[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
One man's retreat is another's prison ... and
it takes a heap of flying to make a hulk a home!
Forty days of heaven and forty nights of hell. That's the way it's
been, Laura. But how can I make you understand? How can I tell you
what it's like to be young and a man and to dream of reaching the
stars? And yet, at the same time, to be filled with a terrible, gnawing
fear--a fear locked in my mind during the day and bursting out like an
evil jack-in-the-box at night. I must tell you, Laura.
Perhaps if I start at the beginning, the very beginning....
It was the Big Day. All the examinations, the physicals and psychos,
were over. The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and
laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after
spawning its first-born.
For it was June in this year of 1995, and we were the graduating class
of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight.
The _first_ graduating class, Laura. That's why it was so important,
because we were the _first_.
We sat on a little platform, twenty-five of us. Below us was a beach
of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New
Mexican sunlight. They were the faces of mothers and fathers and
grandparents and kid brothers and sisters--the people who a short time
ago had been only scrawled names on letters from home or words spoken
wistfully at Christmas. They were the memory-people who, to me, had
never really existed.
But today they had become real, and they were here and looking at us
with pride in their eyes.
A voice was speaking, deep, sure, resonant. "... these boys have worked
hard for six years, and now they're going to do a lot of big things.
They're going to bring us the metals and minerals that we desperately
need. They're going to find new land for our colonists, good rich land
that will bear food and be a home for our children. And perhaps most
important of all, they'll make other men think of the stars and look up
at them and feel humility--for mankind needs humility."
The speaker was Robert Chandler, who'd brought the first rocket down on
Mars just five years ago, who'd established the first colony there, and
who had just returned from his second hop to Venus.
Instead of listening to his words, I was staring at his broad shoulders
and his dark, crew-cut hair and his white uniform which was silk-smooth
and skin-tight. I was worshiping him and hating him at the same time,
for I was thinking:
_He's already reached Mars and Venus. Let him leave Jupiter and the
others alone! Let us be the first to land somewhere! Let us be the
first!_
* * * * *
Mickey Cameron, sitting next to me, dug an elbow into my ribs. "I don't
see 'em, Ben," he whispered. "Where do you suppose they are?"