Shut up! Pete thought savagely. Shut up, _shut up_!
With an effort, he got hold of himself.
I've been working too hard. I'm jittery thinking about the moonshot,
and all this seedy burlesque just irritates me. There's nothing to get
heated up about. Calm down.
But why am I suddenly afraid?
He looked again at the ridiculous moon with its smirking face. He saw
that plaster had fallen from the wall in places, peeling away, leaving
the bare hexagons of wire and laths.
My God, he thought. A chickenwire sky.
He thought again of the girl in the ticket booth, and of the tired,
frightened people all laughing too much and shoving and running outside.
The bullet started down at last, toward the hinged door. On this side
it was painted to look like Earth, with a distorted map of North
America. All wrong, somehow.
Pete felt ill. It was as though someone were making ill-tempered fun
of the dreams and the tall silver ship waiting out on the desert.
Cheapening it. Laughing nastily.
The little bullet bumped through the seedy, scruffy Earth and out
into the night of the midway, out into the crowd-sounds and music and
hot-doggy smells.
"It was fun, Pete," Glory said.
He helped her out onto the rickety platform. He had the insane notion
that the girl in the ticket booth and the lounging attendant were
laughing at him.
"It sure was, honey," he said wearily, still feeling the illogical fear
of he-knew-not-what inside himself. "Real fun."
Glory looked up at him, eyes alight and almost feverishly gay. "I did
what you are going to do. I touched the sky!"
* * * * *
New frontiers. New lands in the sky. New hope.
It was quiet. The jet was still and no sound was anywhere in the ship.
Now a soft tick from the timer. A whisper from the questing radarscope.
And again, the stillness.
We've done it, Pete thought. We've really done it. The hard part is
over.
Ride the rocket!
He remembered the pain of the takeoff and the absolute panic that had
welled up in him when the irrevocability of his action came home. He
remembered riding a tail of red fire up out of the hot desert air of
New Mexico into the still blue, and then the silence and the almost
unnerving thrill of the realization that the moonshot was going to
succeed.
The radio hissed at him with the voice of the desert base half around
the world.
"Hello moonshot. This is Base. All's okay. Stage one landed in the
Gulf. Stage two just reported floating off the Azores. Good show."
Pete lifted himself from the acceleration couch and felt a moment of
nausea and panic as he floated toward the ceiling of the tiny cell.
Free flight. He steadied himself and checked the flow of telemetered
information binding the ship to the glowing curve far below. All okay.
Except that--
Except that you're still afraid, he told himself. Not just the normal
fear-of-falling-afraid that the psychs told you about. Afraid like
before--in that silly damn carnival ride thing.
Afraid of the dark?
No, not quite that. More a closed in, cheated feeling.
Premonition? Nonsense.
He clung to the radarscope, trembling. With every rushing mile upward,
outward, his fear was growing. It wasn't right, it didn't make sense.
But he felt as though he were rushing straight at a brick wall, head
down, eyes closed.
He lit the telescreens.
The stars look funny, he thought uneasily.
The timer ticked. The radar whispered, searching. Time passed and his
fear grew thicker, less reasonable.
His fingers dug hard at the metal of the instrument panel as the night
slipped by outside the hull. The ship's orbital ellipse, Kepler's
contribution to the new frontier, was established.
Pete thought, something's wrong. Very wrong. The stars look queer.
The constellations in the telescreens were distorting, and there
was something ahead of the ship where there should be nothing but
emptiness. It showed in the screen for just an instant and was lost. A
ringed sphere.
I must be dreaming, Pete thought. But then, what is reality? That
sphere was Saturn. And it was a hundred yards across.