I didn't glance far. As I turned my face toward the girl sitting at my
left, she turned hers, and our eyes met. I managed a smile and cocked
an eyebrow toward the speaker's stand. She smiled back with her eyes
and crinkled her nose. It was a smooth straight nose, and the eyes on
each side of it were a clear cool gray, set well apart under level
brows. That was Betty--level and straight, and cool, too, for that
matter. I didn't realize all this at once, of course. Just now I only
knew that she was calmly and compellingly beautiful, and that I didn't
feel sane and practical any more, and certainly not disenchanted.
There was a spatter of mildly enthusiastic applause, and I noticed
the lecture hall again and saw that the President had finished and a
youngish instructor was taking the stand to give out information about
programs and class assignments. I got down enough to keep from getting
lost. I heard him say the sections would be arranged alphabetically.
That scared me--suppose this girl was named Wigglesworth or Zilch or
some such and I would never see her again! I drew a circle around my
name on the class roster they had given each of us at the beginning
of the festivities and handed it to her. She smiled again and drew a
circle around the name right next to it. Betty Day. So that was all
right.
* * * * *
There is no time for social life at Space Tech. You go there for the
training and you get your money's worth. Not that I cared--the work
was hard, but it was exciting, and you could see the purpose of it
as you went along. I would have worked even harder and not minded,
because Betty Day was alongside in every class I had. After a few days
we were eating lunch together every day in the campus slop shop, which
arrangement I liked. It took my mind off the sort of food they served
there.
Every two or three weeks we found or took time to see a tridim
together, since there is not much else in the way of extracurricular
diversion at Tech. It was a very slight intimacy, but it meant a good
deal to me, and I believed that it did to Betty too. She was always
pleased to have me around, and she crinkled her nose at my jokes in a
special way that she did for no one else's, and my jokes were not much
better than the average, either.
It was a long time before I tried to tell her about the way I felt.
It was not until the three years at Tech were over and the Institute
was letting down its hair to the extent of sealing our brow with the
traditional farewell party for graduates known as the Blastoff.
By the time I got there the revelry had already started. I made a
couple of passes at the punch bowl and looked around for Betty. She
was out on the floor; I pried her loose from the Joe who was trying
to dance with her, and we made one eccentric ellipse around the hall
and headed for the terrace. It was cool out there, the unostentatious
coolness of an early summer evening that has not quite forgotten the
heat of the day, and there was a bright wash of moonlight on the bay
beyond the lights of the town. There was a lot of stardust around.
Betty must have seen it too. She turned toward me, and the solemn look
on her face and the way her shoulders glowed in the moonlight and the
moonlight gleamed in her hair was enough to make your breath come
short. My breath, at least. It came right up in my throat and stuck
there, and I reached out and we sort of melted together. It was the
first time that had happened. That's how hard they work you at Tech.
After a little while we separated and I opened my eyes and they still
worked well enough for me to see a bench not far away and we walked
over and sat down.
Betty sighed and leaned toward me and I moved my arm out of the way to
make room. The skin of her shoulder was smooth to my hand, and cool the
way the evening air was cool.
"It's been fun, Tom, hasn't it?" I knew she meant the last three years
and not just the last three minutes.
"Lots of work and lots of fun," I agreed. "That's why space work gets
in your blood, I think. It's fun even when it's hardest. My hitch in
the Girdle even seems like fun now that it's over."
"I can see how planet work must be a thrill, even if I haven't ever
been beyond the moon. I will be though--I'm going out with my uncle's
Vesta expedition in a couple of weeks, you know."
* * * * *
I hadn't known. I knew she had been talking about it, but I had hoped
Ed Day would have sense enough to say no. I wasn't altogether selfish
about it. I did want her closer in, nearer where I would be, but a big
part of the reason was that the asteroid belt was the Edge, and the
Edge has always been a rough place for women, even when it was at the
moon.
I started to tell her this, but she interrupted. "How did you make out
with Translunar? The man must have had a lot to say to keep you this
long."
"I get the money all right. And a job."
"A good one?"
"Six thousand."
"Yes, but what and where?"
"Luna City. I'll be port engineer."
"Oh, Tom!" I didn't think she had to put so much disappointment in her
voice. It was practically disdain. "I should think Translunar could do
better than that. It's practically landlocked. You aren't going to take
it, are you?"
"Why not? Six thousand is a nice sackful of cash, and besides, I get a
piece of the company. Not a very big one, but it will grow."
"Oh, Tom!" It was pure disdain this time. "It isn't the money! You
should have a ship. You should be out doing things. They can't make you
into a glorified slug monkey on the moon!" She pulled away from my arm
and looked at me again. The solemn expression on her face was somber
now, or maybe sullen; anyway I didn't like it.
"For six thousand they can do worse than that," I said. "It's more than
the captain of a liner gets. And, anyway, Translunar's ships are all
staffed. There wouldn't be a place for me even if I wanted one, and I'm
not sure I want one. Maybe there's more glamour in being a deep-space
man, but you can't call the job the engineers do trivial. The idea of
being a slug monkey doesn't bother me at all at that pay. It's better
than being a swamp hog on Venus."
"But it's such a waste, Tom! Anyone can be an engineer. You should be
in research or exploration, and you know it. It's a crime to waste your
talent in a dock job. You belong out on the Edge."
"Look, Betty--there are three sorts of Edge jobs: in the Patrol, on
some sort of an expedition, or as a space-rat. The first two don't pay
and, as for the third, even if I liked the idea of prospecting the
planets, it takes money to outfit for it, and it took all I had to
finish Tech."
"But you have the Aspera, and the Translunar prize would be enough to
get her into shape again and buy supplies."
"I was given to understand this afternoon that it would be considered
very unconventional to take the money and not take the job. And anyway,
what would I do then--hunt for thorium in the asteroids? No thanks.
I'll take the slug monkey job and the salary. And I think you ought to
do the same. You could get a job closer in that would pay a lot more
than going off to the Belt on a wild goose chase. When you graduate
first in your class at Tech you can take your pick."
"Wild goose chase!" She sniffed. "We are going out to get data on the
Warp at close range. We might even find out the way to get around it
and open up the outer planets to exploration."
* * * * *
The Warp was supposed to be a sort of fourth-dimensional wrinkle in
space somewhere beyond the asteroids that swallowed ships and accounted
for the fact that out of three expeditions that had tried to reach
Jupiter, three had not returned. I knew better.
"There isn't any Warp," I told her. "My father proved that eight years
ago when he made the swing around Jupiter."
"But he never published any proof, Tom."
"No, all the proof he had was in his log book, and that went with
him on his last trip. But I read the log. He sighted the pirate camp
on Callisto, and would have had pictures to prove it if all his film
hadn't been raystruck. Maybe he could have got somebody to listen to
him anyway if he had tried a little harder, but he wanted to make a
research job of it. He sold out all his claims and built the Astra and
loaded it up with equipment to bring back all the proof that even the
Patrol could ask for. Then he blasted off and no one ever heard of him
again."
"But the idea of pirates doesn't make sense, Tom. There are no cargoes
worth stealing beyond the Belt. On the Venus run, yes--but why should
there be pirates out where there are no ships?"
"Okay, no pirates, then. What they really are is Hassley and all those
hangers-on of his that were never accounted for after the Polar War.
One of the moons of Jupiter would make a fine hideout for them. Air,
water, and a livable climate. When any one comes snooping around, they
see to it that they never get back. We blame it on the Warp and stay
away and leave them alone."
"They would never get there in the first place. The Warp isn't just
somebody's wild guess, you know. It follows from Heuvelstad's work. He
derived Bode's law from quantum theory, and showed that a warp in space
is the only explanation for the family of asteroids between Mars and
Jupiter where there should be a single planet. No one can doubt it."
"I can. No one used to doubt that the earth was flat, or to bring it a
little more up to date, that the craters of the moon were volcanoes, or
that the red shift in the nebular spectra meant that the universe is
expanding. A theory is good only as long as it explains all the facts,
and Heuvelstad overlooked the fact that my father circled Jupiter and
came back. He will just have to revise his mathematics."
"Maybe we'll know more about that after the Vesta expedition comes
back." She sighed and looked out over the glittering bay.
I sighed too, and took my arm away from the back of the seat. I didn't
quite know how the conversation had wandered so far from the point.
I had felt quite set up about everything when I came to the party.
I thought Betty would be glad about the Translunar offer, and maybe
remark that six thousand credits was a remarkable salary for a fresh
graduate, and I would suggest that it was enough to get married on.
And here we were arguing.
She turned and looked at me again. "Tom," she said softly; maybe I was
going to have my chance after all.
"Yes?" I answered.
"Are you really going to take that engineer job? Couldn't you talk
Translunar out of something that would give you the chance to do the
things a Denby ought to be doing?"
"Maybe I could. But look--I've sweated out the last seven years just
for the chance I've got right now, and I mean to take it. My father
spent all his life chasing a dream, and what did it get him? The one
great discovery he did make no one will even believe."
"I never met Lance Denby, but I know he was a great spaceman, Tom, even
if you do seem to have forgotten it. I never thought a son of his would
ever turn out to be a company man. Let's go inside."
We went inside, and I went home. The punch bowl was empty by now so I
didn't even stop.
* * * * *
It was probably a mistake, but I flew down to Mojave Outport the day
the Vesta Expedition blasted off. Betty was very friendly when we said
goodbye, and her hand in mine was small and firm, and the fingers were
quite cold. I don't remember what I said. It couldn't have been much.
There was a stiff feeling around my lips that it was hard to push any
words through.
Betty was last on board. She turned and looked back for a few seconds
before they closed the hatch, and it seemed to me that there was the
same solemn expression on her face that I had seen that night on the
terrace. I was too far away to be sure.
My interview with the Western manager of Translunar was scheduled for
the next day. I'm afraid I made a poor impression from the very start.
I wasn't feeling very sharp; instead of sleeping I had spent a good
part of the night wondering about that look in Betty's eyes. That and a
few other things.
Elkins, the manager, was the sort of man who wears a nice sharp crease
in his pants and his hair brushed carefully over his bald spot and
calls everyone heartily by his first name.
"Well, Tom," he said expansively, after the formalities of introduction
and exchange of cigarettes were out of the way, "let's get to business.
First of all, this, ah--token."
He held out a check. The four figures on it were even prettier than the
pretty-colored ink they were printed in. That was for me. Legally, by
the terms of their prize offer. I had checked on that.
"Thank you," I said.
"And now, as concerns your place with the Translunar organization--"
I interrupted. "I'm sorry, Mr. Elkins. Personal plans make it
impossible for me to accept the position you have so generously offered
me."
That rocked him. Why not--it rocked me. He still smiled with his lips,
out of habit, but his eyes weren't smiling. He pulled an ash tray to
him and crushed out his cigarette--the one I had given him.
"But--! You realize this is most irregular, Mr. Denby! And unexpected."
"I do. I didn't know it myself until a little while ago."
"Is this decision final, Mr. Denby?"
"I'm afraid it is."
"Very well. I'm sorry to hear it." His tone meant that I would be sorry
too. "In that case there is nothing further to say."
He pushed a button and a flunky came in to sweep me out. As I left
I could as good as see him writing down my name on a sheet marked
Blacklist in 72 point caps.