Twenty minutes later, as the field came up to meet them, rocket units in the nose were triggered by radar and the Santa Fe Trail braked to a landing. The entire trip had taken less time than the copter jaunt from the school to Alburquerque—something less than an hour for the same route eastward that the covered wagons had made westward in eighty days, with luck. The local rocket landed on a field just outside the city, next door to the enormous field, still slightly radioactive, which was both the main spaceport of the planet and the former site of Old Chicago.
Don hung back and let a Navajo family disembark ahead of him, then followed the squaw out. A movable slideway had crawled out to the ship; he stepped on it and let it carry him into the station. Once inside he was confused by the bustling size of the place, level after level, above and below ground. Gary Station served not merely the Santa Fe Trail, the Route 66, and other local rockets shuttling to the Southwest; it served a dozen other local lines, as well as ocean hoppers, freight tubes, and space ships operating between Earth and Circum-Terra Station—and thence to Luna, Venus, Mars, and the Jovian moons; it was the spinal cord of a more-than-world-wide empire.
Tuned as he was to the wide and empty New Mexico desert and, before that, to the wider wastes of space, Don felt oppressed and irritated by the noisy swarming mass. He felt the loss of dignity that comes from men behaving like ants, even though his feeling was not thought out in words. Still, it had to be faced-he spotted the triple globes of Interplanet Lines and followed glowing arrows to its reservation office.
An uninterested clerk assured him that the office had no record of his reservation in the Valkyrie. Patiently Don explained that the reservation had been made from Mars and displayed the radiogram from his parents. Annoyed into activity the clerk finally consented to phone Circum-Terra; the satellite station confirmed the reservation. The clerk signed off and turned back to Don. “Okay, you can pay for it here.”
Don had a sinking feeling. “I thought it was already paid for?” He had on him his father’s letter-of-credit but it was not enough to cover passage to Mars.
“Huh? They didn’t say anything about it being prepaid.”
At Don’s insistence the clerk again phoned the space station. Yes, the passage was prepaid since it had been placed from the other end; didn’t the clerk know his tariff book? Thwarted on all sides, the clerk grudgingly issued Don a ticket to couch 64, Rocket Ship Glory Road, lifting from Earth for Circum-Terra at 9:03:57 the following morning.
“Got your security clearance?”
“Huh? What’s that?”
The clerk appeared to gloat at what was a legitimate opportunity to decline to do business after all. He withdrew the ticket. “Don’t you bother to follow the news? Give me your ID.”
Reluctantly Don passed over his identity card; the clerk stuck it in a stat machine and handed it back. “Now your thumb prints.”
Don impressed them and said, “Is that all? Can I have my ticket?”
” ‘Is that all?’ he says. Be here about an hour early tomorrow morning. You can pick up your ticket then—provided the I.B.I. says you can.”
The clerk turned away. Don, feeling forlorn, did likewise. He did not know quite what to do next. He had told Headmaster Reeves that he would stay overnight at the Hilton Caravansary, that being the hotel his family had stopped at 18 years earlier and the only one he knew by name. On the other hand he had to attempt to locate Dr. Jefferson—”Uncle Dudley”—since his mother had made such a point of it. It was still early afternoon; he decided to check his bags and start looking.
Bags disposed of, he found an empty communication booth and looked up the doctor’s code, punched it into the machine. The doctor’s phone regretted politely that Dr. Jefferson was not at home and requested him to leave a message. He was dictating it when a warm voice interrupted: “I’m at home to you, Donald. Where are you, lad?” The view screen cut in and he found himself looking at the somewhat familiar features of Dr. Dudley Jefferson.