Maggie rose, her eyes wistful. "If you want to come--and if you get
well." She looked at him strangely.
"Suppose--" He fought to find the right words. "Suppose I got well and
decided not to join Jacob. What would happen to me? Would you let me
go?"
Her thin face was criss-crossed by emotion--alarm, then bewilderment,
then fear. "I don't know. That would be up to Jacob."
He lay biting his lip, staring at the photo of Jacob. She touched his
hand and it seemed that sadness now dominated the flurry of emotion
that had coursed through her.
"The only thing that matters, really," she murmured, "is your walking
again. We'll try this afternoon. Okay?"
"Okay," he said.
When she left, his eyes were still turned toward Jacob's photo.
He was like two people, he thought.
Half of him was an officer of the Space Corps. Perhaps one single
starry-eyed boy out of ten thousand was lucky enough to reach that goal.
He remembered a little picture book his mother had given him when she
was alive. Under the bright pictures of spacemen were the captions:
"A Space Officer Is Honest" "A Space Officer Is Loyal." "A Space
Officer Is Dutiful."
Honesty, loyalty, duty. Trite words, but without those concepts,
mankind would never have broken away from the planet that held it
prisoner for half a million years.
Without them, Everson, after three failures and a hundred men dead,
would never have landed on the Moon twenty-seven years ago.
* * * * *
Ben sighed. He had a debt to pay. A good officer would pay that debt.
He'd surrender and take his punishment. He'd rip the crimson braid from
his uniform. He'd prevent the Academy for the Conquest of Space from
being labeled the school of a murderer and a coward.
And by doing these things, the haunting image of a dead man would
disappear from his vision.
But the other half of Ben Curtis was the boy who'd stood trembling
beneath a night sky of beckoning stars.
The eyes in Jacob's photo seemed to be staring at the boy in him, not
at the officer. They appeared both pleading and hopeful. They were
like echoes of cold, barren worlds and limitless space, of lurking
and savage death. They held the terror of loneliness and of exile, of
constant flight and hiding.
But, too, they represented a strength that could fulfill a boy's dream,
that could carry a man to new frontiers. They, rather than the neat
white uniform, now offered the key to shining miracles. That key was
what Ben wanted.
But he asked himself, as he had a thousand times, "If I follow Jacob,
can I leave the dead man behind?"
He tried to stretch his legs and he cursed their numbness. He smiled
grimly. For a moment, he'd forgotten. How futile now to think of stars!
What if he were to be like this always? Jacob would not want a man
with dead legs. Jacob would either send him back to Earth or--Ben
shuddered--see that he was otherwise disposed of. And disposal would be
the easier course.
* * * * *
This was the crisis. He sat on the side of the bed, Maggie before him,
her strong arm about his waist.
"Afraid?" she asked.
"Afraid," he repeated, shaking.
It was as if all time had been funneled into this instant, as if this
moment lay at the very vortex of all a man's living and desiring. There
was no room in Ben's mind for thoughts of Jacob now.
"You can walk," Maggie said confidently. "I _know_ you can."
He moved his toes, ankles, legs. He began to rise, slowly, falteringly.
The firm pressure around his waist increased.
He stood erect. His legs felt like tree stumps, but here and there were
a tingling and a warmth, a sensitivity.
"Can you make it to the window?" Maggie asked.
"No, no, not that far."
"Try! Please try!"
She guided him forward.
His feet shuffled. Stomp, stomp. The pressure left his waist. Maggie
stepped away, walked to the window, turned back toward him.
He halted, swaying. "Not alone," he mouthed fearfully. "I can't get
there by myself."
"Of course you can!" Maggie's voice contained unexpected impatience.
Ashamed, he forced his feet to move. At times, he thought he was going
to crash to the floor. He lumbered on, hesitating, fighting to retain
his balance. Maggie waited tensely, as if ready to leap to his side.
Then his eyes turned straight ahead to the window. This was the first
time he'd actually seen the arid, dust-cloaked plains of the second
planet. He straightened, face aglow, as though a small-boy enthusiasm
had been reborn in him.
His tree-stump legs carried him to the window. He raised shaking hands
against the thick glassite pane.
Outside, the swirling white dust was omnipresent and unchallenged. It
cut smooth the surfaces of dust-veiled rocks. It clung to the squat
desert shrubbery, to the tall skeletal shapes of Venusian needle-plants
and to the swish-tailed lizards that skittered beneath them.
The shrill of wind, audible through the glassite, was like the
anguished complaint of the planet itself, like the wail of an entity
imprisoned in a dark tomb of dust. Venus was a planet of fury,
eternally howling its wrath at being isolated from sunlight and
greenery, from the clean blackness of space and the warm glow of
sister-planet and star.
The dust covered all, absorbed all, eradicated all. The dust was
master. The dome, Ben felt, was as transitory as a tear-drop of fragile
glass falling down, down, to crash upon stone.
"Is it always like this?" he asked. "Doesn't the wind ever stop?"
"Sometimes the wind dies. Sometimes, at night, you can see the lights
from the city."
* * * * *
He kept staring. The dome, he thought, was a symbol of Man's littleness
in a hostile universe.
But, too, it was a symbol of his courage and defiance. And perhaps
Man's greatest strength lay in the very audacity that drove him to
build such domes.
"You like it, don't you?" Maggie asked. "It's lonely and ugly and wild,
but you like it."
He nodded, breathless.
She murmured, "Jacob used to say it isn't the strange sights that
thrill spacemen--it's the thoughts that the sights inspire."
He nodded again, still staring.
She began to laugh. Softly at first, then more loudly. It was the kind
of laughter that is close to crying.
"You've been standing there for ten minutes! You're going to walk
again! You're going to be well!"
He turned to her, smiling with the joyous realization that he had
actually stood that long without being aware of it.
Then his smile died.
Standing behind Maggie, in an open doorway, was a gray, scaly, toadlike
monster--a six-and-a-half-foot Venusian. He was motionless as a statue,
his green-lidded eyes staring curiously at Ben. His scaly hand was
tight about the butt of an old-fashioned heat pistol holstered to his
hip.
Maggie suppressed a smile. "Don't be frightened, Ben. This is
Simon--Simple Simon, we call him. His I. Q. isn't too high, but he
makes a good helper and guard for me. He's been so anxious to see you,
but I thought it'd be better if he waited until you were well."
Ben nodded, fascinated by the apparent muscular solidity of the
creature. It hadn't occurred to his numbed mind that he and Maggie were
not the sole occupants of the dome.
But Maggie had acted wisely, he thought. His nightmares had been
terrifying enough without bringing Simple Simon into them.
"Shake hands with Ben," she told the Venusian.
Simple Simon lumbered forward, then paused. His eyes blinked. "No," he
grated.