The Farthest Horizon by Raymond F. Jones

It was meant to be a vacation. The three of them had looked forward to a week of joyous insanity. By letters - dozens of them - and by one long and recklessly expensive spacephone call they had planned this trip. Rick was coming home after a year-long exile on Mars.

Never again would they be separated so long, he had promised Sarah. But he had not told how he intended to keep that promise - not until he stepped off the spaceship dock and hugged her close while he punched the biceps of their sixteen-year-old Ken.

He told then about the great plans he had for all of them to live on Mars indefinitely. He told about the new space-probing crews of which he had been given command. And he told about the Junior Officers Corps, which came like a golden dream to Ken.

And so this that was meant for vacation time had turned to a harsh and bitter journey.

Sarah glanced aside at the face of Rick. Spaceburned, and grim now after their quarrels, he looked straight ahead, his jaw tight. His hands gripped the steering wheel too hard, making the car sway like an overcontrolled ship.

In the edge of the rear-view mirror she could see Ken. It was like jumping backward two decades in time. But already there was the same intensity of eyes and hard-set jaw that made them alike in unapproachable severity.

A sudden scream cut through the air, far above. It seemed to hang like a vapor trail long after its source was gone.

Rick's face brightened. "What was that?" His eyes sought the sky for a brief instant, but saw nothing.

"Run 32 that Continental has been bragging about," said Ken. "They put it on two weeks ago and it's been making the Moon on a scheduled fourteen hours. It's really a ship! Shorty McComas, who handles mail, took me through her one night after hours."

Their faces were glowing in the intimacy of their private talk, which shut Sarah wholly out of their dread world. The scream of the ship was to her a cry of pain and helplessness. To them it was a song of exultation.

"Let's hurry," she murmured to Rick. "We want to make it before dark."

Like a signal, her words shut the light of fascination out of their faces. She wanted to scream when they closed down like that. They challenged her right to interfere in their lives, but not once did they credit her with a life of her own.

It was almost dusk when they topped the long rise that looked over the valley where her parents lived. The sun was a golden light fanning out across the valley, and the scene brought a choked longing to her throat.

This is what I've wanted, she thought. This says everything I've tried to tell you about the way I feel.

Ken's voice was a sudden, small roar behind her. "Look at that sunset! It's like the flames of ten thousand jets rolled into one!"

Sarah looked away, helpless before the intuitive skill of Ken and Rick to turn everything into reminders of terror.

The farm of Sarah's father consisted of a thousand rolling acres devoted to orchards, grain, and cattle feeding. She had never lived on it, because her parents acquired it after their own retirement and long after her own marriage.

But the farm represented everything that she had come to think of as missing from her own life.

As long as she could remember, there had never been a time when she could put her personal possessions in a place she could call home - her own home. Her father was Commander Ronald Walker, United States Space Navy, Retired, and her early years had seen nothing but a succession of cell-like apartments near space bases, where she and her mother spent the long, lonely hours when the ships were out.

She felt almost cheated when her father retired and bought the farm. There was the peace and security and stability for which she had longed. And now it was still beyond her, for she, like her mother, had married a spaceman.

It was inevitable that she should. The only men she knew were spacemen. If it hadn't been for the Space Navy she and Rick would never have met. She had not yet come to the point of thinking it would have been best if they had not met. It wouldn't! But her heart ached with the weary questioning: Why couldn't their lives have been patterned in the same world?

She hated the very mention of the stars, and they were all that Rick and Ken lived for. It was all that her father had lived for. His frenzied rejection of Earth had left Sarah and her mother to years of loneliness while he chased a faraway dream that could not be caught and held.

In retirement, he had given her mother finally the things she had longed for all her life. A home of her own - but Sarah pitied her mother for the long, wasted years, and the now fruitless achievement of her desire.

The car followed the swelling curve of the road over the hill and crossed a wooden bridge. The hollow rumbling of it was a solemn welcome to this rustic world. Ahead, the farm itself was deceptively casual in appearance. But Rick knew every building and every tree was laid out with the same precision Commander Walker would have used in planning a flight across the Solar System.

This, Sarah did not see or know. For her, this was simply peace in contrast to the hectic naval base where houses were boxes, and "entertainment" was planned in some department by a brisk young woman with owlish glasses.

Sarah's lace softened now, and Rick, watching her, grew less grim. He stopped the car for a moment at the entrance to the farm. On either side, the glistening white fence curved away into the distance, along the green slopes, and was lost among the gentle hills. Overhead, the leaves held back the light of the sky and whispered temptingly to those who passed beneath.

Rick deflated his lungs with a long breath. "We ought to be able to find the answer to almost any problem in a place like this," he said. "Let's make a try, Sarah. Will you forgive me the things I said this morning?"

"Of course - " Her voice held little conviction and drove him away with its utter resignation.

When he started the car again she wished she had taken advantage of the moment. If Rick could look at the farm through her eyes for just an instant - then perhaps they could find an answer to the questions that plagued them.

She looked askance at Ken in the back seat. He was puzzled and grim by the things he heard between them.

He wanted nothing from life except to be a spaceman. He lived only for the whine of the jets overhead, and the hours when he could get some porter or mechanic to take him through the vast ships.

At sixteen he had soloed at three times the speed of sound. He was cast in the mold of his father and his grandfather. And his handsome young face promised unhappiness for some other woman in the long, lonely waiting, Sarah thought.

Or perhaps there would be someone whose vision could soar along with his. There were enough such girls at the Base. Sarah envied their ability to watch the stars with burning light in their own eyes, waiting jubilantly for their men who spanned the chasms of space.

She would be forever apart from these, she knew. She did not know why. She did not understand either herself or the men who were tied to her - but sometimes she wished for the courage to free them, wholly and completely.

The house was long and low, like a great crystal set among the trees. Sarah's mother came out the side door almost the moment the car drove up and erupted with Ken's sudden leap to the ground.

Mrs. Walker was still slim and looked fifteen years younger than her actual sixty-five. And all the harried tension that Sarah remembered so well was gone from her face.

She hugged Ken's man-wide shoulders and kissed his forehead as he struggled away.

"I think Dad's got something for you inside. He said something about your birthday, I believe."

"Wait a minute," called Sarah. "We get to see, too." She even felt that the smile on her face was real, now. She grasped Rick's hand and pulled him along as they left the car.

Then, as they stepped inside the house, the light in her face died away. Her father was standing there with his polished black pipe in one hand, and smiling across the room at Ken.

Reverendy, the boy held a glistening three-foot model of an old-fashioned jet ship. It was a sleek, swept-back thing with a needle nose. Its bright red and gold coloring was like the flame of sunset.

Sarah felt sick inside. She recognized that shape and the golden name, Mollie, on the nose.

Mollie was her mother's name, and she knew that ship. She had seen its prototype when she was a lot younger than Ken was now. She had waited with her mother in a Navy radio room during the cold and rainy night, waited for news of that ship.

Her father was the pilot of it, flying the first round-the-world, non-refuel flight - the first of the atomic jets.

Ken was almost weak with the exquisite pleasure of this gift his grandfather had made for him.

"It . . . it's beautiful," he finally said. "Gosh, it's a beautiful thing. Boy, how I'd like to have been with you when you flew this-"

"You'll fly better ships than that one, son, and fly them farther and faster."

"But there'll never be a 'first' like this one."

"I think there will. I've been hearing about the Junior Patrol Corps that's being set up to train on Mars. I trust that your father has been able to swing enough influence to get you in. If he hasn't, I'm sure I havel"

Ken's angular face sobered. He set the model carefully on the floor and looked at it with his hands in his pockets.

"I won't be going, I believe," he said. "Mother doesn't think I'm old enough for that sort of thing. She doesn't want me to be a spaceman, anyway."

Commander Walker glanced sharply and with new light in his eyes towards his daughter. He knew the expression he saw now on her face. So many times he had seen it - when she was a little girl and he said good-by to her at the beginning of some long flight.

"We'll have a talk about it," he said quietly, "but let's get ready for dinner now. Mother's had it waiting for half an hour. She'll really let us know about it if we keep her waiting much longer."

Ken slept that night with the model on end by his bed. The moonlight sprayed through the open window and softened the bright colors of the ship until it looked like a half-real dream standing there in take-off position.

But it would never be more than a dream for him, he thought. He couldn't hurt his mother as he knew he would do if he went to Mars. And there was more yet to think of. It would put a breach between his mother and father that could never be healed. He could not take the responsibility of that.

His perspective would not yet permit him to understand that the breach was already there and not of his creation. For the moment, he was imprisoned by his parents' conflict.

He watched the shadows slowly engulfing the ship as the moon rose higher. He could almost see and hear it crashing through the night sky as his grandfather left the sun behind on that great flight around the world.

He had to go to Mars. He sat up in bed, his fist beating the pillow, his eyes suddenly wet. Somehow, he had to convince his mother that he and his father were not wrong.

Sarah awoke early, aware of the thin weight of another day. She wished now that they hadn't come. She had actually forgotten that the overwhelming influence of her father would be added to the other side of the argument and she knew she could no longer uphold her own.

She looked across at Rick's sleeping form, and suddenly their arguments seemed so futile. This was all there need be to life: a man, and a woman, and their child. What else mattered? Why couldn't Rick and Ken see that the stars did not matter as long as they had each other

But, they would say, why couldn't she go along with them, if they wanted the stars bad enough? One side of the argument seemed as reasonable as the other, and she did not know the answer - only that she feared and hated the stars.

She took a quick, cold shower, and joined her mother in the kitchen of the farmhouse. Its broad windows opened onto the orchard, snowy with blossoms. In the meadow beyond, the grass was close-cropped by the indolent dairy cows.

Sarah stepped outside a moment and filled her lungs with the sharp, glistening air. It carried the scent of the orchard and the dewy grass and the pungent smells of the distant barn where her father was supervising the milking.

"I don't see how anyone would want to live in any other way," she said. "It's horrible to bring up a child knowing nothing but grease and steel and the sickening smell of jets. Ken doesn't know what the world is like, yet!"

"If this is the world, then neither did any of us know it when we lived at the bases when Dad was in the Navy!"

"We certainly didn't. Day and night - nothing but jets and rockets screaming. I thought I'd go crazy listening to them. I dreamed of finding a place where it was quiet and people moved at a walk instead of screaming through space like witches on atomic broomsticks.

'And then I saw to it that I would spend the rest of my life there by marrying a spaceman!" "You don't have to stay with him."

"I do. It just so happens that I'm still in love with him. It's more likely that he'll tell me to go my own way, but I just can't stand the thought of Ken going to Mars to join this crazy Patrol they've organized for children. It's insane! Sixteen-year-olds being taught to handle spaceships. Don't they deserve any childhood?"

"What does Ken say about it?"

"He's all for it, of course. He doesn't know any better. He doesn't know there's anything else in the world."

Mrs. Walker checked the automatic ovens and glanced at the clock. "We'd better round up the men for breakfast. Almost done." Then she put her hands on her hips and looked at Sarah.

"I haven't had much to do with men - only had the one around during my life. With Ken and Rick you've had more experience in learning how they act, young and old, than I ever had. But one thing I did learn was that it just doesn't matter very much what they do as long as it's what they want. A man shouldn't have to slave at some uninspired career and try to enjoy life on the side. If his career isn't what he wants to do, then he's wasting his life, and no woman has a right to ask him to do that."

"Doesn't anything I want matter?"

"Of course. If you want to leave Rick and be a lady farmer nobody in the whole world would stop you or criticize you. That's one thing you can count on today - and that no one before us could - you are absolutely free to do just about as you please."

"You don't have to make it sound so ridiculous!"

"Well, what do you want, then? You don't want to go to Mars with Rick, and you don't want to stay behind."

"Why does a woman always have to be the one to give in?"

"They don't. I just told you what you could do. You can break up your marriage and you and Rick and Ken can still be good friends - plenty of people have done that rather than 'give in' to each other."

"But that's the ancient dogma that I can't have a marriage and my own life at the same timel"

"You've been married long enough to know that. You've hated the Navy life all these years, but you've lived it. Only this business of Ken's going to Mars has brought it to a climax.

"I had to make the choice, too. It wasn't much fun for me, sitting in the radio shack waiting for news of our great hero. I always thought it was nothing but showing-off, but it was the only thing he lived for, and of all the choices I had to make, he was the one thing I would not give up.

"Yours is twice as hard, because you have Ken as well as Rick - or is it twice as easy?"

In the afternoon she lay on the lawn chair in front of the house watching the twinkling pattern of sunlight that came through the leaves of the old oak tree. The world had stopped its rush of jet wings. She seemed to have slipped into utter timelessness.

Her father's approach startled her out of her reverie. "May I join you?" he said.

"If you promise to talk about nothing but cows and pigs, and crops and weather," she said.

He dropped to the grass and looked up at her. A patch of sunlight caught the silver border of his hair and turned the space-bumed skin of his face to bold bronze.

"I tried to interest Ken in the farm this morning," he said, "but I didn't have much luck. I'd be glad to leave him this place, you know, if he wanted it. I'll be through with it by the time he's old enough. But he won't want it, and neither will Rick - not then, anyway. Farming these days is just an old man's hobby, important enough, but my kind can take care of it."

Sarah sighed. "All right, so you want to talk about Ken and Mars and space jets. You won't let me hear of anything else. You're all determined that I am wrong, that I haven't the right to control my own child's life until he knows what he wants to do."

"Take it easy, Sarah. I'm not used to being jumped like that. It's bad for an old man's heart, you know.

"But as to Ken, are you sure that it's his going to Mars that you are so angry about, or is it something that someone else has done to you - or something, even, that's merely inside yourself?"

"It's everything - everything connected with space and jets and the things that take men away from their families."

"Rick tells me he's arranged for you to go with him."

"He's arranged it! And without consulting me or even assuming I could have another idea about it. He's been gone a whole year, and now he expects to jerk me up and transplant me to some frigid desert where life isn't fit for savages. And I'm supposed to be happy about that!"

"Would you really be happy with anything less than his giving up space altogether?"

Her breathing halted momentarily with a quick, deep intake as if she had not dared to frame in words the magnitude of this demand before. But she nodded slowly. "I guess that's it, Dad. I'd really settle for nothing less."

"You'll have to settle for a lot less!" Commander Walker retorted. "It's always been like this, Sarah," he continued more gently.

"There has always been a peculiar breed of man who had to see just what was beyond the horizon, a kind of man never settled or satisfied with what he had in the here and now. That's the kind of man I am, and that's the kind Rick is - and Ken is one with us.

"There's nothing you can do about it, Sarah - nothing at all." Sarah's face grew pale beneath the unwanted tan painted by sunlight on barren Naval Bases. "I can try," she said slowly. "You'll lose them both." "Would Mother have lost - ?"

He nodded slowly. "There is no way on Earth to hold a man from crossing the private horizon he has to cross. And sometimes I think we all have such a horizon, whether we know it or not.

"At any rate, there were certain things I had to do. To have abandoned them would have hurt us both more than to follow through. Your mother understood that. She understood it very well."

"What about me? I didn't understand it. I don't understand it yet. What about the long nights I sat with mother listening for radio reports - first the solo flight around the world, then the Moon, and then the Mars trip, not once but three times we waited while you tried and failed and tried again.

"I was glad when you had to turn back and missed being the first to reach Mars. I felt it made up a little for all the nights I waited for you. But nothing, really, could make up for that. You didn't even care - "

"There's more to caring than just clinging to someone you love - sucking the life out of him with demands he cannot fulfill. You can't imprison the thing you love.

"Because I left you did not mean that I had forgotten you. Remembering you was the one thing that kept me going. Perhaps I've done nothing, really, to let you know that, but if I'd known you would ever say the thing you have just said I would have kept on going without caring much if I ever succeeded in getting back."

Sarah looked at her hands, lying still and icy in her lap. "I'm sorry, Dad - but that's the way I did feel. It's almost the way I feel now about Rick and Ken. I can't help it. I can't forget those nights of waiting and being afraid - "

"Then you'd better tell Rick and get it over with. You can't change him, and you can't change Ken. Think about it a little while and then tell them if you still feel the same."

He rose to his feet and glanced off towards the distant fields. "I've got to go up to the house and check with the Weather Bureau again. I ordered two inches of rain for tonight and tomorrow. I'd like to postpone it while you're here, but the crops won't stand it. It doesn't show much signs of developing yet. The forecasters are getting pretty careless about filling orders lately."

When he was gone, Sarah lay back in the chair, her arm over her eyes to shield them from the sun edging now through the maze of leaves. She would be glad to see it rain, she thought. It should be raining everywhere. The whole world should be crying.

She would have to tell Rick and Ken that they could go - forever. There had not been any other answer since she first watched in fear while Rick took a new experimental ship to test on a long, lonely Moon flight. She had crouched then in a chair in the radio room just as she and her mother had done for so many long years waiting for news of her father.

There had been a thousand other flights since then, and they had quarreled and made up and quarreled bitterly again. And he had wholly overruled her objections to Ken's taking the jet courses at the Base.

Now, he wanted to take them to Mars forever. That, she could not do. They had to cross their far horizons wherever they might lead them, but they had to go without her.

The sky began clouding that afternoon and by three o'clock the rain came as scheduled. Sarah watched through the windows, watching it drip softly among the trees and wetting the whole Earth as far as she could see.

Her mother was busy with needlework and the men were hotly debating the merits of some fantastic and insignificant jet-drive mechanism.

Of them all, Sarah was alone in her discontent, alone and afraid. And they seemed, as if by conspiracy, to ignore her in her solitude.

Her mother spoke once, and then she turned to Commander Walker. "What are you going to do if the fish pond goes out? You said the dam would never stand another rain like this one, and you haven't done anything about it."

He waved the question away with superior knowledge of such details.

By morning the storm began to abate, the clouds were pierced with sunlight as the air mass was lowered by the controlling beams to conserve its remaining moisture for another location.

But Commander Walker, reading the automatic rain gauge records fumed. The total catch was only sixty per cent of his order.

Sarah slipped into her coat and boots and left the house as he called the Bureau to report his opinion of forecasters and demand the remainder of his order.

With surprise, she found Ken standing just outside the doorway, his face revealing an unbelievable awareness of the spring glory about him.

He smiled almost shyly. "Feel like going for a walk, Mom? It's a swell morning for that."

"I'd love to, Ken. Let's go on up the hill and see what things look like from there."

They started out together as the door opened and Commander Walker roared at them: "We're going to have some more rain this morning if that Weather Bureau can find enough brains to get those clouds back here. Better not go far. Stay in range of the old house on the island. The forecasters are probably mad enough to give it all in one bucketful. And I'll sue if they cost me any topsoil!"

Ken laughed and waved a hand as they retreated from the house. "We'll be all right. Don't worry about us. We like the rain."

The light in his face was a joyous thing to see, and Sarah thought suddenly how little there had been of it during the past years. She thought back over the times that Rick had left them alone, and it seemed there had been nothing of closeness or love between her and Ken. He had always pulled away in the direction of his father's horizon - and she had pulled against almost everything he had wanted.

They walked past the steaming barns and the low grumbling noises of the cattle within. The meadowland underneath their feet was squashy from the rain and she had to grasp Ken's arm to keep her feet beneath her.

He was big, like Rick, and the hardness of muscle in his arm startled her. He seemed to have grown almost without her awareness, she thought in panic.

"I've decided I won't go with Dad," Ken said abruptly. "I know how you feel about it. I'm not going to ask any more. We talked about it last night. I told him, and he said it was up to me.

She couldn't see his face, but she knew how it must look. Yet her heart gave an involuntary leap within her. He was offering the thing she most desired at this moment - or so it appeared.

But it was only appearance. She understood - as he didn't at this moment - that some day he would hate her for the unspoken pressure by which she had forced him to this decision.

"We'll talk about it more, later," she said. Her voice was hoarse and barely audible. "We may find another answer."

They came to the low rise behind the barns and followed the base of it towards the old creek bed, long dried up and overrun with grass. There had once been a sizable stream here, but a dam in the low hills beyond held back all the water that used to flow in spring freshest. This was the fish pond where the runoff from the hills was trapped.

Across the dry stream bed was a rise on which stood the first farmhouse of the place, now long abandoned. The stream had once run behind the house, but one sudden spring flood had washed a new course and left the house stranded on a tiny island between the two branches. It did not matter, for the house had been long abandoned even then.

Now Sarah and Ken turned their steps towards it. Ken glanced at the sky. "It looks like Grandpa is about to get all the rain he can use. I'll bet the forecasters are so tired of his grumbling that they're really going to let him have it."

Sarah stopped and glanced anxiously for the first time at the low gray ceiling that was settling with furious intensity.

"We'd better get back," she said. "We'll be drenched if we get caught out here." But already the first drops had started to fall.

T think it's been raining quite a while over the hill there," said Ken, nodding towards the rise that hid the fish pond. "We'd better go up to the old house and wait it out."

It seemed the sensible thing to do. Sarah hurried on, clutching Ken's hand for support. The bottom of the dry creek bed held three or four inches of water already from the previous rain. They sank to ankle depth in it, and tried to hop across on projecting rocks. Finally, they scrambled up the opposite slope to the house. Their footsteps rattled like dry bones on the old, weather-beaten porch.

From the moment they set foot on it, the rain spurted in torrents. It hammered the aged roof and began to pour through holes. Ken and Sarah dodged, clinging to each other and glancing apprehensively upward.

And Sarah found that she was laughing.

It was a strange and startling discovery. Ken was laughing with her, and she sensed that he, too, felt that they had not laughed together for a very long time.

They clung momentarily in this miracle of laughter, and then it slowly died away in Ken's face. He relaxed his hold on his mother, and then it was there between them again - the wonder and the agony of their divergent lives.

They sat down close to each other on the porch floor, their backs against the wall. Water fell and splashed on either side of them. They watched the sheeting rain, and listened to its roar on the roof.

Their own silence was long. Ken shifted uneasily. Sarah sensed his embarrassment in not knowing what to say to her in this moment.

She broke the silence. "Why do you want to go to Mars?" she asked suddenly. "Can you tell me in just a single phrase that will make me understand this thing?"

"It's what I've got to do," he answered, forgetting his former promise to abandon the plan. "There's one thing that each man in the world is born to do, Grandpa says, and I believe him. Mine is out there in space.

"Think of all there is yet to do I We haven't even reached the last planet of our own System. Somebody living now is going to be the first to make it. That could be me. And there are the other Systems like ours.

"They're talking about an S.O.L - speed of light drive - out there on Mars now. Dad thinks he may get in on some of the development work on that. We could reach the nearest stars with it.

"I've been born in the best age the world has ever known! I can't turn my back on it. You have no right to ask it of me."

"I won't ask it," said Sarah quietly. "I'm going to let you go - you and Dad - you can go together."

"That isn't what we want. We don't just want to go by ourselves. We need you, too."

"No!" Her voice was so shrill it startled her. "You'll never get me to agree to anything like that. I'll give you all the freedom you want for yourselves, but you can't ask any more of me than that."

From a distance there came a sudden sound of thunder. It rose from somewhere in the hills above them, and a gathering roar shook the old house on its rotten underpinnings. Sarah and Ken glanced up the littie valley with wonder and apprehension, and the roaring grew.

"The dam!" Ken cried. "Grandpa's pond - the dam's broken!"

Sarah recalled her mother's complaint about ordering so much rainfall to drain behind the weakened dam. It was incredible that her father should have underestimated such a risk. But now she could see the gray tongue of water curling down the dry creek bed, widening swiftly, some of it overflowing the banks and racing towards the barns and corrals across the meadow.

Then she saw it flowing through the other branch around the house.

"We can't get out of here!" she exclaimed. "There's water all around the house."

Ken eyed the widening reaches of the water. "The bed's pretty well filled up down below so that it won't drain, but it won't be more than six or seven feet deep at the most."

"But how'll we ever get across?"

He grinned as if he were now in the midst of something he could enjoy. "We'll swim, of course."

"No. Your grandfather has the boat he takes to the lake for fishing. They can pull it up here on the trailer and take us off."

"All that trouble? Come on, let's swim across. There's no need to wait for the rain to quit. We couldn't get any wetter than well be crossing."

Sarah looked down at the roiling water with distaste. "They'll come looking for us soon. There's no sense in trying to make it across now."

Ken was halfway across the porch. He turned and looked back with boyish pleading in his eyes. "Oh, come on, Mom. Let's not do it for sense. Let's do it for funl"

For a moment she had a chilling impression that somewhere a key had turned within a lock. She halted in her movement towards him.

To her eyes, resting on his, it seemed as if understanding flared between them - as if some window had opened, letting her see for the first time through the murky turmoil between them. Let's do it for fun-It was so simple she wanted to cry. She had sought for a thousand complex answers to explain the lives of the men who baffled her so.

Let's do it for fun -

They had crossed oceans and prairies in ages past. And now they circled the Earth and reached out to the planets, and Ken already had thoughts of other stars beyond the sun. Their far horizons - they crossed them for fun.

Let's do it for fun - It was so simple, but was it true? How long had it been since she had done anything for fun, for the sheer pleasure of it? Her memory ranged back over the years and they seemed barren of anything but a dread intensity that hovered in the sky on the wings of rockets.

Ken was alarmed by the sudden, half-hysterical giggle that escaped her as she put her hands up to her face and hid her eyes from his sight for a moment.

"What is it, Mom? What's the matter - ?"

She looked at him again, and her eyes were shining in a way that he had never seen before. "Come on - " she said.

It was a crazy thing - they could just as well wait - and she knew if she stopped to think about it she would never go through with it.

There was only one way to find out if it were true - if it were possible to do anything for fun any more.

She stripped off her coat and outer clothing and raced down the slope clad only in her underthings. She stopped at the edge of the water and waved to Ken who struggled with his shirt on the porch. He was grinning in pleased astonishment.

"Wait a minute," he called. "We can put a rock in these and throw them across."

He made a couple of bundles of their clothes and hurled them across the stream. They landed with a squashy sound on the other side.

"Now we've got to go!"

It wasn't cold. The rain was still falling, and it seemed warm on her bare skin. She looked down at herself. She wasn't old, but she couldn't remember another time when she had stood almost naked in the rain. She opened her mouth to taste it. She wondered how many other things that were fun she had missed.

Ken took her hand and they walked into the water. It was colder than the raindrops and closed like circling ice about her legs and waist and chest. But it felt good. She felt as if thirty years' terror had been stripped away with her clothes.

Her father had been so busy crossing his own horizons that he had never thought to explain why they had to be crossed. He had forgotten to tell her that it was fun and she had never sensed it through her dread.

It had taken Ken's impulsive, naive wisdom to explain it to her - and this simple adventure to prove it. And now she knew it was true.

Ken was grinning but puzzled. The puzzlement didn't matter, for she was seeing him really alive for the first time in years. All his joy and life had been suppressed in her presence before now, and she had not known it.

Abruptly, her feet slipped on the grassy slope and she went down. Ken grabbed her and buoyed her up, and then they were both laughing and swimming and sputtering their way towards the opposite slope.

The sky was breaking as they started wading again, and Sarah saw the figures coming towards them, her mother and father and Rick. Rick broke into a run.

Ken squeezed her hand hard, and looked at her as if he understood the feeling that was in her. "Aren't you glad we didn't wait for them, Mom?"

Then Rick was grasping her hand and pulling her towards him, wrapping his own dry coat about her wet shoulders. She looked up into his worried face.

"I've got a surprise for you, darling," she said. "We're going to Mars, all of us. It will be funl"

He scowled in wonder. "I don't know what that's got to do with this, but if it's true it's wonderful."

She didn't get to say more. Her mother was bustling up insisting that Ken take her coat against his wishes.

"Dad knew that dam couldn't take a rain like this. He knew it was weak and ordered rain anyway. Now look at the expense of building the pond again," she complained.

At first the words didn't register through the cold and unpleasantness that was beginning to settle upon Sarah. Then their significance cut sharply. She looked at her father and her son. She caught the momentary glance that passed between them.

And then she understood. A fantastic scheme, a play of their production in which she had been assigned a role without her knowledge. It had worked. They had shown her that the narrow restrictions she called her world could hold the same uncertainties as the vaster universe in which they lived.

But it was Ken's impulsive, unrehearsed invitation that gave her the insight she needed.

Let's do it for fun.

She smiled at her father as he caught her watching them so intently. He flushed as if he guessed she understood what they had done.

She nodded. "It's a lovely vacation, Dad. I'm going to remember it when we're on Mars. And today, I think I've crossed my own horizon."