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VII

After the death of the R-ship—and somehow Kirby could never think of it any other way—the road to the stars was clear. The Lucy B. Davenport trundled and slovened on toward the distant beacon of Alpha Centauri that seemed never to grow nearer. Life settled to a kind of weird normality, with fewer frictions and complaints than Kirby would have believed possible. Shari said it was because everyone had expected to die when the R-ship caught up with them, and now they were just thankful to be alive. Pop Barstow said it was because people can get used to anything if they're forced to it. However it was, people ate and slept and found necessary things to do in between. They played games and taught their young. Babies were born. Two men and one woman and an infant died and were buried in the deep outside. And time went slipping, sliding, gliding past in a kind of dull hypnotic fashion, unnoticed except by the chronometers. They at least knew that time was passing. To everyone else it appeared that time had stopped. So that finally when the day came Kirby could not quite bring himself to believe it.

He went down the ladder to the cargo deck. Halfway on the iron rungs he stopped and looked out over the deck, and all the people that were in it looked up at him but did not speak, and even most of the children were still.

Kirby said, "We'll land within the next two hours."

Now again as he was conscious of time. Five years. Nearly six, as Earthmen count. Five years, nearly six, in the huge cold night that lies between the suns, and the night was over and there were only two short hours left between these people and the realization of a dream.

He knew what they were thinking, sitting there in little huddles on the rows of cots, trying to keep the children safe and quiet, waiting, watching him. They were thinking, what if something happens now, at the last minute? What if all this time and distance has been for nothing, and we die?

A burst of thunder drowned out all other sounds, and the Lucy B. Davenport shuddered in all her iron bones. The people swayed, and Kirby could see their mouths come open, but he could not hear anything but rockets. Everything that was not bolted down moved forward along the deck or through the air. Balancing easily on the ladder, Kirby glanced with a fast professional eye at the preparations that had been made, and then he looked for Wilson and found him.

"Better secure the doors of the galley locker, Wils. If the catches tear off, you'll have the place full of pots and skillets. And there's a wash line over there," he pointed, "just set to wrap around someone's neck. Otherwise everything looks good."

Wilson nodded. He was still a young man, but he looked a hundred years old at this minute, his eyes haggard and very bright. Kirby knew what he was thinking, too. He was wishing he did not have to sweat through these next two hours. He was wishing the landing was already made and done with, and safe.

You think it's tough, Kirby thought, to have to sit down here and sweat through the landing. What about me? I have to make it.

"Get with it," he said to Wilson. "And watch out for the next blast," Wilson turned and beckoned to the other men who were part of the committee responsible for the security of the people in the cargo deck. They talked a minute and then they threaded their way between the cots to the galley where the women had done their cooking for nearly six years now and got busy with part of a coil of wire they had left from making other things fast. A woman got up and rather shamefacedly took down her wash-line. Wash lines and diapers, Kirby thought, stew-pots and soap and a smell of sour milk, and that's how you conquer the stars.

He said aloud, so they could all hear him, "The brake blasts will come closer together now, so don't try to move around. You'll be safest if you use all your bedding to pad the cots and then strap yourselves into them. I see some of you already have—good, and the rest of you get busy and help each other. Above all, keep the kids tied down."

A note of gentleness, almost of pity, came into his voice. "And don't worry. You'll hear a lot of noise, and the ship may pitch around a good bit, but there's nothing to be afraid of."

Somewhere, anonymous in the concealment of blanket-and-pillow padding, a girl was making the sharp barking noises that precede hysteria. Nervous excitement, rather than any real fear. Some of the younger children, frightened by the unaccustomed roar and jarring, were beginning to cry in earnest. Kirby shook his head. "Try and keep them quiet," he said. "It'll soon be over." He went back up the ladder.

He closed the hatch and dogged it down. Scared, he thought. Why should they be scared? They don't know all the things that can happen on a landing, on the best spaceport with the best ship and all the best ground-control equipment there is to help you do it. They don't realize that it isn't easy to come down out of the blue and go to roost in some bramble patch like a ruddy bird. They don't realize how old the Lucy is, a tired old freighter already pushed far beyond her strength. She could blow her tubes. She could break up. She could misfire and just plain crash.

Kirby watched his own hands fastening the hatch. What about those hands? Could they still take a ship down, could they remember after all these years the thousand intangible things a pilot's hands must know, the time and the feel and the balance of a ship?

The all-important hands made three tries on the last dog before they could get it set.

Kirby went on to the bridge.

Pop Barstow was in the pilot's chair. An old rocket man, too old, and Kirby wished he wasn't. He wished he could leave the whole responsibility to Pop.

"Hold on," said Pop. "I ain't through yet." He punched the keys again, and they held on, Kirby and Shaw the radarman in his cubby, and Shari who was standing beside the pilot's chair looking out, looking for the new world that would be stranger to her than to the rest of them because it was not at all like Mars. The roar and the shudder came again, and the great hand of inertia slamming at them, and Kirby's ears hurt with trying to hear the individual creakings of the ship's fabric through the noise of the rockets. When things were quiet again he cursed Pop Barstow. "What're you trying to do, break her back?"

"Her back's in better shape than mine," said Pop. He slid over into the co-pilot's chair. "And anyway, young Kirby, I was flying rockets when you were kicking in your cradle. Haven't got a bottle hid away, have you?"

Kirby took the controls as though they were so many sticks of dynamite. "Hell," he said angrily, "you soaked up every drop there was three years ago."

"Pity. Best thing in the world for what you've got." He looked up at Shari. "Funk," he said. "That's what this husband of yours has got. Last-minute, end-of-the-run funk. Trouble with these young fellows now, no stamina. You'd think after everything else that a simple little landing wouldn't upset him." He shook his head slowly. "Now if I'd been able to beat out an R-ship—"

Kirby said between his teeth, "Thanks, Pop, but I'd rather you left my morale alone."

He punched the keys. When it was over Pop said quietly, "You'll have to give her more than that unless you figure on driving her right through the planet."

Kirby did not answer because he knew that what Pop said was true. He looked out the forward port. The glare-shields were in place, but even so the two suns, Alpha Centauri and the more distant companion, flooded space with a brilliance that was gloriously painful to the eye after the years of darkness. In that sea of light a planet swam, green and lovely and very like Earth, as Alpha Centauri is very like Sol. And Kirby's heart contracted with a pang of mingled pain and exultation.

Shari spoke abruptly over Kirby's head. She spoke in the old High Martian which only she and Kirby understood. "I will put it into words for you, Kirby. Your dream ends with the landing. It is sad, but there is no help for it."

"There are times," Kirby said, "when it would be better if my wife were neither telepathic nor talkative." And then he asked her what the devil she meant by that statement.

"The others," she said, "they broke the law and risked themselves and their families to make this flight because they dreamed of a world where thought and action should be free, and not forever bound by government decree. You, beloved, you thought highly of these things too, but it was only a thought. Your dream was to go to space again, to hold a rocket ship between your hands once more before you died. So now you have done it. Now your dream ends, and theirs begins!"

She leaned over and kissed him quickly, gently, and turned away. "Let it be enough that you are the first spaceman to span the stars. A big thing, Kirby. A very big thing, but not good at all without a landing. Make it."

She went out of the bridge before Kirby could think of any adequate words.

He sat for a moment watching the beautiful green planet sweep toward him, furious because of the implications in what she had said and at time same time wondering if she could just possibly be right. Then all he could think of was the men and women and kids down there under hatches with their lives depending on him, and how scared he had been at the take-off for the same reason. Then he really got mad. He said aloud, "I'll show her." He hit the brake-jets again, and again, and a third time in close succession, hard, and he said to the Lucy B. Davenport, "All right, you old cow, if you're going to break up do it now!"

And he repeated, "I will show her."

In the co-pilot's chair, Pop Barstow grinned a fleeting, nervous grin. He braced his feet as though he meant to push them through the deck plate, and waited.

Kirby took her down.

Part of the time he knew what he was doing, and part of the time his hands and his eyes teamed up and worked by themselves, getting messages from the instrument bank and from the deep inner pulse of the ship and combining them into a single truth expressed in terms of velocity and thrust.

He knew where to land. The spot had been chosen from what they had seen of the data brought back by the RSS-1. To a robot ship, bitterly enough, belonged the honor of the first interstellar flight, and the only consolation Kirby had for that was that the R-ship had paid with its life for that piece of insolence. The information brought back from the reconnaissance flight had been kept secret, of course, but secrets have a way of getting out when enough people are determined to know them, and on one clip of smuggled microfilm a place had been shown that looked well-nigh perfect for a colony. The knowledge that there was a habitable world in the system of Alpha Centauri had sparked this whole odyssey of the Lucy B. Davenport. Without that certainty she would have remained in her hidden cave in the Martian sea bottom until her own red dust was indistinguishable from the red sand.

Kirby checked his coordinates and rolled on over the curve of the world, from the night side through the dawn belt and into the light of day, dropping lower with that splendid tearing thunder that only a rocket has. The seas were blue beneath him, and the forests green, and it was almost like the landings he had made on Earth long ago, except that the continents were differently shaped.

He picked up the landmark in the south temperate zone, a mountain range with three great peaks in line. He crossed them, with the white snow throwing back the sunlight at him like a giant's heliograph. There were miles of forest, and then a plain with a river running through it, a wide slow river as huge and grand as the Mississippi. There were game herds on the plain. They ran from the sound of the rockets, raising a mighty cloud of dust. Awe and disbelief came over Kirby. He set the ship down very carefully as though it were a thing of glass, so carefully that the nerve ends all over his body hurt with the agony of achieving that precision, and she was at rest in a bend of the river.

The rockets were stilled, and there was a kind of terrible silence. Kirby listened to it, and knew that at least part of what Shari had said was true.

The smoke and the hot dust settled or blew away. He could see out the port again. He looked, sitting in the pilot's chair with his hands still on the controls, not moving, feeling like someone who has just died. His nerves did not hurt any more. His head did not ache. Nothing felt at all. Five years, he thought. Nearly six, in space, with an R-ship to hunt us down. And there were all the years before that, working on the Lucy in secret, lying, stealing, risking our necks every day and every night, and all of it aimed straight at this final moment, this now, that none of us ever really believed we'd reach. And we have reached it. We are here, and safe.

He thought, I did it. Not taking anything away from the others, but ultimately it was me, Kirby, that told them how to fit the ship, and took her off, and flew her, and set her down. I did it. And I did it well.

Feeling came back to Kirby. A weakness in the knees, a wild pounding of the heart and a general unnamed and nameless warmth that filled him like fire in the night. He looked out at the new world. It was a good, big world, with horizons all around it, wide open to Andromeda and beyond. He was content.

"Go let em out, Pop," he said, "before they burst out through the seams."

Pop didn't answer. Kirby turned his head. The old man was sitting there with a dazed look and two undeniable tears in his eyes. His lips were moving, and presently Kirby understood that he was saying, over and over again, "I never thought we'd make it. So help me God, I never thought we'd make it."

Kirby got up, staggering a little because the tension had all run out of him and left his muscles loose. He put his hand on Pop's shoulder. "You old so-and-so," he said. "Didn't you trust me?"

Pop shook his head. "You're a good rocket man. So was I, once. But that wasn't enough. We needed miracles. One at the take-off, to beat the R-3's. One to take care of the RSS-1, and that was a big miracle, Kirby, a real king-size spectacular. And then maybe the biggest miracle of all, just to hold together and get here and come down all in one piece. Three miracles. That's too many."

"Well, we had 'em. And now we don't need any more."

A long slow shudder slid through the bones and wiry muscles of the shoulder under Kirby's hand. "Unless they send more R-ships after us. More robot ships to hunt us down."

Kirby said furiously, "Oh, for God's sake." He took his hand away, before he used it to break Pop Barstow's neck. "Look, we just made a landing; we're alive, let us enjoy it a little before you start crying up more woe!"

Pop said wearily, "When you get to be my age, you learn never to trust things when they're going too good."

"That's a fine line of reasoning," Kirby snarled. "I suppose it would be better if we were all dead." He stamped out of the bridge, all the exultation gone from him. Shari was waiting for him in the corridor. He jerked his head toward Pop inside, and said, "Why does he want to be like that?"

Her voice shook a little when she answered, and he saw that her habitual Martian calm was stretched very thin. "None of us is quite sane at this moment. We take it out in different ways. Listen!"

He listened. Below deck and now, it seemed, from outside, there sounded a howling and whooping and clamoring that was the damndest noise Kirby had ever heard, like people laughing and crying and praying and having hysterics all in one breath. He shook his head, smiling uncertainly. Without knowing it he had taken hold of Shari's arms, and his fingers were sunk deep in the flesh. "I did it," he said. "Yes."

"And it wasn't all because I wanted to go to space again, Shari. I want others to go to space, too. I want to save—" The words became confused with the violence of what he felt. Courage and pride, he was trying to say, the man-virtues that are almost gone. These I wanted to save. The uproar from below rose and rocked him. "Who let them out? I was just going to open the hatch."

"The young Shaw. He ran there as soon as the keel touched."

"Without waiting for orders. The young whelp! Oh well, that's the end of orders, anyway. They're on their own now."

He shifted his grip until she was pulled in tight against his chest, so tight that it was hard for both of them to breathe. She was trembling. He kissed the top of her head, thinking vaguely how beautiful she was and how much he loved her, thinking, Damn Pop Barstow and his croaking! And Shari answered him without waiting for his question, "Yes, I was afraid. I have been afraid ever since we left Mars. And you are angry with the old man because you know that more R-ships may come and you don't want to think about it."

"He might have let me enjoy the landing."

"The old live always with their fears." She tried to pull away, laughing in a choked-up, unfamiliar way. "Kirby, you will suffocate me! Let us go outside and stand on the ground and breathe the air. Let us get out of this hideous, this awful hateful ship!"

She said that last with such passion that he was astonished. She ran away from him down to the corridor, to the ladder that led to the hatch. He blinked and went after her. They were practically alone in the ship now. Everybody had stampeded for the open, scattering out beyond the charred and smoking circle the landing jets had made, to where the prairie grass grew thick and green.

They were doing things that Kirby had never seen adult men and women do before unless they were wild drunk. The children screamed and ran and rolled in the grass and the wild-flowers, and the little ones, the ship-born babies, cried. They had never seen a world and a sky, and they were frightened. For them, it was like a second birth.

Shari was still ahead of him. She mingled with the group and he lost her in it because suddenly people were hanging on him and crying and pounding him on the back, and even the most vocal of the women who had made the voyage under protest for this one brief moment loved Kirby next to life itself.

Here and there, on the edges of the crowd and in it, people began to go down on their knees.

Nobody said anything, nobody led the movement, but it spread and the crowd got quieter, and finally it was all quiet and everybody was kneeling, or standing with a bowed head. And Kirby saw Shari, far out on one side where the prairie began to slope upward toward the foothills and the forest. She had stopped running. She was standing still.

He went to her. The air was warm, with a feel and taste of spring. His body felt heavy and pleasantly weak in the unaccustomed gravity, his feet were clumsy in the grass after the years of walking on bare cold iron. It was good. It was good to think of building a house and living here, free from acts of law that told you where to live and where to work and how many children you could have, so that the economic balance could not be upset and no change could occur—because change was always accompanied by pain for somebody, and of course pain was bad.

It was good to think of living with Shari where there was not a dead weight of social custom to stumble over everywhere they turned, because she was Martian and he was not, and that made it somehow improper that they should love each other.

He put his arms around her and told her so, not with words. She didn't need them, and thoughts were better anyway. Then he realized that she was not listening to him. She was not even looking at him, her eyes unfocused and far-away, with nothing in them but a shadow.

He asked her what the matter was. She did not answer, and after a while he shook her hard, and shouted her name. She shivered, and her head dropped forward. He thought she was going to faint, but then she said, "Kirby, please, I want to go back to the ship."

"But you were so crazy to get out of it! What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing."

"Don't give me that. Something frightened you. What was it?"

She looked from him to the kneeling people and then to the old ship that had done with flying. And she lifted her head and smiled and said, "I told you, we are all mad today. Let us not think of it again."

She began to chatter about where they would build their house, bright words with nothing behind them, pulling him back toward where the others were. He stopped that.

"What was it that frightened you, Shari?"

She began to cry, the second time in his life that he had seen her do it.

She said, "I don't know what it was. I can't tell you, Kirby, because I just don't know!"

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Framed