jaggedy tumble of fallen rock almost blocked the drift. There was just about edging-through space between the wall and the heaped-up debris.
“You’d better Channel,” whispered Rainy.
“You mean when we have to scrape past-” I began.
“Not that kind of Channeling,” said Rainy.
The rest of his words were blotted out in the sudden wave of agony and sorrow that swept from Tom and engulfed me-not physical agony, but mental agony. I gasped and Channeled as fast as I could, but the wet beads from that agony formed across my forehead before I could get myself guarded against it.
Tom was kneeling by the heaped-up stones, his eyes intent upon the floor beside them. I moved closer. There was a small heap of soil beside a huge jagged boulder. There was a tiny American flag standing in the soil, and, above it on the boulder, was painted a white cross, inexpertly, so that the excess paint wept down like tears.
“This,” mourned Tom almost inaudibly, “is my son-“
“Your son!” I gasped. “Your son!”
“I can’t take it again,” whispered Remy. “I’m going on to the ship and get busy. He’ll tell it whether anyone’s listening or not. But each time it gets a little shorter. It took all morning the first time.” And Remy went on down the drift, a refugee from a sorrow he couldn’t ease.
“-so I said I’d come out and help him.” Tom’s voice became audible and I sank down on the floor beside him.
“His friends had died-Jug, of pneumonia, Buck, from speeding in his car to tell my son he’d figured out some angle that bad them stopped. And there my son was-no one to help him finish-no one to go out to Space with, so I said I’d come out and help him. We could live on my pension. We had to, because all our money was spent on the ship. All our money and a lot more has gone into the ship. I don’t know how they got started or who got the idea or who drew the plans or which one of them figured out how to make it go, but they were in the service together and I think they must have pirated a lot of the stuff. That’s maybe why they were so afraid the government would find them. I don’t hold with dishonesty and mostly my son don’t either, but he was in on it along with the other two and I think he wanted to go more than any of them. It was like a fever in his blood. He used to say, ‘If I can’t make it alive, I want to make it dead. What a burial! Blackness of Outer Space for my shroud-a hundred million stars for my candles and the music of the spheres for my requiem!’ And here he lies-all in the dark-” Tom’s whole body dropped and he nearly collapsed beside me.
“I heard the crack and crumble,” he whispered urgently. “I heard the roof give away. I heard him yell, ‘No! Not down here!’ and I saw him race for the ship and I saw the rocks come down and I saw the dust billow out-” His voice was hardly audible, his face buried in his hands. “The lights didn’t go. They’re strung along the other wall. After the dust settled, I saw-I saw my son. Only his hand-only his hand reaching-reaching for Space and a hundred million stars. Reaching-asking-wanting.” He turned to me, his face awash with tears. “I couldn’t move the rock. I couldn’t push life back into him. I couldn’t save my son, but I swore that I’d take his ship into Space-that I’d take something of his to say he made it, too. So I gave him the flag to hold. The one he meant to put where the other moon-shot, landed. ‘Litterbugs!’ he called them for messing up the moon. He was going to put this flag there instead-so small it wouldn’t clutter up the landscape. So he’s been holding it all this time-and as soon as Remy and I get the ship to going, we’ll take the flag and-and-“
His eyes brightened and I helped him-shielding strongly from him-to his feet. “You can come, too, if you bring one of those lemon pies!” He had paid his admission ticket of sorrow and was edging past the heap of fallen rock.
“We’ll save that to celebrate with when we get back,” I said.
“Get back?” He smiled over his shoulder. “We’re only going. We have a capsule to send back with all the information, and a radio to keep in touch as long as we can, but we never said anything about coming back. Why should we ever come back?”
Stunned, I watched him edge out of sight off down the drift, his sorrow for the moment behind him. I leaned against the wall, waiting for my Channeling to be complete. I looked down at the small mound of earth and the quietly drooping flag and cried in a sudden panic-“We can’t handle this alone! Not a one-way trip.”
I clasped my hands over my mouth, but Tom was gone. I hurried after him, the echo of my feet slipping on the jagged rocks canceling out the frightened echo of my voice.
As I followed Tom down the drift I was trying frantically to find some way out of this horrible situation. Finally I smiled, relieved. “We just won’t go,” I said aloud. “We just won’t go—”
And then I saw the ship, curving gently up into the darkness of the covered shaft. It was almost with a feeling of recognition that I saw and sensed the quiet, efficient beauty of her, small, compact, lovely, and I saw inside where everything flowed naturally into everything else, where one installation merged so logically and beautifully into another. I stood and felt the wonderful wholeness of the ship. It wasn’t something thrown together of tags and leftovers. It had grown, taking into itself each component part and assimilating it. It was a beautiful, functional whole, except for-I followed the unfinished feeling and found Tom and Remy where they were working together. Tom’s working consisted of holding a corner of a long sheet of diagrams while he dozed the facile doze of age and weariness. Remy had wound himself around behind some sort of panel and was making mysterious noises.
“Finally get here?” His voice came hollowly. “Take a look at the plans, will you? Tom left his reading specs in the shack. See where-” and his speech went off into visualization of something that was lovely to look at but completely incomprehensible to me. I gently took the sheet from Tom.
He snorted and his eyes opened. He half grinned and closed his eyes again. I looked at the sheet. Lines went all over it. There were wiggly lines bisecting other lines and symbols all over it, but I couldn’t find anywhere the thing Remy had showed me.
“He must have the wrong paper,” I said. “There’s nothing here like you want. There’s only-” and I visualized back at him.
“Why, it’s right there!” And he showed me a wiggly sign and equated it to the picture he had given me.
“Well, how am I to tell what’s what when it’s put down in such a mysterious way!” I was annoyed. Remy’s feet wiggled and he emerged backward.
“Ha!” he said, taking the sheet from me. “Anybody knows what a schematic diagram is. Anybody can see that this”-he waved it at me-“is this.” And he showed me mentally a panel full of complications that I never could have conceived of.
