If he turned around now, they’d go all through it again. About the first two expeditions, and what could have happened to them. About the mosses and lichens and red hills of Mars. About living in steel cubicles and breathing through an oxygen mask; Then later, with luck, living in pressure chambers instead. About all the dangers and trials and troubles she could dream up.
He wasn’t going to talk about it any more. Not now. This one last night to get through, and then they’d be on board, and once it started, she’d get over worrying. They’d be too busy to worry.
One more night. Nothing at all, after two months. Two months of waiting since they got their OK slips. Nine weeks of watching the strain around her mouth pull her lips into angry lines; of meeting her eyes too seldom; of hearing her speak her love too often. Of talking and reassuring her about the worries she never voiced and wouldn’t admit to.
It’s your own damn fault! he told himself again. Just once, he’d laughed at her fears. A long time ago, but she didn’t forget. She wouldn’t, couldn’t, admit it any more.
His eyes flickered sideways, to the mirror, took in the stiff mask of her face, and flickered back to the window, to the workmen finishing their job up high on the ramp. The contrast was funny, he thought. So funny it tied knots in his belly, and made his eyes burn for wanting to laugh.
... oh, say can you see?...
Dust whirled in slow eddies of illumination around the blast-revetments that girded the rocket’s base. An Earth-breeze stirred the dust, an Earth-breeze that had wandered out of the Puget Sound, across Wyoming, and into Kansas where the concrete plain buried acres of flatland. The breeze sifted faint dust from the prairie all around, on the ramp and the bales and on the work gang that handled them. It whispered through the storm fence, and along the street between the concrete cubes into the cafeteria where they sat.
Sue felt the breeze on her face, and covered the cheek with the palm of her hand to keep the cool, to hold it for some future need.
But the need is his, she thought.The breeze will still be mine tomorrow. The breeze and trees and grass, and the warm sun on ocean beaches that they’d known together. All hers, now.
“Will!” she said desperately. The name was a prayer.
He groped behind him for her hand. “What is it, Baby?” he said to the air in front of him, to the window, the rocket, the lights outside. He didn’t turn around. “Something wrong?” he said.
Yes! The sudden wave of fury took her by surprise. It shocked her body, stiffening her spine; making her toes curl so her feet dug against the floor; winding her hands into tight fists under the table. It snapped her head back, so that when the shock-wave reached him and he turned to her at last, smiling a little sheepishly, her eyes were flashing straight into his.
And there it was again.
I love you, Will! The sudden sharp intake of breath; the reaching-forward feeling in her arms, spreading down through her whole body; the total sense of physical well-being, taking over after the tightness of the anger, that was gone now as quickly as it had come. Five years: five years of closeness, day after day, and it was still the same, whenever they returned to each other from even the most subtle of departures.
“I’m sorry, Baby,” he said. “I guess I wasn’t really listening.” He sounded tired, as if it took great effort to say so little. But he was trying, anyhow. “What’s the matter, Sue?”
“I love you, Will.”
His eyes mapped her face, narrowing. There was a tightening at the corner of his jaw. “Why say it like that?” he asked finally. “You sound like it’s something to say at a funeral.”
“Can you think of a better thing to say at a funeral?”
“You’re in a hell of a mood!”
Oh, you noticed, did you? She almost said the words out loud, but the song saved her, still running through her head.
. . . through the perilous fight...
“Sorry,” she said.
Dismayed, he watched the stars film her eyes.
“What are you crying about?” He hadn’t meant to growl like that.
“I’m not.” She dabbed at her eyes.
“All right,” he said. “Okay. Then there’s nothing to worry about, I guess. Everything’s just peachy. Hunky-dory.” He was turning back to the window, when the loudspeaker over the door coughed and croaked at them officiously:
“All colonists report for final briefing and examination at nine o’clock. All colonists. White-slip holders, and yellow-slip reserve list, report to the Ad Building in forty-five minutes. Bring all papers and personal effects. All colonists and reserves, nine o’clock in the Ad Building. There will be a warning siren at eight fifty-five.”
The speaker coughed once more. Will turned back to his wife and took her hand in his. Now, if ever, he could pull her back with him, into the realization of the dream. Now . . .
Her hand was cold in his. He tried to squeeze warmth into it, to let his own thought and hope flow into her through their twined fingers. For just a moment he thought he had succeeded. Then the speaker cleared its throat again.
“Announcement: Provisions have been made for the accommodation of relatives of all colonists during the night. All authorized visitors who wish to remain until take-off may register for bedspace . ..”
He didn’t hear the rest of it, because she pulled her hand away, suddenly, jerkily, and he understood what he wouldn’t yet say even to himself in words.
“There isn’t much more time,” she said, in a strange tinny voice.
Forty-five minutes, he thought. Forty-four now . . . three. “What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded.Make her say it now.
“Well, they’ll be ... the announcement . . .” She blinked her eyes, trying to dry them. “They said nine o’clo . . .”
“I heard it. All right, Sue, what is it? What do you want to say?”
Her eyes, suddenly clear, were wide and warm. Big brown eyes a man could drown in. Looking straight at him, the way she always used to. No faking now. And love . . . crazy love you couldn’t doubt when she looked like that.
“I’m not going,” she said.
“Yeah. That’s what I figured.” He felt nothing at all, not inside or out. He could see his hand still holding hers, but he couldn’t feel the curl of his own fingers, or the skin of hers. “I’m glad you got around to telling me,” he said, and found he could still manipulate his muscles. He disentangled his hand, and pushed back his chair. The legs scraped on the linoleum with nerve-splitting shrillness.
She was watching him, her eyes still wide, but baffled now.
“Where are you ... ?”
“Out,” he told her. “I want to take a walk.”
“All right.” She started to get up, and he had to hold his left arm, the one near her, tight against his side to keep from shoving at her, forcing her back into the seat.
“Look, Sue,” he said very evenly, casually, “I want to be alone for a while.”
“But I...”
“I’ll be back. Okay? I’ll see you.”
He walked off quickly, before she could answer, or make up her mind about sitting or standing. Walked out of the bright-lit room into the dusk, and paused a moment on the steps to light his pipe. Smoke your pipe, Will, he jeered at himself, mimicking. You won’t have any smoking oxygen on Mars!
He snorted his scorn, and strode down the steps, onto the ramp, up toward the storm fence. The breeze was cooler now, and it cooled his skin, but not the inferno raging inside him.
He wanted to hate her. He wanted to rend and tear and bellow.
Why? He twisted the blade of agony in the wound. How long? How long had she lied and cheated and tricked him? How long since she made up her mind?
No need to ask that; he knew how long. The night they celebrated; the night the white slips came. But—why?
Why did she have to lie at all? Why make a mockery of everything they’d had before by this last cheap pretense? How could she?
* * * *
She tried to get up. She wanted to go after him, run after him, explain it all to him, but her legs were rubbery and useless. She dropped back into the chair, and sat there, helpless, till she heard a voice over her shoulder.
“Feeling sick, lady?” the busboy asked.
“Oh. No,” she said. “No, I’m all right. Thank you.” She stood up. Her legs worked all right now. She smiled mechanically at the busboy. “Sorry. I guess you want to get the table cleared.”
“We’re getting ready to close up,” he said. “I can get a doctor if you...”
“I’m just fine,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
She walked out steadily, and stood on the steps, shivering. In all the darkness around her the only thing she could see was the area of garish brilliance centered on the rocket. It hurt her eyes, and she turned from it till gradually her vision acclimated to the pink-fringed grayness that had followed the gory sunset. She could make out shapes of other buildings, and then the near part of the ramp; bits of the storm fence; and finally a few scattered figures.
Which one was Will she did not know. If she’d known, she wasn’t sure any more that she’d have gone to find him.
Will! she pleaded, Will, come back! I haven’t told you yet. Will—please!
He said he knew. Maybe he thought he knew. But he didn’t. And maybe it was best that way, still. Maybe it was best for him never to know. To go hating her, as he did now. To leave without regrets.
You’re going to Mars, Will. Alone. I can’t go, Will. Don’t you see? They wouldn’t let me go. They turned me down . . .
But he didn’t see. He couldn’t. Because she hadn’t told him. The words had deserted her. The words, the shining words, drilled daily for two months to march past her lips in shining ranks tonight; the treacherous, useless words had abandoned her in her hour of need.
She giggled, shivering again, wondering what to do. Silly to stand here in the cold, thinking melodramatic thoughts.
But if she left, he might not find her when he came back. The light went out in the cafeteria window, and she stood there, undecided. She opened her handbag, and reached down to the bottom, fingering the pink slip under the compact and the handkerchief. Too dark to read here if she took it out, but she didn’t need to look at it. It was burned into memory behind her eyelids.
“Susan Barth,” it said in neat typed letters on the mimeoed form. “3-45-A-7821. Disqualified. Medical Requ 44-B-3. Calcified node. Left lung.”
That was all. Two lines of type on a pink slip, and the end of marriage, the end of plans and hopes and all that life meant to her.
And now it was ending again. A different end: the end of loving and lying; of hoping against hope; of hating. And waiting. For her, that is.
For him, for Will, it was the end of waiting only, and the beginning of the dream. The beginning of hate, maybe, too.
They’ll tell him, she promised herself. They’ll tell him later, on the rocket. Or after they land. It wasn’t as if he’d go through life not knowing. He’d find out. No need to tell him now. It would be easier for him this way.
She went down one more step, and let herself look at the rocket. The workmen were still there. The metal dragon swallowed all they fed it, stolid, indifferent, letting itself be stuffed, for now, with bits and pieces of paraphernalia, oddments of fiber and metal, of glass and wood. But all the while it waited, knowing the feast that was coming soon, brooding and hungering for the living flesh that would feed it this night. Resting and planning for the moment of dawn when, with its belly full, it would belch fire and vanish from the earth.
. . . and the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air...
No sense waiting. It was better not to see him. She stood there, staring and shivering.
* * * *
The wire of the storm fence was tearing his fingers and his hands. He made himself relax his clutching grip.
Coward! he raged futilely. Cheat and coward!
“Nervous, buddy?”
He whirled, his torn hands clenching into welcome fists, the muscles of his arms literally aching for trouble.
“Maybe,” he said tightly.
It was one of the colonists, a man he knew by sight but not by name; a stocky, sandy-haired character with too many teeth in his smile. “Came out to get away from the wife a minute,” the man said cheerfully. “Yakkety yakkety yak, that’s all I get. And every other word about what a tough time we’re in for. Your wife like that?”
“I—haven’t got a wife.”
“No kidding? I didn’t know they were taking any bachelors. If I’d of known that . . . Clara and I got married because both of us wanted to go.”
“That’s tough!”
“Yeah—Say! what’d you mean by that crack?”
“Beat it, Shorty,” Will said coldly. “Unless you’re looking for trouble.” His knuckles itched with the urge to erase some of the expanse of tooth from the man’s idiotic smile.
Shorty flushed, hitched up his belt “I could use a little,” he offered, “if you got some to spare.”
They faced each other stonily for a few seconds. “A-a-a-h —skip it!” Will said, and turned back to stare through the fence again.
“Dame trouble?” Shorty asked, too sympathetically.
Will shrugged.
“That’s too bad.” The other guy was going to go when he was good and ready, not just because Will told him to. “Another guy, huh?” The sympathy was laid on now, too obviously. But even Shorty seemed to know when he’d gone far enough.
Determinedly unresponsive, Will suffered himself to be jovially slapped on the back, and listened gratefully as he heard the man’s footsteps recede into the distance. When he looked around again, he could no longer find the lighted square of window that had marked the cafeteria building. Just a huddle of squared-off silhouettes against the dark gray sky. In the center, on top of the Administration Building, a clock glowed a warning.
Twenty-five minutes till nine.
He had to go back. He told her he’d come back.
Another guy? Well, what about it? Why not?Another guy! It was the only possible answer, and he’d needed a grinning ape like Shorty to show it to him! Two months of worrying and wondering, noticing all the little changes, all the things that weren’t quite right. Telling himself she was frightened. Telling himself he was wrong. Keeping the knowledge just below the surface of his mind. It spewed up now in all its rottenness, leaving him weak and clean.
It was the only possible explanation.
Will knocked his cold pipe against a fence-post, and put it back in his pocket. He considered slowly, surprisingly calm, what he wanted to do with the rest of the time. Nineteen minutes more, the clock told him.
Was she waiting, still?
Did he care?
He felt cool—indifferent or numb. It didn’t matter which. He’d promised to come back. What difference did a promise make, to her? Another man—was she with him now, sharing the lovely joke? Telling him she loved him? Telling him she was free at last?
Will turned his back on the storm fence and the rocket. He paced slowly the hundred yards down the ramp. He didn’t want to see her. He wanted to tell her that he understood. If there had been any emotion in him at all, he’d have wanted to denounce her, shame her, spit on her; what he might have felt now was not anger, but a bitter cold contempt.
Only he felt nothing.
. . . Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave . . .
The song still ran insanely through her head, and now she knew why, remembering the moment of getting the envelope, of opening it, of looking and seeing the two slips of paper, his and hers—white and pink. White for success and pink for failure. The song had been playing on the radio then, while she stood in the middle of the kitchen and st
ared at the incongruous slips of paper that didn’t match. The first time ever that things hadn’t somehow fitted together for her and Will.
Bit by bit, while the song played through and finished, and somebody started to make a speech, the meaning of it had penetrated to the vital centers of her consciousness.
I’m not going . . . the statement was complete at last, the lesson fully learned ... I can’t go.
She didn’t show Will the slips that night. She had to think it through first, decide what to do, how to tell him. Because as soon as the lesson of failure was thoroughly learned for herself, another piece of knowledge took shape within her.
Star Science Fiction 1 - [Anthology] Page 15