Stanton looked at his sandals as if he had never seen them before, and
scowled. Parker ran his hand through his hair absently, forgetting that
he no longer had any.
There was a buzzing in the next room.
Parker cursed all visaphones and vanished into the other room. They
heard a bellowed, "Pleasure to you, too, and what the hell do you
want?" Pause. "Oh." Another pause. Then: "Glad to hear it, Martin. Yes,
it's a great thing all right. Huh? ... sure; thanks. Same to you. Glad
you changed your mind. Pleasure, Martin."
Parker came back into the room. He tugged absently at his ear lobe.
There was a strange look on his face. He noticed the stares of his
fellow psychologists, and answered the question in their eyes.
"Remember that old duck, Martin Winter, the one with the registry full
of credits he don't know what to do with--who came in here last week?"
He went on without waiting for an acknowledgement of acquaintance from
the other two. "The old fool positively refused when he was here last
time to have a transference to a robot body because he said he didn't
have anything worth living for. But now he's determined to have the
transference made, and to get transported to this other system. Wished
me a happy trip over."
"Oh," said Vaine softly.
The voice of the little man came again into the room.
"Adventure," he said. "Adventure for all of us, and hope, and
happiness." His voice trembled a little with the immensity of his
own vision. "A new heaven and a new Earth, and a new dream for all
mankind--everlasting, eternal, enduring for all time!"
His voice was drowned by a crowd roar that filled the room, then died
away.
* * * * *
The jets under the ship came to life with an ear-splitting _whoo-o-om!_
and the ship leveled off and hurtled west.
Electrical impulses touched the desert outside and rebounded to
register on a dial the information that his distance from the ground
was two thousand feet. He consulted another dial and found that the
rocket was traveling a little more than eighteen hundred feet a second.
Too fast. He cut it down to a thousand feet. Instruments were checked.
The energy waves he had received in space had come from the most
desolate part of Mars. Lawrence was unable to understand why anyone
chose this part of the planet to live on.
It was barren of the Martian planets collected by the settlers for
their medicinal and museum value on earth, and it was far from the
closely-clustered settler's towns. Which was strange. The settlers, he
thought with a smile, made a lot of their being pioneers and all that
sort of thing, but they loved their mechanical comforts and the warm,
close companionship of their fellows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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