He walked along the engines, with his hand sliding on their metal, stroking them as he would pet an animal, astonished and slightly angry at himself for finding in himself a queer, distorted quality of affection for them.
But why not? They had brought him home. He had nursed and pampered them, he had cursed them and watched over them, he had slept with them, and they had brought him home.
And that was more, he admitted to himself, than he had ever thought they would do.
He found that he was alone. The crew had gone swarming up the ladder as soon as he had pulled the switch. And now it was time that he himself was going.
But he stood there for a moment, in that silent room, as he gave the place one final visual check. Everything was all right. There was nothing to be done.
He turned and climbed the ladder slowly, heading for the port.
He found the captain standing in the port, and out beyond the port stretched the redness of the land.
“All the rest have gone except the purser,” said the captain. “I thought you’d soon be up. You did a fine job with the engines, Mr. Cooper. I’m glad you shipped with us.”
“It’s my last run,” Cooper said, staring out at the redness of the hills. “Now I settle down.”
“That’s strange,” said the captain. “I take it you’re a Mars man.”
“I am. And I never should have left.”
The captain stared at him and said again: “That’s strange.”
“Nothing strange,” said Cooper. “I -”
“It’s my last run, too,” the captain broke in. “There’ll be a new commander to take her back to Earth.”
“In that case,” Cooper offered, “I’ll stand you a drink as soon as we get down.”
“I’ll take you up on that. First we’ll get our shots.”
They climbed down the ladder and walked across the field toward the spaceport buildings. Trucks went whining past them, heading for the ship, to pick up the unloaded cargo.
And now it was all coming back to Cooper, the way he had dreamed it in that shabby room on Earth – the exhilarating taste of the thinner, colder air, the step that was springier because of the lesser gravity, the swift and clean elation of the uncluttered, brave red land beneath a weaker sun.
Inside, the doctor waited for them in his tiny office.
“Sorry, gentlemen,” he said, “but you know the regulations.”
“I don’t like it,” said the captain, “but I suppose it does make sense.”
They sat down in the chairs and rolled up their sleeves.
“Hang on,” the doctor told them. “It gives you quite a jolt.”
It did.
And it had before, thought Cooper, every time before.
He should be used to it by now.
He sat weakly in the chair, waiting for the weakness and the shock to pass, and he saw the doctor, there behind his desk, watching them and waiting for them to come around to normal.
“Was it a rough trip?” the doctor finally asked.
“They all are rough,” the captain replied curtly.
Cooper shook his bead. “This one was the worst I’ve ever known. Those engines…”
The captain said: “I’m sorry, Cooper. This time it was the truth. We were really carrying medicine. There is an epidemic. Mine was the only ship. I’d planned an overhaul, but we couldn’t wait.”
Cooper nodded. “I remember now,” he said.
He stood up weakly and stared out the window at the cold, the alien, the forbidding land of Mars.
“I never could have made it,” he said flatly, “if I’d not been psychoed.”
He turned back to the doctor. “Will there ever be a time?”
The doctor nodded. “Some day, certainly. When the ships are better. When the race is more conditioned to space travel.”
“But this homesickness business – it gets downright brutal.”
“It’s the only way,” the doctor declared. “We’d not have any spacemen if they weren’t always going home.”
“That’s right,” the captain said. “No man, myself included, could face that kind of beating unless it was for something more than money.”
Cooper looked out the window at the Martian sandscape and shivered. Of all the God-forsaken places he had ever seen!
He was a fool to be in space, he told himself, with a wife like Doris and two kids back home. He could hardly wait to see them.
And he knew the symptoms. He was getting homesick once again – but this time it was for Earth.
The doctor was taking a bottle out of his desk and pouring generous drinks into glasses for all three of them.
“Have a shot of this,” he said, “and let’s forget about it”
“As if we could remember,” said Cooper, laughing suddenly.
“After all,” the captain said, far too cheerfully, “we have to see it in the right perspective. It’s nothing more than a condition of employment.”