The intercom buzzed and Grace said, “Angelo wants to see you. He says it’s personal.”
“Send him in.”
The kid was beaming. He looked pretty good—not raw and jumpy; just happy.
“I want to say thanks and good-bye, Mr. Farwell,” he told the branch manager. “Look!”
The plastic-laminated card said “WORK PERMIT” and “Brother Angelo Libonari” and “International Union of Spacemen, Spacedockworkers and Rocket Maintenance Men, Unaffiliated (ISU-IND)” and “Member in Good Standing” and other things.
“So that was the game,” said Farwell slowly. “We take you and we train you at a loss hoping that some day you’ll turn out decent copy for us and as soon as you have a thousand bucks saved up you quit like a shot and buy a work card to be a wiper on a rocket. Well, I hope you show a little more loyalty to your space line than you showed us.”
Angelo’s face drooped in miserable surprise. “I never thought—” he stuttered. “I didn’t mean to run out, Mr. Farwell. I’ll give two weeks notice if you want—a month? How about a month?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Farwell. “I should have known. I thought I pounded some sense into your head, but I was wrong. You’re forgiven, Angelo. I hope you have a good time. What are your plans?” He wasn’t really interested, but why go out of his way to kick the kid in the teeth? Obviously he’d meant it when he registered surprise—he didn’t have the boss’s viewpoint and his other jobs had been one-week stands in
hashhouses.
The boy carefully put his work card in his breast pocket and beamed again at what he was saying—partly to Farwell, it appeared, mostly to himself in wonder at its coming true at last. “I’ll be a wiper at the start, all right,” he said. “I don’t care if I never get kigher than that. I want to see it and feel it, all of it. That’s the only way the real thing’s ever going to get written. Higgins and Delare and Beeman and the rest of them—passengers. You can feel it in your bones when you read their stuff. One-trippers or two-trippers.
“They aren’t soaked in it. The big passage in Delare’s Planetfall, the takeoff from Mars: he’s full of the wonder of it, sure. Who wouldn’t be the first time? And he kept his eyes open, watching himself and the others. But I’m going to take off from Earth and Mars and Venus and Ganymede and the Moon twenty times before I dare to write about it. I’m going to get it all—brains, bone, muscle, and belly—takeoff, landings, free flight, danger, monotony—all of it.”
“Sonnets? Prose poems?” asked Farwell, just to be saying something.
Angelo flushed a little, but his eyes didn’t have the old pleading look. He didn’t have to plead; he had what he wanted. “They were good exercise,” he said stoutly. “I suppose I was trying to write form because I didn’t have content. I think it’s going to be novels—if I feel like it. And they can publish them or not publish them, just as they please.” He meant it, Farwell thought. He had what he wanted.
“I’ll look forward to them,” he said, and shook hands with the boy. He didn’t notice him leave. Angelo Messier, he thought; Pete Libonari. “—really creative synthesis of Pinero
and Shaw—, pattered through his head, and the psychiatrist-thought followed naggingly after. He looked at his hands in amazement, suddenly realizing that they had been trembling all morning uncontrollably.