He finished his drank abruptly and rose to his feet Ben rose too, trying to hide the fact that with his last few words Holmgren had lost him completely. Holmgren understanding the middle course that the human race must pursue to survive in space was one thing. Holmgren hinting at the bribe of high office for him was another.
“Well,” Holmgren was saying, “I suppose you’ll be glad to sneak off to your hotel and call it a day. Marsh knows where your clothes are. Call me any time you’re free.”
He shook hands briskly and turned back to his desk. In an empty adjoining office where Marsh took him, Ben changed out of his uniform while Marsh chattered cheerfully.
“Tremendous character, isn’t he?” said Marsh. “The kind who moves mountains.”
“Um,” said Ben, noncommittally, pulling on his slacks. “Well, you’ll be spending the next few months spreading the cash around, I suppose,” said Marsh, shaking hands with him in farewell after Ben was dressed. Ben looked his surprise. “Your loot—the offers in those business letters I brought you,” explained Marsh.
“I didn’t read them,” confessed Ben.
“My God!” Marsh stood, marveling at him. “Why there must be a million for you in endorsements alone!”
“Oh?” Somehow the thought of money had not until this moment worked its way into Ben’s mind. He laughed, a little self-consciously. This was the final touch—this was all it took.
He turned away from Marsh and opened the door from the office they were in.
“Just down the corridor to my left to the elevator?” he asked.
“That’s right. And right from where you get out of the elevator on the ground floor—don’t let anybody direct you any other way,” answered Marsh. He was looking sly again.
“Why?” asked Ben, seeing the question was expected of him.
“Nora’s waiting outside the avenue entrance for you there,” said Marsh. “I told her you’d be coming out that way after leaving Sven.”
Ben stared at him, turned on his heel, and went out of the office. The door with its frosted glass pane banged shut behind him.
He strode rapidly down the corridor, but as he went, the reaction started to set in and his pace slowed. By the time he had reached the elevator and rung for it his mood had changed completely. He laughed ironically at himself.
Of course Nora was not waiting for him down outside the building entrance. Marsh did not know her well enough to understand that. Ben, himself, caught up for the moment in the never-never land of cheering crowds and Medals of Honor and offers of military governorships, had for a moment been ready to believe that Nora, too, was to be found, at his feet, just waiting to be picked up.
But Nora was not like that, to throw herself into the arms of the hero of the hour. If she had really wished to see him again, she would have come to his office before leaving the phase ship after they landed. All she had said to Marsh, the letter she had written to Ben before the trial, had been to support him in the face of the charges against him. She would not abandon him while he was under the ax—she would not have abandoned any of the crew in such a situation. But she would judge, quite rightly, that he no longer needed her moral support now that he stood acquitted and with the world in his hand.
The world in his hand—Ben laughed again to himself, as the elevator stopped before him and he entered it, punching the button marked M on the control panel. —The doors slid smoothly closed and the elevator started down. It was good—a profound relief in a way to feel himself back in his old shell of hard-learned cynicism, isolated and apart from the rest of humanity. Looked at from the old, reliable point of view, he could see the brass shining through the silver plate of everything that had been thrown at him in the last few hours.
The cheering of the crowds meant nothing. They would cheer the central figure of any recent spectacular event. He could no doubt have earned as much noise by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The Congressional Medal of Honor likewise meant little or nothing. Not that the medal itself was meaningless, but Sven had mentioned, hadn’t he, that the Democrats would be back in office after the next Presidential election? The President had undoubtedly had his hands forced by political conditions and the clamor of the press. He had no choice but to award Ben the medal—little as he must have cared to put the United States’ highest military honor to such use.
As for Sven Holmgren and the Space Corps almost certainly it was doomed to failure. After a few days, when the public interest about the phase ship’s return had died down, the chances of the necessary appropriations and the necessary addition of dedicated people to the Space Corps ranks, would become almost nonexistent. Ben had been wise not to respond to the momentary lure of an appointment as Captain in those ranks—even though he recognized now that working for the advancement of man into space was the one job he would have liked to have done.
The elevator hissed to a stop and the doors rolled back. Ben stepped out and turned right toward the patch of still-bright afternoon beyond the glass doors still some distance away.
No, the thing to do was face reality as he had always known it. His place was the place of the Outsider, solitary and unable to bridge the gap between himself and any other person in the world. He must remember this, keep it firmly in mind, and not be pied-pipered back into the chase after that damned elusive will-o'-the-wisp of the future just because a hard-headed earth-bound politician had seemed miraculously to have grasped the almost mystic concept of a middle way among the stars. A middle road, lying between the paths of conquerors and the conquerable—possible to human people because of their inherent contradiction of character, the fact that they could go both ways at once with no trouble at all.
The middle way and—offer a bribe in the next moment. That was what Walt had riot been able to understand. Any single individual had a whole universe of possibilities in him. The brutal one would be suddenly gentle. The coward would unexpectedly fight. The most fearful would turn out a hero. Hans would cling in a vine clump. Kirk would attack a giant barehanded. Always, unexpectedly, when you had given upon them, they did the least likely thing. And the whole tribe went forward.
Oh, it was there—it was there, thought Ben sourly. The final reward of success, for whoever could break his heart for them, keep his eyes fixed on the promise in them, and put up with the rest of their characters. But his own bit was done. He had served his tour of hard duty and ought to be able now to quit trying to help heave the oxcart out of the mud. He had a right now to leave it to somebody else for a change, settle down to keeping a comfortable lighthouse somewhere, away from the storms. It was just lucky that exposure to the tinsel elements of fame and success had helped him realize it in time.
Congratulating himself on having finally peeled away the illusions in him down to the hard core of common sense any man must possess to survive, Ben nodded at the blue-uniformed enlisted rifleman on guard at the door, and pushed through it. Outside, the bright late afternoon sun through the warm, clear air was blinding. The steps before him went down a short way, then, turned to his right below a stone balustrade, and ran down a dozen more steps to the street.He stood blinking a moment while his eyes adjusted and then went ahead and turned to his right to go down the last steps.
—And there was Nora.
Mission to Universe Page 22