“Nothing, eh, Hookey?” the man on the porch said. “Chasin’ armadillos again, eh?”
The screen door slammed again, and the porch light went out. Hogey stood there staring, unable to think. Somewhere beyond the window lights were—his woman, his son.
What the hell was a tumbler doing with a woman and a son?
After perhaps a minute, he stepped forward again. He tripped over a shovel, and his foot plunged into something that went squelch and swallowed the foot past the ankle. He fell forward into a heap of sand, and his foot went deeper into the sloppy wetness.
He lay there with his stinging forehead on his arms, cursing softly and crying. Finally he rolled over, pulled his foot out of the mess, and took off his shoes. They were full of mud—sticky sandy mud.
The dark world was reeling about him, and the wind was dragging at his breath. He fell back against the sand pile and let his feet sink in the mud hole and wriggled his toes. He was laughing soundlessly, and his face was wet in the wind. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t remember where he was and why, and he stopped caring, and after awhile he felt better.
The stars were swimming over him, dancing crazily, and the mud cooled his feet, and the sand was soft behind him. He saw a rocket go up on a tail of flame from the station, and waited for the sound of its blast, but he was already asleep when it came. .
It was far past midnight when he became conscious of the dog licking wetly at his ear and cheek. He pushed the animal away with a low curse and mopped at the side of his face. He stirred, and groaned. His feet were burning up! He tried to pull them toward him, but they wouldn’t budge. There was something wrong with his legs.
For an instant he stared wildly around in the night. Then he remembered where he was, closed his eyes and shuddered. When he opened them again, the moon had emerged from behind a cloud, and he could see clearly the cruel trap into which he had accidentally stumbled. A pile of old boards, a careful stack of new lumber, a pick and shovel, a sand-pile, heaps of fresh-turned earth, and a concrete mixer—well, it added up.
He gripped his ankles and pulled, but his feet wouldn’t budge. In sudden terror, he tried to stand up, but his ankles were clutched by the concrete too, and he fell back in the sand with a low moan. He lay still for several minutes, considering carefully.
He pulled at his left foot. It was locked in a vise. He tugged even more desperately at his right foot. It was equally immovable.
He sat up with a whimper and clawed at the rough concrete until his nails tore and his fingertips bled. The surface still felt damp, but it had hardened while he slept.
He sat there stunned until Hookey began licking at his scuffed fingers. He shouldered the dog away, and dug his hands into the sand-pile to stop the bleeding. Hookey licked at his face, panting love.
“Get away!” he croaked savagely.
The dog whined softly, trotted a short distance away, circled, and came back to crouch down in the sand directly before Hogey, inching forward experimentally.
Hogey gripped fistfuls of the dry sand and cursed between his teeth, while his eyes wandered over the sky. They came to rest on the sliver of light—the space station—rising in the west, floating out in Big Bottomless where the gang was—Nichols and Guerrera and Lavrenti and Fats. And he wasn’t forgetting Keesey, the rookie who’d replaced him.
Keesey would have a rough time for a while—rough as a cob. The pit was no playground. The first time you went out of the station in a suit, the pit got you. Everything was falling, and you fell with it. Everything. The skeletons of steel, the tire-shaped station, the spheres and docks and nightmare shapes—all tied together by umbilical cables and flexible tubes. Like some crazy sea-thing they seemed, floating in a black ocean with its tentacles bound together by drifting strands in the dark tide that bore it.
Everything was pain-bright or dead black, and it wheeled around you, and you went nuts trying to figure which way was down. In fact, it took you months to teach your body that all ways were down and that the pit was bottomless.
He became conscious of a plaintive sound in the wind, and froze to listen.
It was a baby crying.
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 men-folk 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.
BULKHEAD
by Theodore Sturgeon
Miller posed a problem—a problem as old as Cain in its basic meaning; as new, in its special complexities, as the Satellite our government is right now building in the sky over our heads.
This problem, in all its many ramifications (physiological and psychological), is currently being studied by the U.S. Air Force at Randolph Field, Texas. They call it “Space Medicine”; their object is to make certain that human minds and bodies will be able to survive the Big Jump, when we make it.
Now Theodore Sturgeon—the Man With The Golden Pen; for my money, the top writer among established “names” in s-f—deals with an aspect of the same problem on a future level of technology and psychology far more complex than either the U.S. Air Force’s Department of Space Medicine or the hero of The Hoofer have to contend with.
You just don’t look through viewports very often.
It’s terrifying at first, of course—all that spangled blackness and the sense of disorientation. Your guts never get used to sustained free-fall and you feel, when you look out, that every direction is up, which is unnatural, or that every direction is down, which is sheer horror. But you don’t stop looking out there because it’s terrifying. You stop because nothing ever happens out there. You’ve no sensation of speed.