Andre Norton (ed) (32 page)

But,
they would say, why couldn't she go along with them, if they wanted the stars
bad enough? One side of the argument seemed as reasonable as the other, and she
did not know the answer—only that she feared and hated the stars.

She took a quick, cold shower, and joined her
mother in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Its broad windows opened onto the
orchard, snowy with blossoms. In the meadow beyond, the grass was close-cropped
by the indolent dairy cows.

Sarah stepped outside a moment and filled her lungs with the sharp,
glistening air.
It
carried the scent of the orchard and the dewy grass and the pungent smells of
the distant barn where her father was supervising the milking.

"I don't see how anyone would want to
live in any other way," she said. "It's horrible to bring up a child
knowing nothing but grease and steel and the sickening smell of jets. Ken
doesn't know what the world is like, yet!"

"If this is the world, then neither did
any of us know it when we lived at the bases when Dad was in the Navy!"

"We
certainly didn't.
Day and night—nothing but jets and rockets
screaming.
I thought I'd go crazy listening to them. I dreamed of
finding a place where it was quiet and people moved at a walk instead of
screaming through space like witches on atomic broomsticks.

'And then I saw to it that
I would spend the rest of my life there by marrying a spaceman!" "You
don't have to stay with him."

"I
do. It just so happens that I'm still in love with him. It's more likely that
he'll tell me to go my own way, but I just can't stand the thought of Ken going
to Mars to join this crazy Patrol they've organized for children. It's insane!
Sixteen-year-olds being taught to handle spaceships.
Don't
they deserve
any
childhood?"

"What does Ken say
about it?"

"He's
all for it, of course. He doesn't know any better. He doesn't know there's
anything else in the world."

Mrs.
Walker checked the automatic ovens and glanced at the clock. "We'd better
round up the men for breakfast.
Almost done."
Then she put her hands on her hips and looked at Sarah.

"I
haven't had much to do with men—only had the one around during my life. With
Ken and Rick you've had more experience in learning how they act, young and
old, than I ever had. But one thing I did learn was that it just doesn't matter
very much what they do as long as it's what they want. A man shouldn't have to
slave at some uninspired career and try to enjoy life on the side. If his
career isn't what he wants to do, then he's wasting his life, and no woman has
a right to ask him to do that."

"Doesn't anything I
want matter?"

"Of course.
If you want to leave Rick and be a lady farmer nobody in the whole
world would stop you or criticize you. That's one thing you can count on
today—and that no one before us could—you are absolutely free to do just about
as you please."

"You don't have to make it sound so
ridiculous!"

"Well,
what do you want, then? You don't want to go to Mars with Rick, and you don't
want to stay behind."

"Why does a woman
always have to be the one to give in?"

"They
don't. I just told you what you could do. You can break up your marriage and
you and Rick and Ken can still be good friends—plenty of people have done that
rather than 'give in' to each other."

"But that's the ancient dogma that I
can't have a marriage and my own life at the same timel"

"You've
been married long enough to know that. You've hated the Navy life all these
years, but you've lived it. Only this business of Ken's going to Mars has
brought it to a climax.

"I
had to make the choice, too. It wasn't much
fun for me, sitting in the radio shack waiting for news of our great hero. I
always thought it was nothing but showing-off, but it was the only thing he
lived for, and of all the choices I had to make, he was the one thing I would
not give up.

"Yours
is twice as hard, because you have Ken as well as Rick— or is it twice as
easy?"

In the afternoon she lay on the lawn chair in
front of the house watching the twinkling pattern of sunlight that came through
the leaves of the old oak tree. The world had stopped its rush of jet wings.
She seemed to have slipped into utter time-lessness.

Her
father's approach startled her out of her reverie. "May I join you?"
he said.

"If you promise to talk about nothing
but cows and pigs, and crops and weather," she said.

He
dropped to the grass and looked up at her. A patch of sunlight caught the
silver border of his hair and turned the space-bumed skin of his face to bold
bronze.

"I
tried to interest Ken in the farm this morning," he said, "but I
didn't have much luck. I'd be glad to leave him this place, you know
,
if he wanted it. I'll be through with it by the time he's
old enough. But he won't want it, and neither will Rick—not then, anyway.
Farming these days is just an old man's hobby, important enough, but my kind
can take care of it."

Sarah
sighed. "All right, so you want to talk about Ken and Mars and space jets.
You won't let me hear of anything else. You're all determined that I am wrong,
that I haven't the right to control my own child's life until he knows what he
wants to do."

"Take it easy, Sarah. I'm not used to
being jumped like that. It's bad for an old man's heart, you know.

"But as to Ken, are you sure that it's his
going to Mars that you are so angry about, or is it something that someone else
has done to you—or something, even, that's merely inside yourself?"

"It's everything—everything connected
with space and jets and the things that take men away from their families."

"Rick tells me he's
arranged for you to go with him."

"He's
arranged it! And without consulting me or
even assuming I could have another idea about it. He's been gone a whole year,
and now he expects to jerk me up and transplant me to some frigid desert where
life isn't fit for savages. And I'm supposed to be happy about that!"

"Would you really be happy with anything
less than his giving up space altogether?"

Her
breathing halted momentarily with a quick, deep intake as if she had not dared
to frame in words the magnitude of this demand before. But she nodded slowly.
"I guess that's it, Dad. I'd really settle for nothing less."

"You'll
have to settle for a lot less!" Commander Walker retorted. "It's
always been like this, Sarah," he continued more gently.

"There
has always been a peculiar breed of man who had to see just what was beyond the
horizon, a kind of man never settled or satisfied with what he had in the here
and now. That's the kind of man I am, and that's the kind Rick is—and Ken is one
with us.

"There's nothing you can do about it,
Sarah—nothing at all." Sarah's face grew pale beneath the unwanted tan
painted by sunlight on barren Naval Bases. "I can try," she said
slowly. "You'll lose them both." "Would Mother have lost—?"

He nodded slowly. "There is no way on
Earth to hold a man from crossing the private horizon he has to cross. And
sometimes I think we all have such a horizon, whether we know it or not.

"At any rate, there were certain things
I had to do. To have abandoned them would have hurt us both more than to follow
through. Your mother understood that. She understood it very well."

"What
about me? I didn't understand it. I don't understand it yet. What about the
long nights I sat with mother listening for radio reports—first the solo flight
around the world, then the Moon, and then the Mars trip, not once but three
times we waited while you tried and failed and tried again.

"I was glad when you had to turn back
and missed being the first to reach Mars. I felt it made up a little for all
the nights I waited for you. But nothing, really, could make up for that. You
didn't even care—"

"There's
more to caring than just clinging to someone you love—sucking the life out of
him with demands he cannot fulfill. You can't imprison the thing you love.

"Because
I left you did not mean that I had forgotten you. Remembering you was the one
thing that kept me going. Perhaps I've done nothing, really, to let you know
that, but if I'd known you would ever say the thing you have just said I would
have kept on going without caring much if I ever succeeded in getting
back."

Sarah
looked at her hands, lying still and icy m her lap. "I'm sorry, Dad—but
that's the way I did feel. It's almost the way I feel now about Rick and Ken. I
can't help it. I can't forget those nights of waiting and being afraid—"

"Then
you'd better tell Rick and get it over with. You can't change him, and you
can't change Ken. Think about it a little while and then tell them if you still
feel the same."

He
rose to his feet and glanced off towards the distant fields. "I've got to
go up to the house and check with the Weather Bureau again. I ordered two
inches of rain for tonight and tomorrow. I'd like to postpone it while you're
here, but the crops won't stand it. It doesn't show much signs of developing
yet. The forecasters are getting pretty careless about filling orders
lately."

When he was gone, Sarah lay back in the
chair, her arm over her eyes to shield them from the sun edging now through the
maze of leaves. She would be glad to see it rain, she thought. It should be
raining everywhere. The whole world should be crying.

She would have to tell Rick and Ken that they
could go-forever. There had not been any other answer since she first watched
in fear while Rick took a new experimental ship to test on a long, lonely Moon
flight. She had crouched then in a chair in the radio room just as she and her
mother had done for so many long years waiting for news of her father.

There
had been a thousand other flights since then, and they had quarreled and made
up and quarreled bitterly again. And he had wholly overruled her objections to
Ken's taking the jet courses at the Base.

Now,
he wanted to take them to Mars forever. That, she could not do. They had to
cross their far horizons wherever they might lead them, but they had to go
without her.

The
sky began clouding that afternoon and by three o'clock the rain came as
scheduled. Sarah watched through the windows, watching it drip softly among the
trees and wetting the whole Earth as far as she could see.

Her mother was busy with needlework and the
men were hotly debating the merits of some fantastic and insignificant
jet-drive mechanism.

Of them all, Sarah was alone in her
discontent, alone and afraid. And they seemed, as if by conspiracy, to ignore
her in her solitude.

Her
mother spoke once, and then she turned to Commander Walker. "What are you
going to do if the fish pond goes out? You said the dam would never stand
another rain like this one, and you haven't done anything about it."

He
waved the question away with superior knowledge of such details.

By morning the storm began to abate, the
clouds were pierced with sunlight as the air mass was lowered by the controlling
beams to conserve its remaining moisture for another location.

But Commander Walker, reading the automatic
rain gauge records fumed. The total catch was only sixty per cent of his order.

Sarah slipped into her coat and boots and
left the house as he called the Bureau to report his opinion of forecasters and
demand the remainder of his order.

With
surprise, she found Ken standing just outside the doorway, his face revealing
an unbelievable awareness of the spring glory about him.

He
smiled almost shyly. "Feel like going for a walk, Mom? It's a swell
morning for that."

"I'd
love to, Ken. Let's go on up the hill and see what things look like from
there."

They
started out together as the door opened and Commander Walker roared at them:
"We're going to have some more rain this morning if that Weather Bureau
can find enough brains to get those clouds back here. Better not go far. Stay
in range of the old house on the island. The forecasters are probably mad
enough to give it all in one bucketful. And I'll sue if they cost me any
topsoil!"