own tedious heroisms. Of course, with ten billion people, and a great deal of once arable country sterilized by radiation, Earth has little choice.
What I would like to know is, why does anyone emigrate in the first place? The lessons are ghastly enough; why do otherwise sensible people, like this boy, refuse to learn them?
“Oh, well,” he said aloud. He signaled the waiter. “Refuel us, chop-chop.”
Ryerson looked in some awe at the chit which the other man thumbprinted. He could not suppress it: “Do you always travel first-class to the Moon?”
Maclaren put a fresh cigarette between his lips and touched his lighter-ring to the end. His smile cocked it at a wry angle.
“I suppose,” he answered, “I have always traveled first-class through life.”
T
HE ferry made turnover without spilling a drink or a passenger and backed down onto Tycho Port. Maclaren adjusted without a thought to Lunar gravity, Ryerson turned a little green and swallowed a pill. But even in his momentary distress, Ryerson was bewildered at merely walking through a tube to a monorail station. Third-class passengers must submit to interminable official bullying: safety regulations, queues, assignment to hostel. Now, within minutes, he was again on soft cushions, staring through crystalline panes at the saw-toothed magnificence of mountains.
When the train got under way, he gripped his hands together, irrationally afraid. It took him a while to hunt down the reason: the ghost of his father’s God, ranting at pride and sloth from the tomb which the son had erected.
“Let’s eat,” said Maclaren. “I chose this train with malice aforethought. It’s slow enough so we can enjoy our meal en route, and the chef puts his heart into the oysters won-ton.”
“I’m not . . . not hungry,” stammered Ryerson.
Maclaren’s dark, hooked face flashed a grin. “That’s what cocktails and hors d’oeuvres are for, lad. Stuff yourself. If it’s true what I’ve heard of deep-space rations, we’re in for a dreary month or two.”
“You mean you’ve never been on an interstellar ship?”
“Of course not. Never been beyond the Moon in my life. Why should I do any such ridiculous thing?”
Maclaren’s cloak swirled like fire as he Thd the way toward the diner. Beneath an iridescent white tunic, his legs showed muscular and hairless, down to the tooled-leather buskins; the slant of the beret on his head was pure insolence. Ryerson, trailing drably behind in spaceman’s gray coveralls, felt bitterness. What have I been dragged away from Tamara for? Does this peacock know a mass from a hole in the ground? He’s hired himself a toy, is all, because for a while he’s bored with wine and women . . . and Tamara is locked away on a rock with a self-righteous old beast who hates the sound of her name!
As they sat down at their table, Maclaren went on, “But this is too good a chance to pass up. I found me a tame mathematician last year and sicced him onto the Schrddinger equation— Sugimoto’s relativistic version, I mean; Yuen postulates too bloody much for my taste—anyhow, he worked it out for the quantities involved in a dark star, mass and gravitational intensities and cetera. His results make us both wonder if such a body doesn’t go over to an entirely new stage of degeneracy at the core. One gigantic neutron? Well, maybe that’s too fantastic. But consider—”
And while the monorail ran on toward Farside, Maclaren left the Interhuman language quite behind him. Ryerson could follow tensors, even when scribbled on a menu, but Maclaren had some new function, symbolized by a pneumatic female outline, that reduced to a generalized tensor under certain conditions. Ryerson stepped out on Farside, two hours later, with his brain rotating.
He had heard of the cyclopean installations which fill the whole of Yukawa Crater and spread out onto the plains beyond. Who has not? But all he saw on his first visit was a gigantic concourse, a long slideway tunnel, and a good many uniformed technicians. He made some timid mention of his disappointment to Maclaren. The New Zealander nodded: “Exactly. There’s more romance, more sense of distance covered, and a devil of a lot better scenery, in an afternoon on the bay, than in a fifty light-year leap. I say space travel is overrated. And it’s a fact, I’ve heard, that spacemen themselves prefer