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Homesick By: Lyn Venable |
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Homesick By LYN VENABLE Illustrated by EMSH
What thrill is there in going out among the
stars if coming back means bitter loneliness?
Frankston pushed listlessly at a red checker with his right forefinger.
He knew the move would cost him a man, but he lacked enough interest in
the game to plot out a safe move. His opponent, James, jumped the red
disk with a black king and removed it from the board. Gregory, across
the room, flicked rapidly through the pages of a magazine, too rapidly
to be reading anything, or even looking at the pictures. Ross lay
quietly on his bunk, staring out of the viewport. The four were strangely alike in appearance, nearly the same age, the
age where gray hairs finally outnumber black, or baldness takes over.
The age when the expanding waistline has begun to sag tiredly, when
robust middle age begins the slow accelerating decline toward senility. A strange group to find aboard a spaceship, but then The Columbus was
a very strange ship. Bolted to its outer hull, just under the viewports,
were wooden boxes full of red geraniums, and ivy wound tenuous green
fronds over the gleaming hull that had withstood the bombardment of
pinpoint meteors and turned away the deadly power of naked cosmic rays. Frankston glanced at his wristchrono. It was one minute to six. "In about a minute," he thought, "Ross will say something about going
out to water his geraniums." The wristchrono ticked fifty nine times. "I think I'll go out and water my geraniums," said Ross. No one glanced up. Then Gregory threw his magazine on the floor. Ross
got up and walked, limping slightly, to a wall locker. He pulled out the
heavy, ungainly spacesuit and the big metal bulb of a headpiece. He
carried them to his bunk and laid them carefully down. "Will somebody please help me on with my suit?" he asked. For one more long moment, no one moved. Then James got up and began to
help Ross fit his legs into the suit. Ross had arthritis, not badly, but
enough so that he needed a little help climbing into a spacesuit. James pulled the heavy folds of the suit up around Ross's body and held
it while Ross extended his arms into the sleeve sections. His hands, in
the heavy gauntlets, were too unwieldy to do the front fastenings, and
he stood silently while James did it for him. Ross lifted the helmet, staring at it as a cripple might regard a
wheelchair which he loathed but was wholly dependent upon. Then he
fitted the helmet over his head and James fastened it down and lifted
the oxygen tank to his back. "Ready?" asked James. The bulbous headpiece inclined in a nod. James walked to a panel and
threw a switch marked INNER LOCK. A round aperture slid silently open.
Ross stepped through it and the door shut behind him as James threw the
switch back to its original position. Opposite the switch marked OUTER
LOCK a signal glowed redly and James threw another switch. A moment
later the signal flickered out. Frankston, with a violent gesture, swept the checker board clean. Red
and black men clattered to the floor, rolling and spinning. Nobody
picked them up. "What does he do it for?" demanded Frankston in a tight voice. "What
does he get out of those stinking geraniums he can't touch or smell?" "Shut up," said Gregory. James looked up sharply. Curtness was unusual for Gregory, a bad sign.
Frankston was the one he'd been watching, the one who'd shown signs of
cracking, but after so long, even a psycho expert's opinion might be
haywire. Who was a yardstick? Who was normal? "Geraniums don't smell much anyway," added Gregory in a more
conciliatory tone. "Yeah," agreed Frankston, "I'd forgotten that. But why does he torture
himself like this, and us, too?" "Because that's what he wanted to do," answered James. "Sure," agreed Gregory, "the whole trip the last twenty years of it,
anyhow all he could talk about was how, when he got back to Earth, he
was going to buy a little place in the country and raise flowers... Continue reading book >>
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Literature |
Science |
Short stories |
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