“I didn’t try to kill the assignment for you, Kim,” the psych said.
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“You just didn’t think I was the man for the job.”
“Your record is good all the way. You know that,” Steinhart said. “It’s just some of the things—”
Kimball said: “I talked too much.”
“You had to.”
“You wouldn’t think my secret life was so dangerous, would you,” the Colonel said smiling.
“You were married, Kim. What happened?”
“More therapy?”
“I’d like to know. This is for me.”
Kimball shrugged. “It didn’t work. She was a fine girl—but she finally told me it was no go. ‘You don’t live here’ was the way she put it.”
“She knew you were a career officer; what did she expect—?”
“That isn’t what she meant. You know that.”
“Yes,” the psych said slowly. “I know that.”
They rode in silence, across the dark Base, between the concrete sheds and the wooden barracks. Overhead, the stars like dust across the sky. Kimball, swathed in plastic, a fantastic figure not of earth, watched them wheel across the clear, deep night.
“I wish you luck, Kim,” Steinhart said. “I mean that.”
“Thanks.” Vaguely, as though from across a deep and widening gulf.
“What will you do?”
“You know the answers as well as I,” the Colonel said impatiently. “Set up the camp and wait for the next rocket. If it comes.”
“In two years.”
“In two years,” the plastic figure said. Didn’t he know that it didn’t matter?
He glanced at his watch. Zero minus fifty-six minutes.
“Kim,” Steinhart said slowly. “There’s something you should know about. Something you really should be prepared for.”
“Yes?” Disinterest in his voice now, Steinhart noted clinically. Natural under the circumstances? Or neurosis building up already?
“Our tests showed you to be a schizoid—well-compensated, of course. You know there’s no such thing as a normal human being. We all have tendencies toward one or more types of psychoses. In your case the symptoms are an overly active imagination and in some cases an inability to distinguish reality from—well, fancy.”
Kimball turned to regard the psych coolly. “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do you know?”
The analyst flushed. “No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,” Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely child.”
Kimball was watching the sky again.
Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little about the psychology of space-flight, Kim—”
Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.
“You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the planets—”
Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.
They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.
Kimmy saw the girls before they saw him. In their new, low waisted middies and skirts, they looked strange and out of place standing by the pebbled shore of the River Iss.
They were his sisters, Rose and Margaret. Older than he at fifteen and seventeen. But they walked by the river and into danger. Behind him he could hear the rustling sound of the Plant Men as the evening breeze came up.
“Kimm-eeeee—”
They were calling him. In the deepening dusk their voices carried far down the river. “Kimmmmm—eeeeeeeeee—”
He knew he should answer them, but he did not. Behind him he could hear the awful Plant Men approaching. He shivered with delicious horror.
He stood very still, listening to his sisters talking, letting their voices carry down to where he hid from the dangers of the Valley Dor.
“Where is that little brat, anyway?”
“He always wanders off just at dinnertime and then we have to find him—”
“Playing with that old faucet—” Mimicry. “‘My rad-ium pis-tol—’”
“Cracked—just cracked. Oh, where IS he, anyway? Kimmm-eee, you AN-swer!”
Something died in him. It wasn’t a faucet, it WAS a radium pistol. He looked at his sisters with dismay. They weren’t really his sisters. They were Therns, with their yellow hair and their pale skins. He and John Carter and Tars Tarkas had fought them many times, piling their bodies for barricades and weaving a flashing pattern of skillful swords in the shifting light of the two moons.
“Kimmmm—eeee Mom’s going to be mad at you! Answer us!”
If only Tars Tarkas would come now. If only the great Green Jeddak would come splashing across the stream on his huge thoat, his two swords clashing—
“He’s up there in that clump of willows—hiding!”
“Kimmy! You come down here this instant!”
The Valley Dor was blurring, fading. The Golden Cliffs were turning into sandy, river-worn banks. The faucet felt heavy in his grimy hand. He shivered, not with horror now. With cold.
He walked slowly out of the willows, stumbling a little over the rocks.
He lay like an embryo in the viscera of the ship, protected and quite alone. The plastic sac contained him, fed him; and the rocket, silent now, coursed through the airless deep like a questing thought. Time was measured by the ticking of the telemeters and the timers, but Kimball slept insulated and complete.
And he dreamed.
He dreamed of that summer when the river lay still and deep under the hanging willows. He dreamed of his sisters, thin and angular creatures as he remembered them through the eyes of a nine-year-old—
And his mother, tall and shadowy, standing on the porch of the rented cottage and saying exasperatedly: “Why do you run off by yourself, Kimmy? I worry about you so—”
And his sisters: “Playing with his wooden swords and his radium pistol and never wanting to take his nose out of those awful books—”
He dreamed of the low, beamed ceiling of the cottage, sweltering in the heat of the summer nights and the thick longing in his throat for red hills and a sky that burned deep blue through the long, long days and canals, clear and still. A land that he knew somehow never was, but which lived, for him, through some alchemy of the mind. He dreamed of Mars.
And Steinhart: “What is reality, Kimmy?”
The hours stretched into days, the days into months. Time wasn’t. Time was a deep night and a starshot void. And dreams.
He awoke seldom. His tasks were simple. The plastic sac and the tender care of the ship were more real than the routine jobs of telemetering information back to the Base across the empty miles, across the rim of the world.
He dreamed of his wife. “You don’t live here, Kim.”
She was right, of course. He wasn’t of earth. Never had been. My love is in the sky, he thought, filled with an immense satisfaction.