left her practically unmarked on the outside. But sometimes, as she looked out of the apartment’s single window and down through the clouds drifting in the street canyons below, her eyes were like those of a sniper, sorrowful and yet intent.
“What do I want?” Stirling squeezed his way into the living room and closed the door behind him. “What do you mean, what do I want?”
“We don’t see much of you these days. Or should I say these years?”
“I’ve been busy,” Stirling said inadequately, aware of his guilt. “Why didn’t you send me word about Johnny?”
“Didn’t know you’d be interested.”
“No, mother, don’t talk that way. I want to know about Johnny. Have you any idea where he is?” Mrs. Considine gave a sharp laugh. “That’d be a new departure.”
Stirling knew she was referring to the fact that his father had vanished after two years of marriage, her second husband after four, and now Johnny was gone. He resisted an irresponsible impulse to point out that she had made a pun. The matter was too serious. There was nothing particularly unusual about men being unable to stand the psychological erosion of family life in the glove-tight box of a fam-apt. But there was no way of telling if they had managed to evade the immigration barriers thrown up against the Big Three by the other—naturally overcrowded— countries of the world, or if they had chosen to exit from life altogether.
He folded a chair down from the wall and sat on it uncomfortably while his mother brewed coffee. As she moved about, her broad, solid figure almost filling the miniature kitchen, she told him that Johnny had left home exactly a week earlier. He had not said good-by, nor even left a note; but she discovered later that he had taken all his money and a few personal possessions. The police, when she contacted them, had not been noticeably interested.
Although he could not imagine Johnny ever committing suicide, Stirling was relieved to hear about the money and belongings.
“At least,” he said as he accepted a cup of the scalding synthetic, “you know he’s still alive somewhere.” “Of course, he’s alive. The only thing wrong with Johnny is … claustrophobia.”
Stirling noticed the slight pause before she uttered the near-taboo word. It had taken a lot of psychologists many years to convince people that the Compression was acceptable, if not enjoyable—but they had just about succeeded. The ability, literally, to rub shoulders with one’s fellow man all day and then enjoy a sound sleep in a casket-sized bedroom, had become the most prized of the social virtues. Logically, claustrophobia had taken the place of epilepsy or tuberculosis as a disease which mothers hesitated to acknowledge in their children.
“Did the police give you the impression they’d be able to find him?”
“They gave me the impression they weren’t going to look.”
“Then I’ll have to try.” Stirling sipped the black, bitter drink. “Have you no idea where he might be? Nothing at all to go on?”
“All I know is, he went.”
Stirling finished the coffee and lit a cigarette. The age difference between him and his half-brother was only four years, but he found it difficult to accept the idea that Johnny had developed into an adult capable of thinking and acting like a grown man. He kept seeing him as the fair-haired, gap-toothed kid with whom he had shared not only the same bed, but the same pillow, during the timeless dream-years of childhood. At night they had lain in the tiny room, imagining they could feel the two-thousand-foot tower rocking in the night winds outside and telling stories about how they would grow up tall some day and go off in search of their fathers. Sometimes they would imagine discovering them at the North Pole or in Africa, but the usual climax to the boyish fantasies was the finding of their fathers in Heaven.
On an impulse, Stirling crossed to the door of his old bedroom and slid it aside. The room was two-paces long by one-pace wide. The floor space was completely filled by the bed—but it had seemed bigger when they were children. Everything had seemed bigger then. He leaned on the doorframe and smoked thoughtfully, aware that his mother had stopped work on the ferns and was watching him hungrily.
“Do you get enough money?” He asked the question to discharge the emotional potential that was building up.
“Yes. I’ve a production contract for these ferns and flowers. Then there’s the money you send me, and with what Johnny gave in I was even able to save.”
“That’s good.”
Stirling’s gaze roved the walls of the bedroom, taking in the miniature pennants and the old photographs. In the center of the end wall was an empty hook above a brighter path of color of the sort that is left when a picture has been removed, but irregular in shape. He tried for a moment to remember what had hung there; then he began to feel the first gentle stirrings of alarm.
“Mother, what happened to Dad Considine’s boots?”
“Aren’t they still in there? I don’t know. They were there till a few days ago. Johnny must have taken them with him.” “But they were fur-lined flying boots. He wouldn’t want to wear something like that, for God’s sake.” “What’s the matter, Victor? Did you want those boots yourself?”
Shaking his head slowly, Stirling sank down onto the edge of the bed and sat staring across the apartment towards the single window. The old, crinkled, leather boots had been the most tangible souvenir Johnny’s father had left him; but they had played another, and very important, role in both their childhoods. Having grown up in the Compression they had never been able to visualize clearly what it would be like up in Heaven; but they had been, pretty sure it would be cold, and it was agreed that they would wear big boots when they went there to find their fathers. And now Johnny had vanished and taken the boots with him.
Stirling narrowed his eyes against the mid-morning sunlight, focusing them into the eastern sky. He was almost two thousand feet above sea level; but thirteen thousand feet further up he could just discern the pale silhouette of Heaven, drifting in the thin air high above the Atlantic— cold, serene and utterly remote.
Chapter Two
Stirling lounged in the soft warmth of the space cruiser’s control chair. He adjusted the view screen’s filters so that space appeared the color of summer skies on Earth; and far ahead was the slowly expanding disc of Saturn, a spot of creamy light in the gentle blueness. He moved a finger; and, in response to his command, the music that had been whispering around him swelled in dreamy, intangible billows. Silver-sad voices mingled with the drifting chords, creating laceworks of memory, evoking old and almost forgotten thoughts of other times and other places— of the twinkling and tumbling flight of butterflies in orchard shadows, of raindrops patterning the surface of dim lakes. Each impact creating a transient crystal crown.
As Saturn bloomed in the view screen and unfolded its misty rings, Stirling eased the cruiser into a near-perfect circular orbit over the poles. He relaxed again, giving his mind up to the music, and let time itself recede into pictorial abstractions like triangular green flashes strung on a starry helix, every sixtieth one ruby red. This was good. This was living as no one had ever done it before—except that, somewhere far back in his consciousness, was one splinter of worry which seemed to be driving itself deeper and deeper. He ignored it, overlaying the tiny wound with soothing balms of womb-comfort generated by the warmth of the cruiser’s control room, the gyrating star meadows in the view screen, and the pulsing nostalgia of the music.
On Stirling’s eighth orbit of the planet, his eyes detected a flicker of movement ahead and slightly below his own course. Another ship. He had been watching the mote of light for several minutes before he realized the other pilot was matching velocities and closing in on him. Stirling sighed; he had not wanted company. His cruiser lifted its nose, as