The music was so loud that he never heard the doorbell ring, but when a lull came, he heard Nora’s voice downstairs, and listened hopefully for Ken’s. But when they came up, the boy was not with them.
“Hello, skinny-britches,” he greeted his daughter.
Nora grinned and came over to kiss him. Her hair dangled about his face, and he noticed that it was blacker than usual, with the gray streaks gone from it again.
“You smell good,” he said.
“You don’t, Pops. You smell like a sot. Naughty!”
“Where’s Ken?”
She moistened her lips nervously and looked away. “He couldn’t come. He had to take a driver’s lesson. He really couldn’t help it. If he didn’t go, he’d lose his turn, and then he wouldn’t finish before he goes back to the academy.” She looked at him apologetically.
“It’s all right, Nora.”
“If he missed it, he wouldn’t get his copter license until summer.”
“It’s okay. Copters! Hell, the boy should be in jets by now!”
Several breaths passed in silence. She gazed absently toward the window and shook her head. “No jets, Pop. Not for Ken.”
He glowered at her. “Listen! How’ll he get into space? He’s got to get his jet licenses first. Can’t get in rockets without ’em.”
Nora shot a quick glance at her mother. Martha rolled her eyes as if sighing patiently. Nora went to the window to stare down toward the Keith terrace. She tucked a cigarette between scarlet lips, lit it, blew nervous smoke against the pane.
“Mom, can’t you call them and have that racket stopped?”
“Donny says he likes it.”
Nora’s eyes flitted over the scene below. “Female butterflies and puppy-dogs in sport jackets. And the cadets.” She snorted. “Cadets! Imagine Ron Keith the Third ever going to space. The old man buys his way into the academy, and they throw a brawl as if Ronny passed the Compets.”
“Maybe he did,” growled Old Donegal.
“Hah!”
“They live in a different world, I guess,” Martha sighed.
“If it weren’t for men like Pops, they’d never’ve made their fortune.”
“I like the music, I tell you,” grumbled the old man.
“I’m half-a-mind to go over there and tell them off,” Nora murmured.
“Let them alone. Just so they’ll stop the racket for blast-away.”
“Look at them!—polite little pattern-cuts, all alike. They take pre-space, because it’s the thing to do. Then they quit before the payoff comes.”
“How do you know they’ll quit?”
“That party—I bet it cost six months’ pay, spacer’s pay,” she went on, ignoring him. “And what do real spacers get? Oley gets killed, and Pop’s pension wouldn’t feed the Keiths’ cat.”
“You don’t understand, girl.”
“I lost Oley. I understand enough.”
He watched her silently for a moment, then closed his eyes. It was no good trying to explain, no good trying to tell her the dough didn’t mean a damn thing. She’d been a spacer’s wife, and that was bad enough, but now she was a spacer’s widow. And Oley? Oley’s tomb revolved around the sun in an eccentric orbit that spun-in close to Mercury, then reached out into the asteroid belt, once every 725 days. When it came within rocket radius of Earth, it whizzed past at close to fifteen miles a second.
You don’t rescue a ship like that, skinny-britches, my darling daughter. Nor do you salvage it after the crew stops screaming for help. If you use enough fuel to catch it, you won’t get back. You just leave such a ship there forever, like an asteroid, and it’s a damn shame about the men trapped aboard. Heroes all, no doubt—but the smallness of the widow’s monthly check failed to confirm the heroism, and Nora was bitter about the price of Oley’s memory, perhaps.
Ouch! Old Donegal, you know she’s not like that. It’s just that she can’t understand about space. You ought to make her understand.
But did he really understand himself? You ride hot in a roaring blastroom, hands tense on the mixer controls and the pumps, eyes glued to instruments, body sucked down in a four-gravity thrust, and wait for the command to choke it off. Then you float free and weightless in a long nightmare as the beast coasts moonward, a flung javelin.
The “romance” of space—drivel written in the old days. When you’re not blasting, you float in a cramped hotbox, crawl through dirty mazes of greasy pipe and cable to tighten a lug, scratch your arms and bark your shins, get sick and choked up because no gravity helps your gullet get the food down. Liquid is worse, but you gag your whiskey down because you have to.
Stars?—you see stars by squinting through a viewing lens, and it’s like a photo-transparency, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll get an eyeful of Old Blinder and back off with a punch-drunk retina.
Adventure?—unless the skipper calls for course-correction, you float around in the blast-cubicle with damn little to do between blast-away and moon-down, except sweat out the omniscient accident statistics. If the beast blows up or gets gutted in space, a statistic had your name on it, that’s all, and there’s no fighting back. You stay outwardly sane because you’re a hog for punishment; if you weren’t, you’d never get past the psychologists.
“Did you like horror movies when you were a kid?” asked the psych. And you’d damn well better answer “yes,” if you want to go to space.
Tell her, old man, you’re her pop. Tell her why it’s worth it, if you know. You jail yourself in a coffin-size cubicle, and a crazy beast thunders berserk for uncontrollable seconds, and then you soar in ominous silence for the long, long hours. Grow sweaty, filthy, sick, miserable, idle—somewhere out in Big Empty, where Man’s got no business except the trouble he always makes for himself wherever he goes.
