"The name's Cobb." The man hiccoughed. "Spacemen in their white monkey
suits. They think they're little tin gods. Betcha you think you're a
little tin god." He downed a shot of whiskey.
Ben stiffened. He was twenty-four and dressed in the white,
crimson-braided uniform of the _Odyssey's_ junior astrogation officer.
He was three months out of the Academy at White Sands and the shining
uniform was like a key to all the mysteries of the Universe.
He'd sought long for that key.
* * * * *
At the age of five--perhaps in order to dull the memory of his parents'
death in a recent strato-jet crash--he'd spent hours watching the night
sky for streaking flame-tails of Moon rockets. At ten, he'd ground
his first telescope. At fourteen, he'd converted an abandoned shed on
the government boarding-school grounds to a retreat which housed his
collection of astronomy and rocketry books.
At sixteen, he'd spent every weekend holiday hitchhiking from Boys
Town No. 5 in the Catskills to Long Island Spaceport. There, among
the grizzled veterans of the old Moon Patrol, he'd found friends who
understood his dream and who later recommended his appointment to the
U. S. Academy for the Conquest of Space.
And a month ago, he'd signed aboard the _Odyssey_--the first ship, it
was rumored, equipped to venture as far as the asteroids and perhaps
beyond.
Cobb was persistent: "Damn fools shoulda known enough to stay on Earth.
What the hell good is it, jumpin' from planet to planet?"
_The guy's drunk_, Ben thought. He took his drink and moved three
stools down the bar.
Cobb followed. "You don't like the truth, eh, kid? You don't like
people to call you a sucker."
Ben rose and started to leave the bar, but Cobb grabbed his arm and
held him there.
"Thas what you are--a sucker. You're young now. Wait ten years. You'll
be dyin' of radiation rot or a meteor'll get you. Wait and see, sucker!"
Until this instant, Ben had suppressed his anger. Now, suddenly and
without warning, it welled up into savage fury.
His fist struck the man on the chin. Cobb's eyes gaped in shocked
horror. He spun backward. His head cracked sickeningly on the edge of
the bar. The sound was like a punctuation mark signaling the end of
life.
He sank to the floor, eyes glassy, blood tricking down his jaw.
Ben knew that he was dead.
Then, for a single absurd second, Ben was seized with terror--just as,
a moment before, he'd been overwhelmed with anger.
He ran.
* * * * *
For some twenty minutes, he raced through a dizzying, nightmare world
of dark rocketfront alleys and shouting voices and pursuing feet.
At last, abruptly, he realized that he was alone and in silence. He saw
that he was still on the rocketfront, but in the Tycho-ward side of the
city.
He huddled in a dark corner of a loading platform and lit a cigarette.
A thousand stars--a thousand motionless balls of silver fire--shone
above him through Luna City's transparent dome.
He was sorry he'd hit Cobb, of course. He was not sorry he'd run.
Escaping at least gave him a power of choice, of decision.
_You can do two things_, he thought.
_You can give yourself up, and that's what a good officer would do.
That would eliminate the escape charge. You'd get off with voluntary
manslaughter. Under interplanetary law, that would mean ten years in
prison and a dishonorable discharge. And then you'd be free._
_But you'd be through with rockets and space. They don't want new
men over thirty-four for officers on rockets or even for third-class
jet-men on beat-up freighters--they don't want convicted killers. You'd
get the rest of the thrill of conquering space through video and by
peeking through electric fences of spaceports._
_Or--_
There were old wives' tales of a group of renegade spacemen who
operated from the Solar System's frontiers. The spacemen weren't
outlaws. They were misfits, rejectees from the clearing houses on Earth.
And whereas no legally recognized ship had ventured past Mars, the
souped-up renegade rigs had supposedly hit the asteroids. Their
headquarters was Venus. Their leader--a subject of popular and
fantastic conjecture in the men's audiozines--was rumored to be a
red-bearded giant.
_So_, Ben reflected, _you can take a beer-and-pretzels tale seriously.
You can hide for a couple of days, get rid of your uniform, change your
name. You can wait for a chance to get to Venus. To hell with your
duty. You can try to stay in space, even if you exile yourself from
Earth._
After all, was it right for a single second, a single insignificant
second, to destroy a man's life and his dream?
* * * * *
He was lucky. He found a tramp freighter whose skipper was on his last
flight before retirement. Discipline was lax, investigation of new
personnel even more so.
Ben Curtis made it to Venus.
There was just one flaw in his decision. He hadn't realized that the
memory of the dead man's face would haunt him, torment him, follow him
as constantly as breath flowed into his lungs.
But might not the rumble of atomic engines drown the murmuring dead
voice? Might not the vision of alien worlds and infinite spaceways
obscure the dead face?
So now he sat searching for a perhaps nonexistent red-bearded giant,
and hoping and doubting and fearing, all at once.
"You look for someone, _senor_?"