R is for Rocket (24 page)

    The air lock sighed. With a whispering of metal on rubber beddings, the door swung softly sidewise and vanished back.

    He saw Lyte run forward, clutch at her throat, and drop inside a small shiny chamber. He shuffled after her, blankly.

    The air-lock door sealed shut behind him.

    He could not breathe. His heart began to slow, to stop.

    They were trapped inside the ship now, and something was happening. He sank down to his knees and choked for air.

    The ship he had come to for salvation was now slowing his pulse, darkening his brain, poisoning him. With a starved, faint kind of expiring terror, he realized that he was dying.

    Blackness.

    He had a dim sense of time passing, of thinking, struggling, to make his heart go quick, quick. . . . To make his eyes focus. But the fluid in his body lagged quietly through his settling veins and he heard his pulses thud, pause, thud, pause and thud again with lulling intermissions.

    He could not move, not a hand or leg or finger. It was an effort to lift the tonnage of his eyelashes. He could not shift his face even, to see Lyte lying beside him.

    From a distance came her irregular breathing. It was like the sound a wounded bird makes with his dry, unraveled pinions. She was so close he could almost feel the heat of her; yet she seemed a long way removed.

    I'm getting cold! he thought. Is this death? This slowing of blood, of my heart, this cooling of my body, this drowsy thinking of thoughts?

    Staring at the ship's ceiling he traced its intricate system of tubes and machines. The knowledge, the purpose of the ship, its actions, seeped into him. He began to understand in a kind of revealing lassitude just what these things were his eyes rested upon. Slow. Slow.

    There was an instrument with a gleaming white dial.

    Its purpose?

    He drudged away at the problem, like a man underwater.

    People had used the dial. Touched it. People had repaired it. Installed it. People had dreamed of it before the building, before the installing, before the repairing and touching and using. The dial contained memory of use and manufacture, its very shape was a dream-memory telling Sim why and for what it had been built. Given time, looking at anything, he could draw from it the knowledge he desired. Some dim part of him reached out, dissected the contents of things, analyzed them.

    This dial measured time!

    Millions of hours of time!

    But how could that be? Sim's eyes dilated, hot and glittering. Where were humans who needed such an instrument?

    Blood thrummed and beat behind his eyes. He closed them.

    Panic came to him. The day was passing. I am lying here, he thought, and my life slips away. I cannot move. My youth is passing. How long before I can move?

    Through a kind of porthole he saw the night pass, the day come, the day pass, and again another night. Stars danced frostily.

    I will lie here for four or five days, wrinkling and withering, he thought. This ship will not let me move. How much better if I had stayed in my home cliff, lived, enjoyed this short life. What good has it done to come here? I'm missing all the twilights and dawns. I'll never touch Lyte, though she's here at my side.

    Delirium. His mind floated up. His thoughts whirled through the metal ship. He smelled the razor-sharp smell of joined metal. He heard the hull contract with night, relax with day.

    Dawn.

    Already — another dawn!

    Today I would have been fully grown. His jaw clenched. I must get up. I must move. I must enjoy this time.

    But he didn't move. He felt his blood pump sleepily from chamber to red chamber in his heart, on down and around through his dead body, to be purified by his folding and unfolding lungs.

    The ship grew warm. From somewhere a machine clicked. Automatically the temperature cooled. A controlled gust of air flushed the room.

    Night again. And then another day.

    He lay and saw four days of his life pass.

    He did not try to fight. It was no use. His life was over.

    He didn't want to turn his head now. He didn't want to see Lyte with her face like his tortured mother's — eyelids like gray ash flakes, eyes like beaten, sanded metal, cheeks like eroded stones. He didn't want to see a throat like parched thongs of yellow grass, hands the pattern of smoke risen from a fire, breasts like dessicated rinds and hair stubbly and unshorn as moist gray weeds!

    And himself? How did
he
look? Was his jaw sunken, the flesh of his eyes pitted, his brow lined and age-scarred?

    His strength began to return. He felt his heart beating so slow that it was amazing. One hundred beats a minute. Impossible. He felt so cool, so thoughtful, so easy.

    His head fell over to one side. He stared at Lyte. He shouted in surprise.

    She was young and fair.

    She was looking at him, too weak to say anything. Her eyes were like tiny silver medals, her throat curved like the arm of a child. Her hair was blue fire eating at her scalp, fed by the slender life of her body.

    Four days had passed and still she was young . . . no, younger than when they had entered the ship. She was still adolescent.

    He could not believe it.

    Her first words were, "How long will this last?"

    He replied, carefully, "I don't know."

    "We are still young."

    "The ship. Its metal is around us. It cuts away the sun and the things that came from the sun to age us."

    Her eyes shifted thoughtfully. "Then, if we stay here — "

    "We'll remain young."

    "Six more days? Fourteen more? Twenty?"

    "More than that, maybe."

    She lay there, silently. After a long time she said, "Sim?"

    "Yes."

    "Let's stay here. Let's not go back. If we go back now, you know what'll happen to us . . . ?"

    "I'm not certain."

    "We'll start getting old again, won't we?"

    He looked away. He stared at the ceiling and the clock with the moving finger. "Yes. We'll grow old."

    "What if we grow old — instantly. When we step from the ship won't the shock be too much?"

    "Maybe."

    Another silence. He began to move his limbs, testing them. He was very hungry. "The others are waiting," he said.

    Her next words made him gasp. "The others are dead," she said. "Or will be in a few hours. All those we knew back there are old."

    He tried to picture them old. Dark, his sister, bent and senile with time. He shook his head, wiping the picture away. "They may die," he said. "But there are others who've been born."

    "People we don't even know."

    "But, nevertheless,
our
people," he replied. "People who'll live only eight days, or eleven days unless we help them."

    "But we're
young,
Sim! We can
stay
young!"

    He didn't want to listen. It was too tempting a thing to listen to. To stay here. To live. "We've already had more time than the others," he said. "I need workers. Men to heal this ship. We'll get on our feet now, you and I, and find food, eat, and see if the ship is movable. I'm afraid to try to move it myself. It's so big. I'll need help."

    "But that means running back all that distance!"

    "I know." He lifted himself weakly. "But I'll do it."

    "How will you get the men back here?"

    "We'll use the river."

    
"If
it's there. It
may
be somewhere else."

    "We'll wait until there
is
one, then. I've got to go back, Lyte. The son of Dienc is waiting for me, my sister, your brother, are old people, ready to die, and waiting for some word from us — "

    After a long while he heard her move, dragging herself tiredly to him. She put her head upon his chest, her eyes closed, stroking his arm. "I'm sorry. Forgive me. You have to go back. I'm a selfish fool."

    He touched her cheek, clumsily. "You're human. I understand you. There's nothing to forgive."

    They found food. They walked through the ship. It was empty. Only in the control room did they find the remains of a man who must have been the chief pilot. The others had evidently bailed out into space in emergency lifeboats. This pilot, sitting at his controls, alone, had landed the ship on a mountain within sight of other fallen and smashed crafts. Its location on high ground had saved it from the floods. The pilot himself had died, probably of heart failure, soon after landing. The ship had remained here, almost within reach of the other survivors, perfect as an egg, but silent, for — how many thousand days? If the pilot had lived, what a different thing life might have been for the ancestors of Sim and Lyte. Sim, thinking of this, felt the distant, ominous vibration of war. How had the war between worlds come out? Who had won? Or had both planets lost and never bothered trying to pick up survivors? Who had been right? Who was the enemy? Were Sim's people of the guilty or innocent side? They might never know.

    He checked the ship hurriedly. He knew nothing of its workings, yet as he walked its corridors, patted its machines, he learned from it. It needed only a crew. One man couldn't possibly set the whole thing running again. He laid his hand upon one round, snoutlike machine. He jerked his hand away, as if burnt.

    "Lyte!"

    "What is it?"

    He touched the machine again, caressed it, his hand trembled violently, his eyes welled with tears, his mouth opened and closed, he looked at the machine, loving it, then looked at Lyte.

    "With this machine — " he stammered, softly, incredulously. "With — With this machine I can — "

    "What, Sim?"

    He inserted his hand into a cuplike contraption with a lever inside. Out of the porthole in front of him he could see the distant line of cliffs. "We were afraid there might never be another river running by this mountain, weren't we?" he asked, exultantly.

    'Yes, Sim, but — "

    "There
will
be a river. And I
will
come back, tonight! And I'll bring men with me. Five hundred men! Because with this machine I can blast a river bottom all the way to the cliffs, down which the waters will rush, giving myself and the men a swift, sure way of traveling back!" He rubbed the machine's barrellike body. "When I touched it, the life and method of it burnt into me! Watch!" He depressed the lever.

    A beam of incandescent fire lanced out from the ship, screaming.

    Steadily, accurately, Sim began to cut away a riverbed for the storm waters to flow in. The night was turned to day by its hungry eating.

    The return to the cliffs was to be carried out by Sim alone. Lyte was to remain in the ship, in case of any mishap. The trip back seemed, at first glance, to be impossible. There would be no river rushing to cut his time, to sweep him along toward his destination. He would have to run the entire distance in the dawn, and the sun would get him, catch him before he'd reached safety.

    "The only way to do it is to start
before
sunrise."

    "But you'd be frozen, Sim."

    "Here." He made adjustments on the machine that had just finished cutting the riverbed in the rock floor of the valley. He lifted the smooth snout of the gun, pressed the lever, left it down. A gout of fire shot toward the cliffs. He fingered the range control, focused the flame end three miles from its source. Done. He turned to Lyte. "But I don't understand," she said.

    He opened the air-lock door. "It's bitter cold out, and half an hour yet till dawn. If I run parallel to the flame from the machine, close enough to it, there'll not be much heat, but enough to sustain life, anyway."

    "It doesn't sound safe," Lyte protested.

    "
Nothing
does, on this world." He moved forward. "I'll have a half-hour start. That should be enough to reach the cliffs."

    "But if the machine should fail while you're still running near its beam?"

    "Let's not think of that," he said.

    A moment later he was outside. He staggered as if kicked in the stomach. His heart almost exploded in him. The environment of his world forced him into swift living again. He felt his pulse rise, kicking through his veins.

    The night was cold as death. The heat ray from the ship sliced across the valley, humming, solid and warm. He moved next to it, very close. One misstep in his running and —

    "I'll be back," he called to Lyte.

    He and the ray of light went together.

    In the early morning the peoples in the caves saw the long finger of orange incandescence and the weird whitish apparition floating, running along beside it. There was muttering and moaning and many sighs of awe.

    And when Sim finally reached the cliffs of his childhood he saw alien peoples swarming there. There were no familiar faces. Then he realized how foolish it was to expect familiar faces. One of the older men glared down at him. "Who're you?" he shouted. "Are you from the enemy cliff? What's your name?"

    "I am Sim, the son of Sim!"

    "Sim!"

    An old woman shrieked from the cliff above him. She came hobbling down the stone pathway. "Sim, Sim, it
is
you!"

    He looked at her, frankly bewildered. "But I don't know you," he murmured.

    "Sim, don't you recognize me? Oh, Sim, it's me! Dark!"

    "Dark!"

    He felt sick at his stomach. She fell into his arms. This old, trembling woman with the half-blind eyes, his sister.

    Another face appeared above. That of an old man. A cruel, bitter face. It looked down at Sim and snarled. "Drive him away!" cried the old man. "He comes from the cliff of the enemy. He's lived there! He's still young! Those who go there can never come back among us. Disloyal beast!" And a rock hurtled down.

    Sim leaped aside, pulling the old woman with him.

    A roar came from the people. They ran toward Sim, shaking their fists. "Kill him, kill him!" raved the old man, and Sim did not know who he was.