"Dependents?"
"I've a son, four years old." The bitterness must have shadowed my
voice. "But he's not dependent on me. His mother is dead, and her
people convinced the courts that a footloose explorer wasn't the proper
guardian for little Barry."
Dona Carridan was again before me, tall and proud and lovely. The one
year I had known her, when she had tempestuously left her wealthy
family to go with me to Mesopotamia, had been the happiest of my life.
Suddenly I was trembling again with the terror of the plane crash in
the desert; our son born in an Arab's tent; Dona, far from medical aid,
dying in agony....
"Then, Horn," Crosno was asking, "you're ready to cut loose
from--everything?"
"I am."
He stared at me. His long-fingered hands, so very white, were trembling
with the papers. Suddenly he said, decisively:
"All right, Horn. You'll do."
"Now," I demanded again, "what's the job?"
"Come." He rose. "I'll show you."
A huge, shabby old car carried us uptown, across the George Washington
bridge, and up the river to a big, wooded estate. A uniformed butler
let us into an immense old house, as shabby as the car.
"My library."
Guiding me back through the house, Crosno paused as if he wished me
to look into the room. An intricate planetarium was suspended from
the ceiling. Glass cases held models of things that I took to be
experimental rockets. The big man silently pointed out shelves of books
on explosives, gases, aerodynamic design, celestial mechanics, and
astro-physics. Startled, I met Crosno's piercing eyes.
"Yes, Horn," he told me. "You're to be the first rocketeer."
"Eh?" I stared at him. "You don't mean--outer space?"
I wondered at the shadow of bleak despair that had fallen across his
cragged, dead-white features.
"Come," he said. "Into the garden."
* * * * *
The night had a frosty brilliance. Moonlight spilled over the trees
and neglected lawns; and Venus, westward, hung like a solitary drop of
molten silver. I stopped with a gasp of wonderment.
Weathered boards were stacked around the foundation of a dismantled
building. Upon the massive concrete floor, shimmering under the moon,
stood a tall bright cylinder. Bell-flared muzzles cast black shadows
below. A frail ladder led up its shimmering side, sixty feet at least,
to the tiny black circle of an entrance port.
"That--" A queer, stunned feeling had seized me. "That--"
"That is my rocket." The deep voice was ragged, choked. "The
_Astronaut_." His face was bleak with agony. "I've given twenty years
of my life to go, Horn. And now I must send another. An unsuspected
weakness of my heart--couldn't survive the acceleration."
The white lofty cylinder was suddenly a dreadful thing. There is a
feeling that comes upon me, definite as a grasping hand and a whispered
warning. Sometimes I have not heeded it, and always, in the end, found
myself face to face with death. Now that feeling said, _There lies
ghastly peril_.
Slowly I turned to the tall pale man.
"I'm an explorer, all right, Crosno," I said. "I've taken risks, and
I'm willing to take more. But if you think I'm going to climb into that
contraption, and be blown off to the moon--"
The hurt on his gaunt bloodless face stopped my voice.
"Not the moon, Horn." A gesture of his long arm carried my gaze from
the mottled lunar disk, westward to the evening star. "To Venus," he
said. "First."