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

“Ish! Hey, Ish, wake up, will you!” There was a hand on his shoulder. “Will you get a load of this guy!” the voice said to someone else. “An hour to go, and he’s sleeping like the dead.”

Ish willed his eyes to open. He felt his heart begin to move again, felt the blood sluggishly beginning to surge into his veins. His hands and feet were very cold.

“Come on, Ish,” the Crew Chief said.

“All right,” he mumbled. “Okay. I’m up.” He sat on the edge of his bunk looking down at his hands. They were blue under the fingernails. He sighed, feeling the air moving down into his lungs.

Stiffly, he got to his feet and began to climb into his G suit.

The Moon opened its face to him. From where he lay, strapped into the control seat in the forward bubble, he looked at it emotionlessly, and began to brake for a landing.

He looked for footprints in the crater, though he knew he hadn’t left any. Earth was a familiar sight over his right shoulder.

He brought the twin-bubble beast back to the station. They threw spotlights on it, for the TV pickups, and thrust microphones at him. He could see broad grins behind the faceplates of the suits the docking crew wore, and they were pounding his back. The interior of the Station was a babbling of voices, a tumult of congratulations. He looked at it all, dead-faced, his eyes empty.

“It was easy,” he said over a worldwide network, and pushed the press representatives out of his way.

MacKenzie was waiting for him in the crew section. Ish flicked his stolid eyes at him, shrugged, and stripped out of his clothes. He pulled a coverall out of a locker and climbed into it, then went over to his bunk and lay down on his side, facing the bulkhead.

“Ish.”

It was MacKenzie, bending over him.

Ish grunted.

“It wasn’t any good was it? You’d done it all before; you’d been there.”

He was past emotions. “Yeah?”

“We couldn’t take the chance.” MacKenzie was trying desperately to explain. “You were the best there was⁠—but you’d done something to yourself by becoming the best. You shut yourself off from your family. You had no close friends, no women. You had no other interests. You were a rocket pilot⁠—nothing else. You’ve never read an adult book that wasn’t a text; you’ve never listened to a symphony except by accident. You don’t know Rembrandt from Norman Rockwell. Nothing. No ties, no props, nothing to sustain you if something went wrong. We couldn’t take the chance, Ish!”

“So?”

“There was too much at stake. If we let you go, you might have forgotten to come back. You might have just kept going.”

He remembered the time with the Navion, and nodded. “I might have.”

“I hypnotized you,” MacKenzie said. “You were never dead. I don’t know what the details of your hallucination were, but the important part came through, all right. You thought you’d been to the Moon before. It took all the adventure out of the actual flight; it was just a workaday trip.”

“I said it was easy,” Ish said.

“There was no other way to do it! I had to cancel out the thrill that comes from challenging the unknown. You knew what death was like, and you knew what the Moon was like. Can you understand why I had to do it?”

“Yeah. Now get out before I kill you.”

He didn’t live too long after that. He never entered a rocket again⁠—he died on the Station, and was buried in space, while a grateful world mourned him. I wonder what it was like, in his mind, when he really died. But he spent the days he had, after the trip, just sitting at an observatory port, cursing the traitor stars with his dead and purposeless eyes.

The aging man was sweating profusely, and he darted sidelong glances at the windowless walls of the outer office. By turns, he sat stiffly in a corner chair or paced uneasily, his head swiveling constantly.

His hand was clammy when Mead shook it.

“Hello, Mr. Mead,” he said in a husky, hesitant voice, his eyes never quite still, never long on Mead’s face, but darting hither and yon, his glance rebounding at every turn from the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the closed outer door.

Christopher Mead, Assistant Undersecretary for External Affairs, returned the handshake, smiling. “Please come into my office,” he said quickly. “It’s much more spacious.”

“Thank you,” the aging man said gratefully and hurried into the next room. Mead rapidly opened the windows, and some of the man’s nervousness left him. He sank down into the visitor’s chair in front of Mead’s desk, his eyes drinking in the distances beyond the windows. “Thank you,” he repeated.

Mead sat down behind the desk, leaned back, and waited for the man’s breathing to slow. Finally he said, “It’s good to see you again, Mr. Holliday. What can I do for you?”

Martin Holliday tore his glance away from the window long enough to raise his eyes to Mead’s face and then drop them to the hands he had folded too deliberately in his lap.

“I’d⁠—” His voice husked into unintelligibility, and he had to begin again. “I’d like to take an option on a new planet,” he finally said.

Mead nodded. “I don’t see why not.” He gestured expressively at the star chart papered over one wall of his office. “We’ve certainly got plenty of them. But what happened with your first one?”

“It d-d-duh⁠—”

“Mr. Holliday, I certainly won’t be offended if you’d prefer to look out the window,” Mead said quickly.

“Thank you.” After a moment, he began again. “It didn’t work out,” he said, his glance flickering back to Mead for an instant before he had to look out the window again.

“I don’t know where my figuring went wrong. It didn’t go wrong. It was just⁠ ⁠… just things. I thought I could sell enough subdivisions to cover the payments and still keep most of it for myself, but it