Sunday is Three Thousand Years Away and Other SF Classics Page 17

  “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 of 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 if I ever succeeded in getting back.”

  Sarah looked at her hands, lying still and icy in 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 you feel about it. I’m not going to ask anymore. 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 sizeable 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 fishpond where the runoff from the hills was trapped.

  Across the dry streambed 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.”

  “I think it’s been raining quite a while over the hill there,” said Ken, nodding towards the rise that hid the fishpond. “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 sa
nk 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! 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 known! 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 little 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.

  “We can’t get out of here!” she exclaimed. “There’s water all around the house.”

  Ken eyed the widening reaches of the water. “The bed’s pretty well filled up down below so that it won’t drain, but it won’t be more than six or seven feet deep at the most.”

  “But how’ll we ever get across?”

  He grinned as if he were now in the midst of something he could enjoy. “We’ll swim, of course.”

  “No. Your grandfather has the boat he takes to the lake for fishing. They can pull it up here on the trailer and take us off.”

  “All that trouble? Come on, let’s swim across. There’s no need to wait for the rain to quit. We couldn’t get any wetter than we’ll be crossing.”

  Sarah looked down at the roiling water with distaste. “They’ll come looking for us soon. There’s no sense in trying to make it across now.”

  Ken was halfway across the porch. He turned and looked back with boyish pleading in his eyes. “Oh, come on, Mom. Let’s not do it for sense. Let’s do it for fun!”

  For a moment she had a chilling impression that somewhere a key had turned within a lock. She halted in her movement towards him.

  To her eyes, resting on his, it seemed as if understanding flared between them—as if some window had opened, letting her see for the first time through the murky turmoil between them.

  Let’s do it for fun —It was so simple she wanted to cry. She had sought for a thousand complex answers to explain the lives of the men who baffled her so.

  Let’s do it for fun —They had crossed oceans and prairies in ages past. And now they circled the Earth and reached out to the planets, and Ken already had thoughts of other stars beyond the sun. Their far horizons—they crossed them for fun.

  Let’s do it for fun—It was so simple, but was it true? How long had it been since she had done anything for fun, for the sheer pleasure of it? Her memory ranged back over the years and they seemed barren of anything but a dread intensity that hovered in the sky on the wings of rockets.

  Ken was alarmed by the sudden, half-hysterical giggle that escaped her as she put her hands up to her face and hid her eyes from his sight for a moment.

  “What is it, Mom? What’s the matter—?”

  She looked at him again, and her eyes were shining in a way that he had never seen before. “Come on.” she said.

  It was a crazy thing—they could just as well wait—and she knew if she stopped to think about it she would never go through with it.

  There was only one way to find out if it were true—if it were possible to do anything for fun any more.

  She stripped off her coat and outer clothing and raced Ken down the slope clad only in her underthings. She stopped at the edge of the water and waved to Ken who struggled with his shirt on the porch. He was grinning in pleased astonishment.

  “Wait a minute,” he called. “We can put a rock in these and throw them across.”

  He made a couple of bundles of their clothes and hurled them across the stream. They landed with a squashy sound on the other side.

  “Now we’ve got to go!”

  It wasn’t cold. The rain was still falling, and it seemed warm on her bare skin. She looked down at herself. She wasn’t old, but she couldn’t remember another time when she had stood almost naked in the rain. She opened her mouth to taste it. She wondered how many other things that were fun she had missed.

  Ken took her hand and they walked into the water. It was colder than the raindrops and closed like circling ice about her legs and waist and chest. But it felt good. She felt as if thirty years’ terror had been stripped away with her clothes.

  Her father had been so busy crossing his own horizons that he had never thought to explain why they had to be crossed. He had forgotten to tell her that it was fun and she had never sensed it through her dread.

  It had taken Ken’s impulsive, naive wisdom to explain it to her—and this simple adventure to prove it. And now, she knew it was true.

  Ken was grinning but puzzled. The puzzlement didn’t matter, for she was seeing him really alive for the first time in years. All his joy and life had been suppressed in her presence before now, and she had not known it.

  Abruptly, her feet slipped on the grassy slope and she went down. Ken grabbed her and buoyed her up, and then they were both laughing and swimming and sputtering their way towards the opposite slope.

  * * * *

  The sky was breaking as they started wading again, and Sarah saw the figures coming towards them, her mother and father and Rick. Rick broke into a run.

  Ken squeezed her hand hard, and looked at her as if he understood the feeling that was in her. “Aren’t you glad we didn’t wait for them, Mom?”

  Then Rick was grasping her han
d and pulling her towards him, wrapping his own dry coat about her wet shoulders. She looked up into his worried face.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you, darling,” she said. “We’re going to Mars, all of us. It will be fun!”

  He scowled in wonder. “I don’t know what that’s got to do with this, but if it’s true it’s wonderful.”

  She didn’t get to say more. Her mother was bustling up insisting that Ken take her coat against his wishes.

  “Dad knew that dam couldn’t take a rain like this. He knew it was weak and ordered rain anyway. Now look at the expense of building the pond again,” she complained.

  At first the words didn’t register through the cold and unpleasantness that was beginning to settle upon Sarah. Then their significance cut sharply. She looked at her father and her son. She caught the momentary glance that passed between them.

  And then she understood. A fantastic scheme, a play of their production in which she had been assigned a role without her knowledge. It had worked. They had shown her that the narrow restrictions she called her world could hold the same uncertainties as the vaster universe in which they lived.

  But it was Ken’s impulsive, unrehearsed invitation that gave her the insight she needed.

  Let’s do it for fun.

  She smiled at her father as he caught her watching them so intently. He flushed as if he guessed she understood what they had done.

  She nodded. “It’s a lovely vacation, Dad. I’m going to remember it when we’re on Mars. And today, I think I’ve crossed my own horizon.”

  THE UNLEARNED

  The Chief Officer of Scientific Services, Information and Coordination was a somewhat misleading and obscure title, and Dr. Herman Hockley who held it was not the least of those whom the title misled and sometimes obscured.

  He told himself he was not a mere library administrator, although he was proud of the information files built up under his diction. They contained the essential accumulated knowledge found to date on Earth and the extraterrestrial planets so far contacted. He didn’t feel justified in claiming to be strictly a research supervisor, either, in spite of duties as top level administrator for all divisions of National Standardization and search Laboratories and their subsidiaries in government, industry, and education. During his term of supervision the National Laboratories had made a tremendous growth, in contrast to a previous decline.