Do call me if you get round to it—I’ve some jolly interesting ideas.” Then he was gone, leaving us with our hostage.

  I think the Professor had hoped he could do a direct exchange. If so, he had not bargained on Marianne’s stubbornness.

  “It serves Randolph right,” she said. “But I don’t really see that it makes any difference. He’ll be just as comfortable in your ship as in ours, and you can’t do anything to him. Let me know when you’re fed up with having him around.”

  It seemed a complete impasse. We had been too clever by half, and it had got us exactly nowhere. We’d captured Mays, but he wasn’t any use to us.