Well, does it now? Is there really a rocket?
Hold on! he thought, and twisted, turned, sweating, eyes tight, to the wall, the fierce whisper in his teeth. Be certain-sure! You, now, who are you?
Me? he thought. My name?
Jedediah Prentiss, born 1938, college graduate 1959, licensed rocket pilot, 1965. Jedediah Prentiss . . . Jedediah Prentiss . . .
The wind whipped his name away! He grabbed for it, yelling!
Then, gone quiet, he waited for the wind to bring his name back. He waited a long while, and there was only silence, and then after a thousand heartbeats, he felt motion.
The sky opened out like a soft blue flower. The Aegean Sea stirred soft white fans through a distant wine-colored surf.
In the wash of the waves on the shore, he heard his name.
Icarus.
And again in a breathing whisper.
Icarus.
Someone shook his arm and it was his father saying his name and shaking away the night. And he himself lay small, half turned to the window and the shore below and the deep sky, feeling the first wind of the morning ruffle the golden feathers bedded in amber wax lying by the side of his cot. Golden wings stirred half alive in his father’s arms, and the faint down on his own shoulders quilled trembling as he looked at these wings and beyond to the cliff.
“Father, how’s the wind?”
“Enough for me, but never enough for you . . .”
“Father, don’t worry. The wings seem clumsy, now, but my bones in the feathers will make them strong, my blood in the wax will make it live!”
“My blood, my bones, too, remember; each man lends his flesh to his children, asking that they tend it well. Promise you’ll not go high, Icarus. The sun, or my son, the heat of one, the fever of the other, could melt these wings. Take care!”
And they carried the splendid golden wings into the morning and heard them whisper in their arms, whisper his name or a name of some name that blew, spun, and settled like a feather on the soft air.
Montgolfier.
His hands touched fiery rope, bright linen, stitched thread gone hot as summer. His hands fed wool and straw to a breathing flame.
Montgolfier.
And his eye soared up along the swell and sway, the oceanic tug and pull, the immensely wafted silver pear filling with the shimmering tidal airs channeled up from the blaze. Silent as a god tilted slumbering above French countryside, this delicate linen envelope, this swelling sac of oven-baked air would soon pluck itself free. Draughting upward to blue worlds of silence, his mind and his brother’s mind would sail With it, muted, serene among island clouds where uncivilized lightnings slept. Into that uncharted gulf and abyss where no birdsong or shout of man could follow, the balloon would hush itself. So cast adrift, he, Montgolfier, and all men, might hear the unmeasured breathing of God and the cathedral tread of eternity.
“Ah . . .” He moved, the crowd moved, shadowed by the warm balloon. “Everything’s ready, everything’s right. . . .”
Right. His lips twitched in his dream. Right. Hiss, whisper, flutter, rush. Right.
From his father’s hands a toy jumped to the ceiling, whirled in its own wind, suspended, while he and his brother stared to see it flicker, rustle, whistle, heard it murmuring their names.
Wright.
Whispering: sky, cloud, space, wing, fly . . .
“Wilbur, Orville? Look; how’s that?”
Ah. In his sleep, his mouth sighed.
The toy helicopter hummed, bumped the ceiling, murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk; murmured eagle, raven, sparrow, robin, hawk. Whispered eagle, whispered raven, and at last, fluttering to their hands with a susurrance, a wash of blowing weather from summers yet to come, with a last whir and exhalation, whispered hawk.
Dreaming, he smiled.
He saw the clouds rush down the Aegean sky.
He felt the balloon sway drunkenly, its great bulk ready for the clear running wind.
He felt the sand hiss up the Atlantic shelves from the soft dunes that might save him if he, a fledgling bird, should fall. The framework struts hummed and chorded like a harp.
Beyond this room he felt the primed rocket glide on the desert field, its fire-wings folded, its fire-breath kept, held ready to speak for two billion men. In a moment he would wake and walk slowly out to that rocket.
And stand on the rim of the cliff.
Stand cool in the shadow of the warm balloon.
Stand whipped by tidal sands drummed over Kitty Hawk.
And sheathe his boy’s wrists, arms, hands, fingers with golden wings in golden wax.
And touch for a final time the captured breath of man, the warm gasp of awe and wonder siphoned and sewn to lift their dreams.
And spark the gasoline engine.
And take his father’s hand and wish him well with his own wings, flexed and ready.
Then whirl and jump.
Then cut the cords to free the great balloon.
Then rev the motor, prop the plane on air.
And crack the switch to fire the rocket fuse.
And together in a single leap, swim, rush, flail, jump, sail and glide, upturned to sun, moon, stars, they would go above Atlantic, Mediterranean; over country, wilderness, city; town; in gaseous silence, rifling feather, rattle-drum frame, in volcanic eruption, in timid, sputtering roar; in start, jar, hesitation, then steady ascension, beautifully held, wonderously transported, they would laugh and cry each his own himself. Or shout the names of others unborn or others long-dead and blown away by the wine wind or the salt wind or the silent hush of balloon wind or the wind of chemical fire. Each feeling the bright feathers stir and bud deep-buried and thrusting to burst from their riven shoulder blades. Each leaving behind the echo of their flying, a sound to encircle, recircle the earth in the winds and speak again in other years to the sons of the sons of their sons, asleep but hearing the restless midnight sky.
Up, yet further up, higher, higher! A spring tide, a summer flood, an unending river of wings!
A bell rang softly.
No, he whispered, I’ll wake in a moment. Wait. . . .
The Aegean slid away below the window, gone; the Atlantic dunes, the French countryside dissolved down to New Mexico desert. In his room near his coat stirred no plumes in golden wax. Outside no wind-sculptured pear, no trap-drum butterfly machine. Outside only a rocket, a combustible dream, waiting for the friction of his hand to set it off.
In the last moment of sleep, someone asked his name.
Quietly, he gave the answer as he had heard it during the hours from midnight on.
“Icarus Montgolfier Wright.”
He repeated it slowly so the questioner could remember the order and the spelling down to the last letter.
“Icarus Montgolfier Wright.
“Born nine hundred years before Christ. Grammer school: Paris, 1783. High school: Kitty Hawk, 1903. Graduation from Earth to Moon, this day, God willing, August 1, 1965. Death and burial, with luck, on Mars, summer 1999 in the Year of our Lord.”
Then he let himself drift awake.
An hour later, crossing the desert tarmac, he heard someone shouting again and again and again: “Jedediah Prentiss ... !”
And if no one was there or if someone was there behind him, he could not tell. And whether it was one voice or many voices young or old, near or very far away, calling and shouting to him, he. could not tell either. He did not turn to see.
For the wind was slowly rising and he let it take hold and blow him all the rest of the way across the desert to the rocket that stood waiting there.
<
~ * ~
THE WOODS GROW DARKER
We feared the incubus, the hex;
Passing a pond, we crossed two sticks
Against the green-haired water-nix.
Once woods were dark with goblin forms,
But boughs of oak and ash were charms
Against the witch, the nightmare swarms.
; We are much wiser now; such fears
Have been an old wives’ tale for years.
We have more modem fears these years:
We fear the mind’s rank Freudian fen,
The death unleased from cyclotron,
The Iron Curtain closing down,
The spy, the ships from space . . . we scurry
Through mental woods grown dark and eerie,
With not even twigs of ash to carry.
LEAH BODINE DRAKE
<
~ * ~
BRIGHT DESTRUCTION
Once there were hornstones hurled from Mercury,
And sardonyx chalcedonius
And saphirs streamed from Mars and Uranus,
Flung from the falling temples of the sky.
Blende and beryl wander in the air.
High onyx hangs above Osiris’ head,
Carving the earth where he is lying dead,
Static, like old chants suspended there.
Jupiter will edge Behemoth’s bier
With ivory wonders, gold, and stolen jade,
When Saturn rings the jungles in its fear,
When Venus watches bright destruction made
To Neptune’s own, Leviathan, the sea—
Bewildering in strange calamity.
WINONA MC CLINTLC
<
~ * ~
BLAZE OF GLORY
Little Willie made a slip
While landing in his rocket ship.
See that bright, actinic glare?
That’s our little Willie there.
RANDALL GABBETT
<
~ * ~
FREE FLIGHT
The sick surmise that we should not survive
Clouded the start. Then, with the flight begun,
We saw, in the mere flush of being alive,
How we could be, before the thing was done,
In our own right new subjects of the sun,
Freer than the full flight of human will.
The old restraints of earth were on the run.
And heaven all ours to harvest. Later still
Our minds, as the extreme event drew near,
Loosened the long links of assertiveness
And as the irremeable line was crossed
Lost their last hold. Now without pride or fear
We contemplate mankind’s supreme success
With the supreme detachment of the lost.
P. M. HUBBABD
<
~ * ~
THE ANTI-CLIMAX
Surviving the bomb and the alien planes,
The mammals were exterminated.
Etymological history explains
The plots of the emmets who overran Man.
From atom and evil,
Through arts mediaeval,
Tiny tenants of planets their limits advance
To ethical puberty.
Man lost the shrubbery, determinated,
And fated to perish of ants in the plants.
WINONA MC CLINTIC
<
~ * ~
INTERVIEW
“I would like to go back to Earth again,” he said,
“And her tremendous skies. I would like to see
A world that is blue and green (with some seasonal red)
And various shades of brown. I remember” (he
Scratched here his chin) “that moon, as seen from Earth,
In its comprehensible stages (now hot gold,
Now threadbare linen) of pulsating girth.
I am,” he said, “as yet not very old,
But it is hard to remember just Earth’s look.
A man cannot carry the sight of a world in his head
(And that’s forgetting the smell and the taste and the voice),
And most of what I say I got out of a book.
One world is enough. Still, if I had my choice,
I would like to go back to Earth again,” he said.
BIRD FERGUSON
<
~ * ~
The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction Sixth Series Page 27