Arthur Clarke - The Last Theorem

The Subramanian family was used to parties. Out of considerable experience they had become very good at them, too, so by the time Natasha had blown out the candles on her cake and made her conventional wish (not to be told to anyone, especially her parents), they were all feeling warmly, affectionately jovial. That was when Robert threw his arms around his big sister and whispered in her ear.

Which made her look startled. She turned to her parents. “Is that true? You’re going to make Robert go to church?”

“Not church,” her father said. “It’s a Sunday school. We’ve checked, and they have a class that would be good for him—learning the stories about Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount and all. And it would make Surash happy to know that my father’s grandchildren aren’t being kept entirely away from religion—”

Natasha shook her head crossly. “I don’t mind being kept entirely away from religion. And Robert says you want me to go, too! Honestly, don’t you think I have enough to do already? School, solar-sail practice—”

“It’s only one evening a week,” her mother informed her. “We aren’t talking about Sunday school for you. You’d go to the church’s teenager group. They do talk about the Bible now and then, yes, but most of their time is spent on projects to make the world a better place.”

“Which, for now,” her father added, “is mostly working for Bandara Senior’s campaign for the presidency. I assume you might like to help with that.”

That was unquestioned for Natasha, or any of the rest of her family, either. It was the elder Bandara who had persuaded the university to set up the solar-sail simulation laboratory that gave Natasha her best hope of doing well in the race to come. The solar-sail lab was orders of magnitude less expensive than the lunar-gravity chamber she had had to practice in for the moon race; it was little more than a chamber in which all six of the walls were screens. But the computer programs to run it were complex—and expensive. It was a major outlay for the university, and would have been totally impossible for the Subramanian family alone.

“And,” her mother said, passing Natasha her personal screen, “I have a picture of the group when they had a beach party a few weeks ago. They look like kids you might want to be friendly with.”

“Huh,” Natasha said, studying the score or so of young people displayed on the screen.

She didn’t comment on the fact that at least four of the boys in the picture were notably good-looking. Neither did her mother, although she was pretty sure that this unexpectedly reappearing Ron from Brazil wasn’t nearly as handsome.

“Of course,” Myra said, “it’s completely up to you. If you really feel you’d rather not—”

“Oh,” Natasha said, “I suppose I could try it out once or twice. As you say, it’d make Surash happy.”

When Bill returned to unite himself once more with his cluster of Grand Galactics, he wasn’t prepared for the joyous rush of feeling that came with the experience. All the time he had been detached for the running of his various errands, he had been something that was not a part of his previous life experience. He had been alone. And then, once again joined to his fellows, he wasn’t alone anymore, and he was jubilant.

It was almost difficult for him to leave the cluster again.

There wasn’t any choice, of course. The cluster had shared his concerns, and his need to be fair. Perhaps these wretched little humans no longer posed a threat to the galaxy’s peace. If so, perhaps it was unfair to wipe them out.

The Grand Galactics were always stern and sometimes ruthless. But they did not deliberately choose to be unfair.

So Bill took the jumps that returned him to the neighborhood of the little yellow sun that their planet revolved around, and sent two messages.

The first was to the One Point Five armada, now only a small fraction of a light-year from the planet it had been instructed to depopulate. “Cancel instructions for depopulation,” that message began. “Stop. Decelerate totally. Use emergency measures if necessary.”

And the second message was to the armada, but also to the Nine-Limbeds themselves. It merely ordered that no further evidence of their presence should be given to the Earth humans—

Which made a small problem for the Machine-Stored operators of the armada’s 154 ships.

They understood their orders, but those were much easier given than obeyed. In spacecraft you couldn’t just slam on the brakes. There weren’t any brakes. It was one thing to amp up the deceleration firing, which they did at once. That was terribly wasteful of electrical energy and working fluid, of course, but that didn’t matter. Those commodities, like everything else in the observable universe, did after all belong to the Grand Galactics. If they chose to waste them, that was no one’s business but their own.

No, it was the second part of their instruction that troubled the One Point Fives. They were commanded to avoid being observed by the subject species.

But never mind that the Nine-Limbeds had already blown their cover. When the One Point Fives were pouring gigajoules of energy into their exhausts, making a blazing beacon of ionized gases from 154 mammoth torches all firing at once, how could they remain unseen?

Some people might have expected that the bon voyage party for the solar-sail contestants would have been held in some giant auditorium in a city like New York, or Beijing, or Moscow. It wasn’t. True, the cameras were there, and everything that happened within their sight went out to the whole world’s screens. But the place where the cameras were was only the terminal’s little auditorium, and—counting everybody, the seven racers themselves, their handlers, their immediate families, and a very few VIP guests—there weren’t more than two hundred people in the room.

Myra had her suspicions about why. No doubt no two of the big three were willing to let the other one have the event. She said nothing, however. Then she caught a glimpse of her daughter, standing serious and tall with the other six contestants as a judge gave them a last-minute review of the rules of the race. “Doesn’t she look good?” she whispered to her husband, knowing the answer.

She got it. Ranjit had no more doubt than she that Natasha wasn’t only the smartest and best of the solar-sail pilots, but that she looked astonishingly, even a little worrisomely, mature for her sixteen years. He focused on the most worrisome part of the scene. “There’s that Brazilian, Olsos, standing right next to her,” he pointed out to his wife.

She squeezed his hand. “Ron’s all right,” she told him, with the wisdom that came with once having been a sixteen-year-old girl herself. And then, “Oh, hello, Joris.”

Vorhulst got a hug from her, and the two men shook hands. “They’re going to start in a minute,” Vorhulst told them. “I just wanted to say hello—and to tell you that we’ve got a little pool going among the Skyhook engineers. My money’s on Natasha.”

Myra said, “Is that what you engineers were getting excited about a little while ago?”

Vorhulst blinked at her. “Oh, that. No. It was an all-points message from the Sky Events center in Massachusetts. There’s been a hell of a bright supernova just observed in Centaurus, but it’s got some funny features.” He grinned. “Almost makes me wish I’d stayed with astronomy.” And then, as the chairman of the event mounted the podium and all the members of the audience began the move toward their chairs, he said, “See you later!”

There was only one speaker at the ceremony, and that was the newly elected president of the Republic of Sri Lanka, Dhatusena Bandara. He looked presidential, all right, with a strong old face and the slim figure of a man who had never let himself go soft. But what he said was informal, almost jocular. “There were several nations,” he told the select few who were his audience, “who wanted this event to be held in some great city, but you are here. That isn’t because my country is more deserving than any other. It’s simply because, through the good fortune of geography, Sri Lanka is the site for the Skyhook. Without the Skyhook this race could never be. It is the Skyhook that you seven wonderful young men and women will board to take you to low earth orbit. It was the Skyhook that carried each one of your spacecraft up to that point, piece by piece, and now those pieces are nearly completely assembled into the craft that you will fly in this greatest of all races. May God bless you all, and see you safely home when the race is over.”