It was nearly a minute before he got the significance of it. It hit him
where he lived, and he began jerking frantically at his encased feet and
sobbing low in his throat. They'd hear him if he kept that up. He
stopped and covered his ears to close out the cry of his firstborn. A
light went on in the house, and when it went off again, the infant's cry
had ceased.
Another rocket went up from the station, and he cursed it. Space was a
disease, and he had it.
"Help!" he cried out suddenly. "I'm stuck! Help me, help me!"
He knew he was yelling hysterically at the sky and fighting the
relentless concrete that clutched his feet, and after a moment he
stopped.
The light was on in the house again, and he heard faint sounds. The
stirring-about woke the baby again, and once more the infant's wail came
on the breeze.
_Make the kid shut up, make the kid shut up ..._
But that was no good. It wasn't the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's
fault. No fathers allowed in space, they said, but it wasn't their fault
either. They were right, and he had only himself to blame. The kid was
an accident, but that didn't change anything. Not a thing in the world.
It remained a tragedy.
A tumbler had no business with a family, but what was a man going to do?
Take a skinning knife, boy, and make yourself a eunuch. But that was no
good either. They needed bulls out there in the pit, not steers. And
when a man came down from a year's hitch, what was he going to do? Live
in a lonely shack and read books for kicks? Because you were a man, you
sought out a woman. And because she was a woman, she got a kid, and that
was the end of it. It was nobody's fault, nobody's at all.
He stared at the red eye of Mars low in the southwest. They were running
out there now, and next year he would have been on the long long run ...
But there was no use thinking about it. Next year and the years after
belonged to _little_ Hogey.
He sat there with his feet locked in the solid concrete of the footing,
staring out into Big Bottomless while his son's cry came from the house
and the Hauptman menfolk came wading through the tall grass in search of
someone who had cried out. His feet were stuck tight, and he wouldn't
ever get them out. He was sobbing softly when they found him.
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ September 1955.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.