"Come then, I'm going to sign up for pilot training. That's why I wanted to know what you planned to do."
"Oh."
"But it doesn't make any difference-not between us. Anyhow, you're going to Mars."
"Yes. Yes, that's right."
"Good!" Jack glanced at his watch. "I've got to run-or they'll throw my chow to the pigs. Sure you're not coming?"
"Sure."
"See you." He dashed out.
Don stood for a moment, rearranging his ideas. Old Jack must be taking this seriously-giving up Yale for pilot training. But he was wrong-he had to be wrong.
Presently he went out to the corral.
Lazy answered his call, then started searching his pockets for sugar. "Sorry, old fellow," he said sadly, "not even a carrot. I forgot." He stood with his face to the horse's cheek and scratched the beast's ears. He talked to it in low tones, explaining as carefully as if Lazy could understand all the difficult words.
"So that's how it is," he concluded. "I've got to go away and they won't let me take you with me." He thought back to the day their association had begun. Lazy had been hardly more than a colt, but Don had been frightened of him. He seemed huge, dangerous, and probably carnivorous. He had- never seen a horse before coming to Earth; Lazy was the first he had ever seen close up.
Suddenly he choked, could talk no further. He flung his arms around the horse's neck and leaked tears.
Lazy nickered softly, knowing that something was wrong, and tried to nuzzle him. Don raised his head. "Goodbye, boy. Take care of yourself." He turned abruptly and ran toward the dormitories.
II "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin"
THE SCHOOL copter dumped him down at the Albuquerque field. He had to hurry to catch his rocket, as traffic control had required them to swing wide around Sandia Weapons Center. When he weighed in he ran into another new security wrinkle. "Got a camera in that stuff, son?" the weighmaster had inquired as he passed over his bags.
"No. Why?"
"Because we'll fog your film when we fluoroscope, that's why." Apparently X-ray failed to show any bombs hidden in his underwear; his bags were handed back and he went aboard-the winged-rocket Santa Fe Trail, shuttling between the Southwest and New Chicago. Inside, he fastened his safety belts, snuggled down into the cushions, and waited.
At first the noise of the blast-off bothered him more than the pressure. But the noise dopplered away as they passed the speed of sound while the acceleration grew worse; he blacked out.
He came to as the ship went into free flight, arching in a high parabola over the plains. At once he felt great relief no longer to have unbearable weight racking his rib cage, straining his heart, turning his muscles to water-but, before he could enjoy the blessed relief, he was aware of a new sensation; his stomach was trying to crawl up his gullet.
At first he was alarmed, being unable to account for the unexpected and unbearably unpleasant sensation. Then he had a sudden wild suspicion could it? Oh, no! It couldn't be... not space sickness, not to him. Why, he had been born in free fall; space nausea was for Earth crawlers, groundhogs!
But the suspicion grew to certainty; years of easy living on a planet had worn out his immunity. With secret embarrassment he conceded that he certainly was acting like a groundhog. It had not occurred to him to ask for an antinausea shot before blast-off, though he had walked past the counter plainly marked with a red cross.
Shortly his secret embarrassment became public; he had barely time to get at the plastic container provided for the purpose. Thereafter he felt better, although weak, and listened half-heartedly to the canned description coming out of the loudspeaker of the country over which they were falling. Presently, near Kansas City, the sky turned from black back to purple again, the air foils took hold, and the passengers again felt weight as the rocket continued glider fashion on a long, screaming approach to New Chicago. Don folded his couch into a chair and sat up.
Twenty minutes later, as the field came up to meet them, rocket units in the nose were triggered by radar and the Santa F6 Trail braked to a landing. The entire trip had taken less time than the copter jaunt from the school to Alburquerque - something less than an hour for the same route eastward that the covered wagons had made westward in eighty days, with luck. The local rocket landed on a field just outside the city, next door to the enormous field, still slightly radioactive, which was both the main spaceport of the planet and the former site of Old Chicago.
Don hung back and let a Navajo family disembark ahead of him, then followed the squaw out. A movable slideway had crawled out to the ship; he stepped on it and let it carry him into the station. Once inside he was confused by the bustling size of the place, level after level, above and below ground. Gary Station served not merely the Santa Fe Trail, the Route 66, and other local rockets shuttling to the Southwest; it served a dozen other local lines, as well as ocean hoppers, freight tubes, and space ships operating between Earth and Circum-Terra Station-and thence to Luna, Venus, Mars, and the Jovian moons; it was the spinal cord of a more-than-world-wide empire.
Tuned as he was to the wide and empty New Mexico desert and, before that, to the wider wastes of space, Don felt oppressed and irritated by the noisy swarming mass. He felt the loss of dignity that comes from men behaving like ants, even though his feeling was not thought out in words. Still, it had to be faced-he spotted the triple globes of Interplanet Lines and followed glowing arrows to its reservation office.
An uninterested clerk assured him that the office had no record of his reservation in the Valkyrie. Patiently Don explained that the reservation had been made from Mars and displayed the radiogram from his parents. Annoyed into activity the clerk finally consented to phone Circum-Terra; the satellite station confirmed the reservation. The clerk signed off and turned back to Don. "Okay, you can pay for it here."
Don had a sinking feeling. "I thought it was already paid for?" He had on him his father's letter-of-credit but it was not enough to cover passage to Mars.
"Huh? They didn't say anything about it being prepaid."
At Don's insistence the clerk again phoned the space station. Yes, the passage was prepaid since it had been placed from the other end; didn't the clerk know his tariff book? Thwarted on all sides, the clerk grudgingly issued Don a ticket to couch 64, Rocket Ship Glory Road, lifting from Earth for Circum-Terra at 9:03:57 the following morning.
"Got your security clearance?"
"Huh? What's that?"
The clerk appeared to gloat at what was a legitimate opportunity to decline to do business after all. He withdrew the ticket. "Don't you bother to follow the news? Give me your ID."
Reluctantly Don passed over his identity card; the clerk stuck it in a stat machine and handed it back. "Now your thumb prints."
Don impressed them and said, "Is that all? Can I have my ticket?"
" `Is that all?' he says Be here about an hour early tomorrow morning. You can pick up your ticket then-provided the I.B.I. says you can." '
The clerk turned away. Don, feeling forlorn, did likewise. He did not know quite what to do next. He had told Headmaster Reeves that he would stay overnight at the Hilton Caravansary, that being the hotel his family had stopped at 18 years earlier and the only one he knew by name. On the other hand he had to attempt to locate Dr. Jefferson "Uncle Dudley"-since his mother had made such a point of it. It was still early afternoon; he decided to check his bags and start looking.
Bags disposed of, he found an empty communication booth and looked up the doctor's code, punched it into the machine. The doctor's phone regretted politely that Dr. Jefferson was not at home and requested him to leave a message. He was dictating it when a warm voice interrupted: "I'm at home to you, Donald. Where are you, lad?" The view screen cut in and he found himself looking at the somewhat familiar features of Dr. Dudley Jefferson.