Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Page 16

  They would hate him forever, he thought. It would be deep and murderous when that vision out of the tortured mind of Emdor wore away and they began to wonder why they had done this.

  But they could never escape the knowledge that it was their own hands that had set the timers to jerk the moderators, sending that atomic engine into space to consume in its own fires. They would never betray him.

  That knowledge would silence them forever.

  And then he looked again at their faces and astonishment crept over him. There were deep understanding and comprehension there. He had been wrong, he thought. Prentiss and Kendricks would always understand why none of the races of the galaxies needed Fourth Order now. This night they had matured.

  Rick’s face brightened. “What was that?” His eyes sought the sky for a brief instant, but saw nothing.

  “Run 32 that Continental has been bragging about,” said Ken. “They put it on two weeks ago and it’s been making the Moon on a scheduled fourteen hours. It’s really a ship. Shorty McComas, who handles mail, took me through her one night after hours.

  Their faces were glowing in the intimacy of their private talk, which shut Sarah wholly out of their dread world. The scream of the ship was to her a cry of pain and helplessness. To them it was a song of exultation.

  “Let’s hurry,” she murmured to Rick. “We want to make it before dark.”

  Like a signal, her words shut the light of fascination out of their faces. She wanted to scream when they closed down like that. They challenged her right to interfere in their lives, but not once did they credit her with a life of her own.

  It was almost dusk when they topped the long rise that looked over the valley where her parents lived. The sun was a golden light fanning out across the valley, and the scene brought a choked longing to her throat.

  This is what I’ve wanted, she thought. This says everything I’ve tried to tell you about the way I feel.

  Ken’s voice was a sudden, small roar behind her. “Look at that sunset! It’s like the flames of ten thousand jets rolled into one!”

  Sarah looked away, helpless before the intuitive skill of Ken and Rick to turn everything into reminders of terror.

  * * * *

  The farm of Sarah’s father consisted of a thousand rolling acres devoted to orchards, grain, and cattle feeding. She had never lived on it, because her parents acquired it after their own retirement and long after her own marriage.

  But the farm represented everything that she had come to think of as missing from her own life.

  As long as she could remember, there had never been a time when she could put her personal possessions in a place she could call home—her own home. Her father was Commander Ronald Walker, United States Space Navy, Retired, and her early years had seen nothing but a succession of cell-like apartments near space bases, where she and her mother spent the long, lonely hours when the ships were out.

  She felt almost cheated when her father retired and bought the farm. There was the peace and security and stability for which she had longed. And now it was still beyond her, for she, like her mother, had married a spaceman.

  It was inevitable that she should. The only men she knew were spacemen. If it hadn’t been for the Space Navy she and Rick would never have met. She had not yet come to the point of thinking it would have been best if they had not met. It wouldn’t! But her heart ached with the weary questioning: Why couldn’t their lives have been patterned in the same world?

  She hated the very mention of the stars, and they were all that Rick and Ken lived for. It was all that her father had lived for. His frenzied rejection of Earth had left Sarah and her mother to years of loneliness while be chased a faraway dream that could not be caught and held.

  In retirement, he had given her mother finally the things she had longed for all her life. A home of her own—but Sarah pitied her mother for the long, wasted years, and the now fruitless achievement of her desire.

  The car followed the swelling curve of the road over the hill and crossed a wooden bridge. The hollow rumbling of it was a solemn welcome to this rustic world. Ahead, the farm itself was deceptively casual in appearance. But Rick knew every building and every tree was laid out with the same precision Commander Walker would have used in planning a flight across the Solar System.

  This, Sarah did not see or know. For her, this was simply peace in contrast to the hectic naval base where houses were boxes, and “entertainment” was planned in some department by a brisk young woman with owlish glasses.

  Sarah’s face softened now, and Rick, watching her, grew less grim. He stopped the car for a moment at the entrance to the farm. On either side, the glistening white fence curved away into the distance, along the green slopes, and was lost among the gentle hills. Overhead, the leaves held back the light of the sky and whispered temptingly to those who passed beneath.

  Rick deflated his lungs with a long breath. “We ought to be able to find the answer to almost any problem in a place like this,” he said. “Let’s make a try, Sarah. Will you forgive me the things I said this morning?”

  “Of course — ” Her voice held little conviction and drove him away with its utter resignation.

  When he started the car again she wished she had taken advantage of the moment. If Rick could look at the farm through her eyes for just an instant—then perhaps they could find an answer to the questions that plagued them.

  She looked askance at Ken in the back seat. He was puzzled and grim by the things he heard between them.

  He wanted nothing from life except to be a spaceman. He lived only for the whine of the jets overhead, and the hours when he could get some porter or mechanic to take him through the vast ships.

  At sixteen he had soloed at three times the speed of sound. He was cast in the mold of his father and his grandfather. And his handsome young face promised unhappiness for some other woman in the long, lonely waiting, Sarah thought.

  Or perhaps there would be someone whose vision could soar along with his. There were enough such girls at the Base. Sarah envied their ability’ to watch the stars with burning light in their own eyes, waiting jubilantly for their men who spanned the chasms of space.

  She would be forever apart from these, she knew. She did not know why. She did not understand either herself or the men who were tied to her but sometimes she wished for the courage to free them, wholly and completely.

  * * * *

  The house was long and low, like a great crystal set among the trees. Sarah’s mother came out the side door almost the moment the car drove up and erupted with Ken’s sudden leap to the ground.

  Mrs. Walker was still slim and looked fifteen years younger than her actual sixty-five. And all the harried tension that Sarah remembered so well was gone from her face.

  She hugged Ken’s man-wide shoulders and kissed his forehead as he struggled away.

  “I think Dad’s got something for you inside. He said something about your birthday, I believe.”

  “Wait a minute,” called Sarah. We get to see, too.” She even felt that the smile on her face was real, now. She grasped Rick’s hand and pulled him along as they left the car.

  Then, as they stepped inside the house, the light in her face died away. Her father was standing there with his polished black pipe in one hand, and smiling across the room at Ken.

  Reverently, the boy held a glistening three-foot model of an old-fashioned jet ship. It was a sleek, swept-back thing with a needle nose. Its bright red and gold coloring was like the flame of sunset.

  Sarah felt sick inside. She recognized that shape and the golden name, _Mollie,_ on the nose.

  Mollie was her mother’s name, and she knew that ship. She had seen its prototype when she was a lot younger than Ken was now. She had waited with her mother in a Navy radio room during a cold and rainy night, waited for news of that ship.

  Her father was the pilot of it, flying the first round-the-world, non-refuel flight—the first of the atomic jets.
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  Ken was almost weak with the exquisite pleasure of this gift his grandfather had made for, him.

  “It … it’s beautiful,” he finally said. “Gosh, it’s a beautiful thing. Boy, how I’d like to have been with you when you flew this — “

  “You’ll fly better ships than that one, son, and fly them farther and faster.”

  “But there’ll never be a ‘first’ like this one.”

  “I think there will. I’ve been hearing about the junior Patrol Corps that’s being set up to train on Mars. I trust that your father has been able to swing enough influence to get you in. If he hasn’t, I’m sure I have!”

  Ken’s angular face sobered. He set the model carefully on the floor and looked at it with his hands in his pockets.

  “I won’t be going, I believe,” he said. “Mother doesn’t think I’m old enough for that sort of thing. She doesn’t want me to be a spaceman, anyway.

  Commander Walker glanced sharply and with new light in his eyes towards his daughter. He knew the expression he saw now on her face. So many times he had seen it—when she was a little girl and he said good—by to her at the beginning of some long flight.

  “We’ll have a talk about it,” he said quietly, “but let’s get ready for dinner now. Mother’s had it waiting for half an hour. She’ll really let us know about it if we keep her waiting much longer.”

  * * * *

  Ken slept that night with the model on end by his bed. The moonlight sprayed through the open window and softened the bright colors of the ship until it looked like a half-real dream standing there in take-off position.

  But it would never be more than a dream for him, he thought. He couldn’t hurt his mother as he knew he would do if he went to Mars. And there was more yet to think of. It would put a breach between his mother and father that could never be heated. He could not take the responsibility of that.

  His perspective would not yet permit him to understand that the breach was already there and not of his creation. For the moment, he was imprisoned by his parents’ conflict.

  He watched the shadows slowly engulfing the ship as the moon rose higher. He could almost see and hear it crashing through the night sky as his grandfather left the sun behind on that great flight around the world.

  _He had to go to Mars._ He sat up in bed, his fist beating the pillow, his eyes suddenly wet. Somehow, he had to convince his mother that he and his father were not wrong.

  * * * *

  Sarah awoke early, aware of the thin weight of another day. She wished now that they hadn’t come. She had actually forgotten that the overwhelming influence of her father would be added to the other side of the argument and she knew she could no longer uphold her own.

  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. Walter 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 time!”

  “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 timelessness.

  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,” 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 spaceburned 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.”
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br />   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.