"Wouldn't that have been something!" said Shay. "I mean, to be the
first."
"It was something," said Kellard.
"Maybe someday I----" Shay began, and broke off and then went on, "I
mean, if the star-drive is perfected as soon as some people say it will
be, I could maybe be one of the first ones out there? Sir?"
"You could be," said Kellard. "Someone's going to be first. The stars
are waiting. All we have to do is go out there and keep going, and the
stars will be ours, just like the planets here are, all ours, forever
and amen."
Shay looked at him puzzledly, and shuffled, and then went away.
Halfrich had been listening, and watching. He said, "Did you have to
slap the kid's face?"
Kellard shrugged. "What did I say? I was merely repeating what everyone
feels, these days. The glory of the conquest of space."
"I'd give a lot," Halfrich said, "to know what's riding you. We'll soon
reach Sunside and we'll find out, but I wish you'd tell me now."
"All right," said Kellard. "I'll tell you. I've been disinherited.
That's what's wrong with me."
* * * * *
He would say nothing more, nor did Halfrich ask him another question,
until the Y-90 was far in past the orbit of Venus and going into its
pattern of approach.
"I assume," said Halfrich, "that you bear none of us any personal
ill-will. If there is anything dangerous awaiting us, now would be the
time to tell us."
Kellard considered. "You're going to land, I suppose, at the same spot
where we crashed."
"Of course."
"Then land," said Kellard. "As far as I know, there is not a thing
there to harm you."
In the scanner, he watched Mercury swing slowly toward them, a tiny
crescent of white that was hard to see against the Sun. For here the
Sun was a monster thing, fringed with writhing flames, paling the
stars, drenching this whole area with radiation that already would have
killed them but for the ship's anti-heaters.
Kellard remembered that when he had come this way before, Binetti had
quoted something, a line from William Blake's poems, he had said.
"_The desire of the moth for the star._" And that was what we were, he
thought. Three little moths, going right into the furnace, and I was
the only one to get out of it, but now I'm going back.
The Y-90 went into its landing pattern. It skimmed over the dark side
of Mercury, the black cliffs and peaks and chasms that never saw the
Sun, and then light seemed to burst ragingly up from all the horizon
ahead of them, and they were over Sunside.
In old days this little world had been called "the moon of the Sun,"
and it looked like it, the same stark, lifeless rock plains and ridges
and cracks, the fang-like look of pinnacles in a place where no
atmosphere eroded anything. But the Moon was cold and still, whereas
Sunside seemed to throb with sullen hidden fires. Volcanoes spewed
ash and lava, and the infernal storm of radiation from overhead made
everything quiver in a shimmering haze. The indicator board told them
that the temperature of the outside hull was climbing to four hundred
as the Y-90 went down.
And the wide valley that haunted his dreams opened up ahead.
Across it the squat volcanic cones still dribbled ash and dust and
it was all just as it had been when he had last looked back from the
relief cruiser that had come from Venus Station to take him off. And
there gleamed bright on its floor the crumpled wreck in which Binetti
and then Morse had died.
Kellard's gaze flew to the place north of the wreck, the tumbled,
odd-shaped rocks. He felt his palms sweating. Maybe there would be
nothing. After all, could it all happen again?
They set down, and after the crashing rocket uproar, the steady throb
of the anti-heaters was an anti-climactic sound.
"You've got the armor ready?" Halfrich asked of Morgenson.
The biophysicist nodded nervously. "Three suits, with their anti-heater
equipment tested on and off all the way out."
"One suit stays here, for emergencies," Halfrich said. "Kellard and I
will go out, when there's something to go out for. First, we'll make
observations."
* * * * *
The recording telescope-cameras and the radar, Halfrich ordered focused
on the place of the odd-shaped rocks. And then, sitting there on
Sunside, they watched. They waited.
Nothing.
Kellard's hopes began to rise. He was right, he told himself, it
couldn't happen again.
"How long," he asked, "are we going to sit waiting for nothing because
a radar made a screwy record? If those anti-heaters quit for five
minutes, we're fried."
Halfrich looked at him bleakly. "I'll tell you how long. Till you tell
the truth, and we see the truth for ourselves. That's how long."
Kellard shrugged. "If that's the way you want it. I would tell you to
go to hell except that we're already there."
They watched and waited some more.