Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction; Spouses -- Fiction
Miss Eagen looked an unspoken question.
Marcia said, painfully, "He's like the Captain of the _Elsinore_. He's
risking his life for a--a stranger. A jaywalker. Not for me. Not even
for his baby."
"Does it hurt to know that?"
Marcia looked into the smooth, strong face and said with genuine
astonishment, "Hurt? Oh, no! It's so--so big!"
There was a sudden thunder. Over Miss Eagen's shoulder, through the
port, Marcia saw the stars begin to move. Miss Eagen followed her gaze.
"He's started the spin. You'll be all right now."
* * * * *
Marcia could never recall the rest of the details of the trip. There
was the outboard bulkhead that drew her like a magnet, increasingly,
until suddenly it wasn't an attracting wall, but normally and naturally
"down." Then a needle, and another one, and a long period of deep
drowsiness and unreality.
But through and through that drugged, relaxed period, Jack and the
stars, the Moon and Sue Eagen danced and wove. Words slipped in and out
of it like shreds of melody:
"A man comes to love the things he has to fight for." And Jack
fighting--for his ship, for the Moon, for the new-building traditions
of the great ones who would carry humanity out to the stars.
Sue Eagen was there, too, and the thing she shared with Jack. Of course
there was something between them--so big a thing that there was
nothing for her to fear in it.
Jack and Sue Eagen had always had it, and always would have; and now
Marcia had it too. And with understanding replacing fear, Marcia was
free to recall that Jack had worked with Sue Eagen--but it was Marcia
that he had loved and married.
* * * * *
There was a long time of blackness, and then a time of agony, when
she was falling, falling, and her lungs wanted to split, explode,
disintegrate, and someone kept saying, "Hold tight, Marcia; hold tight
to me," and she found Sue Eagen's cool strong hands in hers.
_Marcia. She called me Marcia._
More blackness, more pain--but not so much this time; and then a long,
deep sleep.
A curved ceiling, but a new curve, and soft rose instead of the
gunmetal-and-chrome of the ship. White sheets, a new feeling of "down"
that was unlike either Earth or the ship, a novel and exhilarating
buoyancy. And kneeling by the bed--
"Jack!"
"You're all right, honey."
She raised herself on her elbow and looked out through the unglazed
window at the ordered streets of the great Luna Dome. "The Moon....
Jack, you did it!"
He snapped his fingers. He looked like a high-school kid. "Nothin' to
it." She could see he was very proud. Very tired, too. He reached out
to touch her.
She drew back. "You don't have to be sweet to me," she said quietly. "I
understand how you must feel."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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