Andre Norton (ed)

by Space Pioneers

  She looked across at Rick's sleeping form, and suddenly their arguments seemed so futile. This was all there need be to life: a man, and a woman, and their child. What else mattered? Why couldn't Rick and Ken see that the stars did not matter as long as they had each other

  But, they would say, why couldn't she go along with them, if they wanted the stars bad enough? One side of the argument seemed as reasonable as the other, and she did not know the answer—only that she feared and hated the stars.

  She took a quick, cold shower, and joined her mother in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Its broad windows opened onto the orchard, snowy with blossoms. In the meadow beyond, the grass was close-cropped by the indolent dairy cows.

  Sarah stepped outside a moment and filled her lungs with the sharp, glistening air. It carried the scent of the orchard and the dewy grass and the pungent smells of the distant barn where her father was supervising the milking.

  "I don't see how anyone would want to live in any other way," she said. "It's horrible to bring up a child knowing nothing but grease and steel and the sickening smell of jets. Ken doesn't know what the world is like, yet!"

  "If this is the world, then neither did any of us know it when we lived at the bases when Dad was in the Navy!"

  "We certainly didn't. Day and night—nothing but jets and rockets screaming. I thought I'd go crazy listening to them. I dreamed of finding a place where it was quiet and people moved at a walk instead of screaming through space like witches on atomic broomsticks.

  'And then I saw to it that I would spend the rest of my life there by marrying a spaceman!" "You don't have to stay with him."

  "I do. It just so happens that I'm still in love with him. It's more likely that he'll tell me to go my own way, but I just can't stand the thought of Ken going to Mars to join this crazy Patrol they've organized for children. It's insane! Sixteen-year-olds being taught to handle spaceships. Don't they deserve any childhood?"

  "What does Ken say about it?"

  "He's all for it, of course. He doesn't know any better. He doesn't know there's anything else in the world."

  Mrs. Walker checked the automatic ovens and glanced at the clock. "We'd better round up the men for breakfast. Almost done." Then she put her hands on her hips and looked at Sarah.

  "I haven't had much to do with men—only had the one around during my life. With Ken and Rick you've had more experience in learning how they act, young and old, than I ever had. But one thing I did learn was that it just doesn't matter very much what they do as long as it's what they want. A man shouldn't have to slave at some uninspired career and try to enjoy life on the side. If his career isn't what he wants to do, then he's wasting his life, and no woman has a right to ask him to do that."

  "Doesn't anything I want matter?"

  "Of course. If you want to leave Rick and be a lady farmer nobody in the whole world would stop you or criticize you. That's one thing you can count on today—and that no one before us could—you are absolutely free to do just about as you please."

  "You don't have to make it sound so ridiculous!"

  "Well, what do you want, then? You don't want to go to Mars with Rick, and you don't want to stay behind."

  "Why does a woman always have to be the one to give in?"

  "They don't. I just told you what you could do. You can break up your marriage and you and Rick and Ken can still be good friends—plenty of people have done that rather than 'give in' to each other."

  "But that's the ancient dogma that I can't have a marriage and my own life at the same timel"

  "You've been married long enough to know that. You've hated the Navy life all these years, but you've lived it. Only this business of Ken's going to Mars has brought it to a climax.

  "I had to make the choice, too. It wasn't much fun for me, sitting in the radio shack waiting for news of our great hero. I always thought it was nothing but showing-off, but it was the only thing he lived for, and of all the choices I had to make, he was the one thing I would not give up.

  "Yours is twice as hard, because you have Ken as well as Rick— or is it twice as easy?"

  In the afternoon she lay on the lawn chair in front of the house watching the twinkling pattern of sunlight that came through the leaves of the old oak tree. The world had stopped its rush of jet wings. She seemed to have slipped into utter time-lessness.

  Her father's approach startled her out of her reverie. "May I join you?" he said.

  "If you promise to talk about nothing but cows and pigs, and crops and weather," she said.

  He dropped to the grass and looked up at her. A patch of sunlight caught the silver border of his hair and turned the space-bumed skin of his face to bold bronze.

  "I tried to interest Ken in the farm this morning," he said, "but I didn't have much luck. I'd be glad to leave him this place, you know, if he wanted it. I'll be through with it by the time he's old enough. But he won't want it, and neither will Rick—not then, anyway. Farming these days is just an old man's hobby, important enough, but my kind can take care of it."

  Sarah sighed. "All right, so you want to talk about Ken and Mars and space jets. You won't let me hear of anything else. You're all determined that I am wrong, that I haven't the right to control my own child's life until he knows what he wants to do."

  "Take it easy, Sarah. I'm not used to being jumped like that. It's bad for an old man's heart, you know.

  "But as to Ken, are you sure that it's his going to Mars that you are so angry about, or is it something that someone else has done to you—or something, even, that's merely inside yourself?"

  "It's everything—everything connected with space and jets and the things that take men away from their families."

  "Rick tells me he's arranged for you to go with him."

  "He's arranged it! And without consulting me or even assuming I could have another idea about it. He's been gone a whole year, and now he expects to jerk me up and transplant me to some frigid desert where life isn't fit for savages. And I'm supposed to be happy about that!"

  "Would you really be happy with anything less than his giving up space altogether?"

  Her breathing halted momentarily with a quick, deep intake as if she had not dared to frame in words the magnitude of this demand before. But she nodded slowly. "I guess that's it, Dad. I'd really settle for nothing less."

  "You'll have to settle for a lot less!" Commander Walker retorted. "It's always been like this, Sarah," he continued more gently.

  "There has always been a peculiar breed of man who had to see just what was beyond the horizon, a kind of man never settled or satisfied with what he had in the here and now. That's the kind of man I am, and that's the kind Rick is—and Ken is one with us.

  "There's nothing you can do about it, Sarah—nothing at all." Sarah's face grew pale beneath the unwanted tan painted by sunlight on barren Naval Bases. "I can try," she said slowly. "You'll lose them both." "Would Mother have lost—?"

  He nodded slowly. "There is no way on Earth to hold a man from crossing the private horizon he has to cross. And sometimes I think we all have such a horizon, whether we know it or not.

  "At any rate, there were certain things I had to do. To have abandoned them would have hurt us both more than to follow through. Your mother understood that. She understood it very well."

  "What about me? I didn't understand it. I don't understand it yet. What about the long nights I sat with mother listening for radio reports—first the solo flight around the world, then the Moon, and then the Mars trip, not once but three times we waited while you tried and failed and tried again.

  "I was glad when you had to turn back and missed being the first to reach Mars. I felt it made up a little for all the nights I waited for you. But nothing, really, could make up for that. You didn't even care—"

  "There's more to caring than just clinging to someone you love—sucking the life out of him with demands he cannot fulfill. You can't imprison the thing you love.

  "
Because I left you did not mean that I had forgotten you. Remembering you was the one thing that kept me going. Perhaps I've done nothing, really, to let you know that, but if I'd known you would ever say the thing you have just said I would have kept on going without caring much if I ever succeeded in getting back."

  Sarah looked at her hands, lying still and icy m her lap. "I'm sorry, Dad—but that's the way I did feel. It's almost the way I feel now about Rick and Ken. I can't help it. I can't forget those nights of waiting and being afraid—"

  "Then you'd better tell Rick and get it over with. You can't change him, and you can't change Ken. Think about it a little while and then tell them if you still feel the same."

  He rose to his feet and glanced off towards the distant fields. "I've got to go up to the house and check with the Weather Bureau again. I ordered two inches of rain for tonight and tomorrow. I'd like to postpone it while you're here, but the crops won't stand it. It doesn't show much signs of developing yet. The forecasters are getting pretty careless about filling orders lately."

  When he was gone, Sarah lay back in the chair, her arm over her eyes to shield them from the sun edging now through the maze of leaves. She would be glad to see it rain, she thought. It should be raining everywhere. The whole world should be crying.

  She would have to tell Rick and Ken that they could go-forever. There had not been any other answer since she first watched in fear while Rick took a new experimental ship to test on a long, lonely Moon flight. She had crouched then in a chair in the radio room just as she and her mother had done for so many long years waiting for news of her father.

  There had been a thousand other flights since then, and they had quarreled and made up and quarreled bitterly again. And he had wholly overruled her objections to Ken's taking the jet courses at the Base.

  Now, he wanted to take them to Mars forever. That, she could not do. They had to cross their far horizons wherever they might lead them, but they had to go without her.

  The sky began clouding that afternoon and by three o'clock the rain came as scheduled. Sarah watched through the windows, watching it drip softly among the trees and wetting the whole Earth as far as she could see.

  Her mother was busy with needlework and the men were hotly debating the merits of some fantastic and insignificant jet-drive mechanism.

  Of them all, Sarah was alone in her discontent, alone and afraid. And they seemed, as if by conspiracy, to ignore her in her solitude.

  Her mother spoke once, and then she turned to Commander Walker. "What are you going to do if the fish pond goes out? You said the dam would never stand another rain like this one, and you haven't done anything about it."

  He waved the question away with superior knowledge of such details.

  By morning the storm began to abate, the clouds were pierced with sunlight as the air mass was lowered by the controlling beams to conserve its remaining moisture for another location.

  But Commander Walker, reading the automatic rain gauge records fumed. The total catch was only sixty per cent of his order.

  Sarah slipped into her coat and boots and left the house as he called the Bureau to report his opinion of forecasters and demand the remainder of his order.

  With surprise, she found Ken standing just outside the doorway, his face revealing an unbelievable awareness of the spring glory about him.

  He smiled almost shyly. "Feel like going for a walk, Mom? It's a swell morning for that."

  "I'd love to, Ken. Let's go on up the hill and see what things look like from there."

  They started out together as the door opened and Commander Walker roared at them: "We're going to have some more rain this morning if that Weather Bureau can find enough brains to get those clouds back here. Better not go far. Stay in range of the old house on the island. The forecasters are probably mad enough to give it all in one bucketful. And I'll sue if they cost me any topsoil!"

  Ken laughed and waved a hand as they retreated from the house. "We'll be all right. Don't worry about us. We like the rain."

  The light in his face was a joyous thing to see, and Sarah thought suddenly how little there had been of it during the past years. She thought back over the times that Rick had left them alone, and it seemed there had been nothing of closeness or love between her and Ken. He had always pulled away in the direction of his father's horizon—and she had pulled against almost everything he had wanted.

  They walked past the steaming barns and the low grumbling noises of the cattle within. The meadowland underneath their feet was squashy from the rain and she had to grasp Ken's arm to keep her feet beneath her.

  He was big, like Rick, and the hardness of muscle in his arm startled her. He seemed to have grown almost without her awareness, she thought in panic.

  "I've decided I won't go with Dad," Ken said abruptly. "I know how you feel about it. I'm not going to ask any more. We talked about it last night. I told him, and he said it was up to me.

  She couldn't see his face, but she knew how it must look. Yet her heart gave an involuntary leap within her. He was offering the thing she most desired at this moment—or so it appeared.

  But it was only appearance. She understood—as he didn't at this moment—that some day he would hate her for the unspoken pressure by which she had forced him to this decision.

  "We'll talk about it more, later," she said. Her voice was hoarse and barely audible. "We may find another answer."

  They came to the low rise behind the barns and followed the base of it towards the old creek bed, long dried up and overrun with grass. There had once been a sizable stream here, but a dam in the low hills beyond held back all the water that used to flow in spring freshets. This was the fish pond where the runoff from the hills was trapped.

  Across the dry stream bed was a rise on which stood the first farmhouse of the place, now long abandoned. The stream had once run behind the house, but one sudden spring flood had washed a new course and left the house stranded on a tiny island between the two branches. It did not matter, for the house had been long abandoned even then.

  Now Sarah and Ken turned their steps towards it. Ken glanced at the sky. "It looks like Grandpa is about to get all the rain he can use. I'll bet the forecasters are so tired of his grumbling that they're really going to let him have it."

  Sarah stopped and glanced anxiously for the first time at the low gray ceiling that was settling with furious intensity.

  "We'd better get back," she said. "We'll be drenched if we get caught out here." But already the first drops had started to fall.

  T think it's been raining quite a while over the hill there," said Ken, nodding towards the rise that hid the fish pond. "We'd better go up to the old house and wait it out."

  It seemed the sensible thing to do. Sarah hurried on, clutching Ken's hand for support. The bottom of the dry creek bed held three or four inches of water already from the previous rain. They sank to ankle depth in it, and tried to hop across on projecting rocks. Finally, they scrambled up the opposite slope to the house. Their footsteps rattled like dry bones on the old, weather-beaten porch.

  From the moment they set foot on it, the rain spurted in torrents. It hammered the aged roof and began to pour through holes. Ken and Sarah dodged, clinging to each other and glancing apprehensively upward.

  And Sarah found that she was laughing.

  It was a strange and startling discovery. Ken was laughing with her, and she sensed that he, too, felt that they had not laughed together for a very long time.

  They clung momentarily in this miracle of laughter, and then it slowly died away in Ken's face. He relaxed his hold on his mother, and then it was there between them again—the wonder and the agony of their divergent lives.

  They sat down close to each other on the porch floor, their backs against the wall. Water fell and splashed on either side of them. They watched the sheeting rain, and listened to its roar on the roof.

  Their own silence was long. Ken shifted uneasily. Sarah sensed
his embarrassment in not knowing what to say to her in this moment.

  She broke the silence. "Why do you want to go to Mars?" she asked suddenly. "Can you tell me in just a single phrase that will make me understand this thing?"

  "It's what I've got to do," he answered, forgetting his former promise to abandon the plan. "There's one thing that each man in the world is born to do, Grandpa says, and I believe him. Mine is out there in space.

  "Think of all there is yet to do I We haven't even reached the last planet of our own System. Somebody living now is going to be the first to make it. That could be me. And there are the other Systems like ours.

  "They're talking about an SOL—speed of light drive—out there on Mars now. Dad thinks he may get in on some of the development work on that. We could reach the nearest stars with it.

  "I've been born in the best age the world has ever knownl I can't turn my back on it. You have no right to ask it of me."

  "I won't ask it," said Sarah quietly. "I'm going to let you go— you and Dad—you can go together."

  "That isn't what we want. We don't just want to go by ourselves. We need you, too."

  "No!" Her voice was so shrill it startled her. "You'll never get me to agree to anything like that. I'll give you all the freedom you want for yourselves, but you can't ask any more of me than that."

  From a distance there came a sudden sound of thunder. It rose from somewhere in the hills above them, and a gathering roar shook the old house on its rotten underpinnings. Sarah and Ken glanced up the littie valley with wonder and apprehension, and the roaring grew.

  "The dam!" Ken cried. "Grandpa's pond—the dam's broken!"

  Sarah recalled her mother's complaint about ordering so much rainfall to drain behind the weakened dam. It was incredible that her father should have underestimated such a risk. But now she could see the gray tongue of water curling down the dry creek bed, widening swiftly, some of it overflowing the banks and racing towards the barns and corrals across the meadow.

  Then she saw it flowing through the other branch around the house.