Short Fiction - Algis Budrys (chrysanthemum read aloud .TXT) 📗

into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with the tension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalked out of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch. He stopped there, hesitating a little.

“Marty!” His father’s shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemed to act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almost ran as he got down the porch stairs.

“What is it, Howard?” Marty’s mother asked in a worried voice as she came in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry against the sides of her housedress.

“Crazy kid,” Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of his son as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into the street. “Come back here!” he shouted. “A rocket pilot,” he cursed under his breath. “What’s the kid been reading? Claiming he’s a rocket pilot!”

Margaret Isherwood’s brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown. “But⁠—isn’t he a little young? I know they’re teaching some very odd things in high schools these days, but it seems to me.⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Marge, there aren’t even any rockets yet! Come back here, you idiot!” Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, his clenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.

“Are you sure, Howard?” his wife asked faintly.

“Yes, I’m sure!”

“But, where’s he going?”

“Stop that! Get off that bus! You hear me? Marty?”

“Howard! Stop acting like a child and talk to me! Where is that boy going?”

Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turned away from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. “I don’t know,” he told her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs. “Maybe, the moon,” he told her sarcastically.

Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4′, 11″, had come of age at seventeen.

The small man looked at his faculty advisor. “No,” he said. “I am not interested in working for a degree.”

“But⁠—” The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellow pencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arc of black flecks. “Look, Ish, you’ve got to either deliver or get off the basket. This program is just like the others you’ve followed for nine semesters; nothing but math and engineering. You’ve taken just about every undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you going to keep this up?”

“I’m signed up for Astronomy 101,” Isherwood pointed out.

The faculty advisor snorted. “A snap course. A breather, after you’ve studied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What’s the matter, Ish? Scared of liberal arts?”

Isherwood shook his head. “Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And that Astronomy course isn’t a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav⁠—they won’t be talking about stars as check points, but as things in themselves.” Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.

The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. “Still a snap. What’s the difference, how you look at a star?”

Isherwood almost winced. “Call it a hobby,” he said. He looked down at his watch. “Come on, Dave. You’re not going to convince me. You haven’t convinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well give up, don’t you think? I’ve got a half hour before I go on the job. Let’s go get some beer.”

The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. “Crazy,” he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the next man.

The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, and softly quoted:

“Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I am nothing a-cold;
I stuff my skin so full within
Of jolly good ale and old.”

“Huh?” Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to the unfamiliar.

The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. “It’s a poem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t you give a damn?” the advisor asked, with some peevishness.

Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. “Sorry, Dave, but no. It’s not my racket.”

The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass. “Strictly a specialist, huh?”

Ish nodded. “Call it that.”

“But what, for Pete’s sake? What is this crazy specialty that blinds you to all the fine things that man has done?”

Ish took a swallow of his beer. “Well, now, if I was a poet, I’d say it was the finest thing that man has ever done.”

The advisor’s lips twisted in derision. “That’s pretty fanatical, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh.” Ish waved to the bartender for refills.

The Navion took a boiling thermal under its right wing and bucked upward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunette girl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ish laughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as that sudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, and corrected with a tilt of the wheel.

“Relax, Nan,” he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter. “It’s only air; nasty old air.”

The girl patted her short hair back into place. “I wish you wouldn’t fly this low,” she said, half-frightened.

“Low? Call this low?” Ish teased. “Here. Let’s drop it a little, and you’ll really get an idea of how fast we’re going.” He nudged the wheel forward, and the Navion dipped its nose in a shallow dive, flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with the chug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at the protesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into a dirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.

“Marty!”

Ish chuckled again. He couldn’t have held the ship down much longer, anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bank with his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set. The Navion went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast as it