And, almost unmanned by his relief, Garris turned and cried out to the anxious crowd, “It’s all right, folks, there’s not going to be any fighting right now. Mr. Kenniston’s going to go clear out to where those people come from and put this thing to their government! He’s going to ask a square deal for us!”
There was cheering, during which the Mayor’s high color began to fade back to its original pallor as a new thought struck him.
He said to Kenniston, “But if anyone’s going out there to represent us, maybe as Mayor—” Kenniston really admired him as he struggled to get out those last awful words—“as Mayor, I ought to go?”
Kenniston shook his head. “You’re needed right here, Mr. Garris. And besides, you don’t speak the language, so there wouldn’t be any use in your going.”
“That’s so,” said the Mayor, beginning to breathe again. “Of course, that’s so. Yes, indeed. Now, Kenniston, what can we do to help you? Anything—”
“No, there’s nothing,” said Kenniston. “I haven’t much time. I only need to get a few things, and to say goodbye to someone. Hubble, will you come with me?”
Hubble came. And behind them, as they hurried back into town, they heard the Mayor shouting, and heard the rising voice of relief and jubila-tion from the people.
They had seen themselves about to be beaten in a hopeless fight against weapons they couldn’t combat, those people. And now, suddenly, there wasn’t going to be any fight, the ships were going away, one of their own was going out and convince the star-folk that they couldn’t shove Earth people around, everything was going to be all right!
Kenniston groaned. “I wish they weren’t so God-damned sure! This is only a reprieve.”
“What are our chances, Ken?” Hubble asked him. “Between us.”
“Honest to God, Hubble, I don’t know! I’ve got us into a big undercov-er struggle that I don’t half understand yet.” He told Hubble what Gorr Holl had said, and added, “Gorr and the humanoids are on our side, but maybe they’re only using me as a catspaw. Anyway, I’ll do my best.”
“I know you will,” said Hubble. “I wish I were going with you—but I’m too old, and I’m needed here.” He added, “I’ll get Carol while you pack.”
The nightmare unreality of it hit Kenniston again as he hastily got his few necessaries together. It was just like packing for an overnight run to Pittsburgh or Chicago, instead of for a trip across the galaxy. It couldn’t be really going to happen… Carol’s face, when she came, didn’t help him. There was no color in it at all, and when he took her in his arms and tried to explain, she only whispered, “No, Ken—no! You can’t go! You’re not like them—you’ll die out there!”
“I won’t die, and I can maybe help us all,” he told her. “Carol, listen—if I can do this, if I can find a way out for us, it’ll make up a little for our work that brought this whole thing on Middletown, won’t it? Won’t it?”
She wasn’t even listening to him. She was searching his face, her hands clinging to him painfully, and she said suddenly, “You want to go.”
“Want to?” said Kenniston. “I’m scared stiff! My skin is crawling right now! But I’ve got to.”
“You want to go,” she said again, and looked at him, he thought, as though she finally saw clearly a barrier between them. “That’s the difference between us, it’s always been the difference. I only want the old things, the old, loved ways. You want the new.”
Time was running out, and a sort of despair was in him, and it made him grasp her with a rough male masterfulness, and hold her fiercely against the intangible tide that was sweeping them apart.
“I’m going, to do what I can for us all, and I’m coming back the same, and you’re going to be waiting for me, Carol! You hear?”
He kissed her, and she returned his kiss with a curious tenderness as if she were never going to see him again and was remembering all the good days that they had had together. And when he let her go, her eyes were bright with tears.
He went with Hubble toward the portal, and now the whole city was vibrant with a new hopefulness and excitement, that centered upon himself. But he was quaking with the realization of what he was going toward, he hardly saw the crowded faces that watched him with a mixture of anxious hope and of awe, he hardly heard the voices that shouted,
“Good luck, Mr. Kenniston!” and “You tell ’em out there, Mr. Kenniston! You tell ’em!”
Kenniston went on, out of the domed city and across the plain, and the black, strange belly of the Thanis took him in.
Chapter 15
MISSION FOR EARTH
He would not show fear. They expected him to do so, they were watching him with sidelong glances of interest and amused expectation. But Kenniston clenched his fists inside his jacket pockets, and resolved fiercely to disappoint them.
He was afraid, yes. It was one thing to read and talk and speculate on flying space. It was another and much more frightening thing to do it, to step off the solid Earth, to rush and plunge and fall through the world-less emptiness.
He stood there with Gorr Holl and Piers Eglin in the bridge of the Thanis, looking ahead through the curving view windows, and a cold sickness clutched at his vitals.
“It isn’t the way I expected it to be,” he said unsteadily. “Only those stars ahead—”
He fought against the impulse to clutch for support. He wouldn’t do that, while the bronzed star-men behind him were curiously watching him.
The deep humming and slight quivering of the great fabric around him were the only evidence that the Thanis was moving.
Directly ahead, Kenniston looked at a depthless black in which fierce stars flared like lamps. The blue-hot beacon of Vega centered that vista, and up from it blazed the stars of the time-distorted Lyre and Aquila, crossed on the upper left by the glittering sun-drift of the Milky Way.
Only that section of sky ahead was clear. The rest of the firmament, ex-tending back from it, was an increasingly blurred vista of warped star-light whose rays seemed to twitch, jerk and dance.
Gorr Holl nodded toward the bank of controls behind which four men sat. “You know the principle of propulsion? Reaction rays many times faster than light, pushing back against the cosmic dust of space.”
Kenniston sighed. “I feel ignorant as a child. The possibility of such rays was wholly unsuspected, in my day. And Einstein’s equations proved that if matter moved faster than light, it would expand indefinitely.”
Gorr Holl uttered a rumbling chuckle. “Your Einstein was a great scientist, but we’ve opened up new fields of knowledge since then. The mass control that prevents that expansion, and other things.”
Kenniston was only half listening. He was looking at the blue-white eye of Vega, glaring arrogantly at him from the great drift of spangled stars. And looking at it somehow made him sense their awful speed, their nightmare fall through the infinite.
It was worse than the takeoff, and he had not thought that anything could be worse than that. If he lived forever, he would never forget those last still minutes, strapped into a recoil chair, trying to relax and not succeeding, listening to ringing alarm bells, watching the blinking of lights, feeling the deep quivering of the ship as it gathered itself for the outward leap, his heartbeats choking him and the icy sweat running, trying to tell himself that it was no different from taking off in a plane… And then the lift, the pressure, the instinctive gasp for breath, the terrible claustrophobia of being shut into a moving thing over which he had no control.
He could not know yet by what mastery of science the occupants of the ship were shielded from the enormous pressures of that acceleration.