"If you don't like it," Dorothy said, and thrust her face near his,
"make some yourself."
Sam half-rose and gripped the table. "Look, my lovely one, _I'm_ the
gent who brings home that weekly paycheck you can't get along without.
Measly or not, it's good, honest American dough that lets us live a
little decently--and the least _you_ could do is give me warm coffee in
the morning!"
His voice had risen almost to a shout and Sam himself was surprised at
it. Dorothy's eyebrows crept into a bewildered frown, and like one in a
trance she moved to turn on the heat beneath the coffee pot.
Sam's heart was beating swiftly as he sat down. Conditioned responses,
he thought a little wildly. He'd started it off last night by defying
Dorothy--and now, bit by bit, it was becoming easier. All he'd have to
do was keep it up, see that he didn't lapse.
He sipped the coffee slowly, as if tasting his recent triumph in the
black liquid.
"You'd better hurry," Dorothy said, looking at him a little uneasily.
Sam glanced at the wall clock and began gulping the hot liquid. Ten of
eight! He'd have to hurry. He paused suddenly, the cup in mid-air, and
wondered. Hurry to what? To those two wires and the tester and the
endless stream of untested engines flowing toward him?
With an infinite firmness, Sam Meecham placed his cup on the saucer.
"I'm not going in," he said.
Dorothy looked at him as though he were crazy. "What do you mean, you're
not going in?" she demanded. "Just because you've got some mulish notion
in your head, do you think we have to starve? You're going in and liking
it."
"The engine I bought is coming today," he said in a quiet voice. "I want
to install it." In Sam Meecham's eyes there was a deadly fire that even
his wife had not seen before. She gulped and backed away a little.
"But--"
"Call up the foreman," Sam said. "Tell him I'm sick. No, wait." He
paused, smiling coldly. That would leave him an out; he could always go
back to the job if he changed his mind. He said slowly, "Tell him I've
quit."
"_Sam!_"
"Tell him I've quit," Sam insisted. That was the thing. Burn your
bridges behind you so you can't turn back, so the only road is ahead.
Sam Meecham was going to the stars, and he would never return!
The atomic engine came that afternoon, neat and shiny and sleek, with
all the wires in their proper places, checked and double-checked by a
sober human cog in the prison from which Sam Meecham had just escaped.
Sam busied himself in the hangar, lifting out the old engine and
replacing it with the new one. Carefully, he settled it into its housing
and bolted it down. Then he rearranged the wires into the pattern
outlined on the sheet of paper.
Dorothy brought him coffee. That surprised him but he accepted it
gratefully.
"Can--can I help you, Sam?" she offered.
He looked at her, perhaps a little disappointed that her face was
serious. He said, "Sure you're not just trying to be nosey?"
A sharp pain darted into her eyes and she turned away.
"Wait," he said.
He called himself a fool. It was another of her tricks and he was
falling for it. He put a restraining hand on her arm and remembered
another time eight years ago when the touch would have sent electric
thrills coursing through him. Oddly, he felt a small remnant of the
pleasure stir within him.
"All right," he said gruffly. "All right, you can help."
So he was a fool. He'd been a fool before and chances were he'd be one
again more often than he'd care to admit. In a short while, hours
perhaps, he'd be gone--and he'd never see Dorothy again. Somehow the
thought was not as comforting as he had expected, and he tried to work
off a lingering doubt that rose to plague him.
They worked through the afternoon, testing any weak parts the rocket
might have, bracing the struts, checking for leaks. Sam found two
space-suits in the locker. He'd better leave one, he thought. They were
expensive and Dorothy might need one sometime. With him gone, she
couldn't afford to throw money around. Yet he might need it more than
she ever would. For a minute he stood undecided, and then he put them
both in the locker.
Dorothy came into the room and smiled wearily at him. "It'll go any
place now," she told him proudly.
In her eyes Sam saw an indefinable something. Something he might have
seen eight years ago--but mixed with it was a sadness he had not known
she could possess. Guiltily, he turned his gaze away.
"We--we'd better go in and eat," he said, looking at his watch without
seeing it.
She didn't say anything, and that was odd. Sam wished she would nag and
complain as she always had before. He wondered why he wished that, when
only a short time before he had wanted just the opposite. It was with a
start that he realized the reason. He was running away. That was it. He
was running away, and he wanted to be deathly certain that he had good
cause to run. Slowly the suspicion was creeping over him that the
situation had changed slightly, was changing more.
He would leave tonight, he told himself, before he weakened enough to
shelve his plans for another comfortable rut.
Sam's voice was a little hoarse. "What are you doing here? What do you
want?" He had finished loading enough supplies aboard the rocket to last
him months.
Dorothy came toward him from the darkness.
"It's no use," he said. "You can't talk me out of it this time."
But she only smiled sadly and said, "I know that, Sam. I came to say
good-bye."
"Good-bye?"
"You're leaving, aren't you?"
"Yes." He looked at the ground, studying the darkness.
"I'm sorry, Sam," she said. "We started out wrong. Maybe, if we tried
again--"