I should have said something flip at that point, but the words weren’t in me. Like a fool, I asked him questions about the galaxies, about the distant stars. We drove slowly back. The next day he loaned me two of his books. Within a week I had caught his fervor, his sense of dedication.
After that it was, of course, too late.
All persons in love have dreams. This was ours. Johnny would be at the controls of one of the first interplanetary rockets. He would return to me and then we would become one of the first couples to become colonists for the new world.
Silly, wasn’t it?
He told me of the problems that would be solved with that first interplanetary flight. They would take instruments far enough out into space so that triangulation could solve that tiresome bickering among the physicists and astronomers about the theory of the exploding universe as against the theory of “tired light” from the distant galaxies.
And now I am the only person in the world who can solve that problem. Oh, the others will find the answer soon enough. And then they, too, can go quietly mad.
They will find out that for years they have been in the position of the man at the table with his fingers almost touching the sugar bowl and who asks why there isn’t any sugar on the table.
That year was the most perfect year of my life.
“When are you going to marry me, Johnny?” I asked him.
“This is so sudden,” he said, laughing. Then he sobered. “Just as soon as I come back from the first one, honey. It isn’t fair any other way. Don’t you see?”
I saw with my mind, but not with my heart. We exchanged rings. All very sentimental. He gave me a diamond and I gave him my father’s ring, the one that was sent home to my mother and me when Dad was killed in Burma in World War II. It fit him and he liked it. It was a star ruby in a heavy silver setting. The star was perfect, but by looking closely into the stone you could see the flaws. Two dark little dots and a tiny curved line which together gave the look of a small and smiling face.
With his arm around me, with the cool night air of Arizona touching our faces, we looked up at the sky and talked of the home we would make millions of miles away.
Childish, wasn’t it?
Last night after looking in the mirror, I walked down to the rocks. The Government money was given to me when Johnny didn’t come back. It is enough. It will last until I die and I hope it will not be too long before I die.
The sea, washing the rocks, asked me the soft, constant question. “Why? Why? Why?” I looked at the sky. The answer was not there.
Fourteen months after I met Johnny, a crew of two in the Destiny I made the famous circuit of the moon and landed safely. Johnny was not one of them. He had hoped to be.
“A test run,” he called it. The first step up the long flight of stairs.
You certainly remember the headlines given that flight of Destiny I. Even the New York Times broke out a new and larger type face for the headlines. Korby and Sweeny became the heroes of the entire world.
The world was confident then. The intervening years have shaken that confidence. But the world does not know yet. I think some suspect, but they do not know. Only I know for a certainty. And I, of course, am quite mad. I know that now.
Call it a broken heart — or broken dreams.
Johnny was selected for Destiny II. After he told me and after the tears came, partly from fear, partly from the threat of loneliness, he held me tightly and kissed my eyes. I had not known that the flight of Destiny II, if successful, would take fourteen months. The fourteen months were to include a circuit of Mars and a return to the takeoff point. Fourteen months before I would see him again. Fourteen months before I would feel his arms around me.
A crew of four. The famous Korby and Sweeny, plus Anthony Marinetta and my Johnny. Each morning when I went to work I could see the vast silver ship on the horizon, the early sun glinting on the blunt nose. Johnny’s ship.
Those last five months before takeoff were like the five months of life ahead of a prisoner facing execution. And Johnny’s training was so intensified after his selection that I couldn’t see him as often as before.
We were young and we were in love and we made our inevitable mistake. At least we called it a mistake. Now I know that it wasn’t, because Johnny didn’t come back.
With the usual sense of guilt we planned to be married, and then reverted to our original plan. I would wait for him. Nothing could go wrong.
Takeoff was in the cold dawn of a February morning. I stood in the crowd beside a girl who worked in the same office. I held her arm. She carried the bruises for over a week.
The silver hull seemed to merge with the gray of the dawn. The crowd was silent. At last there was the blinding, blue-white flare of the jets, the stately lift into the air, the moment when Destiny II seemed to hang motionless fifty feet in the air, and then the accelerating blast that arrowed it up and up into the dark-gray sky where a few stars still shone. I walked on leaden legs back to the administration building and sat slumped at my desk, my mouth dry, my eyes hot and burning.
The last faint radio signal came in three hours later.
“All well. See you next year.”
From then on there would be fourteen months of silence.
I suppose that in a way I became accustomed to it.
I was numb, apathetic, stupefied. They would probably have got rid of me had they not known how it was between Johnny and me. I wouldn’t have blamed them. Each morning I saw the silver form of Destiny III taking shape near where Destiny II had taken off. The brash young men made the same jokes, gave the office girls the same line of chatter.
But they didn’t bother me. Word had got around.
I found a friend. The young wife of Tony Marinetta. We spent hours telling each other in subtle ways that everything would come out all right.
I remember one night when Marge grinned and said:
“Well anyway, Carol, nobody has ever had their men go quite so far away.”
There is something helpless about thinking of the distance between two people in the form of millions of miles.
After I listened to the sea last night, I walked slowly back up the steep path to this beach house. When I clicked the lights on Johnny looked at me out of the silver frame on my writing desk. His eyes are on me as I write this. They are happy and confident eyes. I am almost glad that he didn’t live to find out.
The fourteen months were like one single revolution of a gigantic Ferris wheel. You start at the top of the wheel, and through seven months the wheel carries you slowly down into the darkness and the fear. Then, after you are at your lowest point, the wheel slowly starts to carry you back up into the light.
Somewhere in space I knew that Johnny looked at the small screen built into the control panel and saw the small bright sphere of earth and thought of me. I knew all during that fourteen months that he wasn’t dead. If he had died, no matter how many million miles away from me, I would have known it in the instant of his dying.
The world forgets quickly. The world had pushed Destiny II off the surface of consciousness a few months after takeoff. Two months before the estimated date of return, it began to creep back into the papers and onto the telescreens of the world.
Work had stopped on Destiny III. The report of the four crewmen might give a clue to alterations in the interior.