R Is for Rocket

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 le
ver, 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.

  "Stop!" Sim held out his hands. "I come from the ship!"

  "The ship?" The people slowed. Dark clung to him, looking up into his young face, puzzling over its smoothness.

  "Kill him, kill him, kill him!" croaked the old man, and picked up another rock.

  "I offer you ten days, twenty days, thirty more days of life!"

  The people stopped. Their mouths hung open. Their eyes were incredulous.

  "Thirty days?" It was repeated again and again. "How?"

  "Come back to the ship with me. Inside it, one can live forever!"

  The old man lifted high a rock, then, choking, fell forward in an apoplectic fit, and tumbled down the rocks to lie at Sim's feet.

  Sim bent to peer at the ancient one, at the raw, dead eyes, the loose, sneering lips, the crumpled, quiet body.

  "Chion!"

  "Yes," said Dark behind him, in a croaking, strange voice. "Your enemy. Chion."

  That night two hundred men started for the ship. The water ran in the new channel. One hundred of them were drowned or lost behind in the cold. The others, with Sim got through to the ship.

  Lyte awaited them, and threw wide the metal door.

  The weeks passed. Generations lived and died in the cliffs, while the scientists and workers labored over the ship, learning its functions and its parts.

  On the last day, two dozen men moved to their stations within the ship. Now there was a destiny of travel ahead.

  Sim touched the control plates under his fingers.

  Lyte, rubbing her eyes, came and sat on the floor next to him, resting her head against his knee, drowsily. "I had a dream," she said, looking off at something far away. "I dreamed I lived in caves in a cliff on a cold-hot planet where people grew old and died in eight days."

  "What an impossible dream," said Sim. "People couldn't possibly live in such a nightmare. Forget it. You're awake now."

  He touched the plates gently. The ship rose and moved into space.

  Sim was right.

  The nightmare was over at last.

  UNCLE EINAR

  "It will take only a minute," said Uncle Einar's sweet wife.

  "I refuse," he said. "And that takes but a second."

  "I've worked all morning," she said, holding to her slender back, "and you won't help? It's drumming for a rain."

  "Let it rain," he cried, morosely. "I'll not be pierced by lightning just to air your clothes."

  "But you're so quick at it."

  "Again, I refuse." His vast tarpaulin wings hummed nervously behind his indignant back.

  She gave him a slender rope on which were tied four dozen fresh-washed clothes. He turned it in his fingers with distaste. "So it's come to this," he muttered, bitterly. "To this, to this, to this." He almost wept angry and acid tears.

  "Don't cry; you'll wet them down again," she said. "Jump up, now, run them about."

  "Run them about." His voice was hollow, deep, and terribly wounded. "I say: let it thunder, let it pour!"

  "If it was a nice, sunny day I wouldn't ask," she said, reasonably. "All my washing gone for nothing if you don't. They'll hang about the house - "

  That did it. Above all, he hated clothes flagged and festooned so a man had to creep under on the way across a room. He jumped up. His vast green wings boomed. "Only so far as the pasture fence!"

  Whirl: up he jumped, his wings chewed and loved the cool air. Before you'd say Uncle Einar Has Green Wings he sailed low across his farmland, trailing the clothes in a vast fluttering loop through the pounding concussion and backwash of his wings!

  "Catch!"

  Back from the trip, he sailed the clothes, dry as popcorn, down on a series of clean blankets she'd spread for their landing.

  "Thank you!" she cried.

  "Gahh!" he shouted, and flew off under the apple tree to brood.

  Uncle Einar's beautiful silk-like wings hung like sea-green sails behind him, and whirred and whispered from his shoulders when he sneezed or turned swiftly. He was one of the few in the Family whose talent was visible. All his dark cousins and nephews and brothers hid in small towns across the world, did unseen mental things or things with witch-fingers and white teeth, or blew down the sky like fire-leaves, or loped in forests like moon-silvered wolves. They lived comparatively safe from normal humans. Not so a man with great green wings.

  Not that he hated his wings. Far from it! In his youth he'd always flown nights, because nights were rare times for winged men! Daylight held dangers, always had, always would; but nights, ah, nights, he had sailed over islands of cloud and seas of summer sky. With no danger to himself. It had been a rich, full soaring, an exhilaration.

  But now he could not fly at night.

  On his way home to some high mountain pass in Europe after a Homecoming among Family members in Mellin Town, Illinois (some years ago) he had drunk too much rich crimson wine. "I'll be all right," he had told himself, vaguely, as he beat his long way under the morning stars, over the moon-dreaming country hills beyond Mellin Town. And then - crack out of the sky -

  A high-tension tower.

  Like a netted duck
! A great sizzle! His face blown black by a blue sparkler of wire, he fended off the electricity with a terrific back-jumping percussion of his wings, and fell.

  His hitting the moonlit meadow under the tower made a noise like a large telephone book dropped from the sky.

  Early the next morning, his dew-sodden wings shaking violently, he stood up. It was still dark. There was a faint bandage of dawn stretched across the east. Soon the bandage would stain and all flight would be restricted. There was nothing to do but take refuge in the forest and wait out the day in the deepest thicket until another night gave his wings a hidden motion in the sky.

  In this fashion he met his wife.

  During the day, which was warm for November first in Illinois country, pretty young Brunilla Wexley was out to udder a lost cow, for she carried a silver pail in one hand as she sidled through thickets and pleaded cleverly to the unseen cow to please return home or burst her gut with unplucked milk. The fact that the cow would have most certainly come home when her teats really needed pulling did not concern Brunilla Wexley. It was a sweet excuse for forest-journeying, thistle-blowing, and flower chewing; all of which Brunilla was doing as she stumbled upon Uncle Einar.

  Asleep near a bush, he seemed a man under a green shelter.

  "Oh," said Brunilla, with a fever. "A man. In a camp-tent."

  Uncle Einar awoke. The camp-tent spread like a large green fan behind him.

  "Oh," said Brunilla, the cow-searcher. "A man with wings."

  That was how she took it. She was startled, yes, but she had never been hurt in her life, so she wasn't afraid of anyone, and it was a fancy thing to see a winged man and she was proud to meet him. She began to talk. In an hour they were old friends, and in two hours she'd quite forgotten his wings were there. And he somehow confessed how he happened to be in this wood.

  "Yes, I noticed you looked banged around," she said. "That right wing looks very bad. You'd best let me take you home and fix it. You won't be able to fly all the way to Europe on it, anyway. And who wants to live in Europe these days?"

  He thanked her, but he didn't quite see how he could accept.

  "But I live alone," she said. "For, as you see, I'm quite ugly."

  He insisted she was not.

  "How kind of you," she said. "But I am, there's no fooling myself. My folks are dead, I've a farm, a big one, all to myself, quite far from Mellin Town, and I'm in need of talking company."

  But wasn't she afraid of him? he asked.

  "Proud and jealous would be more near it," she said. "May I?" And she stroked his large green membraned veils with careful envy. He shuddered at the touch and put his tongue between his teeth.

  So there was nothing for it but that he come to her house for medicaments and ointments, and my! what a burn across his face, beneath his eyes! "Lucky you weren't blinded," she said. "How'd it happen?"

  "Well. . ." he said, and they at her farm, hardly noticing they'd walked a mile, looking at each other.