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IV

The word went out from Mars. There are men in space again.

Secretly and stealthily that word went, on the tight Government beams. But it was heard and repeated. Inward from Mars it traveled, across Earth and Venus and into the sun-bitten, frost-wracked valleys of Mercury. Outward from Mars it traveled, to the lunar colonies of Jupiter and Saturn, to the nighted mining camps of the worlds beyond. There are men in space again!

Human mind and muscle had challenged the dark ships, and the barriers that had been so strong were broken, the frontiers that had been closed were open, and a thing had been done so splendid and insane and terrifying that it struck the mass consciousness with the impact of a bomb. There was no longer any point in feigning secrecy. The news services broadcast the story, training expressive cameras on the comfortable houses left vacant and forlorn, the abandoned toys, the supper dishes untouched on dusty tables.

Neighbor women shook their heads for a System-wide audience, lamenting the tragic fate of those whose husbands and fathers had so forcibly betrayed them. Two prospective passengers who had fled screaming into the night, leaving their husbands to go starward alone, gave solemn interviews and received much sympathetic attention. To that portion of the population given to feeling intensely about things, the Lucy B. Davenport became a symbol.

To most she was the black shadow of reaction, the last resurgence of the bad old days. But to some, chiefly the boys and the young men with the dreams not quite stamped on them yet, she was the bright single spark in a dreary monotone of settled routine. If she made it, she would have started something.

If she made it, she would have ended something, too—the absolute authority of the dark ships.

If she made it.

Here and there, scattered through the Solar System, certain men—other Kirbys and Wilsons and Barstows—had a special interest in the outcome. The Lucy B. Davenport was not only the only survivor of the Age of Rockets, cherished in the secrecy of waste places. It was not possible that she should have been. The law requiring the surrender and destruction of all manned ships was a challenge to the rebellious old Adam inherent in the human race. A few men actually succeeded in breaking it.

On Pluto there was activity. There was a base there for the heavily-shielded R-40's that carried the uranium ore from the mines. Behind it there were black mountains sheathed in ice, and all around it was a plain that glittered in the starlight, white with frozen air. The base itself was one vast sunken dome, for the ships and for the men who served them. But to one side was a second dome, and above it was a group of towers somewhat different from those of the base proper, squatter and more massive. This place had been used once. Since then it had lain quiet, its contents sheathed cocoon-like in protective webs.

Now men invaded it again, stripping away the sheathing, checking, testing, making delicate adjustments. And underneath the dome the giant dynamos awoke, and the solid granite of the plain was shaken.

On its massive launching track, a long dark shape lay waiting.

Far out in the gulf that lies between Sol and Alpha Centauri, Kirby wished desperately that he could go someplace else, at least temporarily. "Don't they ever give up?" he said. "Don't they ever shut up?"

"Ain't the nature of the beast," said Pop. He added philosophically, "Have a drink."

Kirby swore. "How many bottles did you smuggle aboard? Anyway, that's not the answer." He walked up and down. "I don't mind them yakking. I don't mind them screaming. I don't even mind them sending committees, as long as I can keep them off the bridge. I mind what they're doing to the men. You hear the scuttlebutt, Pop, more than I do. You know they're beginning to wonder out loud if maybe we shouldn't turn around and go back."

"Don't blame the women too much," Shari said. She was curled up in a corner of the bench that ran around part of the bridge, looking tired and bored and infinitely, infuriatingly patient. "It was never their idea to come."

Kirby knew she was right, but it only angered him more to know it. "I don't know why you want to defend them, the way they've treated you."

Shari smiled briefly. "They are beating you over my shoulder, Kirby. Partly. Partly they're envious, not of my exotic beauty, as you might suppose, but of the luxury I enjoy, being the captain's wife. Privacy. A whole glorious eight-by-ten room all to ourselves."

"Better go down and talk to them, young Kirby." Pop said. "Talk real hard, too, or they're likely to mutiny and storm the bridge, and then where'll you be?"

"He's right," Shari said. "Go. And when you talk to them, remember this. A man thinks usually in straight lines. Women think in circles. You and the others, you see the take-off and the landing, and you worry about the dark ships, but you're sure somehow in spite of everything you'll come through. The women see their discomfort now, and their sadness for all they had to leave behind, and they're afraid for themselves—but most of all, Kirby, they're afraid for their husbands and children. You see a wonderful world ahead; they see only a terrible wilderness. How will they live, how will their children live, who will teach them, who will care for their health? What dreadful things may happen, and how will they be able to cope with all these troubles? That's why they want to go back, because of the safety of their families."

Kirby opened his mouth, and Shari said quickly, "We have no children, Kirby, so it's easier for us. Be patient with them."

"Well," said Kirby, without joy, "I'll try."

"Luck," said Pop cynically. "And if you're not back in half-an-hour I'll send in the rescue squad."

Kirby went out and down the passage. One watch before the ark had reached the maximum acceleration her middle-aged bones could stand, and the stern rockets had been cut. She was running now on constant velocity, in absolute silence except when one of the auxiliaries was cut in briefly by the automatic compensators to keep her on course, or by the sensor-field detector relays that guided her safely around spatial debris. After the incessant roaring he had become used to, Kirby's own footsteps sounded unnaturally loud in the stillness. He didn't like it. It gave him a feeling of cessation, of not moving, when every nerve was screaming to make speed, speed, and more speed. He wished that somebody had perfected one of those interstellar drives they had talked about, and that he had it. Might as well wish for wings. Or luck. All he had was an elderly ship and conventional rockets, and it was going to be a long trip. Unless it was a very short one.

He went down a winding ladder to the cargo deck. It ceased to be quiet. The main holds below were full of everything they had been able to latch onto and smuggle out in the fliers, added to the original cargo the Lucy B. Davenport had been carrying when she went into hiding. But the cargo deck had been cleared of what light stuff was in it and refilled with women and kids.

Every one of them, Kirby thought, was yelling at full lung power. Babies cried. Small children roared, in pleasure or pain, it was impossible to tell which. Family pets yelped and yowled. Half a dozen teenage girls giggled together in a corner. A boy the same age was shooting paper wads at them. Women moved here and there, doing things, doing nothing, calling their children, playing with them, smacking them. Some of them sat on the improvised bunks, sewing or caring for infants. Some of them just sat, or lay, staring stonily ahead of them. There was a faint odor of cooking.

A network of cords ran overhead, with blankets and tarpaulins fixed to them, so that the separate families might have some privacy when they wanted it. Some of the cords were hung with diapers, and rows of little pants and shirts, and men's socks and feminine undergarments. The husbands and fathers who were off duty and had no place else to go were scattered around here and there, looking dismal and not saying much. Wilson was among them. He sat humped up beside a bunk on which his wife lay in the attitude of an uncompromising corpse, staring straight up at the roof.

Kirby hesitated. He had managed to avoid this so far. He and Shari and Pop and what single men there were aboard bunked in the officer's cabins on the bridge deck, and his duty had given him an excuse to ignore the demands forwarded to him from below to come down and be slain. The women seemed to have fastened on him as the archfiend and enemy, probably because he made the actual flight possible, and because he was by circumstance placed in supreme authority as skipper of this reluctant star-ark. Now he had a cowardly desire to turn tail and run. But it was too late. Somebody's wife, with total disregard for shipboard etiquette, cried, "Phil Kirby! It's about time!" And the riot began.

Kirby climbed part way up the ladder again and roared for silence. He regretted bitterly that there were no proper intercom systems in these freight decks. It was undignified for a captain to shout and wave his arms. Finally he stopped it and let the explosion of talk wear itself out.

Sally Wilson got up off her bed and stalked through the crowd until she was directly below Kirby. The table of voices quieted, with final cries of, "Tell him, Sally!"

There was a tremendous assent from the women. But it was countered by a furious "No!" from every boy in the place, from the teen-agers down to little ones far too young to know what they were saying No to. Kirby grinned.

"Between your husbands and your sons, I think you're outvoted."

Half a dozen or so active-looking girls shouted, "Us too!"

"Good," said Kirby. "Welcome aboard." To the women he said, "You all loved your husbands enough to come with them. Why don't you stop being martyred about it now and help them."

"We were forced to come," said Sally.

"How many of you." Kirby asked, "were actually knocked unconscious and carried aboard?"

No hands went up.

"It amounts to the same thing," Sally said.

"No, it doesn't. You could have run away or screamed for help or called the police."

"We didn't have time" Sally wailed. "Wils just walked in and. . . I could kill you, Phil Kirby. You got Wils into this."

"Wils is a grown man, Sally. He's perfectly capable of making his own decisions."

"Damn right," said Wils.

"Well," said Sally, "I don't care. If it hadn't been for you the whole thing wouldn't have been possible. If you'd said no—" She began to cry. "We were all so happy where we were. Why did you have to do this? What more could you want that you didn't have?"

Kirby said soberly, "I couldn't explain that to you. You'll have to find out for yourself." He looked at the children, standing in little mobs and watching the grownups. "Maybe it was for them, more than anything. They ought to have a chance to grow up to be men and women, not just bits of information fed to a computer."

"I've heard all that talk," said a very large young women, pushing her way past Sally. She held an enormous pink child in her arms. "My husband's full of it. Here." She thrust the child suddenly at Kirby, so that he had to grab it to keep it from falling. "Now you look at her. It's her life you're gambling with, and what you're saying is that you don't care if she lives or dies. She can do without the care and safeguards and the advantages."

"You'd be surprised," said Kirby, "how many people did."

The child, alarmed by the uproar, began to howl and kick. The mother took it back. "They didn't know any better," she said. "I want my child to be safe, I don't want anything ever to happen to her. I don't want her to grow up like an animal on some God-forsaken world nobody ever heard of." Her voice rang all over that cargo deck. "I want to go home!"

Kirby waited for the resultant clamor to die down, and as he watched them he felt an emotion stirring in him for the first time and knew that it was pity. Only it was all for the wrong reasons.

"I knew it was late in the day for this," he said. "Maybe it was too late. You're all children of your time. You're old. You were born old. That's the real thing that's been taken out of people. Youth. You never had it. Perhaps you'll never find it. I'm sorry for you. But now you listen to me. There'll be no turning back. You can't go home, unless you all want to spend the rest of your lives in penal institutions, and I doubt if you do, even though they are eminently safe and protected places. For the men there's no doubt of this at all. The women might or might not get off with lighter sentences, I don't know. The children, however, would be taken away from yon and given a long course of re-education in foster homes, and you would certainly never see them again. You think that over, and then I suggest that you get to work doing something constructive, like setting up schoolrooms for your kids and organizing things a little better here. Maybe you'll even find it's kind of nice to do things for yourself, in of sitting and having them done for you."

"But," said Sally, much subdued, "but—"

The large young woman said dramatically, "For my child's sake I'd be willing."

"Oh, bull," said her husband, who was one of the three doctors aboard. "And don't be so noble with my life, honey."

Some of the men laughed.

Kirby said, "Don't think so much about what you've left behind. Think about what's ahead. It's a beautiful world, very much like Earth—where you were not permitted to live. You can have your pick of it. It's not inhabited. You can make new towns, a whole new country, just to suit yourselves. There'll be others along in time, too. We're not the only ones who still think freedom wasn't so bad, in spite of the risks. Your kids will grow up to be the lawmakers of a new world, the pioneers of a galactic civilization."

It sounded fine when he said it. He hoped it would work out that way.

But Sally Wilson said, "You don't know what it's like there any more than we do. Nobody's ever been there. What's the use of lying about it?"

Kirby sighed. "I thought that had been explained to you, but I'll give it to you again. Years ago the government built a special long-range base on Pluto and sent out from it a robot starship. It was strictly a reconnaissance flight. They wanted to know what was out there, and whether it held any threat to System security. The information the R-ship brought back was never made public, naturally. But those things have a way of getting out. I've seen clips from the films taken by automatic cameras, and photostats of data concerning atmosphere, gravity, temperatures, the works. Alpha Centauri has an A-1 habitable planet. Does that satisfy you?"

"I'll believe it," Sally muttered sulkily, "when I see it. And how long will we be shut up in this smelly old trap?"

"Well," said Kirby uncomfortably, "quite a while."

"That's no answer. Weeks? Months? Years?"

"Years. About five of them. Our velocity is something under the speed of light."

Too much under. The thoughts ran swiftly through Kirby's mind: the question is, do we have enough head start? Once we land we'll be safe. Scatter and hide. A planet's a big place. But if we miscalculated, if they overhaul us—

"Five years?" Sally was saying. "Five years?"

"We've got supplies, if we're careful with them. We have doctors, nurses, and a stock of drugs. We—" But suppose, he thought, we did miscalculate, and suppose our emergency plan doesn't work? Suppose something goes wrong with the ship, with the oxygen supply, or the water, or suppose we're hulled by a hunk of drift too big to patch up after. And then, oh God, what will we have done? The women had a choice, at least. But the kids—

He looked at the fat child straddling the large young woman's ample hip. It stared back at him, pop-eyed, smearing tears over its face with a grubby palm. Its nose was running. It snuffled, and suddenly Kirby was overcome with awe and horror and a sense of guilt.

Somebody shrieked in anguish. "Five years? You mean that for five long solid years I've got to stay in this room with—"

Voices.

"Joe Zimmerman, what did you mean, telling me it wouldn't take long? Joe, you come back here and answer me."

"But I didn't bring nearly enough clothes . . ."

". . . No decent kitchen and those awful beds . . ."

". . . No privacy, you can hear every word that's said . . ."

". . . have a baby here?"

". . . but I'll be an old woman before I ever see this world!"

Bedlam.

Kirby fled up the ladder, back to the safety and quiet of the bridge. He took the bottle away from Pop Barstow and had himself a long drink. Then he grinned.

"Well," he said, "they've quit wailing, at least. Now they're fighting like wildcats. That's a good sign, isn't it?"

Pop Barstow said, "Like the feller said, young Kirby, you have only just begun to fight."

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Framed