R Is for Rocket

She just looked at me. She took my hand between her two soft warm ones. "You're so young, Chris. You're so awfully young."

  I didn't speak.

  Her eyes brightened. "You never knew your father. I wish you had. You know what he was, Chris?"

  I said, "Yeah. He worked in a Chemistry Lab, deep underground most of the time."

  And, my mother added, strangely, "He worked deep under the ground, Chris, and never saw the stars."

  My heart yelled in my chest. Yelled loud and hard.

  "Oh, Mother. Mother - "

  It was the first time in years I had called her mother.

  When I woke the next morning there was a lot of sunlight in the room, but the cushion where Priory slept when he stayed over, was vacant. I listened. I didn't hear him splashing in the shower-cube, and the dryer wasn't humming. He was gone.

  I found his note pinned on the sliding door.

  "See you at formula at noon. Your mother wanted me to do some work for her. She got a call this morning, and said she needed me to help. So long. Priory."

  Priory out running errands for Jhene. Strange. A call in the early morning to Jhene. I went back and sat down on the cushion.

  While I was sitting there a bunch of the kids yelled down on the lawn-court. "Hey, Chris! You're late!"

  I stuck my head out the window. "Be right down!"

  "No, Chris."

  My mother's voice. It was quiet and it had something funny in it. I turned around. She was standing in the doorway behind me, her face pale, drawn, full of some small pain. "No, Chris," she said again, softly. "Tell them to go on to formula without you - today."

  The kids were still making noise downstairs, I guess, but I didn't hear them. I just felt myself and my mother, slim and pale and restrained in my room. Far off, the weather-control vibrators started to hum and throb.

  I turned slowly and looked down at the kids. The three of them were looking up, lips parted casually, half-smiling, semantic-tabs in their knotty fingers. "Hey - " one of them said. Sidney, it was.

  "Sorry, Sid. Sorry, gang. Go on without me. I can't go to formula today. See you later, huh?"

  "Aw, Chris!"

  "Sick?"

  "No. Just - Just go on without me, gang. I'll see you."

  I felt numb. I turned away from their upturned, questioning faces and glanced at the door. Mother wasn't there. She had gone downstairs, quietly. I heard the kids moving off, not quite as boisterously, toward the monorail station.

  Instead of using the vac-elevator, I walked slowly downstairs. "Jhene," I said, "where's Ralph?"

  Jhene pretended to be interested in combing her long light hair with a vibro-toothed comb. "I sent him off. I didn't want him here this morning."

  "Why am I staying home from formula, Jhene?"

  "Chris, please don't ask."

  Before I could say anything else, there was a sound in the air. It cut through the very soundproofed wall of the house, and hummed in my marrow, quick and high as an arrow of glittering music.

  I swallowed. All the fear and uncertainty and doubt went away, instantly.

  When I heard that note, I thought of Ralph Priory. Oh Ralph, if you could be here now. I couldn't believe the truth of it. Hearing that note and hearing it with my whole body and soul as well as with my ears.

  It came closer, that sound. I was afraid it would go away. But it didn't go away. It lowered its pitch and came down outside the house in great whirling petals of light and shadow and I knew it was a helicopter the color of the sky. It stopped humming, and in the silence my mother tensed forward, dropped the vibro-comb and took in her breath.

  In that silence, too, I heard booted footsteps walking up the ramp below. Footsteps that I had waited for a long time.

  Footsteps I was afraid would never come.

  Somebody touched the bell.

  And I knew who it was.

  And all I could think was, Ralph, why in heck did you have to go away now, when all this is happening? Blast it, Ralph, why did you?

  The man looked as if he had been born in his uniform. It fitted like a second layer of salt-colored skin, touched here and there with a line, a dot of blue. As simple and perfect a uniform as could be made, but with all the muscled power of the universe behind it.

  His name was Trent. He spoke firmly, with a natural round perfection, directly to the subject.

  I stood there, and my mother was on the far side of the room, looking like a bewildered little girl. I stood listening.

  Out of all the talking I remember some of the snatches:

  ". . . highest grades, high IQ. Perception A-1, curiosity Triple-A. Enthusiasm necessary to the long, eight-year educational grind. . . ."

  "Yes, sir."

  ". . . talks with your semantics and psychology teachers - "

  "Yes, sir."

  ". . . and don't forget, Mr. Christopher . . ."

  Mister Christopher!

  ". . . and don't forget, Mr. Christopher, nobody is to know you have been selected by the Astronaut Board."

  "No one?"

  "Your mother and teacher know, naturally. But no other person must know. Is that perfectly understood?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Trent smiled quietly, standing there with his big hands at his sides. "You want to ask why, don't you? Why you can't tell your friends? I'll explain.

  "It's a form of psychological protection. We select about ten thousand young men each year from the earth's billions. Out of that number three thousand wind up, eight years later, as spacemen of one sort or another. The others must return to society. They've flunked out, but there's no reason for everyone to know. They usually flunk out, if they're going to flunk, in the first six months. And it's tough to go back and face your friends and say you couldn't make the grade at the biggest job in the world. So we make it easy to go back.

  "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 a
bout 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 picturel"

  "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 arid 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."