"It was easy," he said over a world-wide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.
MacKenzie was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.
"Ish."
It was MacKenzie, bending over him.
Ish grunted.
"It wasn"t any good was it? You"d done it all before; you"d been there."
He was past emotions. "Yeah?"
"We couldn"t take the chance." MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. "You were the best there was--but you"d done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family.
You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot--nothing else. You"ve never read an adult book that wasn"t a text; you"ve never listened to a symphony except by accident.
You don"t know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. _We couldn"t take the chance, Ish!_"
"So?"
"There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going."
He remembered the time with the _Navion_, and nodded. "I might have."
"I hypnotized you," MacKenzie said. "You were never dead. I don"t know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you"d been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip."
"I said it was easy," Ish said.
"There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?"
"Yeah. _Now get out before I kill you._"
He didn"t live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again--he died on the Station, and was buried in s.p.a.ce, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.