He shoved a crumpled card into my lax fingers.
"Now," he said, "now tell them--"
"Yeah, yeah."
"Tell them the whole thing is useless."
* * * * *
My stomach retched drily, grinding the sober pills to dust between its
ulcerating walls.
"Meyverik," I said to the empty video tube, "they made a mistake. They
underestimated curvature. You can't reach Alpha Centauri. You can't
correct enough. Free space is all you'll hit. Ever. You may as well come
home."
The soft voice came out of nowhere, from nothing.
"I don't want to come back. I like it here. This is what I've always
been trying to get and I never knew it."
Madison grabbed my arm with pronged fingers.
"Shut up, Doc. That's just the way the government wants him to be."
"Johnson," I said to the creased face in the screen, "they made a
mistake. They underestimated curvature. You can't reach Alpha Centauri.
You can't correct enough. Free space is all you'll hit. Ever. You may as
well come--back."
Johnson sighed, a whisper of breath across the miles.
"I'll keep going. No one has ever been so far out before. I can report
valuable things."
I stood there. The textbooks report it takes muscular effort to frown,
more so than to smile. But my face seemed to flow into the lines of pain
so hard it ached without any effort of my will. And I knew it would
_hurt_ to smile.
"They passed the final test," Madison said at my side. "Tell them it was
a test."