Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (21 page)

“Oh, well,” he said aloud, “forget it.”

He went back into the house, to his own room, his workroom—he had never called it a study because he didn’t study in it, he only worked—and shut the door and sat down in front of his typewriter. There was a half-written page in it, and six pages of copy beside it, the groping and much x-ed-out unfinished first chapter to the sequel of “Child of a Thousand Suns.” He read the last page, and then the page in the typewriter, and he put his hands on the keyboard.

A very long time later he sighed and began almost mechanically to type.

Later still Sally came in and found him sitting. He had taken that page out of the typewriter but he had not put another one in, and he was just sitting there.

“Troubles?” asked Sally.

“Can’t seem to get the thing going, is all.”

She shook him gently by the shoulder. “Come and have a drink, and then let’s get the hell out of this house for a while.”

She did not often talk like that. He nodded, getting up. “Drive in the country might do us good. And maybe a movie tonight.” Anything at all to get our minds off the fact that tomorrow morning is lift-off if the weather is right. Already Dan has slipped out of our grasp into the strange seclusions of the final briefing.

“Did I urge him?” he said suddenly. “Did I, Sally? Ever?”

She looked at him startled, and then she shook her head decisively. “No, Jim, you never did. He just naturally had to go and do this. So forget it.”

Sure. Forget it.

But Dan did get his horizons stretched young. And who’s to say what minute seed dropped so carelessly along the way, a single word perhaps, written for two cents or one cent or half a cent, and long forgotten, may by devious ways have led the boy to that little steel room atop a skyrocket?

You might as well forget it, for there’s nothing you can do.

They had the drive in the country, and they ate something, and they went to the movie, and then there was nothing to do but go home and go to bed. Sally went to bed, anyway. He did not know if she slept. He himself stayed up, sitting in his workroom alone with his typewriter and a bottle.

All around him on the walls were the framed originals of cover paintings and interior illustrations from his stories. There was one from “Stardream,” written long before Dan was born, showing a beautiful white rocket in space, with Mars in the background. Underneath the pictures were rows of shelves filled with the end results of more than thirty years of writing, marching battalions of yellowing pulps a little frayed at the corners, paperbacks, the respectable hardcovers with their shiny jackets. This room was himself, an outer carapace compounded from his needs and his dreams, the full times when his mind flowered ideas like a spring river and the times of drought when nothing came at all, and always the work which he loved and without which he would cease to be Jim Burnett.

He looked at the empty typewriter and the pages beside it and he thought that if he was going to sit up all night, he ought to go on with the story. What was it that Henry had said, years ago.…“A professional is a writer who can tell a story when he doesn’t feel like telling a story.” That was true, but even for an old pro, there were times.…

At some time during the dark hours Burnett fell asleep on the couch and dreamed that he was standing outside the closed hatch of the capsule, pounding on it and calling Dan’s name. He couldn’t get it open, and he walked angrily around until he could look in through the port and see Dan lying there in the recoil chair, a suited dummy with a glittering plastic head, his gloved hands flicking at rows of toggles and colored levers with a cool unhurried efficiency that was unpleasantly robot-like. “Dan,” he shouted. “Dan, let me in, you can’t go off without me.” Inside the plastic helmet he saw Dan’s head turn briefly, though his hands never stopped from arranging the toggles and levers. He saw Dan’s face smiling at him, a fond but somehow detached smile, and he saw the head shake just a shade impatiently. And he heard Dan answer, “I’m sorry, Dad, I can’t stop now, I’ve got a deadline.” A shield or curtain, or perhaps a cloud of vapor from the liquid hydrogen moved across the port and he couldn’t see Dan anymore, and when he hammered on the hatch again he was unable to strike it hard enough to make the slightest sound.

Without warning, then, he was a long distance away and the rocket was going up, and he was still shouting, “Dan, Dan, let me in!” His voice was swallowed up in thunder. He began to cry with rage and frustration and the sound of his tears was like rain falling.

He woke to find that it was morning and a small thunderstorm was moving through, one of those little indecisive ones that change nothing. He got up rustily, wondering what the hell that dream was all about, and then looked at his watch. A little less than two hours to launch.

He had one quick one to untie the knots in his stomach and then put the bottle away. Whatever happened, he would watch it sober.

Damned queer dream, though. He hadn’t been worried at all, only angry.

Sally was already up and had the coffee on. There were dark smudges under her eyes and the age-lines seemed to stand out clearer this morning than they usually did, not that Sally was old but she wasn’t twenty any more either, and this morning it showed.

“Cheer up,” he said, kissing her. “They’ve done this before, you know. Like eight times, and they haven’t lost anybody yet.” Immediately, superstitiously, he was sorry he had said it. He began to laugh rather too loudly. “If I know Dan,” he said, “if I know that kid, he’s sitting in that capsule cooler than a polar bear’s nose in January, the only man in the country that isn’t…”

He shut up too abruptly, and the phone rang.
The
phone. They had long ago shut off the regular one, silencing the impossible number of relatives and friends and wellwishers and reporters and plain pests, and this one that rang was a private thing between them and the Cape. He picked it up and listened, watching Sally standing frozen in mid-floor with a cup in her hands, and then he said, Thank you, and put it down.

“That was Major Quidley. Everything’s Go except the weather. But they think the cloud-cover will pass. Dan’s fine. He sends his love.”

Sally nodded.

“We’ll know right away if they call off the shot.”

“I hope they don’t,” Sally said flatly. “I don’t think I could start this all over again.”

They took their coffee and went into the living room and turned on the television and there it was, alone and splendid in the midst of the deserted field, the white flanks gleaming softly, touched around with little nervous spurts of vapor, and high above, so high, so small atop that looming shaft, the capsule thrust impatiently toward the clouds.

And Dan was in there, suited, helmeted, locked away now from man and parent earth, waiting, watching the sky and listening for the word that would send him riding the thunder, bridling the lightning with sure hands, out into the still black immensity where the stars.…

Oh, Christ. Word stuff, paper stuff, and that’s neither words nor paper in that goddam little coffin, that’s my son, my kid, my little dirty gap-toothed boy with the torn britches and the scabs on his knees, and he wasn’t ever intended to ride thunder and bridle lightning, no man is. Pulp heroes were all made of wood and they could do it, but Dan’s human and soft and easily broken. He hasn’t any business there, no man has.

And yet in that fool dream I was mad because I couldn’t go too.

T-minus forty and holding. Perhaps they’ll call it off.…

Announcers’ faces, saying this and that, stalling, filling up time, making ponderous statements. Personages making ponderous statements. Faces of people, mobs of people with kids and lunches and bottles of pop and deck chairs and field glasses and tight capri pants and crazy hats that wanted to blow off in the wind, all watching.

“They make me sick at my stomach,” he snarled. “What the hell do they think this is, a picnic?”

“They’re all with us, Jim. They’re pulling for him. And for Shontz.”

Burnett subsided, ashamed. “Okay,” he grumbled, “but do they have to drink orange soda?”

The announcer pushed his headphone closer to his ear and listened. “The count is on again, ladies and gentlemen, T-minus thirty-nine now and counting. All systems are Go, the cloud-cover is beginning to break up, and there comes the sun…”

The announcer vanished and the rocket was there again. The sun struck hard on the white flanks, the sharp uplifted nose.

Dan would feel that striking of the sun.

T-minus thirty and counting.

I wish I could write this instead of watching it, Burnett thought. I’ve written it a hundred, two hundred, times. The ship rising up on the hammering flames, rising steady, rising strong, a white arrow shafting on a tail of fire, and you know when you write it that it’s going to do just that because you say so, and plunge on into the free wide darkness of space and go where you damned well tell her to without any trouble.

T-minus twenty and counting.

I wish, thought Burnett, I wish.…

He did not know what he wished. He sat and stared at the screen, and was only dimly aware when Sally got up from beside him and left the room.

Ten. Nine. And that’s science fiction too, that countdown going backwards, somebody did it in a movie or a story decades ago because he thought it would be a nice touch. And here they are doing it.

With my kid.

Three, two, one, ignition, the white smoke bursting in mushrooming clouds from beneath the rocket, but nothing happening, nothing at all happening. But it is, the whole thing’s starting to rise, only why does it seem so much slower than the others I watched, what’s wrong, what the hell is wrong…

Nothing. Nothing’s wrong, yet. It’s still going up, and maybe it only seems slower than the other times. But where are all the emotions I was sure I was going to feel, after writing it so many times? Why do I just sit here with my eyes bugging and the palms of my hands sweating, shaking a little, not very much but a little…

Through the static roar and the chatter, Dan’s voice cutting in, calm and quick. All systems Go, it looks good, how does it look down there? Good, that’s good…

Burnett felt an unreasonable flash of pure resentment. How can he be so calm about it when we’re sweating our hearts out down here? Doesn’t he give a damn?

“Separation okay…second-stage ignition okay…all okay…” the level voice went on.

And Burnett suddenly knew the answer to his resentful wonder. He’s calm because he’s doing the job he’s trained for. Dan’s the pro, not me. All we writers who daydreamed and babbled and wrote about space, we were just amateurs, but now the real pros have come, the tanned, placid young men who don’t babble about space but who go up and take hold of it…

And the white arrow went on upward, and the voices talked about it, and it was out of sight.

Sally came back into the room.

“It was a perfect shot,” he said. And added, for no reason he could think of, “He’s gone.”

Sally sat down in a chair, not saying anything, and Burnett thought, What kind of dialogue is that for a man who’s just seen his son shot into space?

The voices went on, but the tension was going out of them now, it looks good, it looks very good, it
is
good, they’re on their way…

Burnett reached out and snapped off the television. As though it had been waiting for the silence, the phone rang again.

“You take it, honey,” he said, getting up. “Everything’s okay for now, at least.…I might as well get back to work.”

Sally gave him a smile, the kind of a smile a wife gives her husband when she sees all through his pretenses but wants to tell him, It’s all right, go on pretending, it’s all right with me.

Burnett went into his workroom and closed the door. He took up the bottle in his hands and sat down in his padded chair in front of the typewriter with the empty roller and the neat stack of clean yellow sheets on one side and the thin pile of manuscript on the other. He looked at it, and he turned and looked at the shelves where thirty years of magazines and books and dreams and love and sweat and black disappointment were lined up stiff and still like paper corpses.

“
Your stories surely had some influence on Dan in making the choice of his career?
”

“No,” said Burnett loudly, and drank.

“
Wouldn’t all that sort of urge him into it…your son…going to the Moon…
”

He put the cork in the bottle and set it aside. He stood up and walked to the shelves and stood by them, looking, picking out one thing and then another, the bright covers with the spaceships and the men and girls in their suits and helmets, and the painted stars and planets.

He put them back neatly into their places. His shoulders sagged a little, and then he beat his fist softly against the shelves of silent paper.

“Damn you,” he whispered. “Damn you, damn you…”

Copyright © 1964 by Mercury Publications, Inc.

“The” Pro is included in Edmond Hamilton
Collection,
The Best of Edmond Hamilton
edited by Leigh Brackett