The other Harry was a dimple-cheeked boy with blond hair and a small
nose like his mother's. He was wearing a junior spaceman's suit and
pointed a ray gun straight at you.
"Thank you."
"Sure you don't want anything to eat?" She wore a pleasant enough
expression on her face, the same as she might use for a door to door
solicitor or a visiting great-aunt from out of town.
"That's all right. I want to wish you good luck, Nancy."
"Thank you. Are you sure you don't want...." And then the pleasant
look melted before tears, not slowly but all at once, so that this was
a different person standing in the doorway and Harry Allerton wanted
either to take her in his arms and comfort her or flee for the elevator
but nothing in between. "Harry ... Harry ... I didn't know ... I
couldn't ... we never...."
"That's all right," he said, settling for the in between and abruptly
hating himself not for what was within him but for what was outside,
for the world and its conventions and the things he had wanted to do
but never could and the security he had wanted to earn but which now
had eluded him.
"I'm sorry I carried on so," said Nancy, the conventional smile
returning, the tears kleenex'd away.
"If there is something little Harry needs...?"
"Oh, no, thank you. His father, I mean my husband--Mr. Chambers is an
engineer over at Grumman and everything is fine."
"I guess I'll be going."
"I'm glad you could come."
"Does the boy know about me?"
"No. I thought it would be better."
"Of course, Nancy. You did the right thing."
"I was hoping you would think so."
"You couldn't do anything else."
"Where will you go now? Are you going to make a career of space?"
"I haven't thought about it. There's no hurry."
"Well...."
"Well...."
"I hope you get whatever you want, Harry."
He wanted to say it no longer was available. "A man doesn't know what
he wants, until he has it."
"Well...."
"Goodbye, Nancy."
"Goodbye, Harry."
The door shut. He fled with his picture.
* * * * *
"Come in, Allerton. Nice vacation?" Captain Greene peered at him
through a blue haze of cigar smoke.
"Not particularly. There are too many people. Too many complications.
A man can't think straight out there, with all that confusion. I don't
know...."
"I said you were for space. When you've been around as long as I have,
you'll be able to smell 'em, too. You think I'm kidding?"
"Probably not, sir."
"There is security and security, Allerton. It can't be explained to a
man. He's got to find out for himself. Alone in space, with the ship
and a frontier vaster than all the frontiers before it in history,
a certain type of man can be secure. He's the man who's lost in a
crowd. Confused and muddled by convention, he's not a hero. Basically,
he's a lonesome man. Strangely, the psychologists tell you he's happy
then--when he's lonesome. You see what I mean, Allerton?"
"No, sir. Not entirely."
"Forget that formal stuff. Well, you'll learn. The important thing is
this: there aren't enough real spacemen to go around. A normal man
doesn't give up life for dedication. A spaceman does. You belong to a
strange breed, Allerton. Want to talk about your vacation?"
"Absolutely not," Allerton said curtly, then apologized. The thought of
it, the thought of stepping off the _Eros_ again and feeling the ground
of Earth underfoot, wet ground sometimes, or dry and dusty, or covered
with a white mantle of snow, always unpredictable, was distasteful.
"You're one of the breed now," the Captain repeated.
* * * * *
"You may close the Allerton file," said the government psychologist to
his secretary.
"It's finished?"
"We paid his wife a visit yesterday. They're the hardest ones to deal
with. The man never knows, but the woman does. How can you convince a
woman her husband will be happiest away from her--how can you convince
her when you're not even sure yourself?"
"I feel sorry for Allerton. You can't help feeling sorry for him."
"But psychological tests indicate he'll be happier this way. Besides--"
"--besides," the secretary finished for him, "it's for the good of the
nation. But never mind those psychological tests. Don't have to tell
_me_ which came first, the chicken or the egg."
"Have it your way. But Mrs. Allerton understood."
"After we worked on her night and day for three years!"
"Nevertheless, she understood. Allerton is a special breed, a spaceman.
Well, isn't he?"
"And Mrs. Allerton playing along with us like that, pretending she had
re-married--"
"It was the best way. She knew that."
"We convinced her of that. But forget it, chief. I'd rather not talk
about it. Still, Allerton wasn't a born spaceman, and you know it.
There's no such thing, except for extreme introverts, who aren't such
good workers, anyway."
"We need spacemen. We need dedicated men who don't want to see their
native planet. Either we control space or our enemy does."
"Then why don't you say it that way?"
"Well, because--"
"Because you're afraid to admit it even to yourself, that's why.
Spacemen aren't born, chief. They are made. They are not particularly
heroic or well-adjusted people. They are ordinary men with induced
traumas and they don't want to go near Earth again, and we call them
spacemen."
"It's for the security of the nation," said the government psychologist
as he opened a new file....