Murph was a man to be admired, Pete knew,
for Murph had a silver rocket and a passport to
the stars. Now Murph had promised him a ride....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1957
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Careful to keep trees and bushes between himself and the cottage, the
boy legged it across the fields toward the glass rocket poised in
Johnson's pasture, glittering and slim like a dark, slender dancer. To
Pete it was all the promise in the world distilled into a pointed black
glass bottle. But to the women in the cottage....
He glanced back. Apparently they hadn't seen him. He had to hurry,
because he had something to ask Murph Vanderpool, the rocketman, and
sometime tomorrow the rocket would be gone.
His grandmother and his mother would be glad when it was gone. To them
it was a monstrous and terrible symbol of something, and, like an evil
woman, most terrible because of its beauty.
"Just can't get away from them," his grandmother had said at lunch,
gazing irefully out the window toward where it stood. She was a
stiffbacked old lady with a valentine face where something wintry mixed
with something mild. "I moved out here on the edge of a little town and
thought I'd got away from 'em--and the television's full of 'em--and
the magazines full of 'em--and now this barnstormer sets one down
practically in the backyard!"
Pete curled his brows in a way that made the women remember his father.
"What's wrong with rockets, Grammy?"
"No reason for them! No reason for men to want to go way off hundreds
of miles from earth, getting lost, getting killed! We had jets--we
should have been satisfied."
She sighed, and her daughter-in-law echoed it. Looking out the window
their thoughts ran to space and rockets and their men, who had been
rocketmen and who would never come back. What was left of them was
still out there, moving eternally through lonesome space in straight
lines or circling some dead moon or planet. The gray-haired woman's
thoughts ran to the husband torn and destroyed when the early test ship
burst on the moon-run, and the other woman's mind reached grieving
toward her own husband, the gray-haired woman's son, whose ship had
turned in an instant to a molten glob when its white metal coating
suddenly peeled and it took the full, brutal hammer of the sun.
The younger ran her fingers through Pete's spiky hair. "Petey, you're
not to see that barnstormer any more."
"Aw--fooher! Fooner!"
His grandmother raised her hands. "Where do they pick up that awful
slang?"
Pete scowled out the window, thinking of the rocket, the knobs and
slings and dials within it, the feel of speed and space and war about
it, the slash-grinned young god who rode it. He had something to ask
Murph.
"Aw fooner," he muttered.