Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight -- Fiction; Space travelers -- Fiction
He really made a little headway. He got where he could move a little
faster and could occasionally take a quick glance upward at the
crystalline patchwork of the sky.
And what was that beautiful point of light out there?
Trase knew it was Saturn, and his eyes would be fixed upon it as
a final mount of redemption, as the supreme goal of a well lived
lifetime. He wheedled his way into the Moon-Station Astrodome and
hungrily gulped in the sight of the ringed planet canted there in the
scope view-finder. It was there! The rings were there, the huge planet
was there, but the scope only showed you enough to make it just out
of your reach; tantalizing, torturing--a pearl to melt through your
fingers when you reached for it.
"Hi'ya Saturn!" he would cry. "God of Time that you are, you've waited
a long time for me but I'll be there!"
Trase began going to the dispatcher's station, getting the schedules
of arrivals and departures and destinations, and figuring the orbits.
Then he could tell the exact time the space vessels were due to shoot
the rings at Saturn, or burst through the 1,100 mile space between
the crape ring and the middle one. Then he would be sitting there at
the scope, imagining that he could see a ship--a so-small fleck of
blackness skimming across the yellow of the watery hulk of Saturn. That
was the way he saw the blow-up of the _Andromeda_, carrying a load of
fissionable materials, when she burst in a flash of white-hot energy in
a collision with some hunks of jet in the middle ring.
After he saw that, Trase walked home with something dead inside of him,
with his head quiet, his shoulders drooping, his heart sobbing out the
Saturn "Home Song" as he had heard his father sing it so often. For his
father had been master of the _Andromeda_.
Trase was the one who had to tell his mother, and she took it,
dry-eyed, for the first few minutes. But then she could stand it no
longer, and she flung herself at her tall son, lean and muscular, and
sobbed, "I'm glad you can't be a spaceman. I'm glad, I'm glad. It's a
dirty life, and your reward is a flashing death in a fire-pit."
Trase held her while she sobbed out her grief. He had to keep
swallowing down the lump in his own throat, but he could somehow keep
seeing that white-hot burst of flame framed before the God of Time,
and could imagine that his father's spirit was freed in the space he
had loved, out there where he could live on forever, gazing on that
magnificent scene.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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