what would it be like
to step quickly
into the roaring
of the sun
and walk down its streets
of golden apples
and shapeless streetlamps . . .
Amishi, Star Dreams
“because it’s there,” I said.
There was an appreciative murmur of laughter from the press. The twinkling lens of NBTri-D seemed like jeweled eyes of mythical dragons.
Bacon of the Times raised his hand and waved.
I suppressed an urge to wave back. “Mr. Bacon?”
“Exactly how many days will the trip require?”
“I believe the answer to that can be found on the data sheet that Space Cent handed out a half an hour ago.” Twenty-four going and twenty-four coming home—x-plus days there. What we found would dictate the length of our fiery visit.
There was a waving of hands. Again the silly urge. I fought another urge to scream. Instead, I said, “Time,” rising and moving away from behind the small desk.
Unasked questions burst forth from a dozen lips as if they had suddenly acquired a life of their own and refused to be restrained by lips and teeth and gum. “Sorry, sorry,” I shook my head, exiting from the conference chamber via a small door at the rear of the stage.
Krison was waiting in the hallway.
“Fine,” he said.
Krison always said, “Fine—but—”
“But,” he said on schedule, “perhaps you shouldn’t have been so abrupt, so—well, antisocial.”
“I can afford to be,” I snapped.
“But the project can’t. We at Space Cent get our funds from Congress, and Congress, in turn, gets its funds from the public. Tell them what they want to know. Straight off the proverbial shoulder, tell them that unmanned probes have discovered as much as possible. Tell them that men must now go in a heavily armored ship to study surface turbulence at close quarters. Tell them about solar flares and solar wind and about how we must know these things before safe space travel is made cheap and easy. But for God’s sake, don’t brush off the people!”
“My job isn’t public relations. I promised to cybernet the ship to and from—not to answer a lot of foolish questions.”
“If you didn’t want to be the center of public interest,” he said with a moronic grin, “you shouldn’t have had an affair with Mandy Morain.”
“It isn’t an affair,” I snorted and walked even faster toward the door at the end of the hall, beyond which rested my hovercar.
He paced me. “Remember, tomorrow starts a four week period of training, exhaustive runs. Mandy. Morain will be out of the schedule for awhile.”
“Yes, coach. I know the rules.” I slammed the door as quickly as I opened it. But it only hummed shut softly, and I could feel his grin on my back. Bruce Krison was the ultimate pest—a perfectionist.
It was raining a misty, cold sort of rain. It nibbled at my bone marrow. The temperature inside the hovercar, a Champion, was a comfortable seventy-four, so I took off my coat, loosened my tie, and settled back in the seat. There was a stiff pain in my neck. I needed relaxation, but there was no place in particular I cared to relax at. The bars would be crowded since the offices closed within the hour, and crowds weren’t much to my liking. I thumbed the city-oriented group of maps into the car’s “brain” and punched several random coordinates. Closing my heavy eyes, I settled back to rest with the soft moan of rushing wind blowing under the rising craft . . .
“No” she said. “God, God, no.”
He coughed blood and stared at it lying in a black pool.
His leg seemed pinned beneath the rubble, but when he looked, it wasn’t. It was simply turning slightly blue, streaming blood where he could see the skin through torn trouser leg. Slowly, he became aware of her soft moaning, mixed now and then with a thick, gurgling noise.
Explosion!
There were other sounds around him. Now and then a chunk of plaster fell with a crash. The whine of white metal cooling to red was the screeching of wild animals in his brain. Steam hissed. There were other moans in the distance, and the sounds of sirens seeped through the watts of flames.