Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight -- Fiction; Space travelers -- Fiction
His clear-headedness lasted about half-an-hour. Then Trase got sick
again. He was sick for a day and a half, until the ship began to come
in on Titan.
But the drifter crew had hid out some Mercurian liquor and got drunk
before landing. They failed to cut the jets. Irinia cursed until the
spaceship bulkheads turned red hot, but she fell and knocked herself
out running down from the pilot's compartment to the engine-room. And
so there was the ship headed wide-open into Titan with the crew drunk,
Irinia unconscious, and Trase dead-sick in his bunk.
Well, you'll know now that Trase saved the day. He began to think of
Saturn as he had seen it. He staggered down to the engine-room, cut
the jets, then ran up to the pilot's room where the rough surface of
Titan stared him in the face. And he wasn't sick while he thought of
Saturn.
The ship cracked up but nobody was killed. They hadn't been able to get
any insurance with an unlicensed crew, so that left Trase flat-broke.
He wasn't a veepee anymore since he had no stock in Air-Lanes, and
Irinia got fired for taking the extended leave.
So things were kind of tough for a while, but.... Where are they now?
Oh, you know, you've heard all about it. They found a backer, and now
they're out on Pluto with a space-drive job, getting ready to set out
for Centauri. And Trase has never been sick again.
What does it prove?
Well, see those words written right there over the entrance to the
spacemen's mess? Those are the words Trase used when they pulled him
out of the wreck on Titan. I'll read them for you. "I've seen Saturn!
And to you who have seen it, I don't need to say whether spacemen can
be made. To others, to millions of youngsters who want to be spacemen,
I'll say now that spacemen _are_ born. But to each of them I'll say
this--If you want to be a spaceman, you don't need a spaceman's ear,
all you need is a spaceman's soul."
So the spacemen took that and added another verse to the Saturn "Home
Song," and it's the one that really makes me hurt because I can't go to
space again. Sometimes late at night I hear them singing it from far
out on the field when a crew is coming in off a run, and that's when I
know you can't stop them. You can't stop the born spacemen until they
reach the stars. The verse goes like this:
"Oh, Saturn, the God of Time,
May your majesty never fade.
For your beauty is final proof,
Spacemen are born not made."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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