R is for Rocket

“But there’s still another reason. It’s psychological, too. Half the fun of being a kid is being able to lord it over the other guys, by being superior in some way. We take half the fun out of Astronaut selection by strictly forbidding you to tell your pals. Then, we’ll know if you wanted to go into space for frivolous reasons, or for space itself. If you’re in it for personal conceit—you’re damned. If you’re in it because you can’t help being in it and have to be in it—you’re blessed.”

He nodded to my mother. “Thank you, Mrs. Christopher.”

“Sir,” I said. “A question. I have a friend. Ralph Priory. He lives at an ortho-station—”

Trent nodded. “I can’t tell you his rating, of course, but he’s on our list. He’s your buddy? You want him along, of course. I’ll check his record. Station-bred, you say? That’s not good. But—we’ll see.”

“If you would, please, thanks.”

“Report to me at the Rocket Station Saturday afternoon at five, Mr. Christopher. Meantime: silence.”

He saluted. He walked off. He went away in the helicopter into the sky, and Mother was beside me quickly, saying, “Oh, Chris, Chris,” over and over, and we held to each other and whispered and talked and she said many things, how good this was going to be for us, but especially for me, how fine, what an honor it was, like the old old days when men fasted and took vows and joined churches and stopped up their tongues and were silent and prayed to be worthy and to live well as monks and priests of many churches in far places, and came forth and moved in the world and lived as examples and taught well. It was no different now, this was a greater priesthood, in a way, she said, she inferred, she knew, and I was to be some small part of it, I would not be hers any more, I would belong to all the worlds, I would be all the things my father wanted to be and never lived or had a chance to be.…

“Darn rights, darn rights,” I murmured. “I will, I promise I will …”

I caught my voice. “Jhene—how—how will we tell Ralph? What about him?”

“You’re going away, that’s all, Chris. Tell him that. Very simply. Tell him no more. He’ll understand.”

“But, Jhene, you—”

She smiled softly. “Yes, I’ll be lonely, Chris. But I’ll have my work and I’ll have Ralph.”

“You mean …”

“I’m taking him from the ortho-station. He’ll live here, when you’re gone. That’s what you wanted me to say, isn’t it, Chris?”

I nodded, all paralyzed and strange inside.

“That’s exactly what I wanted you to say.”

“He’ll be a good son, Chris. Almost as good as you.”

“He’ll be fine!”

We told Ralph Priory. How I was going away maybe to school in Europe for a year and how Mother wanted him to come live as her son, now, until such time as I came back. We said it quick and fast, as if it burned our tongues. And when we finished, Ralph came and shook my hand and kissed my mother on the cheek and he said:

“I’ll be proud. I’ll be very proud.”

It was funny, but Ralph didn’t even ask any more about why I was going, or where, or how long I would be away. All he would say was, “We had a lot of fun, didn’t we?” and let it go at that, as if he didn’t dare say any more.

It was Friday night, after a concert at the amphitheater in the center of our public circle, and Priory and Jhene and I came home, laughing, ready to go to bed.

I hadn’t packed anything. Priory noted this briefly, and let it go. All of my personal supplies for the next eight years would be supplied by someone else. No need for packing.

My semantics teacher called on the audio, smiling and saying a very brief, pleasant good-bye.

Then, we went to bed, and I kept thinking in the hour before I lolled off, about how this was the last night with Jhene and Ralph. The very last night.

Only a kid of fifteen—me.

And then, in the darkness, just before I went to sleep, Priory twisted softly on his cushion, turned his solemn face to me, and whispered, “Chris?” A pause. “Chris. You still awake?” It was like a faint echo.

“Yes,” I said.

“Thinking?”

A pause.

“Yes.”

He said, “You’re—You’re not waiting any more, are you, Chris?”

I knew what he meant. I couldn’t answer.

I said, “I’m awfully tired, Ralph.”

He twisted back and settled down and said, “That’s what I thought. You’re not waiting any more. Gosh, but that’s good, Chris. That’s good.”

He reached out and punched me in the arm-muscle, lightly.

Then we both went to sleep.

It was Saturday morning. The kids were yelling outside. Their voices filled the seven o’clock fog. I heard Old Man Wickard’s ventilator flip open and the zip of his para-gun, playfully touching around the kids.

“Shut up!” I heard him cry, but he didn’t sound grouchy. It was a regular Saturday game with him. And I heard the kids giggle.

Priory woke up and said, “Shall I tell them, Chris, you’re not going with them today?”

“Tell them nothing of the sort.” Jhene moved from the door. She bent out the window, her hair all light against a ribbon of fog. “Hi, gang! Ralph and Chris will be right down. Hold gravity!”

“Jhene!” I cried.

She came over to both of us. “You’re going to spend your Saturday the way you always spend it—with the gang!”

“I planned on sticking with you, Jhene.”

“What sort of holiday would that be, now?”

She ran us through our breakfast, kissed us on the cheeks, and forced us out the door into the gang’s arms.

“Let’s not go out to the Rocket Port today, guys.”

“Aw, Chris—why not?”

Their faces did a lot of changes. This was the first time in history I hadn’t wanted to go. “You’re kidding, Chris.”

“Sure he is.”

“No, he’s not. He means it,” said Priory. “And I don’t want to go either. We go every Saturday. It gets tiresome. We can go next week instead.”

“Aw …”

They didn’t like it, but they didn’t go off by themselves. It was no fun, they said, without us.

“What the heck—we’ll go next week.”

“Sure we will. What do you want to do, Chris?”

I told them.

We spent the morning playing Kick the Can and some games we’d given up a long time ago, and we hiked out along some old rusty and abandoned railroad tracks and walked in a small woods outside town and photographed some birds and went swimming raw, and all the time I kept thinking—this is the last day.

We did everything we had ever done before on Saturday. All the silly crazy things, and nobody knew I was going away except Ralph, and five o’clock kept getting nearer and nearer.

At four, I said good-bye to the kids.

“Leaving so soon, Chris? What about tonight?”

“Call for me at eight,” I said. “We’ll go see the new Sally Gibberts picture!”

“Swell.”

“Cut gravity!”

And Ralph and I went home.

Mother wasn’t there, but she had left part of herself, her smile and her voice and her words on a spool of audio-film on my bed. I inserted it in the viewer and threw the picture on the wall. Soft yellow hair, her white face and her quiet words:

“I hate good-byes, Chris. I’ve gone to the laboratory to do some extra work. Good luck. All of my love. When I see you again—you’ll be a man.”

That was all.

Priory waited outside while I saw it over four times. “I hate good-byes, Chris. I’ve gone … work.… luck. All … my love.…”

I had made a film-spool myself the night before. I spotted it in the viewer and left it there. It only said good-bye.

Priory walked halfway with me. I wouldn’t let him get on the Rocket Port monorail with me. I just shook his hand, tight, and said, “It was fun today, Ralph.”

“Yeah. Well, see you next Saturday, huh, Chris?”

“I wish I could say yes.”

“Say yes anyway. Next Saturday—the woods, the gang, the rockets, and Old Man Wickard and his trusty para-gun.”

We laughed. “Sure. Next Saturday, early. Take—Take care of our mother, will you, Priory?”

“That’s a silly question, you nut,” he said.

“It is, isn’t it?”

He swallowed. “Chris.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll be waiting. Just like you waited and don’t have to wait any more. I’ll wait.”

“Maybe it won’t be long, Priory. I hope not.”

I jabbed him, once, in the arm. He jabbed back.

The monorail door sealed. The car hurled itself away, and Priory was left behind.

I stepped out at the Port. It was a five-hundred-yard walk down to the Administration building. It took me ten years to walk it.

“Next time I see you you’ll be a man—”

“Don’t tell anybody—”

“I’ll wait, Chris—”

It was all choked in my heart and it wouldn’t go away and it swam around in my eyes.

I thought about my dreams. The Moon Rocket. It won’t be part of me, part of my dream any longer. I’ll be part of it.

I felt small there, walking, walking, walking.

The afternoon rocket to London was just taking off as I went down the ramp to the office. It shivered the ground and it shivered and thrilled my heart.

I was beginning to grow up awfully fast.

I stood watching the rocket until someone snapped their heels, cracked me a quick salute.

I was numb.

“C. M. Christopher?”

“Yes, sir. Reporting, sir.”

“This way, Christopher. Through that gate.”

Through that gate and beyond the fence …

This fence where we had pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go …

This fence where had stood the boys who liked being boys who lived in a town and liked the town and fairly liked school and liked football and liked their fathers and mothers …

The boys who some time every hour of every day of every week thought on fire and stars and the fence beyond which they waited.… The boys who liked the rockets more.

Mother, Ralph, I’ll see you. I’ll be back.

Mother!

Ralph!

And, walking, I went beyond the fence.

The End of the Beginning

He stopped the lawn mower in the middle of the yard, because he felt that the sun at just that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut grass that had showered his face and body died softly away. Yes, the stars were there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He heard the porch screen door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as he watched the night.

“Almost time,” she said.

He nodded; he did not have to check his watch. In the passing moments he felt very old, then very young, very cold, then very warm, now this, now that. Suddenly he was miles away. He was his own son talking steadily, moving briskly to cover his pounding heart and the resurgent panics as he felt himself slip into fresh uniform, check food supplies, oxygen flasks, pressure helmet, space-suiting, and turn as every man on earth tonight turned, to gaze at the swiftly filling sky.

Then, quickly, he was back, once more the father of the son, hands gripped to the lawn-mower handle. His wife called, “Come sit on the porch.”

“I’ve got to keep busy!”

She came down the steps and across the lawn. “Don’t worry about Robert; he’ll be all right.”

“But it’s all so new,” he heard himself say. “It’s never been done before. Think of it—a manned rocket going up tonight to build the first space station. Good Lord, it can’t be done, it doesn’t exist, there’s no rocket, no proving ground, no takeoff time, no technicians. For that matter, I don’t even have a son named Bob. The whole thing’s too much for me!”

“Then what are you doing out here, staring?”

He shook his head. “Well, late this morning, walking to the office, I heard someone laugh out loud. It shocked me, so I froze in the middle of the street. It was me, laughing! Why? Because finally I really knew what Bob was going to do tonight; at last I believed it. Holy is a word I never use, but that’s how I felt stranded in all that traffic. Then, middle of the afternoon I caught myself humming. You know the song. ‘A wheel in a wheel. Way in the middle of the air.’ I laughed again. The space station, of course, I thought. The big wheel with hollow spokes where Bob’ll live six or eight months, then get on back. Walking home, I remembered more of the song. ‘Little wheel run by faith, Big wheel run by the grace of God.’ I wanted to jump, yell, and flame-out myself!”

His wife touched his arm. “If we stay out here, let’s at least be comfortable.”

They placed two wicker rockers in the center of the lawn and sat quietly as the stars dissolved out of darkness in pale crushings of rock salt strewn from horizon to horizon.

“Why,” said his wife, at last, “it’s like waiting for the fireworks at Sisley Field every year.”

“Bigger crowd tonight …”

“I keep thinking—a billion people watching the sky right now, their mouths all open at the same time.”

They waited, feeling the earth move under their chairs.

“What time is it now?”

“Eleven minutes to eight.”

“You’re always right; there must be a clock in your head.”

“I can’t be wrong, tonight. I’ll be able to tell you one second before they blast off. Look! The ten-minute warning!”

On the western sky they saw four crimson flares open out, float shimmering down the wind above the desert, then sink silently to the extinguishing earth.

In the new darkness the husband and wife did not rock in their chairs.

After a while he said, “Eight minutes.” A pause. “Seven minutes.” What seemed a much longer pause. “Six …”

His wife, her head back, studied the stars immediately above her and murmured, “Why?” She closed her eyes. “Why the rockets, why tonight? Why all this? I’d like to know.”

He examined her face, pale in the vast powdering light of the Milky Way. He felt the stirring of an answer, but let his wife continue.

“I mean it’s not that old thing again, is it, when people asked why men climbed Mt. Everest and they said, ‘Because it’s there.’ I never understood. That was no answer to me.”

Five minutes, he thought. Time ticking … his wristwatch … a wheel in a wheel … little wheel run by … big wheel run by … way in the middle of … four minutes! … The men snug in the rocket by now, the hive, the control board flickering with light.…

His lips moved.

“All I know is it’s really the end of the beginning. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age; from now on we’ll lump all those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth and heard the birds at morning and cried with envy. Maybe we’ll call it the Earth Age, or maybe the Age of Gravity. Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine, tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling. A billion years Gravity kept us home, mocked us with wind and clouds, cabbage moths and locusts. That’s what’s so really big about tonight … it’s the end of old man Gravity and the age we’ll remember him by, for once and all. I don’t know where they’ll divide the ages, at the Persians, who dreamt of flying carpets, or the Chinese, who all unknowing celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets, or some minute, some incredible second in the next hour. But we’re in at the end of a billion years trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway, honorable.”

Three minutes … two minutes fifty-nine seconds … two minutes fifty-eight seconds …

“But,” said his wife, “I still don’t know why.”

Two minutes, he thought. Ready? Ready? Ready? The far radio voice calling. Ready! Ready! Ready! The quick, faint replies from the humming rocket. Check! Check! Check!

Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we’ll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and later, all the stars. We’ll just keep going until the big words like immortal and forever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that’s what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved in our mouths we’ve asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, forever. Individuals will die as always, but our history will reach as far as we’ll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we’ll know security and thus the answer we’ve always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is preserve and pass on the gift to infinity. That’s a goal worth shooting for.

The wicker chairs whispered ever so softly on the grass.

One minute.

“One minute,” he said aloud.

“Oh!” His wife moved suddenly to seize his hands. “I hope that Bob …”

“He’ll be all right!”

“Oh, God, take care …”

Thirty seconds.

“Watch now.”

Fifteen, ten, five …

“Watch!”

Four, three, two, one.

“There! There! Oh, there, there!”

They both cried out. They both stood. The chairs toppled back, fell flat on the lawn. The man and his wife swayed, their hands struggled to find each other, grip, hold. They saw the brightening color in the sky and, ten seconds later, the great uprising comet bum the air, put out the stars, and rush away in fire flight to become another star in the returning profusion of the Milky Way. The man and wife held each other as if they had stumbled on the rim of an incredible cliff that faced an abyss so deep and dark there seemed no end to it. Staring up, they heard themselves sobbing and crying. Only after a long time were they able to speak.

“It got away, it did, didn’t it?”

“Yes …”

“It’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Yes … yes …”

“It didn’t fall back …?”

“No, no, it’s all right, Bob’s all right, it’s all right.”

They stood away from each other at last.

He touched his face with his hand and looked at his wet fingers. “I’ll be,” he said, “I’ll be.…”

They waited another five and then ten minutes until the darkness in their heads, the retina, ached with a million specks of fiery salt. Then they had to close their eyes.

“Well,” she said, “now let’s go in.”

He could not move. Only his hand reached a long way out by itself to find the lawn-mower handle. He saw what his hand had done and said, “There’s just a little more to do.…”

“But you can’t see.”

“Well enough,” he said. “I must finish this. Then we’ll sit on the porch awhile before we turn in.”

He helped her put the chairs on the porch and sat her down and then walked back out to put his hands on the guide bar of the lawn mower. The lawn mower. A wheel in a wheel. A simple machine which you held in your hands, which you sent on ahead with a rush and a clatter while you walked behind with your quiet philosophy. Racket, followed by warm silence. Whirling wheel, then soft footfall of thought.

I’m a billion years old, he told himself; I’m one minute old. I’m one inch, no, ten thousand miles, tall. I look down and can’t see my feet they’re so far off and gone away below.

He moved the lawn mower. The grass showering up fell softly around him; he relished and savored it and felt that he was all mankind bathing at last in the fresh waters of the fountain of youth.

Thus bathed, he remembered the song again about the wheels and the faith and the grace of God being way up there in the middle of the sky where that single star, among a million motionless stars, dared to move and keep on moving.

Then he finished cutting the grass.

The Fog Horn

Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the gray sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

“It’s a lonely life, but you’re used to it now, aren’t you?” asked McDunn.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re a good talker, thank the Lord.”

“Well, it’s your turn on land tomorrow,” he said, smiling, “to dance the ladies and drink gin.”

“What do you think, McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?”

“On the mysteries of the sea.” McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn’t a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

“The mysteries of the sea,” said McDunn thoughtfully. “You know, the ocean’s the most confounded big snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colors, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock’s tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don’t you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?”

I shivered. I looked out at the long gray lawn of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.

“Oh, the sea’s full.” McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn’t said why. “For all our engines and so-called submarines, it’ll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real terror. Think of it, it’s still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we’ve paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other’s countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet.”

“Yes, it’s an old world.”

“Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell you.”

We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there’d be no reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.

“Sounds like an animal, don’t it?” McDunn nodded to himself. “A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years called out to the Deeps, I’m here, I’m here, I’m here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year,” he said, studying the murk and fog, “something comes to visit the lighthouse.”

“The swarms of fish like you said?”

“No, this is something else. I’ve put off telling you because you might think I’m daft. But tonight’s the latest I can put it off, for if my calendar’s marked right from last year, tonight’s the night it comes. I won’t go into detail, you’ll have to see it yourself. Just sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat in to land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights. I won’t question or blame you. It’s happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone’s been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch.”