“Tonight is the threshold to tomorrow.” I’m not sure whether I ran out of the house or walked, but when I got home, I let the videophone ring, knowing it was she. With malice aforethought, I drank myself into a fitful sleep. Dreams filled my head, and a face without eyes asked me why do you want to go to the sun? Why to the sun, the sun?
The following weeks were what Krison had promised-work that would break a bull’s back. We ran and reran emergency situations. We tested the ship. I familiarized myself with it, with the feeling of the intricate wiring, the platings, the cyberpickups, the shields. In all the lanes of space, there was no ship so heavily shielded as ours. She would have to withstand more raw radiation than we really had a right to ask of her. Other ships had become death traps in radiation storms of less intensity than the ones we would face. If it had been economically feasible to build all ships as well insulated as she, then our trip would be unnecessary. But the cost was—to make a pun—astronomical. The only other alternative was to study the origin of the solar winds in hopes that we could eventually predict radiation storms in space and detour ships around them. Ours was a history-making ship. She was a good ship. There are good ships and good women.
“There are good ships and good women,” said Malherbe, the captain.
“I only knew one,” I said.
“One? Why, I’ve captained a half dozen good ones in the last twenty years.”
“I meant women,” I said, putting down the coffee and moving to the window to watch the sunset. It was difficult to imagine soaring toward that lantern, toward the gaseous, nebulous, semiliving creature in the sky. But in a few weeks . . . There were pinks and yellows and soft blues, and a man could lose his thoughts, could hypnotize himself almost like watching a painted spiral on a wheel-spinning and spinning and spinning and . . .
It happened the next morning at eleven o’clock. Malherbe, First Officer Blanksman, and ship’s doctor Amishi were coping with a series of fake emergencies that a group of security men had thought up—most of which could not possibly occur aboard a saucer. A fire had been started in a mock-up of the ship, and the three were to stop it before irreparable damage could be done. Of course it was ridiculous, for the plasterboard of the mock-up burned very much more rapidly than would the special alloy of the real saucer. I stopped a moment to watch the fun and games.
But Fate was in rare form that morning. The heat—something the security experts had not connected with fire—ignited a stack of boxes behind the “stage.” There was a sudden explosion that rocked the mock-up, and the wall of crates came tumbling down over the wooden saucer, burying the crew.
They said I screamed. I only remember running, tearing at boxes, heaving them out of the way with a furiousness I never knew I possessed. I dragged Amishi out onto the safe floor. He was unconscious but unburned. I remember seeing Malherbe and Blanksman too—all three safe. And the fire crew waving hoses and fog dispensers.
I don’t know why I rushed back in. But they had to drag me out in the end. Whimpering, Malherbe said. Whimpering.
Schedules were reworked, and the launch date was moved back ten days. Everyone was given a thorough psychic probe. The big shots wanted to be sure no traumas from the incident would render us incapable of acting when we reached our target—Old Sol. But they didn’t check back any farther than that fire.
The day after the near disaster, I came across Amishi sitting in the coffee shop. He was composing one of his poems.
“Let’s go
down foggy paths
in twisted moonlight
in purple moon-night
in some overwhelming
sort of madness
taken through open-souled osmosis
from hatter-mad flowers
And let’s go
holding hands and laughing
1 feel your arteries throbbing
Let’s go
in the cool ice of evening
through haunted forests
. where trees bend
to the white world’s end