by Kris Neville
Herb staggered erect. Blood covered his suit. It hurt to move. A broken collar bone, he thought. Too high for the lungs.
He found Norma weeping hysterically in his arm. The other arm hung limp, and he winced with pain as he drew her tight.
He choked and bent to her ear and said, “Yes, yes,” and suddenly he bent to kiss her tear stained lips, and he wanted to brush away the hair from her face, but that arm refused to move. She trembled against him, and he whispered, “Yes.”
The sunlight came in the broad windows and slanted across Bud’s face, boyish and petulant still in death; the sun, moving toward noon, bathed the whole awakening world with light, and far beyond it, in space but not in time, lay other stars.
And Herb felt free. For the first time in his life. Here, on Earth . . .
It was a wonderful feeling.
THE END
GOING HOME
The jets roared . . . and Joe Wolfe came back from memory to find that he was plunging toward the sun in that last fatal orbit of the Down.
There were years that over-reached themselves: a compacted infinity of endless stretches of space memory. For no man can stand before a port, peering out into the jet and awful loneliness of space where diamond hard spits of fire blaze unceasingly, without feeling the continuity of the past and the future, of the now and eternity. All things, all ages, all, meet for a moment. A thousand thousand threads converging into the knot of the present; a thousand thousand threads radiating outward into the tomorrow.
He thought: Space makes all men immortal in the moment. Everything is caught and mirrored in brief self.
The jets roared.
Behind was Lunar, covered by the mantle of sparks his ship let fall. A bright-hard diadem set in velvet emptiness. Ahead of him, around him, within him, eternity.
“You are old,” they had told him. And he had waved his huge knuckled hands, shot through by time, like a wounded bird in flight: frantic and aimless. And retired.
Then he had sat in the swivel seat behind the shiny desk and watched the fleet of silver birds leap skyward in a mist of fire, singing the song of the jets, going upward, and the song dying into silence.
He had looked out of the windows of Administration and seen the ant hill movement concentrated on pouring a stream of cargo outward. He had counted them away, like an old sea captain the passing ships; he had counted them back in again, seen them scarred and dented, and known the ones who never returned. The shuttle of activity in which he was an observer, processing unreal paper slips that bore no relation to the great play of passions unfolding beyond the walls.
The jets roared.
He thought: And I am alone with her again. With space, the dark lady of the soul sonnets: the unknowable love . . .
There is a lethal attraction in space: like the haunting thought of death. Fear intermingled with an indefinable ecstasy: peering down from the orbital esplanade into the infinite. Spacemen love space for what she is, and fear her for what she does: for sending prowling fingers of alien thought that knead the fertile soil of mind, planting strange seeds, and, in the ripeness of time, cultivating exotic blossoms.
That is why one man is never left alone in the control room. That is why the pilots divide their time between the scanner and their fellow pilot. Men intent upon the business of navigation, and also alert for the first glassy-eyed sign of space fever in the man next to them.
A wave of insanity can flutter across a nation: a man jumps from a building, and dozens imitate him. Suicides employing identical means: the tenuous power of suggestion.
In space it is not called suicide: it is called space fever. And there is a pattern.
“When you come to love space, leave her.” That is the classic precept. Because only those who love space can know the fever. But the profound gentlemen who search in the innermost recesses of the mind have never explained how you can leave the thing you love. Or if the aching loneliness in separation is better than the final embrace.
The jets roared.
For three years he had waited in mechanical inactivity, while space called plaintively, like the sea to the retired and rhuemy-eyed Captains of yesteryear. Then Tri-Planet developed the single, ship, whose cargo had a margin of profit greater than the ship itself. One trip was enough: and they could afford to lose a ship now and then.
They needed experienced spacemen. And experienced spacemen will work a single ship only when they can find no other job. The Tri-Planet dealt in human lives; but there was a cloak of legality: for each man is free to pursue his own profession. Each man works his own way through the web of life, and each man weaves his own destiny.
And an old, retired spaceman can ignore the psychiatrists when they say: “If you keep going back, it will eventually get you.” For they do not give you a time limit: how many safe trips are still left within your clay form: how much flight living remains?
He had seen the stars on a clear winter night: from Earth, calling to him through the heavy atmosphere, twinkling to him like a million mistress’ coy eyes. And his own eyes had misted, watching, with memory, with the vague, indefinable longing . . .
He had said: “One more trip. One last trip . . . Once more.” But three times, on the single ship, alone with his destiny, the moon had faded behind him, and Mars had spread like a map unrolling, before him.
The jets roared.
There was an inner excitement; and a restful quiet: interconnected in a way beyond all description, which only the old spacemen can know.
“I’ll quit next trip,” he told himself, speaking aloud, apologizing to her out there, and knowing that he lied. For, unable to prevent it, he would keep coming back.
Love is stronger than fear.
And he knew that space—how was the line?—“never did betray the heart that loved her. He laughed, not wildly, but deeply, for he had nothing to fear.
The jets roared.
He adjusted the controls with his long experienced hands and relaxed. The long practiced art of spacemen. Letting his thoughts eddy like drifting smoke.
Memory is easy. But the time relationship is painful. Memory without time.
“You’re a spaceman now, Joe,” she had said.
He had seized her around the waist, twirling her around until her careful hair fluttered loose in a golden rain. He had set her down, both laughing.
Laughing eyes: for her eyes glittered and laughed like the farthest stars. Laughing hair: for it shone like the spring-time sun, overbrimming with secret glee. And the darkness and light played on her yet young face.
“Your uniform is beautiful,” she had said, fingering the shining lapel insigna. She had looked up at him with eyes turned serious. “We can be married now,” she had whispered.
That was when he had been graduated from the Academy: how long ago?
But better not to think of time, for out here it is not. But Earthbound, time has no meaning until suddenly you’re old, and you fear to think of it, least you come to treasure the last minute-drops of life that fall swiftly, oh, so swiftly, into the placid lake of the past. You look ahead where there was once a river, and now you see only a tiny stream: you look behind to see where it has all gone, finding it there, clear, deep and cool, and forever untouchable. But here it has no meaning. Here is a timeless dream of what was and what might have been.
But dreams aside, there had been his dull-death Earth life of three years, where he had remembered the unnumbered years flowing past. He could not dam them with his body, nor speed nor retard the flow. He was unsubstantial before them, filtering out only memories that lodge in the fine screen work of his mind.
He could afford to remember once more, 4s it was, before he began to build the new yesterday.
He thought: You don’t see your wife often, a spaceman.
He forced himself to face it, for the last time. And the memory of pain was sweet, for it would soon be gone.
Eventually, laughing eyes, no longer childlike, had left him.
She had herded
in the children: gathering them from him. Remarried.
“They need a father,” she had said. “And I need a husband, not a fleeting shadow and a memory.”
He had known it would happen. And it hurt, as he knew it would. He had tried to shrug it off: “I can’t stand it any longer, Joe.”
But a spaceman needs to come home to love. Otherwise there is only the cosmic loneliness that separates the visitor from the new world. And gradually he had come to look more to Her, out there, than to fellow men and women.
He had met and passed shadow figures in the dread night of humanity: “Buy me a drink, huh, big boy,” and later, “I’ll be waiting for you, honey, when you come back.” The unsubstantial substance of spaceport women. Where there is no love, but only hollowness.
No one loves a spaceman.
People forget: Emotions sputter out in the vacuum of time.
He thought: I saw Laughing Eyes ten times in twelve years.
And now, in this temporal moment, it was no consolation that she had lasted longer than most.
The last time: there had been the barrier of worlds between them. Neither were what they once were: strangers only. They could no longer go back to the bright day at the Academy. The insigna was tarnished, now.
“I’m—I’m sorry, Joe.”
“I know, Laughing Eyes,” he had said, putting his head in his hands; and his Earth tears of the moment had been borne along by time to mingle in that glorious pool from which no mortal, however thirsty, may ever drink.
The past.
And strange, too, how first he had feared space: not understanding. Remembering the first trip with fatherly emotion. How easy to recreate, for spacemen live with memory, peer out into the void where time unfolds, reeling back.
Time to remember again, before the past is forgotten.
The jets roared.
Memory came clear . . .
Out of the mists, and he was smiling wryly. Long ago.
His stomach began to surge; his heart expanded and blood pounded in his ears like the break of waves on the beach.
He lay back on his bunk. Things had that swimming green . . . “Yah feeling ok, kid?” came the voice from the sickness around him.
“Sure,” he gulped. “Sure. Just—fine.” And sickness was clawing its way up from his stomach, rising. He shut his mouth. Tight.
The Second stretched out full length, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the bottomless feeling of accelerating movement.
“I know how you feel: if they don’t stop the ship you think you’ll die. Things rising to a climax in you.”
“I—” he gasped, “all right.”
“You’ll live: they always do. Coupla days an’ you’re over it.”
The Second sucked in the smoke.
“Take me:” he said, brooding, “Hell, free flight is second nature to me. Couldn’t live without it . . . And don’t go getting any ideas, either: it’s not the Fever. Not ol’ McMinn, Wolfe, my boy; that’s for loonies.”
Joe Wolfe tried to steer his mind: “What’cha suppose causes it?”
“The Fever?” The Second squirmed on the bed, getting comfortable. “Don’t know: guess nobody does.” Fie stared at the overhead. “Don’t even like to think much about it. You wouldn’t either, if you ever saw one of the poor devils, afterwards.”
Joe Wolfe muttered something.
“I’ll tell you,” the Second continued. “ ‘Gotta go back,’ they keep sayin’, over and over: ‘Gotta go back.’ They somehow think they’ve left something out here. Mindless, pathetic.”
He blew a lazy smoke ring.
“They seem convinced that they have to die out here: horrible.”
He shuddered, peering sightlessly upward, lost in grim thought.
Joe Wolfe unhearing, struggled, trying to master the sickness. He closed his eyes and time passed. He could not measure it, minutes or hours. All encompassed by spacesickness.
The Second slept and there was silence. Broken, finally by the harsh roar of the jets, long since silenced, now that the orbit was set.
Almost immediately the alarm bell chattered harshly and the Second’s feet hit the deck in automatic response.
“Helmet,” he cried. “Get your helmet. We must be trying to blast clear of a meteorite storm.”
He was already struggling into his awkward suit.
“I’m—I’m side,” Joe Wolfe answered.
“You ain’t got time,” the Second roared. “Get that helmet on.” And the Second was out of the cabin.
Joe Wolfe pulled on his space suit, stomach quiyering. He buckled down the helmet and heard an unreal conversation chatter ringingly in the steel confines.
He weaved toward the bridge.
There, before the control room, stood a jam of officers, all talking into their open mikes at once, all bulky in their tin union suits.
A charged voice crackled: “Quiet!” And then, “Helmets off.” Unmistakably the voice of the Skipper.
Joe Wolfe unbuckled his helmet with a flood of relief: no leak, then. He flipped it back over his head, where it bobbed wildly between his shoulder blades.
“Wrecking bar!” the Skipper barked.
He felt himself helping to unlimber it from the wall rack.
Then, with other officers, he was slamming it against the sealed control room door. The door buckled. It screamed piercingly, and then, with a final plunge of the wrecking bar, crashed inward.
There was a single, shocked moment while everyone waited.
The Skipper broke into smooth motion, burling himself into the room.
He grabbed the assistant third by the shoulder and spun him around. The man was old, and the Skipper hurled a right hook into his face; it sent him, like a spinning feather, across the room. One of the officers caught him.
The Skipper had to step over the other half of the watch, who was lying before the central control board. His head had been cut open with a wrench; it leaked blood onto the floor panneling.
The Skipper’s hands moved in practiced rhythm.
“We’re not far on the outward swing,” he said tensely. He cut the power by jamming the firing lever back savagely.
Silent and white-faced the officers watched.
How far along the dread orbit?
The Skipper’s eyes flew from dial to dial.
“Go to the crew: form them at escape hatches,” he said calmly.
There was silence for a moment as the Chief moved to comply.
“ ’Gator,” the Skipper snapped. The astrogator stepped forward. The Skipper reeled off a series of figures on the recorder, reading them from the dials.
The ’Gator ripped the paper from the machine and sat down at his desk. He fed the numbers into the calculator.
Joe Wolfe stood motionless, sickness forgotten.
“Twenty-seven on one,” the ‘Gator barked.
“Twenty-seven on one,” the Skipper echoed.
“Power two-oh-three.”
“Power two-oh-three,” said the Skipper, adjusting the firing lever.
A whirl of tape was issuing from the calculator with calibrated sections overlaid by the flight line.
“Now!” the ’Gator snapped.
The Skipper threw the lever and the ship shuddered.
The calculator clacked and hummed.
Without taking his eyes off the tape, the ’Gator asked: “Fuel?”
Joe Wolfe’s eyes strayed to the indicator: it wavered on the red.
“Nine-point-seven,” the Skipper hissed.
The ’Gator fed this information into his machine.
“Partial deflection,” he said. “We can check her to escape and head outward.”
The Skipper looked up. The fuel indicator was in the red. “Check,” he said tiredly. He turned. “Sound the alarm. You”—he pointed to Joe Wolfe, “see this man out.” He referred to the man on the floor.
They crowded into the escape ship. Everyone was tense. The Skipper cut the ship free, but it continued, by
the grim hand of inertia, to cling to the mother ship.
Velocity was well below escape. The Skipper nursed the blast, conserving fuel. The tiny craft pulled free.
They had checked the mother ship before the acceleration had become too great to permit escape with their limited fuel, and they were free.
The Skipper nursed the little craft into the Mars orbit.
He glanced at the fuel gauge. Plenty. And they had avoided the horrible, and easily set orbit of the Down: the final plunge men with the Fever try to make.
The Second peered out the port, musing. “It would have been a hell of a way to die,” he said, shuddering. “Roasted. Your skin turning red, and metal getting too hot to touch . . . God!”
Joe Wolfe came back from memory. His jets had sputtered and died. The powerful roar, coughing like an old man, deeply, and silence. The silence of space. Of Her, out there.
He glanced languidly at the fuel dial. Posted across the red. Empty.
He did not need to tell himself to relax. For his mind was caught up with the strange dreams of space, the flimsy web of Eternity.
Only his body, dull and empty, was roaring now toward the sun in the orbit of the Down, toward the maw of the hungry sun, like a moth into a flame.
And his ego, that indefinable essence of man, unweighed, unmeasured, and unknown, was—almost—floating free. Was waiting eagerly for its last contact with reality, to be consumed by purifying flame.
And he would be finally and irrevocably lost, not in the inexpressible loneliness, but in the quiet womb of the first mother.
OVERTURE
IN THE MOUNTAINS SOMEWHERE IN NORTHWESTERN MEXICO, she rested. Looking west, she could see the ocean, placid and blue with distance; and although she was too far away to hear, except in imagination, the roar of the waters against the foreshortened cliffs, she could still smell faintly the tangy and mysterious odor of the ageless salt water.
No Tintern Abbey and no rapid Wye served to recall the intermediate past and the onrush of the imminent tomorrow. Time here was forever and changeless. Her heart slowed its excited rhythm. The tranquil sky bundled prehistory and all of the future together and made them one. She felt that some solitary and magnificent truth would within another heartbeat stand revealed. She wanted to paint the changeless immediacy of the endless sea and the ageless mountains and imprison their spacious silence upon a remote canvas.