R is for Rocket (2 page)

    "Ralph," I said, as we dressed, "I got a war on."

    "All by yourself?" he asked.

    "I can't include you," I said. "Because this is personal. How many times has my mother said, 'Don't eat so much, Chris, your eyes are bigger than your stomach?'"

    "A million times."

    "
Two
million. Well, paraphrase it, Ralph. Change it to 'Don't
see
so much, Chris, your mind is too big for your body.' I got a war on between a mind that wants things my body can't give it."

    Priory nodded quietly. "I see what you mean about its being a personal war. In that case, Christopher, I'm at war, too."

    "I knew you were," I said. "Somehow I think the other kids'll grow out of it. But I don't think we will, Ralph. I think we'll keep waiting."

    We sat down in the middle of the sunlit upper deck of the house, and started checking over some homework on our formula-pads. Priory couldn't get his. Neither could I. Priory put into words the very thing I didn't dare say out loud.

    "Chris, the Astronaut Board
selects.
You can't apply for it. You
wait
."

    "I know."

    "You wait from the time you're old enough to turn cold in the stomach when you see a Moon rocket, until all the years go by, and every month that passes you hope that one morning a blue Astronaut helicopter will come down out of the sky, land on your lawn, and that a neat-looking engineer will ease out, walk up the rampway briskly, and touch the bell.

    "You keep waiting for that helicopter until you're twenty-one. And then, on the last day of your twentieth year you drink and laugh a lot and say what the heck, you didn't really care about it, anyway."

    We both just sat there, deep in the middle of his words. We both just sat there. Then:

    "I don't want that disappointment, Chris. I'm fifteen, just like you. But if I reach my twenty-first year without an Astronaut ringing the bell where I live at the ortho-station, I — "

    "I know," I said. "I know. I've talked to men who've waited, all for nothing. And if it happens that way to us, Ralph, well — we'll get good and drunk together and then go out and take jobs loading cargo on a Europe-bound freighter."

    Ralph stiffened and his face went pale. "Loading cargo."

    There was a soft, quick step on the ramp and my mother was there. I smiled. "Hi, lady!"

    "Hello. Hello, Ralph."

    "Hello, Jhene."

    She didn't look much older than twenty-five, in spite of having birthed and raised me and worked at the Government Statistics House. She was light and graceful and smiled a lot, and I could see how father must have loved her very much when he was alive. One parent is better than none. Poor Priory, now, raised in one of those orthopedical stations. . . .

    Jhene walked over and put her hand on Ralph's face. "You look ill," she said. "What's wrong?"

    Ralph managed a fairly good smile. "Nothing — at all."

    Jhene didn't need prompting. She said, "You can stay here I tonight, Priory. We want you. Don't we, Chris?"

    "Heck, yes."

    "I should get back to the station," said Ralph, rather feebly, I observed. "But since you asked and Chris here needs help on his semantics for tomorrow, I'll stick and help him."

    "Very generous," I observed.

    "First, though, I've a few errands. I'll take the 'rail and be back in an hour, people."

    When Ralph was gone my mother looked at me intently, then brushed my hair back with a nice little move of her fingers.

    "Something's happening, Chris."

    My heart stopped talking because it didn't want to talk any more for a while. It waited.

    I opened my mouth, but Jhene went on:

    "Something's up somewhere. I had two calls at work today. One from your teacher. One from — I can't say. I don't
want
to say until things happen — "

    My heart started talking again, slow and warm.

    "Don't tell me, then, Jhene. Those calls — "

    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 about 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.