She laughed. "You youngsters are all alike inside, no matter how
different you seem. My boy was the same way when he was young. But he
got over it. A space explorer, no less!"
* * * * *
Plato didn't answer. It was only a half hour's trip, and the conductor
was walking down the aisle. Plato found it difficult to take his eyes
off him. He was afraid that the man would take a look at his ticket,
say, "Wrong plane, son," and turn him over to the stationmaster at Space
Junction, to be shipped back.
In his nervousness, Plato had difficulty getting his ticket out of his
pocket. As he had expected, the conductor said, "You're on the wrong
flight."
The motherly woman exclaimed, "Oh, isn't that a shame! Are they waiting
for you in Venusberg?"
Plato said tearfully, "Yes, ma'am." The tearfulness wasn't hard to
manage; he'd learned the trick at school.
"That's too bad. How are you going to get there?"
"I don't know. I had just enough money to pay for this ticket."
"Doesn't the company correct mistakes, Conductor?"
"Not mistakes the passengers make," said the conductor sourly. "I'm
sorry, boy, I'll have to take that ticket."
The woman's eyes flashed and, as the conductor moved on, she said, "The
nasty thing. They have no consideration at all. Look, child." For a
moment Plato thought she was going to offer him flight fare from Space
Junction to Venusberg, but she was not, he discovered, as motherly as
that. "You know what you'll do when you get off? Send a 'gram, collect,
to your people in Venusberg. They'll wire you your fare. And you'll
reach them in a couple of hours."
"Thank you, ma'am," he said, not feeling thankful at all. So it was all
right to be sympathetic, he thought indignantly, up to the point where
sympathy might cost her money. Like most people, she was free-handed
only with advice.
Who wanted advice?
* * * * *
At Space Junction he waved her a shy farewell, and then turned and
disappeared into the station crowd.
At the takeoff grounds, his heart sank. As he might have expected, the
entrance to the space tarmac was well guarded. How was he going to
become a stowaway on a spaceship if he couldn't even get close to it?
He wandered around outside, staring through the charged wire fence at
the crowds, the spacemen, the ships inside. They were gigantic shining
things, those wonderful ships, each so long that he realized for the
first time how far away they must have been and how rapidly they must
have traveled, for those he saw had seemed to him like shooting stars.
They were pointed almost straight up. Near the stern of each ship was a
vacuum-pit to absorb the radioactive exhaust gases.
His eye caught an old tub, its shininess dulled, its hull faintly
scarred. Just such a ship, he thought with a thrill, as the one on which
Comets Carter had been shanghaied on that momentous occasion when ...
* * * * *
_The old freighter swung a great circle, its torsion jets blasting
desperately in an effort to keep it on an even keel. This, thought
Comets Carter, was it. This was the foul revenge that Rogue Rogan had
planned, the evil death he had plotted with his unhuman companions. In a
moment the pulsating radiations of electroid rays would set off the
cargo of ghoulite, and when the interplanetary echoes of the explosion
died away, Comets Carter would be no more than a series of photon
packets, his body torn apart, his very atoms converted into radiation
that was hurtling with the speed of light to the far corners of the
universe...._
* * * * *
It hadn't happened that way, of course. But if it _had_ happened--well,
it might have on just such a tub as this.
A guard saw him peering through the fence, and said, "What are you
looking at, kid?"
"Those ships," said Plato, honestly enough. And then he added, to throw
the man off the track, "Gee, I'd be scared to go up in one of them. No,
sir, you couldn't get me into one of them for a million credits."
The man laughed. "They're not for the likes of you. A lot of those ships
go to other stars."
"Other stars? Gosh! Does that little one, the _Marie T._--"
"That tub? Just an interplanetary freighter. But even that isn't for
you. Now run along and mind your own business."
Plato was happy to run along. Unfortunately, he realized, running along
didn't help him to get past the fence.
And then he had a fear-inspiring thought. He couldn't tell an
interplanetary ship from an interstellar. What if he did manage,
somehow, to get in and stow away--and then found himself on a ship bound
for no more distant port than Earth, from which he could easily be sent
home in disgrace?
It sent a shiver through him. Fortunately, it also stimulated his mind.
After all, there _were_ such things as newspapers, and the school,
nuisance in many ways though it was, had taught him to read.
* * * * *
He bought a paper and turned at once to the shipping news section. As he
had hoped, every ship was listed. He checked off some of the names he
had glimpsed on the field, and found happily that their destinations
were printed in the most routine manner.
There still remained the question of how to get past the guards. This,
he suddenly realized, was a question impossible to solve on an empty
stomach. It had been many hours since he had eaten lunch.
There were a dozen restaurants in the spaceport, and he selected one
carefully, studying the illuminated menus and the prices before daring
to enter. If that motherly old woman had been as kind-hearted as she
pretended to be, he wouldn't have had to worry so much about prices. As
it was, he knew that he had money enough for only two days, and after
that--his stomach could complain all it wanted to, it would have to go
unfed.
He chose from the menu only items that he never tasted at school--dishes
made from real plant and animal life, with just enough synthetics to
give them flavor. He couldn't say that he liked what he ate, but at
least it gave him the feeling of being on his own, of having made the
break with his tame past as complete as possible. Earth-beef tasted too
strong; Venus seaweed stew had a pungency that he didn't like.
He finished his plate only because he had been taught that to leave food
over was wasteful. And for the first time he began to wonder what they
would feed him on the spaceship. Suppose he got on one that wasn't
scheduled to make port for five years--and all he received to eat was
stuff like this? The thought made him shudder. Here was a hardship of
space travel that the books he read had never mentioned.
After eating, he slumped back in his chair. He hadn't realized he was so
completely exhausted until a hand shook his shoulder. Then he awoke
with a start.