by Jerry eBooks
By the time we had finished with the June-bug it was already late afternoon. The conference we held decided against pushing on to the garden. There was a good deal of June-bug meat left, and we had before us now the problem of shelter rather than that of food. There was also the question of weapons, though I solved this to some extent by worrying loose the wing cases of the beetle and splitting them down with the watch-spring. Properly sharpened on a stone, they made not inefficient poinards; rough, but good enough to attack insects with.
Kaye, who was a bit of an antiquarian, essayed making a sling with the aid of some tough grass fibres. After considerable practice, he became quite expert with this ungainly weapon. With tiny stones for ammunition, he could knock flies off distant grass-blades almost every time—an interesting but impractical feat, as after the first attempt, none of us cared to try fly-meat again. The odor alone is enough to turn the stomach. Once he did succeed in slaying a bee, however, and we got some valuable food from it, and about a week later, Kaye and his sling removed from our path a very grim and ferocious-looking spider that we all hesitated to approach.
Our main difficulty was clothing. Sherman offered the idea of working around toward the park where we could perhaps come by a handkerchief or something of the sort. He pointed out that the numerous trees would constitute an advantage, both in offering us ample fuel and a place to live tinder the roots, and there was a possibility of getting small fish out of the shallower reaches of the creek.
It took us over a week to make the long march, but when we had accomplished it, we were repaid for all our labor. At the border of the stream we found a chair that one of the internes must have left behind, and with it not only his medicine case, but a book, some writing paper and a bottle of ink.
This was treasure-trove indeed. Kaye and I hammered away at the catch of the medicine case for half an hour with the biggest stone we could lift, and finally manage’d to get it open. Beside various oddments of no utility to us, it contained a bottle of quinine capsules, which were just what we wanted. Once the quinine had been emptied out of them, they made ideal general carryalls. The bottle we succeeded in breaking, and with the sharp glass and a good deal of patience, fashioned useful tools and weapons.
I thought it would be worth while to write some kind of a record, as long as the gods had thrown the bottle of ink and the paper in our way, and with the aid of the others managed to roll the ink down to the headquarters we presently established under an arching tree-root. The paper was a wash-out, however. It was too heavy and the beetle’s leg, which was perforce the only pen I had, too scratchy.
By this time it was full day, and we were running chances by going back to the things the interne had left, but the gain was worth the risk, and I made another attempt. By great good fortune the book was Brinkley’s “History of Japan—india paper. With Sherman’s help I got a couple of the fly-leaves loose, and he had gone off with one when I looked up and saw the menacing shape of a man in the distance—Grimshaw, I thought, though from his height and the distance, I could not be certain. Leaving the paper behind I fled.
I doubt whether I would have written this record even then but for what has happened since. We were comfortably domiciled under our root in the park, living off grasshoppers (of which there seemed an unending supply) and making preparations for the winter. Once we even caught a mole, stabbed it to death with our glass swords, and skinned it laboriously. It furnished us both good food and clothing. Sherman developed uncanny skill with such poor needles as we could contrive, and even Kraicki contributed to the general fund of welfare by the discovery that the yellow hearts of grass stems have a delicious flavor when baked.
But three days ago there came a change. Sherman and Kraicki were out hunting together. I was in our home, trying out some darts I had made with fragments of wood and glass points, when Sherman burst in, panting with speed and very pale.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, “and where’s Kraicki?”
“Gone,” he said. “Grimshaw’s got a cat. It found us.”
Then I saw it all.
So I am leaving this record. There is no more hope for us. All that remains is a chance, however remote, that these capsules will fall into the hands of some not too skeptical individual who will take the trouble to investigate—the shadowy chance of a delayed revenge which I shall not live to see. I only hope the cat will not get me before I can secrete these capsules in some place where they will be found. Winter is coming; we dare not hunt for fear of the animal, and our food is running short.
THE END
Requiem
Robert A. Heinlein
It was a matter of business and investments—but it wouldn’t stay that way, for a man who’d dreamed, and financed those dreams.
On a high hill in Samoa there is a grave. Inscribed on the marker are these words:
“Under the widec and starry sky
Dig my grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die
And I lay me down with a will!
“This be the verse yon grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
These lines appear another place—scrawled on a shipping tag torn from a compressed-air container, and pinned to the ground until a knife.
IT was not much of a fair, as fairs go. The trotting races didn’t promise much excitement, even though several entries claimed the blood of the immortal Dan Patch. The tents and concession booths barely covered the circus grounds, and the pitchmen seemed discouraged.
D.D. Harriman’s chauffeur could not see any reason for stopping. They were due in Kansas City for a directors’ meeting; that is to say, Harriman was. The chauffeur had private reasons for promptness, reasons involving darktown society on Eighteenth Street. But the boss not only stopped; he hung around. He didn’t seem much interested in the racetrack or sideshows, though.
Bunting and a canvas arch made the entrance to a large inclosure beyond the racetrack. Red and gold letters announced:
This way to the
MOON ROCKET!!!!
See it in actual flight!
Public Demonstration Flights
TWICE DAILY
This is the ACTUAL TYPE used by the
First Men to Reach the MOON!!
YOU can ride in it!!—$25
A boy, nine or ten years old, hung around the entrance and stared at the posters.
“Want to see the ship, son?”
The kid’s eyes shone. “Gee, mister, I sure would.”
“So would I. Come on.”
Harriman paid out fifty cents for two pink tickets which entitled him and the boy to enter the inclosure and examine the rocketship. The kid ran on ahead with the single-minded preoccupation of boyhood. Harriman looked over the stubby curved lines of the ovoid body. He noted with a professional eye that she was a single-jet type with fractional controls around her midriff. He squinted through his glasses at the name painted in gold on the carnival red of the body, Carefree. He paid another quarter to enter the control cabin.
WHEN his eyes had adjusted to the gloom caused by the strong ray filters of the ports, he let them rest lovingly on the keys of the console and the semicircle of dials above. Each beloved gadget was in its proper place. He knew them—graven in his heart.
While he mused over the instrument board, with the warm liquid of content soaking through his body, the pilot entered and touched his arm.
“Sorry, sir. We’ve got to cast loose for the flight.”
“Eh?” Harriman started, then looked at the speaker. Handsome devil, with a good skull and strong shoulders—reckless eyes and a self-indulgent mouth, but a firm chin. “Oh, excuse me, captain.”
“Quite all right.”
“Oh, I say, captain . . . er . . . uh—”
“McIntyre.”
“Captain McIntyre, could you take a passenger this trip?” T
he old man leaned eagerly toward him.
“Why, yes, if you wish. Come along with me.” He ushered Harriman into a shed marked “Office” which stood near the gate. “Passenger for a check-over, doc.”
Harriman permitted the medico to run a stethoscope over his thin chest and to strap a rubber bandage around his arm. Presently the doctor unstrapped it, glanced at McIntyre, and shook his head.
“No go, doc?”
“That’s right, captain.”
Harriman looked from face to face, his disappointment plain to see. “You won’t take me?”
The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “I couldn’t even guarantee that you would live through the take-off. You see, sir,” he continued, not unkindly, “it’s not only that your heart condition makes heavy acceleration dangerous, but at your age bones are brittle, highly calcified, and easily broken in the shock of take-off. Rocketry is a young man’s game.”
McIntyre added: “Sorry, sir. I’d like to, but the Bates County Fair Association pays the doctor here to see to it that I don’t take up anyone who might be hurt by the acceleration.”
The old man’s shoulders drooped miserably. “I rather expected it.”
“Sorry, sir.” McIntyre turned to go, but Harriman followed him out.
“Excuse me, captain—”
“Yes?”
“Could you and your . . . uh . . . engineer have dinner with me after your flight?”
The pilot looked at him quizzically. “I don’t see why not. Thanks.”
“CAPTAIN MCINTYRE, it is difficult for me to see why anyone would quit the Earth-Moon run,” said Harriman a few hours later. Fried chicken and hot biscuits in a private dining room of the best hotel the little town of Butler afforded, three-star Hennessey, and Corona Coronas had produced a friendly atmosphere, in which three men could talk freely.
“Well, I didn’t like it.”
“Aw, don’t give him that, Mac—you know damn well it was Rule G that got you.” McIntyre’s mechanic poured himself another brandy as he spoke.
McIntyre looked sullen. “Well, what if I did take a couple o’ drinks? Anyhow, I could have squared that—it was the damn persnickety regulations that got me fed up. Who are you to talk? Smuggler!”
“Sure, I smuggled! Who wouldn’t—with all those beautiful rocks just aching to be taken back to Earth? I had a diamond once as big as—But if I hadn’t been caught I’d be in Luna City tonight. And so would you, you drunken blaster—with the boys buying us drinks and the girls smiling and making suggestions—”
He put his face down and began to weep quietly.
McIntyre shook him. “He’s drunk.”
“Never mind.” Harriman interposed a hand. “Tell me, are you really satisfied not to be on the run any more?” McIntyre chewed his lip. “No—he’s right, of course. This barnstorming isn’t what it’s all cracked up to be. We’ve been hopping junk at every pumpkin doin’s up and down the Mississippi Valley—sleeping in tourist camps, and eating at greaseburners. Half the time the sheriff has an attachment on the ship, the other half the Society for the Prevention of Something or Other gets an injunction to keep us on the ground. It’s no sort of a life for a rocket man.”
“Would it help any for you to get to the Moon?”
“Well—yes. I couldn’t get back on the Earth-Moon run, but if I was in Luna City, I could get a job hopping ore for the company—they’re always short of rocket pilots for that, and they wouldn’t mind my record. If I kept my nose clean, they might even put me back on the run, in time.”
Harriman fiddled with a spoon, then looked up. “Would you young gentlemen be open to a business proposition?”
“Perhaps. What is it?”
“You own the Carefree?”
“Yeah. That is, Charlie and I do—barring a couple of liens against her. What about it?”
“I want to charter her—for you and Charlie to take me to the Moon!”
Charlie sat up with a jerk. “D’joo hear what he said, Mac? He wants us to fly that old heap to the Moon!”
McIntyre shook his head. “Can’t do it, Mr. Harriman. The old boat’s worn out. We don’t even use standard juice in her—just gasoline and liquid air. Charlie spends all of his time tinkering with her at that. She’s going to blow up some day.”
“SAY, Mr. Harriman,” put in Charlie, “what’s the matter with getting an excursion permit and going in a company ship?”
“No, son,” the old man replied, “I can’t do that. You know the conditions under which Congress granted the company a monopoly on lunar exploitation—no one to enter space who was not physically qualified to stand up under it. Company to take full responsibility for the safety and health of all citizens beyond the stratosphere. The official reason for granting the franchise was to stop the enormous loss of life that occurred during the first few years of rocket travel.”
“And you can’t pass the physical exam?”
Harriman shook his head.
“Well, what the hell—if you can afford to hire us, why don’t you just bribe yourself a brace of company docs? It’s been done before.”
Harriman smiled ruefully. “I know it has. Charlie, but it won’t work for me. You see. I’m a little too prominent. My full name is Delos D. Harriman.”
“What? You are old D.D.? But, hell’s bells, you own a big slice of the company yourself; you ought to be able to do anything you like, rules or no rules.”
“That is not an unusual opinion, son, but it is incorrect. Rich men aren’t more free than other men; they are less free—a good deal less free. I tried to do what you suggest, but the other directors would not permit me. They are afraid of losing their franchise. It costs them a good deal in—uh—political contact expenses to retain it, as it is.”
“Well, I’ll be a—Can you tie that, Mac? A guy with lots of dough, and he can’t spend it the way he wants to.” McIntyre did not answer, but waited for Harriman to continue.
“Captain McIntyre, if you had a ship, would you take me?”
McIntyre rubbed his chin. “It’s against the law.”
“I’d make it worth your while.”
“Sure, he would, Mr. Harriman. Of course you would, Mac. Luna City! Oh, baby!”
“Why do you want to go to the Moon so badly, Mr. Harriman?”
“Captain, it’s the one thing I’ve really wanted to do all my life—ever since I was a boy. I don’t know whether I can explain it to you or not. You young fellows have grown up to rocket travel the way I grew up to aviation. I’m a great deal older than you are; maybe fifty years older. When I was a kid practically nobody believed that men would ever reach the Moon. You’ve seen rockets all your lives, and the first to reach the Moon got there before you were old enough to vote. When I was a boy they laughed at the idea.
“But I believed—I believed. I read Verne and Wells and Smith, and I believed that we could do it—that we would do it. I set my heart on being one of the men to walk the surface of the Moon, to see her other side, and to look back on the face of the Earth, hanging in the sky.
“I used to go without my lunches to pay my dues in the American Rocket Society, because I wanted to believe that I was helping to bring the day nearer when we would reach the Moon. I was already an old man when that day arrived. I’ve lived longer than I should, but I would not let myself die—I will not!—until I have set foot on the Moon.”
McIntyre stood up and put out his hand. “You find a ship, Mr. Harriman. I’ll drive ’er.”
“Atta boy, Mac! I told you he would, Mr. Harriman.”
HARRIMAN mused and dozed during the hour’s run to the north into Kansas City, dozed in the light, troubled sleep of old age. Incidents out of a long life ran through his mind in vagrant dreams. There was that time—oh, yes, 1910—a little boy on a warm spring night. “What’s that, daddy?”
“That’s Halley’s comet, sonny.”
“Where did it come from?”
“I don’t know, son. From way out in the sky somewhere.�
��
“It’s beyooootiful, daddy. I want to touch it.”
“ ’Fraid not, son.”
“Delos, do you mean to stand there and tell me you put the money we had saved for the house into that crazy rocket company?”
“Now, Charlotte, please! It’s not crazy; it’s a sound business investment. Some day soon rockets will fill the sky. Ships and trains will be obsolete. Look what happened to the men that had the foresight to invest in Henry Ford.”
“We’ve been all over this before.”
“Charlotte, the day will come when men will rise up off the Earth and visit the Moon, even the planets. This is the beginning.”
“Must you shout?”
“I’m sorry, but you—”
“I feel a headache coming on. Please try to be a little quiet when you come to bed.”
He hadn’t gone to bed. He had sat out on the veranda all night long, watching the full Moon move across the sky. There would be the devil to pay in the morning, the devil and a thin-lipped silence. But he’d stick by his guns. He’d given in on most things, but not on this. The night was his. Tonight he’d be alone with his old friend. He searched her face. Where was Mare Crisium? Funny, he couldn’t make it out. He used to be able to see it plainly when he was a hoy. Probably needed new glasses—this constant office work wasn’t good for his eyes.
But he didn’t need to see; he knew where they all were: Crisium, Mare Fecunditatis, Mare Tranquillitatis—that one had a satisfying roll!—the Apennines, the Carpathians, old Tycho with its mysterious rays.
Two hundred and forty thousand miles—ten times around the Earth. Surely men could bridge a little gap like that. Why, he could almost reach out and touch it, nodding there behind the elm trees.
Not that he could help to do it. He hadn’t the education.
“Son, I want to have a little serious talk with you.”
“Yes, mother.”
“I know you had hoped to go to college next year”—Hoped! He had lived or it. The University of Chicago to study under Moulton, then on to the Yerkes Observatory to work under the eye of Dr. Frost himself—“and I had hoped so, too. But with your father gone, and the girls growing up, it’s harder to make ends meet. You’ve been a good boy, and worked hard to help out. I know you’ll understand.”
