Ringing quiet came down and she caught up Toby, held him tight, tight...
"Perfect!" Gordon Kimberly sighed. "Perfect!"
So if anything was wrong, it hadn"t showed up yet.
She put Toby down, then took his hand. "Come on," she said. "I"ll buy you an ice-cream soda." He grinned at her. He"d been looking very strange all day, but now he looked real again. His hair had gotmessed up when she grabbed him.
"We"re having c.o.c.ktails for the press in the conference room," Kimberly said. "I think we could find something Toby would like."
"Wel-1-1-1..." She didn"t want a c.o.c.ktail, and she didn"t want to talk to the press. "I think maybe we"ll beg off this time..."
"I think there might be some disappointment-" the man started; then Tim O"Heyer came dashing up.
"Come on, babe," he said. "Your old man told me to take personal charge while he was gone." He leered. On him it looked cute. She laughed. Then she looked down at Toby. "What would you rather, Tobe? Want to go out by ourselves, or go to the party?"
"I don"t care," he said.
Tim took the boy"s hand. "What we were thinking of was having a kind of party here, and then I think they"re going to bring some dinner in, and anybody who wants to can stay up till your Daddy gets to the moon. That"ll be pretty late. I guess you wouldn"t want to stay up late like that, would you?"
Somebody else talking to Toby like that would be all wrong, but Tim was a friend, Toby"s friend too.
Ruth still didn"t want to go to the party, but she remembered now that there had been plans for something like that all along, and since Toby was beginning to look eager, and it was important to keep the press on their side...
"You win, O"Heyer," she said. "Will somebody please send out for an ice-cream soda? Cherry syrup, I think it is this week..." She looked inquiringly at her son. "... and... strawberry ice cream?"
Tim shuddered. Toby nodded. Ruth smiled, and they all went in to the party.
"Well, young man!" Toby thought the redheaded man in the brown suit was probably what they called a reporter, but he wasn"t sure. "How about it? You going along next time?"
"I don"t know," Toby said politely. "I guess not."
"Don"t you want to be a famous flier like your Daddy?" a strange woman in an evening gown asked him.
"I don"t know," he muttered, and looked around for his mother, but he couldn"t see her.
They kept asking him questions like that, about whether he wanted to go to the moon. Daddy said he was too little. You"d think all these people would know that much.
Jock Kruger came up swiftly out of dizzying darkness into isolation and clarity. As soon as he could move his head, before he fully remembered why, he began checking the dials and meters and flashing lights on the banked panel in front of him. He was fully aware of the ship, of its needs and strains and motion, before he came to complete consciousness of himself, his weightless body, his purpose, or his memories.
But he was aware of himself as a part of the ship before he remembered his name, so that by the time he knew he had a face and hands and innards, these parts were already occupied with feeding the beast"s human brain a carefully prepared stimulant out of a nippled flask fastened in front of his head.
He pressed a b.u.t.ton under his index finger in the arm rest of the couch that held him strapped to safety.
"Hi," he said. "Is anybody up besides me?"He pressed the b.u.t.ton under his middle finger and waited.
Not for long.
"Thank G.o.d!" a voice crackled out of the loudspeaker. "You really conked out this time, Jock. Nothing wrong?"
"Not so I"d know it. You want... How long was I out?"
"Twenty-three minutes, eighteen seconds, takeoff to reception. Yeah. Give us a log reading."
Methodically, in order, he read off the pointers and numbers on the control panel, the colors and codes and swinging needles and quiet ones that told him how each muscle and nerve and vital organ of the great beast was taking the trip. He did it slowly and with total concentration. Then, when he was all done, there was nothing else to do except sit back and start wondering about that big blackout.
It shouldn"t have happened. It never happened before. There was nothing in the compendium of information he"d just sent back to Earth to account for it.
A different ship, different... different men. Two and a half years different. Years of easy living and...
growing old? Too old for this game?
Twenty-three minutes!
Last time it was under ten. The first time maybe 90 seconds more. It didn"t matter, of course, not at takeoff. There was nothing for him to do then. Nothing now. Nothing for four more hours. He was there to put the beast back down on...
He grinned, and felt like Jock Kruger again. Ident.i.ty returned complete. This time he was there to put the beast down where no man or beast had ever been before. This time they were going to the moon.
CHAPTER THREE.
RUTH KRUGER SIPPED AT A c.o.c.kTAIL and murmured responses to the admiring, the curious, the envious, the hopeful, and the hate-full ones who spoke to her. She was waiting for something, and after an unmeasurable stretch of time Allie Madero brought it to her.
First a big smile seeking her out across the room, so she knew it had come. Then a low-voiced confirmation.
"Wasn"t it... an awfully long time?" she asked. She hadn"t been watching the clock, on purpose, but she was sure it was longer than it should have been.
Allie stopped smiling. "Twenty-three," she said.
Ruth gasped. "What... ?"
"You figure it. I can"t."
"There"s nothing in the ship. I mean nothing was changed that would account for it." She shook her head slowly. This time she didn"t know the ship well enough to talk like that. There could be something. Oh, Jockl "I don"t know," she said. "Too many people worked on that thing. I..."
"Mrs. Kruger!" It was the redheaded reporter, the obnoxious one. "We just got the report on the blackout. I"d like a statement from you, if you don"t mind, as designer of the ship-""I am not the designer of this ship," she said coldly.
"You worked on the design, didn"t you?"
"Yes."
"Well, then, to the best of your knowledge... ?"
"To the best of my knowledge, there is no change in design to account for Mr. Kruger"s prolonged unconsciousness. Had there been any such prognosis, the press would have been informed."
"Mrs. Kruger, I"d like to ask you whether you feel that the innovations made by Mr. Argent could-"
"Aw, lay off, will you?" Allie broke in, trying to be casual and kidding about it; but behind her own flaming cheeks, Ruth was aware of her friend"s matching anger. "How much do you want to milk this for, anyhow? So the guy conked out an extra ten minutes. If you want somebody to crucify for it, why don"t you pick on one of us who doesn"t happen to be married to him?" She turned to Ruth before the man could answer. "Where"s Toby? He"s probably about ready to bust from cookies and carbonation."
"He"s in the lounge," the reporter put in. "Or he was a few minutes-"
Ruth and Allie started off without waiting for the rest. The redhead had been talking to the kid. No telling how many of them were on top of him now.
"I thought Tim was with him," Ruth said hastily, then she thought of something, and turned back long enough to say: "For the record, Mr... uh... I know of no criticism that can be made of any of the work done by Mr. Argent." Then she went to find her son.
There was nothing to do and nothing to see except the instrument meters and dials to check and log and check and log again. Radio stations all around Earth were beamed on him. He could have kibitzed his way to the moon, but he didn"t want to. He was thinking.
Thinking back, and forward, and right in this moment. Thinking of the instant"s stiffness of Ruth"s body when she said she wasn"t scared, and the rambling big house on the hill, and Toby politely agreeing when he offered to bring him back a piece of the moon.
Thinking of Toby growing up some day, and how little he really knew about his son, and what would they do, Toby and Ruth, if anything...
He"d never thought that way before. He"d never thought anything except to know he"d come back, because he couldn"t stay away. It was always that simple. He couldn"t stay away now, either. That hadn"t changed. But as he sat there, silent and useless for the time, it occurred to him that he"d left something out of his calculations. Luck, they"d been talking about. Yes, he"d had luck. But-what was it Sue had said about a vector sum?-there was more to figure in than your own reflexes and the beast"s strength. There was the outside. s.p.a.ce... environment... G.o.d... destiny. What difference does it make what name you give it?
He couldn"t stay away... but maybe he could be kept away.
He"d never thought that way before.
"You tired, honey?"
"No," he said. "I"m just sick of this, party. I want to go home.""It"ll be over pretty soon, Tobe. I "think as long as we stayed this long, we better wait for... for the end of the party."
"It"s a silly party. You said you"d buy me an ice-cream soda."
"I did, darling," she said patiently. "At least, if I didn"t buy it, I got it for you. You had it, didn"t you?"
"Yes, but you said we"d go out and have one."
"Look. Why don"t you just put your head down on my lap and..."
"I"m no babyl Anyhow I"m not tired."
"All right. We"ll go pretty soon. You just sit here on the couch, and you don"t have to talk to anybody if you don"t feel like it. I"ll tell you what. I"ll go find you a magazine or a book or something to look at, and-"
"I don"t want a magazine. I want my own book with the pirates in it."
"You just stay put a minute, so I can find you. I"ll bring you something."
She got up and went out to the other part of the building where the officers were, and collected an a.s.sortments of leaflets and folders with shiny bright pictures of mail rockets and freight transports and jets and visionary moon rocket designs, and took them back to the little lounge where she"d left him.
She looked at the clock on the way. Twenty-seven more minutes. There was no reason to believe that anything was wrong.
They were falling now. A man"s body is not equipped to sense direction toward or from, up or down, without the help of landmarks or gravity. But the body of the beast was designed to know such things; and Kruger, at the nerve center, knew everything the beast knew.
Ship is extension of self, and self is-extension or limitation?-of ship. If Jock Kruger is the center of the universe-remember the late night after the party, and picking Toby off the floor?-then ship is extension of self, and the man is the brain of the beast. But if ship is universe-certainly continuum; that"s universe, isn"t it?-then the weakling man-thing in the couch is a limiting condition of the universe. A human brake.
He was there to make it stop when it didn"t "want" to.
Suppose it wouldn"t stop? Suppose it had decided to be a self-determined, free-willed universe?
Jock grinned, and started setting controls. His time was coming. It was measurable in minutes, and then in seconds... now!
His hand reached for the firing lever (but what was she scared of?), groped, and touched, hesitated, clasped, and pulled.
Grown-up parties at home were fun. But other places, like this one, they were silly. Toby half-woke-up on the way home, enough to realize his Uncle Tim was driving them, and they weren"t in their own car.
He was sitting on the front seat next to his mother, with his head against her side, and her arm around him. He tried to come all the way awake, to listen to what they were saying, but they weren"t talking, so he started to go back to sleep.
Then Uncle Tim said, "For G.o.d"s sake, Ruth, he"s safe, and whatever happened certainly wasn"t your fault. He"s got enough supplies to hold out till...""Shh!" his mother said sharply, and then, whispering, "I know."
Now he remembered.
"Mommy..."
"Yes, hon?"
"Did Daddy go to the moon all right?"
"Y... yes, dear."
Her voice was funny.
"Where is it?"
"Where"s what?"
"The moon."
"Oh. We can"t see it now, darling. It"s around the other side of the earth."
"Well, when is he going to come back?"
Silence.
"Mommy... -when?"
"As soon as... just as soon as he can, darling. Now go to sleep."
And now the moon was up, high in the sky, a gilded football dangling from Somebody"s black serge lapel. When she was a little girl, she used to say she loved the man in the moon, and now the man in the moon loved her too, but if she was a little girl still, somebody would tuck her into bed, and pat her head and tell her to go to sleep, and she would sleep as easy, breathe as soft, as Toby did...
But she wasn"t a little girl, she was all grown up, and she married the man, the man in the moon, and sleep could come and sleep could go, but sleep could never stay with her while the moonwash swept the window panes.
She stood at the open window and wrote a letter in her mind and sent it up the path of light to the man in the moon. It said: "Dear Jock: Tim says it wasn"t my fault, and I can"t explain it even to him. I"m sorry, darling. Please to stay alive till we can get to you. Faithfully yours, Ca.s.sandra."