"The range of the _Astronaut_," he said, "should enable you to reach
there, land, spend several months in exploration, and time your return
to reach Earth safely at the next conjunction--if you are very lucky."
His dark, magnetic eyes probed me.
"What do you say, Horn?"
"Give me a little while," I said. "Alone."
I walked out of the garden, and up through dark-massed trees to the
open summit of a little hill beyond. The autumn constellations flamed
near and bright above; yet I could hear crickets below, and a distant
frog; could sometimes catch a haunting flower-odor from the meadows.
A long time I stood there, gazing up at Venus and the stars. Earth, I
thought, had not been kind to me; life, since Dona's death, had seemed
all weariness and pain. Yet--could I leave it, willingly and forever?
Indecision tortured me, until I saw a shooting star. A white stellar
bullet, out of the black mystery of space, it flamed down across
Cassiopeia and Perseus; and somehow its fire rekindled in me that vague
and yet intense knowledge-lust that is the heart of any scientist.
But I couldn't understand the thing that happened then. It was a waking
dream, queerly real, that banished the sky and the hill. Standing in
sudden darkness, I saw a woman who lay sleeping in a long crystal box.
Her slim, long-limbed form was beautiful, and it seemed hauntingly
familiar.
She seemed to wake, as I watched. She looked at me, with wide eyes that
were violet-black, and filled with an urgent dread. She half rose, in
her thick mantle of dark, red-gleaming hair. And her voice spoke to me
from the crystal casket, saying:
"Go, Barry Horn! You must go."
In another instant, the vision was ended. The soft night sounds and the
moonlight were about me again, and the autumnal breeze swept a cool
fragrance from the meadows. I caught a deep breath, and wrestled with
enigma.
The woman in the crystal had been, unmistakably, Dona Carridan!
Scientific training has left me little superstition. Walking back down
the hill, I wondered if I had been trying too hard to drown in alcohol
my bitter loneliness for her. It must have been hallucination. But her
beauty and her terror had been too real to ignore. I knew that I must
go.
I went back to Crosno, waiting beside the rocket, and told him my
decision. But something caught my throat as I asked him, "When?"
* * * * *
Venus was overhauling Earth in its orbit, he said, approaching inferior
conjunction. His calculations were based on a start at three the next
Sunday morning.
"Four days," he said. "Can you be ready?"
I said I could. And there was oddly little to do. I packed and stored a
few possessions, called on my attorney, and then went back to study the
controls and mechanism of the rocket.
The greatest danger, Crosno said, would be from the Cosmic Rays. They
would penetrate the rocket. He made me take a drug to guard against
them.
"It was compounded for me by a great radiologist," he told me. "A
modification of the Petrie formula. The base of it is uranium salts.
The activity of that should neutralize the cosmic radiation."
The stuff was a greenish liquid. He injected it into my arm, twice
daily. The only apparent effect was a feverish restlessness. I was
unable to sleep, despite a mounting, crushing fatigue.
On the last night, when all was tested and ready, Crosno sent me up
to my room. But the torture of that insomnia drove me to slip out of
the house. I walked for many hours across the slumbering countryside.
The world slept beneath a gibbous moon. Far off, a train rumbled and
whistled. A dog barked in the distance. The air was spiced with autumn.
A slow dull regret rose in me that I must leave all this--all the Earth.
I thought of Dona, dead. Suddenly my bitterness toward her people
seemed a childish, petulant thing. I wanted to make peace with them.
For Dona's sake, and little Barry's. I wanted to find a telephone, and
call them, and talk to little Barry.
But it was long past midnight--too late to wake the child. I recalled
that strange dream, hallucination, whatever it was, of Dona in the
crystal box. And a sudden breathless eagerness turned me back to
Crosno's place. He was waiting about the rocket, alarmed by my absence.
"I couldn't sleep," I told him. "That damned drug--"
"I was afraid--" he said anxiously. "You've just ten minutes."
I climbed the spidery ladder, pulled myself through the small round
man-hole into the cramped tiny control room, and screwed the airtight
plate into position behind me. Outside, Crosno dived into a sand-bagged
shelter.
Trying to forget that I was sitting on enough high explosive to blow me
to kingdom come, I kept my eyes on an illuminated chronometer. My hands
were cold and trembling on the three levers connected to the three
rocket motors. At last the needle touched the hour, and I pulled the
firing levers.
The sound was the shriek of a million typhoons. The rocket drove upward
like a giant sledge. I could see the hurricane of fire spread blue
against the dark ground. It covered Crosno's shelter.
Then all the Earth was whisked downward. Enduring that hell of
deafening sound and battering force, I held the three levers down
for seeming eternities. At last the velometer showed eight miles a
second--enough to escape the gravity of Earth--and I shut off the
motors.
A strange peace filled the tiny room. The silence and the apparent
want of motion--for I had no sense of the rocket's terrific
velocity--cradled me in delicious comfort. I set out to discover my
position and course.
The moonlit Earth became visibly a huge round ball, floating amid the
stars, slowly receding. The moon was a queer globe of harsh light and
blackness, drifting beside my path. The Sun came finally into view from
behind the Earth, so intolerably bright that I slid the metal screens
over the ports toward it.
* * * * *
A long time I searched for Venus, which also had been hidden when
I started. Bright, tiny point, I could hardly realize that it was
another world, rushing toward our rendezvous with a speed greater than
my own.
I was fumbling for sextant and slide rule and tables, to try to
discover and correct the direction of my flight, when I first perceived
the prickling of my flesh. A queerly painful feeling, burning through
every tissue.
It must be the Cosmic Rays, I knew; those intense, space-pervading
radiations from which the Earth is shielded only by miles of
atmosphere. Perhaps I hadn't taken enough of Crosno's drug. With numbed
hands I found the little hypodermic clipped to the wall, shot another
heavy dose into my arm.
"No sleep now," I muttered wearily. "Not for a million miles!"
And I reached again for the sextant. For the white point of Venus
was incredibly tiny, and thirty million miles away. The slightest
deviation, I knew, would carry me thousands of miles wide of the
target--perhaps to fall into the merciless furnace of the Sun.
But a queer, deadly numbness had followed the prickling. I felt a
terrible sudden pressure of sleep. All the accumulated fatigue of those
sleepless nights and days poured over me resistlessly.
I knew it wouldn't do to sleep--not until the course of the _Astronaut_
had been calculated and corrected. A delay of minutes, even, might be
fatal. With dead hands I struggled to adjust the sextant, fighting for
life itself.
But the instrument slipped from my fingers. _The drug_, I thought.
_Some reaction with the Cosmic Rays; an effect that Crosno had not
anticipated. Missing ... Venus ..._