But when the Mavourneen was only two hours out from Pluto, bound back to Earth, Joe had the first inkling of the event that was to make his whole journey remarkable. The first mate brought a girl into the kitchen and said briefly:
“This is Miss Alice Cawdor. She rates as supernumerary steward. The skipper had orders to bring her to Earth if she wanted to make the trip. See that she has meals. She isn’t required to do any work, but if she wants to, she may.”
He went away. The girl said politely:
“How do you do?”
She looked at Joe with a friendly reserve which was exactly the way a small-town girl looks at people she has not met before. Not suspicious, and not stand-offish, but like somebody who’s known the same people all her life, and knows that some new people will become her friends and some won’t. Joe had been pretty lonely on Pluto, and he’d expected to be lonely on the way back. He found himself hoping that this girl would decide he was worth making friends with.
Back on Earth his father and mother were beginning to talk about taking a vacation somewhere. They needed it. Joe’s father was drawn pretty fine, now, and his mother had had to take in all her clothes. There could be no communication by radio beyond a distance to be measured in thousands of miles. The distance to where Joe was was thousands of millions of miles. So there would be no word from or about Joe until his ship got back. The next three and a half months were going to be hard to last through.
Joe’s new duties as a second steward were easier than those of a spaceman, second class. He set the table for the officers and put the food on it. He took out the dishes and put them in the washer. Later he stacked them. He did some polishing of cutlery and pans. Not much. The girl stayed in an empty cabin most of the time. She came and got her meals from the kitchen and took them to her cabin to eat, alone. She was pleasant, but reserved.
During the first week, though, she did ask Joe if there were any books or vision-tapes to read or look at. He found some for her and set up a small tape-viewer for her to watch the vision-tapes in. He mentioned one record he thought she’d like.
The sun, at that time, was a flaring bright star four light-hours away. It would take the Mavourneen a little over three and a half months to reach a spot eight light-minutes away from it, where there should be a certain small planet called Earth.
Joe worked in the kitchen and served the officers’ meals. He thought often and deeply about the stars. He set a table and cleared it and put dishes in a washer and later stacked them. Once he thought about the profession he had studied to practice. He also thought about the vision-reels in the ship’s library, and the books, and picked out some others for the girl to see when she wanted them.
Two weeks out of Pluto they were talking about other subjects than books and vision-reels. With a little embarrassment she told him she’d been born on Pluto and had lived all her life in the underground settlement there.
“My mother got tired of it, finally,” she said. “She used to get homesick for Earth. I don’t remember, but she made my father promise that he’d send me back to Earth to see it, anyway, before I married somebody out there.”
“Have you picked him out?” asked Joe.
She shook her head.
By the time they passed the orbit of Neptune they were friends. And Joe knew that she’d estimated him carefully before she gave him her friendship. He felt that the honor was great. His selection of vision-reels and books became even more painstaking. But they talked quite a lot. Sometimes about the stars outside the ship. She had never seen the stars, either.
“You’ll see them on Earth,” Joe promised. “You’ll see them every night.”
She said uncomfortably:
“Night ... It must be strange. That’s when there isn’t any light. And the stars are in the sky . . .” She said uncertainly. “I can’t imagine what a sky is like. My father says there isn’t any ceiling over your head ...”
Joe looked at her in astonishment. Then he realized. He, himself, had not seen a sky for nearly five months. She had never seen one. She had never been out-of-doors. Not that she had suffered physically from the fact. Lamps supplied needed ultraviolet in the ship, and certainly in the settlement on Pluto.
“And sunshine,” she added uneasily. “It’s yellow, isn’t it? I wonder what I’ll look like in—daylight?”
Joe tried to tell her. He was very earnest about it. But when he was by himself, sometimes he doubted the accuracy of the descriptions he gave her. It had been a long time since he’d seen a sky or the sun or trees, or grass, or even the stars as they look from the bottom of Earth’s ocean of air.
The Mavourneen floated on through emptiness toward Earth. Around her the stars shone by myriads of myriads. Some were brighter than others, and some were yellow and some were blue and pink and even green. But none was larger than any other. All were pinpoints—unwinking and infinitely small.
All but the sun.
That had visibly a disk when the Mavourneen crossed the orbit of Uranus. Not that Joe saw the planet, nor did Alice Cawdor, the girl. As a matter of fact, Uranus was around on the other side of the sun and was not seen even by the officers and crew-members who had occasion to enter the control room and look out of its ports. Saturn was visible, but the ship would not pass within hundreds of millions of miles of it. There was not much excitement even in duty in the control room of the Mavourneen.
The firmament gave no impression of distance. It looked like an all-encompassing backdrop in which someone had prickled countless tiny holes through which lights shone. There was the sun ahead, but it was merely a distinct bright light of small but appreciable size. Navigating the Mavourneen was merely a matter of working controls so that dials would read what mathematics said they should. One had no feeling of movement or adventure.
The ship passed the orbit of Saturn. Back on Earth, Joe’s mother began to find it more difficult to sleep. Joe might be home in two months more. If nothing had happened . . . Joe’s father smoked too much. But he would have grinned at the suggestion that he worried about Joe. Joe was all right. Of course!
Then Jupiter and the sun and the Mavourneen were at the three corners of an equilateral triangle, if anybody cared. The ship had been decelerating for a long time when she reached that point and kept on sunward toward the orbit of Mars. She continued to decelerate. The only noteworthy thing that turned up in Joe’s life was that he discovered Alice did not know that on Earth everybody went to sleep at night. Without really thinking about it, she’d assumed that life on Earth was like life on Pluto, and that people were awake and slept in shifts—as on Pluto—and that there was always brightness outside one’s room and somebody up and about and working or amusing themselves. She found it frightening to think of everybody asleep at once. It seemed to her that somebody ought to be on duty to make sure there was light and heat and air. On Pluto there was.
Joe felt a sort of compassionate protectiveness toward her now. He told her about his family, and assured her that his mother would instantly invite her to visit and grow used to Earth in his home. She had been bound for some institutional hotel where she would be properly guarded against her unsophistication in Earth customs.
They passed the orbit of Mars.
Now Joe was enormously impatient for the Mavourneen to land. He wanted to show Alice the sky. She had never seen it. He wanted to show her the stars—not from space, but from Earth. He was going to show her the sunset, and the rain, and a sunrise. There would be mountains to be regarded, and the ocean. She must see—and be protected from terror at the sight of—more people than lived on all of Pluto, dining at once in one great room, with many times more moving about outside. She must hear bird songs in the morning. She must—