by Algis Budrys
again, feltthe blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands andfeet were very cold.
"Come on, Ish," the Crew Chief said.
"All right," he mumbled. "Okay. I'm up." He sat on the edge of his bunklooking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. Hesighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.
Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.
The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into thecontrol seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, andbegan to brake for a landing.
He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't leftany. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.
He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threwspotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. Hecould see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the dockingcrew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Stationwas a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at itall, dead-faced, his eyes empty.
"It was easy," he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the pressrepresentatives out of his way.
MacKenzie was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked hisstolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulleda coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to hisbunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.
"Ish."
It was MacKenzie, bending over him.
Ish grunted.
"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there."
He was past emotions. "Yeah?"
"We couldn't take the chance." MacKenzie was trying desperately toexplain. "You were the best there was--but you'd done something toyourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family.You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You werea rocket pilot--nothing else. You've never read an adult book thatwasn't a text; you've never listened to a symphony except by accident.You don't know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, noprops, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. _We couldn't takethe chance, Ish!_"
"So?"
"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might haveforgotten to come back. You might have just kept going."
He remembered the time with the _Navion_, and nodded. "I might have."
"I hypnotized you," MacKenzie said. "You were never dead. I don't knowwhat the details of your hallucination were, but the important part camethrough, all right. You thought you'd been to the Moon before. It tookall the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workadaytrip."
"I said it was easy," Ish said.
"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill thatcomes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, andyou knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?"
"Yeah. _Now get out before I kill you._"
He didn't live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again--hedied on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful worldmourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he reallydied. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at anobservatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead andpurposeless eyes.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Text in italics is surrounded with underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected without note.
This etext was produced from Dynamic Science Fiction, January, 1954. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
