“It was just that I—I’d always wanted to be in space. I thought about it in the daytime and dreamed about it at night. And all of a sudden, there it was, happening to me for real. I thought I ought to say something and I opened my mouth to do it and all of a sudden I was crying. I couldn’t help it. I guess I— Crazy, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t say so. You can hear and talk and see pictures and get yourself all ready, but there’s nothing like doing it. I know.”
“You, you’re used to it.”
He seems to want to say something else; you hold the button down. Finally, with difficulty, he asks, “You’re big, aren’t you? I mean you’re . . . you know. Big.”
“Well, yes.”
“I wish I was. I wish I was good for... well, something.”
“Everybody push you around?”
“Mm.”
“Listen,” you say. “You take a human being and put him down next to a starship. They’re not the same size and they’re not the same shape, and one of ‘em’s pretty insignificant. But you can say that this built this, not the other way around.”
“Y-e-eah.” It is a whisper.
“Well, you’re that human being, that self-same one. Ever think of that?”
“No.”
“Neither did I, till now,” you admit rapidly. “It’s the truth, though.”
He says, “I wish I was a cadet.”
“Where do you come from, kid?”
“Masolo. It’s no place. Jerk town. I like big places with big things going on. Like the Base.”
“Awful lot of people charging around.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I don’t like crowds much, but the Base —it’s worth it.”
You sit and look at the bulkhead. It’s companionable, suddenly, and sort of changed, as if it had just grown warm, or quilted. You get a splinter of light off the bright metal where you’ve scored it. You think it’s down pretty deep. A man could stand up to it and knock that piece out with a maul, if a man could stand up, if he had a maul.
You say, very fast, as if you’re afraid something’s going to stop you, “Ever do anything you were really ashamed of? I did when I talked to you the way I did. I shouldn’t’ve done it like that... I don’t know what got into me. Yes, I do and I’ll tell you. I was afraid you were a boy genius planted on me to strip my brains and take my command. I got scared.”
It all comes out like that. You feel much better and at the same time you’re glad Walkinok or Shank aren’t around to hear you spout like that.
The kid’s very quiet for a while. Then he says, “One time my mother sent me to the market and something was a special, I forget what. But anyway I had forty cents change and I forgot about it. I found it in my pants in school next day and bought a starship magazine with it and never told her. I used to get every issue that way after that. She never missed the money. Or maybe she did and didn’t say anything. We were pretty hard up.”
You understand that the kid is trying to give you something, because you apologized to him. You don’t say anything more about that. Right here, a wonder starts to grow. You don’t know what it is, but you know that stand-off-and-watch part of your mind is working on it.
You say, “Where is this Masolo?”
“Upstate. Not far from Base. Ever since I was a baby, the axitugs were shaking the house when they took off. There’s a big tree outside the house and all the leaves shiver—with the tugs, you know. I used to climb out a limb and get on the roof and lie down on my back. Sometimes you could see the starships orbiting. Just after the Sun goes down, sometimes you can...” He swallows; you can hear it plainly. “I used to put out my hand. It was like a firefly up there.”
“Some firefly,” you say.
“Yeah. Some firefly, all right.”
Inside you, the wonder is turning to a large and luminous astonishment. It’s still inexpressible, so you leave it alone.
The kid is saying, “I was with two other fellows out by the high school one time. I was just a kid—eleven, I think. Well, some gorillas from the high school chased us. We ran and they caught up with us. The other kids started to fight them. I got over to one side and, when I had a chance, I ran. I ran all the way home. I wish I’d stayed there with those other two kids.
“They got the tar kicked out of them and I guess it hurt, but I guess it stopped hurting after some teacher came along and broke up the fight. But I hurt every time I think about running away like that. Boy, did those two give me a razzing when they saw me next day! Boy! So what I wanted to ask you, you don’t think a kid who would run away like that could be a cadet.”
He ends it like that, flat. No question.
You think about it. You’ve been in some fine brawls as a cadet. You’re in a bar and someone cracks wise, and your blood bubbles up, and you wade in, feeling giant-size. But maybe that’s just because of the business of belonging.
You say carefully, “I think if I was in a fight, I’d rather have a guy on my side who knew what being scared felt like. Then it would be like having two guys on my side, instead of one. One of the guys wouldn’t care if he got hurt and the other guy would never want to be hurt that way again. I think a fellow like that would be a pretty good cadet.”
“Well, yeah,” says the kid, in that funny whisper.
Now the inner astonishment bursts into sight and you recognizie what it is about this kid.
At first, you were scared of him, but even when that went away, you didn’t like him. There was no question of liking him or not liking him; he was a different species that you couldn’t have anything to do with.
And the more you talked with him, the more you began to feel that you didn’t have to set yourself apart from him, that he had a whole lot you didn’t have—and that you could use it. The way he talked, honest and unabashed; you don’t know how to do that. You nearly choked to death apologizing to him.
It suddenly is very important to get along with this kid. It isn’t because the kid is important. It’s because if you can get along with somebody so weak, so wet behind the ears, and yet in his peculiar way so rich, why, you can get along with anybody, even your own lousy self.
And you realize that this thing of getting along with him has extension after extension. Somehow, if you can find more ways to get along with this kid, if you can see more things the way he sees them with no intolerance and no altitude, you’ll tap something in yourself that’s been dried up a long time now.
You find all this pretty amazing, and you settle down and talk to the kid. You don’t eke it out. You know he’ll last all the way back to Base and have plenty left over. You know, too, that by the time you get there, this kid will know a cadet can also be a louse. You can give him that much.
The way you treated him, he was hurt. But you know? He wasn’t mad. He doesn’t think he’s good enough to get mad at a cadet. He thinks a cadet rates what he does just by being a cadet.
Well, you are going to fix that.
The time goes by and the time comes; the acceleration tug reaches out and grabs you high above Earth, so, after all that manual-control drill, you don’t have a thing to do but sit there and ride it down.
The tug hovers over the compound right near the administration building, which disappears in a cloud of yellow dust. You sink down and down in the dust cloud until you think they must be lowering you into a hole in the ground. Then, at last, there’s a slight thump and an inhuman amount of racket as the tug blasts away free.
After that, there’s only the faint whisper of the air circulator, the settling dust, and a profoundly unpleasant feeling in calves and chest as the blood gets used to circulating in a 1-G environment.