“Well! Music!” grunted Old Donegal. “That’s good. This is some shebang. Good whiskey and good music and you.” He chuckled, but it choked off into a fit of coughing.
“Donny, about Ken—”
“No matter, Martha,” he said hastily. “Space-medic’s pay is good.”
“But, Donny—” She turned from the window, stared at him briefly, then said, “Sure, Donny, sure,” and came back to sit down by his bed.
He smiled at her affectionately. She was a man’s woman, was Martha—always had been, still was. He had married her the year he had gone to space—a lissome, wistful, old-fashioned lass, with big violet eyes and gentle hands and gentle thoughts—and she had never complained about the long and lonely weeks between blastoff and glide-down, when most spacers’ wives listened to the psychiatrists and soap-operas and soon developed the symptoms that were expected of them, either because the symptoms were chic, or because they felt they should do something to earn the pity that was extended to them. “It’s not so bad,” Martha had assured him. “The house keeps me busy till Nora’s home from school, and then there’s a flock of kids around till dinner. Nights are a little empty, but if there’s a moon, I can always go out on the porch and look at it and know where you are. And Nora gets out the telescope you built her, and we make a game of it. ‘Seeing if Daddy’s still at the office,’ she calls it.”
“Those were the days,” he muttered.
“What, Donny?”
“Do you remember that Steve Farran song?”
She paused, frowning thoughtfully. There were a lot of Steve Farran songs, but after a moment she picked the right one, and sang it softly …
“O moon whereo’er the clouds fly,
Beyond the willow tree,
There is a ramblin’ space guy
I wish you’d save for me.“Mare Tranquillitatis,
O dark and tranquil sea,
Until he drops from heaven,
Rest him there with thee …”
Her voice cracked, and she laughed. Old Donegal chuckled weakly.
“Fried mush,” he said. “That one made the cats wilt their ears and wail at the moon.
“I feel real crazy,” he added. “Hand me the king kong, fluff-muff.”
“Keep cool, Daddy-O, you’ve had enough.” Martha reddened and patted his arm, looking pleased. Neither of them had talked that way, even in the old days, but the outdated slang brought back memories—school parties, dances at the Rocketport Club, the early years of the war when Donegal had jockeyed an R-43 fighter in the close-space assaults against the Soviet satellite project. The memories were good.
A brassy blare of modern “slide” arose suddenly from the Keith terrace as the small orchestra launched into its first number. Martha caught an angry breath and started toward the window.
“Leave it,” he said. “It’s a party. Whiskey, Martha. Please—just a small one.”
She gave him a hurtful glance.
“Whiskey. Then you can call the priest.”
“Donny, it’s not right. You know it’s not right—to bargain for such as that.”
“All right. Whiskey. Forget the priest.”
She poured it for him, and helped him get it down, and then went out to make the phone-call. Old Donegal lay shuddering over the whiskey taste and savoring the burn in his throat. Jesus, but it was good.
You old bastard, he thought, you got no right to enjoy life when nine-tenths of you is dead already, and the rest is foggy as a thermal dust-rise on the lunar maria at hell-dawn. But it wasn’t a bad way to die. It ate your consciousness away from the feet up; it gnawed away the Present, but it let you keep the Past, until everything faded and blended. Maybe that’s what Eternity was, he thought—one man’s subjective Past, all wrapped up and packaged for shipment, a single space-time entity, a one-man microcosm of memories, when nothing else remains.
“If I’ve got a soul, I made it myself,” he told the gray nun at the foot of his bed.
The nun held out a pie pan, rattled a few coins in it. “Contribute to the Radiation Victims’ Relief?” the nun purred softly.
“I know you,” he said. “You’re my conscience. You hang around the officers’ mess, and when we get back from a sortie, you make us pay for the damage we did. But that was forty years ago.”
The nun smiled, and her luminous eyes were on him softly. “Mother of God!” he breathed, and reached for the whiskey. His arm obeyed. The last drink had done him good. He had to watch his hand to see where it was going, and squeezed the neck until his fingers whitened so that he knew that he had it, but he got it off the table and onto his chest, and he got the cork out with his teeth. He had a long pull at the bottle, and it made his eyes water and his hands grow weak. But he got it back to the table without spilling a bit, and he was proud of himself.
The room was spinning like the cabin of a gyro-gravved ship. By the time he wrestled it to a standstill, the nun was gone. The blare of music from the Keith terrace was louder, and laughing voices blended with it. Chairs scraping and glasses rattling. A fine party, Keith, I’m glad you picked today. This shebang would be the younger Keith’s affair. Ronald Tonwyler Keith, III, scion of Orbital Engineering and Construction Company—builders of the moon-shuttle ships that made the run from the satellite station to Luna and back.
It’s good to have such important neighbors, he thought. He wished he had been able to meet them while he was still up and about. But the Keiths’ place was walled-in, and when a Keith came out, he charged out in a limousine with a chauffeur at the wheel, and the iron gate closed again. The Keiths built the wall when the surrounding neighborhood began to grow shabby with age. It had once been the best of neighborhoods, but that was before Old
