He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. "You've got
to understand that what you've been saying isn't a valid claim. If it
were, human history would be very different, wouldn't it?"
"Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether
you want to stay, after all."
"How long's it going to take?" Ish flushed under the memory of having
actually begged for something.
"Not long," the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at
the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were
suddenly standing.
"Earth," the Personnel Manager said.
Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by
cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice.
The unblinking stars filled the night.
He looked around him. The Moon was silent--quiet, patient, waiting.
Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large
enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had
waited.
Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the
ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It
was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the
years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed
the _Navion_ at, that day over the Everglades.
"It's not the same," he said.
The Personnel Manager sighed.
"Don't you see," Ish said, "It _can't_ be the same. I didn't push the
beast up here. There wasn't any _feel_ to it. There wasn't any sound of
rockets."
The Personnel Manager sighed again. "There wouldn't be, you know. Taking
off from the Station, landing here--vacuum."
Ish shook his head. "There'd still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody
else to hear--and, maybe, maybe there _would_ be. There'd be people,
back on Earth, who'd hear it."
"All right," the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his
eyes were shining a little.
"Ish! Hey, Ish, wake up, will you!" There was a hand on his shoulder.
"Will you get a _load_ of this guy!" the voice said to someone else. "An
hour to go, and he's sleeping like the dead."
Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt
the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and
feet were very cold.
"Come on, Ish," the Crew Chief said.
"All right," he mumbled. "Okay. I'm up." He sat on the edge of his bunk
looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He
sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.
Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.
The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the
control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and
began to brake for a landing.
He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn't left
any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.
He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw
spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He
could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking
crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station
was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it
all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.
"It was easy," he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press
representatives out of his way.
MacKenzie was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his
stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled
a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his
bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.
"Ish."
It was MacKenzie, bending over him.
Ish grunted.
"It wasn't any good was it? You'd done it all before; you'd been there."