R is for Rocket (8 page)

    I went out and sat beside him.

    We glided awhile in the swing.

    At last I said, "How many ways are there to die in space?"

    "A million."

    "Name some."

    "The meteors hit you. The air goes out of your rocket. Or comets take you along with them. Concussion. Strangulation. Explosion. Centrifugal force. Too much acceleration. Too little. The heat, the cold, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, the asteroids, the planetoids, radiation . . ."

    "And do they bury you?"

    "They never find you."

    "Where do you go?"

    "A billion miles away. Traveling graves, they call them. You become a meteor or a planetoid traveling forever through space."

    I said nothing.

    "One thing," he said later, "it's quick in space. Death. It's over like that. You don't linger. Most of the time you don't even know it. You're dead and that's it."

    We went up to bed.

    It was morning.

    Standing in the doorway, Dad listened to the yellow canary singing in its golden cage.

    "Well, I've decided," he said. "Next time I come home, I'm home to stay."

    "Dad!" I said.

    "Tell your mother that when she gets up," he said.

    "You
mean
it!"

    He nodded gravely. "See you in about three months."

    And there he went off down the street, carrying his uniform in its secret box, whistling and looking at the tall green trees and picking chinaberries off the chinaberry bush as he brushed by, tossing them ahead of him as he walked away into the bright shade of early morning. . . .

    I asked Mother about a few things that morning after Father had been gone a number of hours. "Dad said that sometimes you don't act as if you hear or see him," I said.

    And then she explained everything to me quietly.

    "When he went off into space ten years ago, I said to myself, 'He's dead.' Or as good as dead. So think of him dead. And when he comes back, three or four times a year, it's not him at all, it's only a pleasant little memory or a dream. And if a memory stops or a dream stops, it can't hurt half as much. So most of the time I think of him dead — "

    "But other times — "

    "Other times I can't help myself. I bake pies and treat him as if he were alive, and then it hurts. No, it's better to think he hasn't been here for ten years and I'll never see him again. It doesn't hurt as much."

    "Didn't he say next time he'd settle down?"

    She shook her head slowly. "No, he's dead. I'm very sure of that."

    "He'll come alive again, then," I said.

    "Ten years ago," said Mother, "I thought, What if he dies on Venus? Then we'll never be able to see Venus again. What if he dies on Mars? We'll never be able to look at Mars again, all red in the sky, without wanting to go in and lock the door. Or what if he died on Jupiter or Saturn or Neptune? On those nights when those planets were high in the sky, we wouldn't want to have anything to do with the stars."

    "I guess not," I said.

    The message came the next day.

    The messenger gave it to me and I read it standing on the porch. The sun was setting. Mom stood in the screen door behind me, watching me fold the message and put it in my pocket.

    "Mom," I said.

    "Don't tell me anything I don't already know," she said.

    She didn't cry.

    Well, it wasn't Mars, and it wasn't Venus, and it wasn't Jupiter or Saturn that killed him. We wouldn't have to think of him every time Jupiter or Saturn or Mars lit up the evening sky.

    This was different.

    His ship had fallen into the sun.

    And the sun was big and fiery and merciless, and it was always in the sky and you couldn't get away from it.

    So for a long time after my father died my mother slept through the days and wouldn't go out. We had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the morning, and dinner at the cold dim hour of 6
a.m.
We went to all-night shows and went to bed at sunrise, with all the green dark shades pulled tight down on all the windows.

    And, for a long while, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days when it was raining and there was no sun.

"South," said the captain.

    "But," said his crew, "there are no directions out here in space."

    "When you travel on down toward the sun," replied the captain, "and everything gets yellow and warm and lazy, then you're going in one direction only." He shut his eyes and thought about the smouldering, warm, faraway land, his breath moving gently in his mouth. "South." He nodded slowly to himself. "South."

    Their rocket was the
Copa de Oro,
also named the
Prometheus
and the
Icarus,
and their destination in all reality was the blazing noonday sun. In high good spirits they might almost have packed along two thousand sour lemonades and a thousand white-capped beers for this journey to the wide Sahara. But now as the sun boiled up at them they remembered a score of verses and quotations:

    "'The golden apples of the sun?'"

    "Yeats."

    "Tear no more the heat of the sun?'"

    "Shakespeare, of course!"

    " 'Cup of Gold?' Steinbeck. 'The Crock of Gold?' Stephens.

    And what about the pot of gold at the rainbow's end?
There's
a name for our trajectory! Rainbow!"

    "Temperature?"

    "One thousand degrees Fahrenheit!"

    The captain stared from the huge dark lensed port, and there indeed was the sun, and to go to that sun and touch it and steal part of it forever away was his quiet and single idea. In this ship were combined the coolly delicate and the coldly practical. Through corridors of ice and milk-frost, ammoniated winter and storming snowflakes blew. Any spark from that vast hearth burning out there beyond the callous hull of this ship, any small fire-breath that might seep through would find winter, slumbering here like all the coldest hours of February.

    The audio-thermometer murmured in the arctic silence: "Temperature: two thousand degrees!"

    Falling, thought the captain, like a snowflake into the lap of June, warm July, and the sweltering dog-mad days of August.

    "Three thousand degrees Fahrenheit!"

    Under the snow fields engines raced, refrigerants pumped ten thousand miles per hour in rimed boa-constrictor coils.

    "Four thousand degrees Fahrenheit."

    Noon. Summer. July.

    "Five thousand Fahrenheit!"

    And at last the captain spoke with all the quietness of the journey in his voice:

    "Now, we are touching the sun."

    Their eyes, thinking it, were melted gold.

    "Seven thousand degrees!"

    Strange how a mechanical thermometer could sound excited, though it possessed only an emotionless steel voice.

    "What
time
is it?" asked someone.

    Everyone had to smile.

    For now there was only the sun and the sun and the sun. It was every horizon, it was every direction. It burned the minutes, the seconds, the hourglasses, the clocks; it burned all time and eternity away. It burned the eyelids and the serum of the dark world behind the lids, the retina, the hidden brain; and it burned sleep and the sweet memories of sleep and cool nightfall.

    "Watch it!"

    "Captain!"

    Bretton, the first mate, fell flat to the winter deck. His protective suit whistled where, burst open, his warmness, his oxygen, and his life bloomed out in a frosted steam.

    "Quick!"

    Inside Bretton's plastic face-mask, milk crystals had already gathered in blind patterns. They bent to see.

    "A structural defect in his suit, Captain. Dead."

    "Frozen."

    They stared at that other thermometer which showed how winter lived in this snowing ship. One thousand degrees below zero. The captain gazed down upon the frosted statue and the twinkling crystals that iced over it as he watched. Irony of the coolest sort, he thought; a man afraid of fire and killed by frost.

    The captain turned away. "No time. No time. Let him lie." He felt his tongue move. "Temperature?"

    The dials jumped four thousand degrees.

    "Look. Will you look? Look."

    Their icicle was melting.

    The captain jerked his head to look at the ceiling.

    As if a motion-picture projector had jammed a single clear memory frame in his head, he found his mind focused ridiculously on a scene whipped out of childhood.

    Spring mornings as a boy he had leaned from his bedroom window into the snow-smelling air to see the sun sparkle the last icicle of winter. A dripping of white wine, the blood of cool but warming April fell from that clear crystal blade. Minute by minute, December's weapon grew less dangerous. And then at last the icicle fell with the sound of a single chime to the graveled walk below.

    "Auxiliary pump's broken, sir. Refrigeration. We're losing our ice!"

    A shower of warm rain shivered down upon them. The captain jerked his head right and left. "Can you see the trouble? Quick!"

    The men rushed; the captain bent in the warm air, cursing, felt his hands run over the cold machine, felt them burrow and search, and while he worked he saw a future which was removed from them by the merest breath. He saw the skin peel from the rocket beehive, men thus revealed running, running, mouths shrieking, soundless. Space was a black mossed well where life drowned its roars and terrors. Scream a big scream, but space snuffed it out before it was half up your throat. Men scurried, ants in a flaming matchbox; the ship was dripping lava, gushing steam, nothing!

    "Captain?"

    The nightmare flicked away.

    "Here." He worked in the soft warm rain that fell from the upper decks. He fumbled at the auxiliary pump. "Damn it!" He jerked the feed line. When it came, it'd be the quickest death in the history of dying. One moment, yelling; a warm flash later only a billion billion tons of space-fire would whisper, unheard, in space. Popped like strawberries in a furnace, their thoughts would linger on the scorched air a long breath after their bodies were charred roast and fluorescent gas.

    "There!" He stabbed the auxiliary pump with a screw driver. "So!" He shuddered. The complete annihilation of it. He clamped his eyes tight, teeth tight. Lord, he thought, we're used to more leisurely dyings, measured in minutes and hours. Even twenty seconds now would be a slow death compared to this hungry idiot thing waiting to eat us!

    "Captain, do we pull out or stay?"

    "Get the Cup ready. Take over, finish this. Now!"

    He turned and put his hand to the working mechanism of the huge Cup; shoved his fingers into the robot Glove. A twitch of his hand here moved a gigantic hand, with gigantic metal fingers, from the bowels of the ship. Now, now, the great metal hand slid out holding the huge
Copa de Oro
, breathless, into the chemical furnace, the bodiless body and the fleshless flesh of the sun.

    A million years ago, thought the captain, quickly, quickly, as he moved the hand and the Cup, a million years ago a naked man on a lonely northern trail saw lightning strike a tree. And while his clan fled, with bare hands he plucked a limb of fire, broiling the flesh of his fingers, to carry it, running in triumph, shielding it from the rain with his body, to his cave, where he shrieked out a laugh and tossed it full on a mound of leaves and gave his people summer. And the tribe crept at last, trembling, near the fire, and they put out their flinching hands and felt the new season in their cave, this small yellow spot of changing weather, and they, too, at last, nervously, smiled.  And the gift of fire was theirs.

    "Captain!"

    It took all of four seconds for the huge hand to push the empty Cup to the fire. So here we are again, today, on another trail, he thought, reaching for a cup of precious gas and vacuum, a handful of different fire with which to run back up cold space, lighting our way, and take to Earth a gift of fire that might burn forever. Why?

    He knew the answer before the question.

    Because the atoms we work with our hands, on Earth, are pitiful; the atomic bomb is pitiful and small and our knowledge is pitiful and small, and only the sun really knows what we want to know, and only the sun has the secret. And besides, it's grand, it's a chance, it's a great thing coming here, playing tag, hitting and running. There is no reason, really, except the pride and vanity of little insect men hoping to sting the lion and escape the maw. Look! See! We'll cry we
did
it! And here is our cup of energy, fire, vibration, call it what you will, that may well power our cities and sail our ships and light our libraries and tan our children and bake our daily breads and simmer the knowledge of our universe for us for a thousand years until it is well done. Here, from this cup, all good men of science and religion: drink! Warm yourselves against the night of ignorance, the long snows of superstition, the cold winds of disbelief, and from the great fear of darkness in each man. So: we stretch out our hand with the beggar's cup . . .

    "Ah."

    The Cup dipped into the sun. It scooped up a bit of the flesh of God, the blood of the universe, the Hazing thought, the blinding philosophy that set out and mothered a galaxy, that idled and swept planets in their fields and summoned or laid to rest lives and livelihoods.

    "What'll happen when we pull it inside? That extra heat now, at this time, Captain?"

    "Only the good Lord knows. . . ."

    "Now,
slow,"
whispered the captain.

    "Auxiliary pump all repaired, sir."

    "Start it!"

    The pump leaped on.

    "Close the lid of the Cup and inside now, slow, slow." The beautiful hand outside the ship trembled, a tremendous image of his own gesture, sank with oiled silence into the ship body. The Cup, lid shut, dripped yellow flowers and white stars, slid deep. The audio-thermometer screamed. The refrigerator system kicked; ammoniated fluids banged the walls like blood in the head of a shrieking idiot.