The Journey
Murray Leinster
It was the year Joe graduated from college, and he signed on the Mavourneen for one trip out and back. He wanted to do it, he explained carefully to his father, just to get used to standing on his own feet and earning his living the hard way before beginning to practice the profession his father had paid to have him study for. His father admitted that it was normal for a young man to want to spend a certain amount of time making a fool of himself.
“It’s a sort of honeymoon with life,” he told Joe, “when you and the cosmos seem especially made for each other and you’re sure you’ll never quarrel. All right. Go ahead.”
He did better than consent. He pulled some highly necessary wires so Joe could join the Mavourneen as a spaceman, second class, in spite of competition. And eventually he and Joe’s mother went down to see the Mavourneen lift off. The ship was not new or impressive. She carried cargo only, so Joe was visible to them only as a figure in a white duck crew-suit, working a cargo-crane as the last bales went on board. He saw them and waved, and presently the cargo port closed and sealed, and then the lift-warning horn blared. There was nothing overhead, so it didn’t make a bit of difference, but it was custom. Then came that curious rumbling sound which is a drive warming up, and Joe’s father and mother tried to get rid of the cotton-woolly feeling it made in their ears, and after a little the outside speaker said hollowly: “Seconds to lift:—ten,—nine—eight—seven—”
Joe’s father and mother felt the way parents would feel at that moment, but Joe felt fine. He was sealed up in the Mavourneen for his first cruise—which would probably be his only one, things being as they were. It wasn’t likely that he’d ever again be able to spare eight months out of his life to go traveling on a freighter, with a living to make which he had to try to nurse into a career.
Then the ungainly bulk of the Mavourneen lifted heavily and seemed to go grunting skyward.
Joe’s mother waved her handkerchief until the ship was a bare speck. Then she wept, as mothers do when their sons take one step nearer to not needing their mothers any more. His father rumbled unhappily. He remembered, poignantly, how magnificently confident and competent a young man can feel. Then they drove homeward with their thoughts on the Mavourneen—out of atmosphere before they were a mile from the field—and they thought of the clumsy, bulbous-shaped ship as speeding splendidly toward the stars, with sunlight shining on her outer plates. They knew that was how Joe had been thinking of it.
But Joe was busy. He was rated as spaceman, second class, which is as low as a rating can go. The first hour up he worked in the cargo hold putting braces in place so the cargo wouldn’t shift. That’s always done, and at some time or another between take-off and landing the skipper puts his ship through her paces to see just how she handles with the trim for this particular voyage. The second hour up, Joe followed a spaceman, first class, along a seemingly interminable corridor with white-painted walls and ceilings and a gray-painted floor. This was to learn where motors were— there were motors in most unexpected places—and exactly how they should be oiled.
He knew that outside the ship the sky had long since turned from blue to dark purple and then to black, and that it was no longer night or day but both at once. Which was because the sun was always shining outside the ship, and the stars shone too—in uncountable multiples of the number to be seen when looking up from one’s bedroom window at home.
But Joe didn’t see the stars. When he’d followed the spaceman, first class, along the corridor, he went to the crew’s quarters and found his bunk and his possessions exactly where he’d dumped them. His name was on a duty list, so he went and got a swab and wiped down a floor that didn’t need wiping. Then he went to mess—the food was not at all bad—and he found out his watch, and learned that now he could turn in while other people walked around white-painted corridors and swabbed floors.
He lay in his bunk and thought gloriously that now he was in space. He saw, of course, nothing but the underside of the bunk above his and the strictly aseptic crew’s quarters. He had exactly the physical sensations of anybody in an air-conditioned, metal-walled space anywhere at all. But he knew that outside there was illimitable emptiness, and the sun glared fiercely and silently in the middle of all of it, spurting out pseudopods of flame, and Earth would only be a ball that was momently growing smaller. By now it would be about the size of an orange—but a little greenish for an orange, with patches of fungus-looking white stuff at its poles. And all around would be the stars. Millions and billions and quintillions of them, tinier specks than anybody could imagine and more than anyone could think of counting. But he did not see them. Naturally!
He didn’t sleep well that first night. —It wasn’t really night, but only a certain number of hours of ship-time. His mother didn’t sleep well either. Back on Earth, she and Joe’s father went to bed and lay quite still, each pretending to the other to be asleep. But it was unbearable. Quite suddenly his mother gave up the pretense and said worriedly in the darkness of the bedroom: “Do you suppose they’re nice boys in the ship?— They all looked so young!”
And Joe’s father said with a dryness that Joe’s mother didn’t catch: “Oh, yes! They’re nice boys. They’re star-crazy and ships can pick and choose their crews, you know.”
This was perfectly true, because the most romantic thing in the world— No. The most romantic things in all the solar system were the ships that floated magnificently from one planet to another. There weren’t but so many. There was a stodgy fleet that hauled metal from Mercury—ready-smelted metal. There were brisk liners that went to the domes on Venus—it was proof that one was a millionaire to spend a few weeks every year on Venus—and there were a couple of ships hauling back the things the scientists were finding in the ruined cities on Mars. Then there were the ships that went to the Jovian moons—two of them—and to the mines on Uranus and Pluto. That was all. There was work for perhaps a hundred space-ships. There wasn’t work for more. So every year there were several thousand space-crazy young men trying frantically for each one of the very few vacancies in their crews. The ships could pick their crews on any basis their skippers pleased. Joe was lucky to be signed on.
But he didn’t see the stars. A week from Earth, he was trusted to remember all the motors and places that had to be oiled. Thereafter he made his round alone. Each watch, he made a trudging progress along what seemed miles of white-painted corridor, dutifully stopping at each place where a motor lurked behind a door or panel, and conscientiously made sure that each one was adequately lubricated. And he had other official duties, of which swabbing floors seemed to be most prominent.
When he was two weeks out he realized that he was pretty well ignored by the rest of the crew. He was acutely and gloriously aware that he was in space. They prided themselves upon being space-hardened. Which meant having no illusions about the romance of space travel. The older men may even have meant it, but the ones around Joe’s age were self-consciously disillusioned. They were raucously amused at any suggestion that being a spaceman was anything but a tedious and not-too-well-paid job. They conceded only that their profession entitled them to—and secured them—their choice of female companionship in the dives they spent their pay in back on Earth. They talked as nearly as possible in four-letter words only. Which proved their sophistication but made their talk unduly monotonous. Lost in his rapt contemplation of the fact that he was in space, Joe bored them.