She grew scared.
“I—want to see the sky,” she said uneasily, “but—what will I look like, Joe, in the sunlight?”
Joe said:
“You’ll look beautiful!”
And he kissed her tenderly.
They’d reached that point above the asteroid belt. The Mavourneen had made a parabolic curve above the plane of the ecliptic to dodge the asteroids, which may be the fragments of that planet which ought to lie between Earth and Mars, but doesn’t. The ship was then curving down again to a rendezvous with Earth. The sun was an angry ball of seething flame, floating in emptiness and spouting streamers of fire. It was already too bright to be looked at directly from the control room ports. Mars could be plainly seen, and Venus was almost as bright as the sun itself appeared from Pluto.
But Joe and Alice did not even think what space looked like, outside the ship. Joe served the meals for the officers and cleared away the dishes and put them in the washer and later stacked them. He did some polishing of cutlery. But then he hastened to find excuses to talk to Alice.
She grew afraid. She had watched vision-tape plays about life on Earth. She had seen pictures. She had read. But by anticipation she felt a shaking agoraphobia. Yet she wanted desperately to see the sky.
Eight hours before landing, she wept bitterly. Joe’s arms were tightly about her, for comfort, but she was terrified. Then she tried to smile at him with wet eyes and her breath still coming in little gasps from past sobbing.
“I—I don’t know what I’d do without you, Joe. You—encourage me so! What would I do without you?”
“You’ll never find out,” he told her. “You’ll never be without me!”
It was quite definitely settled that they were going to marry. After all, Joe had finished college and was trained to a profession, and so was able to support a wife as soon as he got started. Anyhow, his father would help out at the beginning. Obviously Joe couldn’t let Alice try to make her way about Earth alone! So of course they would be married immediately. His father would agree that it was the only sensible arrangement. Nothing else was thinkable!
And so the Mavourneen, huge and swollen of shape and ungraceful to look at and horribly clumsy to handle in atmosphere—so the Mavourneen reached Earth. Joe’s mother and father were at the field when the ship landed. It came down out of nowhere, and Joe’s mother saw it first, but it was instantly blotted out by tears. It grew larger and larger, and its few, unbeautiful exterior features became visible, and then it seemed to sway crushingly overhead. Then it settled down, very heavily and gruntingly, and was on Earth again.
It was not like a passenger-liner landing. Joe’s father and mother were the only people to meet it except those whose livelihood it made. But presently they saw Joe. There was, then, no sign of his having broken an arm. It was long since healed. He came down the landing-ladder with Alice. He helped her to the ground, with the swelling hull of the Mavourneen, above them, blotting out the sky. He hurried her toward his father and mother—but he did not see them. He stopped no more than a dozen feet away from them. Joe’s mother could not speak. His father simply looked.
Joe said exultantly:
“Look, darling! That’s the sky! Look at it! Isn’t it wonderful?”
Joe’s mother and father saw a pretty girl. A young girl. A sweet-faced girl, in every way suitable to rouse their son’s enthusiasm. Joe’s father and mother looked at Joe, and at her. And Alice was frightened and desperately yearning. She did not look at the sky. Her eyes clung affrightedly to Joe’s face, searching his expression. She said in a scared voice:
“H—how do I look—in daylight?”
“Beautiful!” said Joe. It had not occurred to him to have any doubt. There had been no reason for doubt. He kissed her joyously.
His father and mother waited for him to see them. His mother’s eyes overflowed. It was at least partly the result of seeing that Joe had taken another step toward not needing a mother any more. Joe’s father’s face was a little bit gaunt. The last eight months had been pretty bad for him.
They waited while Joe kissed Alice triumphantly, and then faced her about and commanded her to look at the sky and the grass and the trees beyond the field. He showed her a cloud. He showed her the sun.
Presently he noticed his father and mother.