Murph was a man to be admired, Pete knew,
for Murph had a silver rocket and a passport to
the stars. Now Murph had promised him a ride....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1957
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Careful to keep trees and bushes between himself and the cottage, theboy legged it across the fields toward the glass rocket poised inJohnson's pasture, glittering and slim like a dark, slender dancer. ToPete it was all the promise in the world distilled into a pointed blackglass bottle. But to the women in the cottage....
He glanced back. Apparently they hadn't seen him. He had to hurry,because he had something to ask Murph Vanderpool, the rocketman, andsometime tomorrow the rocket would be gone.
His grandmother and his mother would be glad when it was gone. To themit was a monstrous and terrible symbol of something, and, like an evilwoman, most terrible because of its beauty.
"Just can't get away from them," his grandmother had said at lunch,gazing irefully out the window toward where it stood. She was astiffbacked old lady with a valentine face where something wintry mixedwith something mild. "I moved out here on the edge of a little town andthought I'd got away from 'em—and the television's full of 'em—andthe magazines full of 'em—and now this barnstormer sets one downpractically in the backyard!"
Pete curled his brows in a way that made the women remember his father."What's wrong with rockets, Grammy?"
"No reason for them! No reason for men to want to go way off hundredsof miles from earth, getting lost, getting killed! We had jets—weshould have been satisfied."
She sighed, and her daughter-in-law echoed it. Looking out the windowtheir thoughts ran to space and rockets and their men, who had beenrocketmen and who would never come back. What was left of them wasstill out there, moving eternally through lonesome space in straightlines or circling some dead moon or planet. The gray-haired woman'sthoughts ran to the husband torn and destroyed when the early test shipburst on the moon-run, and the other woman's mind reached grievingtoward her own husband, the gray-haired woman's son, whose ship hadturned in an instant to a molten glob when its white metal coatingsuddenly peeled and it took the full, brutal hammer of the sun.
The younger ran her fingers through Pete's spiky hair. "Petey, you'renot to see that barnstormer any more."
"Aw—fooher! Fooner!"
His grandmother raised her hands. "Where do they pick up that awfulslang?"
Pete scowled out the window, thinking of the rocket, the knobs andslings and dials within it, the feel of speed and space and war aboutit, the slash-grinned young god who rode it. He had something to askMurph.
"Aw fooner," he muttered.
His mother swung him to her lap. "Shall we tell him about the surprise?"
Pete thought he caught something odd—a nearly invisible craft orknowingness—in the glance they traded.
"You didn't get much for your birthday last week, Pete," his motherbeamed, "so we decided to give you a kind of late birthday party.You're going to have that picnic on Indian Hill. It'll be an all-daypicnic, with all the youngsters you know, hunting for arrowheads andrelics. We're going in Mr. Fobey's copter."
"Oh boy! Indian Hill! At last!" Then he sobered, thinking of paunchy,bland-faced, nervous Mr. Fobey.
"Will Fobey bring his air sluice?"
"He says he will."
"All right then. Indian Hill! Whoopee!"
He kissed them, and went larking t