And the ironic thing, he thought, is that people say God never meant for us to travel in space.
The lunatics are right, he thought, because they know it has nothing to do with how profitable the ore concessions can be made to be. We're only pretending to mine ore on Luna. It's not a political question, or even an ethical one. But you have to answer something when someone asks you. You have to pretend that you know.
For a week he bathed in the warm mineral waters at the Roosevelt Hot Springs on Venus. Then they shipped him back to Earth. And, shortly after that, he started spending his time thinking back to his childhood. To the peaceful days when his father had sat around the living room reading the newspaper and the kids had watched Captain Kangaroo on TV. When his mother had driven their new Volkswagen, and the news on the radio hadn't been about war but about the first Earth satellites and the initial hopes for thermonuclear power. For infinite sources of energy.
Before the great strikes and depressions and civil discord that came later.
That was his last memory. Spending his time meditating about the 'fifties. And then, one day, he found himself back in the 'fifties. It had seemed a marvelous event to him. A breath-taking wonder. All at once the sirens, the e.e. buildings, the conflict and hate, the bumper strips reading ONE HAPPY WORLD, vanished. The soldiers in their uniforms hanging around him all day long, the dread of the next missile attack, the pressure and tension, and above all the doubt that they all felt. The terrible guilt of a civil war, masked over by greater and greater ferocity. Brother against brother. Family against itself.
_A Volkswagen rolled up and parked. A woman, very pretty and smiling, stepped out and said,_
_"Almost ready to go home?"_
_That's a darn sensible little car they've got, he thought. They made a good buy. High resale value._
_"Just about," he said to his mother._
_"I want to get a few things in the drugstore," his father said, closing the car door after them._
_Trade-in on electric razors, he thought as he watched his mother and father go off toward the drug department of Ernie's Shopping Center. Seven-fifty for your old razor, regardless of make. No ominous preoccupation: the pleasure of buying. Above his head the shiny signs. Colors of shifting ads. The brightness, the splendor. He wandered about the parking lot, among the long pastel cars, gazing up at the signs, reading the words in the window displays. Schilling drip coffee 69 cents a pound. Gosh, he thought. What a buy._
_His eyes took in the sight of merchandise, cars, people, counters; he thought, What a lot to look at. What a lot to examine. A fair, practically. In the grocery department a woman giving away free samples of cheese. He wandered that way. Bits of yellow cheese on a tray. The woman holding the tray out to anyone. Something for nothing. The excitement. Hum and murmur. He entered the store and reached out for his free sample, trembling. The woman, smiling down at him, said,_
_"What do you say?"_
_"Thank you," he said._
_"Do you enjoy this?" the woman asked. "Roaming around here in the different stores while your parents are shopping?"_
_"Sure," he said, munching on the cheese._
_The woman said, "is it because you feel that everything you might need is available here? A big store, a supermarket, is a complete world in itself?"_
_"I guess so," he admitted._
_"So there's nothing to fear," the woman said. "No need to feel anxiety. You can relax. Find peace, here."_
_"That's right," he said, with a measure of resentment at her, at the questioning. He looked once more at the tray of food._
_"Which department are you in now?" the woman asked._
_He looked around him and saw that he was in the pharmacy department. Among the tubes of toothpaste and magazines and sun-glasses and jars of hand lotion. But I was in the food part, he thought with surprise. Where the samples of food are, the free food. Are there free samples of gum and candy here? That would be okay._
"You see," the woman said, "they didn't do anything to you, to your mind. You slipped back yourself. You've slipped back now, just reading about it. You keep wanting to go back." Now she did not have a tray of cheese samples. "Do you know who I am?" she asked in a considerate voice.
"You're familiar," he said, stalling because he could not recall.
"I'm Mrs. Keitelbein," the woman said.
"That's so," he agreed. He moved away from her. "You've done a lot to help me," he said to her, feeling grateful.
"You're getting out of it," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "But it'll take time. The pull on you is strong. The tug back into the past."
_The Saturday-afternoon crowd swarmed on all sides of him. How nice, he thought. This is the Golden Age. The finest time to be alive. I hope I can live like this always._
_His father, beckoning to him from the Volkswagen. Armload of parcels. "Let's go," his father called._
_"Okay," he said, still wandering, still seeing everything, unwilling to let it all go by him. In the corner of the parking lot heaps of colorful paper that had blown there, wrappers and cartons and paper bags. His mind made out the patterns, the cigarette packages crumpled up, the lids to milkshake cartons. And in the debris lay something of value. A dollar bill, folded. It had blown there with the rest. Bending, he sorted it out, tinfolded it. Yes, a dollar bill. Lost by someone, probably a long, long time ago._
_"Hey, look what I found," he called to his father and mother, running toward them and the car._
_Conference, ending in, "Can he keep it? Would it be right?" His mother, concerned._
_"Never be able to locate the owner," his father said. "Sure, keep it." He tousled the boy's hair._
_"But he didn't earn it," his mother said._
_"I found it," Ragle Gumm chanted, clutching the bill. "I figured out where it was; I knew it was there with all that other junk."_
_"Luck," his father said. "Now, I know fellows that can walk along and spot money on the pavement any day of the week. I never can. I bet I never found a dime in the gutter all my life."_
_"I can do that," Ragle Gumm chanted. "I can figure it out; I know how."_
_Later, his father relaxing on the couch in the living room, relating tales about World War Two, his part in the Pacific phase. His mother washing dishes in the kitchen. The tranquillity of the house..._
_"What are you going to do with your dollar?" his father asked._
_"Invest it," Ragle Gumm said. "So I'll have more."_
_"Big businessman, eh?" his father said. "Don't forget about corporation taxes."_
_"I'll have plenty left over," he said confidently, leaning back the way his father did, hands behind his head, elbows stuck out._
He savored this happiest of all moments of life.
"But why so inaccurate?" he asked Mrs. Keitelbein. "The Tucker car. It was a terrific car, but--"
Mrs. Keitelbein said, "You did ride in one, once."
"Yes," he said. "Or at least I think so. When I was a kid." And, at that point remembering, he could feel the presence of the car. "In Los Angeles," he said. "A friend of my dad's owned one of the prototypes."
"You see, that would explain it," she said.
"But it never was put into production. It never got beyond the hand-built stage."
"But you needed it," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "It was for you." Eagle Gumm said, "_Uncle Tom's Cabin_." It had seemed perfectly natural to him, at the time, when Vic had shown them all the brochure from the Book-of-the-Month Club. "That thing was written a century before my time. That's a really ancient book."