Earthbound (Winston Science Fiction Book 1)

by Milton Lesser

  But Pete heard nothing. He waited until the Marshal had finished, and then he saluted smartly, turned on his heel and left the room. Somehow, his eyes had clouded over; he could hardly see the receptionist at her desk.

  In his mind, the spacemen were singing their chant again. Ho! for the void and far away!

  But he was washed out. . . .

  Chapter 2 — Big Pete and Little Pete

  Pete walked about aimlessly for a time, watching the Academy campus come to life. By the time he returned to his room, Garr had gone to his first morning class. A big note was tacked to their makeshift bulletin board. “See you soon, Petey-boy. Seegarr.”

  At any other time, Pete would have laughed. A year ago, Garr had retreated to the sheltered area behind the athletic field with his prize possession, a cigar. To this day, no one knew where he had found it, but everyone knew that he had attempted to smoke it. A very green and very ill Garr had returned to the dormitory, and since then no one had let him live down his nickname, See-garr.

  Hardly aware of what he was doing, Pete opened his bureau drawers and began to pile his gear neatly on his bunk. When the whistle ending the first morning period had sounded, he’d finished packing his clothing, and he sat on the bunk, staring at his suitcases. Mere hours before, he thought he’d soon be taking them to some far-away place, to Mars perhaps; but now he knew he’d be returning with them to his folks’ home in White Sands. Well, at least he’d be able to see the space-liners blasting off, for with the advent of space travel the old White Sands proving grounds had become the world’s largest Spaceport.

  I am Peter Hodges, Jr., he thought numbly. Dad is a retired space-captain, and Dad likes to watch the Spaceport too. Now I’ll have to watch it with him, while he dreams of the past and I dream of what might have been. . . .

  “Hey! You cut first period or something? What gives?” Smiling, Garr stood in the open doorway.

  “Yes,” Pete told him. “I cut my first period.”

  “Well, you missed something. Old Doc Caruthers really was in form. I mean, really in form! He gave us a picture of Mars so you almost thought your feet were crunching through those ochre sands.”

  “It sounds fine,” Pete said.

  “When I get my commission, I hope it’s Mars.”

  “I hope so too, Garr. I hope you get everything you want.”

  “Thanks! Yeah, and — why in space did you pack your bags?”

  “I’m leaving the Academy.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Leaving the Academy.”

  “Well,” Garr was still smiling, “don’t tell me they have a special mission for you before graduation! That happens sometimes, Pete. Where are they sending you? Oh, maybe it’s a secret.”

  “No, it’s not a secret. I’m going home to White Sands.”

  “You lucky guy! You’ll be able to see your folks before they ship you off.”

  Pete slammed his hand down on one of the suitcases. “Cut it out, Garr! Please cut it out.” He felt a lump rising in his throat, the same kind he always felt when they were singing the Spaceman’s Chant, only this time it was bigger and he had a hunch it might not go away.

  The smile left Garr’s face slowly, and a confused frown replaced it. “Did I say something wrong? I don’t get it. What’s the matter, Pete; what is it?”

  “I’m washed out,” Pete said stiffly. And then he found himself telling the whole story, everything.

  When he finished, Garr was silent. He crossed the room and sat down on the other bunk, rubbing a hand across his freckled cheek. Finally, he said:

  “That’s a rotten break, Pete. I — I guess talk isn’t much good, but it’s a rotten break. Heck, if it happened to me, it wouldn’t be so bad. No one in my family ever went to space. Sometimes they almost make a joke of it. ‘With all this room on Earth,’ they say, ‘what does a MacDougal want with the stars?’ But with you it’s different. Your father was a spaceman — a real famous one from what I hear. And didn’t you once tell me something about your older brother getting killed out in the asteroids. . . .”

  “Stop it!” Pete cried. “What do you want to rub it in for?”

  “Huh? I’m sorry, Pete. I was only trying —”

  “No, forget it. I’m sorry. I’ve got no business snapping at you like that.” But the way he felt, Pete knew he’d snap at anyone and everyone. It might be a good idea if he could go away some place, far from all the familiar things, far from the Spaceman’s Chant and the roar of the rockets. . . . No, that wasn’t right, either. Life wouldn’t he worth much without the rockets rising on their glorious pillars of flame. . . .

  “Hi, fellows!” Roger Gorham pushed the door open and came inside. Somehow, Roger always managed to look smug and self-satisfied. He made a practice of it,, despite the fact that he was the most unpopular cadet at the Academy; and he let everyone know that his father was Burton Gorham of Gorham Spacelines.

  “Scram” Garr said coldly.

  Roger ignored him. “I came to find out how urgent that office-gram was.”

  “Plenty urgent,” Garr told him. “Now scram.”

  “Hodges . . . .” Roger began.

  “What?

  “About that office-gram. . . .”

  “Don’t you see,” Garr stormed, “he wants to know exactly what went on between you and the Marshal. Say the word, Pete, and I’ll throw him out.”

  But Pete said, “I’ve been washed out.” He’d grown used to it by now. He could say it without batting an eyelash, but it left an empty feeling deep inside.

  “Don’t tell me they gave you the bounce for sneaking off to your little hill and watching the spaceships!” Roger was incredulous. “I admit it’s a kid’s trick, but they shouldn’t bounce you for something like that.”

  “You wouldn’t understand about that hill,” Garr said. “Not you.”

  “There’s nothing to understand. You’re kids, so you act like kids. You’re from the wrong side of the tracks and things like spaceships are so new and different to you . . . .”

  Garr got up swiftly and grabbed the front of Roger’s tunic, tugging until he brought the chunky cadet’s face within a few inches of his own. “Listen!” Garr shouted. “Maybe I’m from the wrong side of the tracks like you say — but not Pete. Pete’s father is a retired space-captain, or didn’t you know?”

  Roger backed away. “Let go of me! There, that’s better. A retired space-captain,” he snickered, “now isn’t that something? He goes to Mars a few times or maybe to the Jovian moons. He’s a hero after that, retiring when he’s twenty-five and living off a fat pension. That’s what he’s been doing for the last twenty years — living on a pension. Now, take my dad . . . .”

  “You can take him,” Garr said, thoroughly disgusted. “We don’t want him. As for Mr. Hodges, he happens to be chairman of the Spaceflight Advisory Board.”

  “Of course,” Roger persisted, “A soft armchair job for an ex-spaceman living on his reputation, too lazy to work . . . .”

  He couldn’t retreat through the opened door in time. Pete sailed into him with fists flying, and soon they were down on the floor, rolling over and over. Roger was strong, fighting with the desperation that a coward uses when he knows be cannot run away; but Pete fought with a blind fury.

  Dimly, he was aware of Roger striking back. But the fists bounced off his face and chest with almost no sensation at all. His father had told him that once: Big Pete had said, “When you fight, fight hard — but don’t start it, not unless you have to. Forget about the other fellow, he can’t hurt you, not as long as you’re hurting him . . . .

  It was like that now. Afterwards he might be hurt, he might find cuts and bruises on his face, but for now he only felt the pain shooting up his arms when his own blows landed. Soon he had Roger on his back, straddled, and he was pumping both hands at the no-longer-smug face.

  Vaguely, he heard Garr shouting encouragement. Even more vaguely, he knew that a crowd had gathered, heard them offering a
dvice first to one contestant, then the other.

  “Take it back!” Pete cried, panting.

  He didn’t wait for an answer. Splat! His right fist struck home again, then his left. Roger tried to grab a handful of his hair and pull him down, but Pete avoided the groping fingers and hammered away with his fists.

  “Take it back!”

  “I . . . I take it. . . back. . . .” Roger blubbered.

  Shaking with rage, Pete stood up, and all the other cadets milled about and thumped his back and told him it was a fair fight which he had won. They did not understand at all when Garr told them to get out of the room, but one by one they left.

  Roger scrambled up off the floor and wiped his face with a handkerchief. “You jumped me when my back was turned,” he mumbled, which wasn’t true at all. “You jumped me when my back was turned and you kicked me. I’m going to tell my father, and then we’ll see what the Chief Marshal thinks of a coward who jumps people from behind just because they try to be sympathetic. You haven’t heard the last of this, Hodges.”

  Laughing, Garr pushed him out of the room and closed the door. Then he sobered. “It’s not so funny, Pete. His father has a lot of influence, he could cause a lot of trouble.”

  Pete shrugged, fingering a bruise on his jaw. “So what? You forget that I’m already kicked out.”

  “Yeah,” Garr said. “Yeah.”

  Every night the Cadets became more boisterous. They sang the Spaceman’s Chant in town, sang it again on the athletic field, roared its chorus around great bonfires under the light of the moon. They sang it on their way to classes each morning as well, but a memo came through from the Marshal’s office, telling them that the lowerclassmen couldn’t do their work. On the same day — four days after his fight with Roger — Pete received another office-gram from the Marshal.

  The gray-haired man was as impersonal as ever, but he did not look friendly. “Cadet Hodges,” he began at once, “have you made preparations for your departure?”

  “‘Yes, sir. I have. I leave tomorrow morning, at seven hundred.”

  “Very well. But until that time, you are to remember this, Cadet Hodges: you are still a Cadet. You will remain a Cadet until you leave the Academy tomorrow, and I want you to behave like one.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “‘Naturally, you know to what I have reference.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I do not.”

  “Four days ago you made an unwarranted attack on Cadet Gorham, striking him from behind and . . .”

  “It was not unwarranted, Sir. And I did not strike him from behind. If you wish, sir, you may ask any of the Cadets in my dormitory.”

  The Marshal shook his head. “That would prove nothing. Gorham is unpopular; naturally, they would side with you. The point I am trying to make is this, Cadet Hodges: you merit a medical discharge. I would not like to find myself forced to change that . . . .”

  “Forced, Sir?”

  “Cadet Hodges! That is the second time you have interrupted me. The fact that you add a ‘sir’ to what you say doesn’t alter things. Forced by your behavior, I was about to say. Don’t misunderstand: we appreciate the gravity of the situation, we can sympathize with you.”

  “Thank you, sir. But as you say, that doesn’t alter . . . .”

  “Off the record, Hodges, I knew your father well. Ask him about Brian Mahoney sometime, won’t you? Together, Big Pete and I blasted open the path to the Jovian moons. We stood side by side on the bridge of the first ship that cut jets over Callisto. . . .”

  Pete nodded eagerly. “He was a great captain, wasn’t he, sir?”

  “The greatest, son! There was that time in Venusport, many years ago, it was, when we were a couple of kids fresh out of the Academy . . .”

  The Marshal rambled on and on, completely off the record now, and friendly once more. Pete listened avidly; he could listen to tales of space all day long and far into the night. But he sensed a difference. Oh, he wanted to hear about his father and the wonderful things Big Pete had done, for Big Pete himself wasn’t prone to talk much. But all the glowing accounts of different places and alien things reminded Pete that he’d never rocket out to them himself. Someday, if he had the money, he might go as a tourist, but it wouldn’t be the same thing. He wouldn’t like it at all.

  Garr was smiling secretively when Pete returned to their room. “Hiya, Little Pete,” he said.

  “Little Pete? Only my dad, only Big Pete calls me that.”

  “True,” Garr grinned broadly. “Very true — Little Pete.”

  A big, broad-shouldered man came out from behind the door. He was tall, a head taller than Pete but with the same sensitive features and bright gray eyes. His hair was gray at the temples, but he walked with a firm, youthful stride, “Hello, Pete,” he said.

  “Dad!”

  Garr smiled. “I sent him a wire, Pete. I thought you might like to see him.”

  “See him?” Pete cried, hardly aware of the words. “What do I want to see him for?” How could he face his father? How could he face Big Pete, who had dreamed of a son who would astrogate the first rocket to Neptune or to Pluto? His older brother, Jerry, had died trying to rescue a miner out in the asteroid belt, and it had been a long time before Big Pete had recovered from the shock. Now this — an earthbound son, and the proud roll call of spacemen would not again know the name Hodges.

  “It’s been months, son,” Big Pete was saying. “I haven’t seen you since your last Christmas vacation. Umm-mm, yes, you’ve grown. You’ve —”

  “Let me alone!” Pete said, turning away, “Garr, Garr — why’d you have to send for him? Don’t you see I can’t look him in the face? Don’t you see?”

  And then Big Pete’s strong hands were on his shoulders, and for a moment he wanted to find his own strength from them. But he knew how it would be. Big Pete would be sorry for him, and so would his mother. All the neighbors in White Sands would feel the same way. They would drown him with sympathy. It couldn’t be that way, ever.

  He tore himself loose, ran for the door without looking back. He heard his father pounding through the halls after him, but he ducked into a sink closet and waited until the footsteps faded away. He took an escalator down to ground level and set out for the highway.

  One thing was clear. He must never see Garr again, nor Big Pete — nor anything else that would remind him of what could have been. But he had to watch the space-liners. He couldn’t live without watching.

  Three jet-cars streaked by before an old, obsolete gasoline truck stopped for him. “How far you going?” the driver demanded as Pete climbed into the cab.

  “All the way,” Pete told him.

  The man looked at his tunic. “You a Cadet?”

  Wordless, Pete ripped the epaulets from his shoulders, removed the shining buttons from his tunic. He threw them out the window as the truck rolled off down the highway and said, “No. No, I’m not a Cadet. It was just part of a masquerade, Mister.”

  Chapter 3 — Carnival of the Worlds

  Once every ten years, White Sands became more than a sprawling Spaceport city. Millions of dollars were spent and millions of people amused, while White Sands took on a carnival atmosphere. Games and customs and artifacts were gathered from all the habitable worlds of the Solar System. The ultimate development of the mid-twentieth century State Fair could be seen in this, but it was a State Fair a hundred times over.

  And now, during Carnival year, Pete’s wanderings brought him to White Sands. He got a job collecting tickets at the Exhibition of Interplanetary Flight, and after hours he lost himself completely in the glittering, make-believe worlds of the Carnival. He had left the Academy a month ago, hitch-hiking from town to town until, hardly realizing it, he had covered the thousand miles to White Sands. He never would have done that out of direct choice: White Sands was his home city, someone he knew might discover him. Still, the cheerful, raucous atmosphere of the Carnival dimmed his painful memories, and Pete was not sorry he had come
to the Spaceport city.

  After working hours one night he walked along the Midway and took in the sights like any gawking tourist. Here was the pleasure-dome of Phobos — and, in truth, such a dome had been built on the tiny Martian moon; over there were the Venusian Botanical Gardens, featuring the huge, multicolored orchids which had fared so well in the hothouse climate of Venus; and there, quaint tools and pottery of a long-vanished Martian civilization, now gone into decadence.

  Anything and everything — and Pete liked it all, for it could make him forget.

  Pete first thought he was being followed when he passed the Dome of Asteroid Mineralogy. It was nothing more than a hunch, but the same bright cap bobbed up and down in the crowd behind him. He walked faster, and his heart began to thump wildly. Had someone discovered him? A White Sands neighbor, perhaps? He started running, and people looked at him queerly.

  He paused to catch his breath outside the Venusian Aquashow, turning halfway around to look at the crowd. There it was again — the checkered cap!

  He ducked through the crowd, breathless now, until he found himself in the shadows behind the Dome of Interplanetary Oddities. Dimly, he could hear the hawker’s chanting cry. “Come in! Come in! For only a slim quarter — one slim quarter with nothing more to pay on the inside — you’ll see all the Oddities of the six inhabited worlds. Items to tickle your fancy from the four Jovian moons, from Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa — heart-stopping puzzlers from the sands of ancient Mars — exotic items from the steaming water-world of Venus! Come in, come in — it’s only a slim quarter, with nothing more to pay. . . .”

  A figure flitted in and out through the shadows. It was too dark to see the checkered cap, but Pete knew the man would be wearing it.