[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction December 1950.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Women may be against progress because it means new
pseudo-widowhoods. Space-widowhood, for instance....
At last she was on the gangplank, entering the mouth of the
spaceship--and nothing could ever stop her now. Not unless she broke
down completely in front of all these hurrying, Moon-bound passengers,
in plain sight of the scattered crowd which clustered on the other
side of the space-field barriers. Even that possibility was denied her
when two gently insistent middle-aged ladies indicated she was blocking
the way....
Somehow, dizzily, she was at her seat, led there by a smiling,
brown-clad stewardess; and her azure-tipped fingers were clutching at
the pearl-gray plasta-leather of the chair arm. Her eyes, the azure
of her nails, the azure (so she had been told) of Earth seen from
interplanetary space, grew hot. She closed them, and for a moment
gave herself up to an almost physical yearning for the Toluca Lake
house--the comfort, the safety, the--the _sanity_ of it.
* * * * *
Stubbornly she forced herself back to reality. At any moment Jack,
dark-eyed and scrappy, might come swinging down the long, shining
aisle. Jack--Captain Jack McHenry, if you please--must not know, yet,
what she was doing to patch up their marriage.
She turned her face away from the aisle, covered her cheek with her
hand to hide it. Her gaze went out through the ray-proof glass port to
the field, to the laboring beetle of a red tractor bearing the gangway
on its busy back, to the low, blast-proof administration building. When
her gaze came to the tall sign over the entrance, she hurried it past;
it was too late to think about that now, the square, shouting type that
read: