But four of them I could see, the four that are as big as Earth’s moon or bigger, the four that Galileo had discovered in 1610, with the first crude telescope he made.
Four moons, four cold but lovely moons which man had never reached but which man was going to reach and set foot upon. Soon. Damned soon.
Io. Europa. Ganymede. Callisto.
Which would I land upon? Or would I ever land on any? Max, I told myself, Max you silly fool you dreamer, it’s still a thousand to one chance. The rocket is going, yes, the rocket will be built and you’ll supervise the building of it. But Max you ass, your chance of stealing it? It’s going to be a government project with guards, with hundreds of people working on it. Sure, you can arrange some of the things you’ll have to arrange; you can have it fueled and loaded and ready to take off twenty-four or forty-eight hours before actual take-off time; you can arrange somehow to have the orbital refueling rocket up there already, ahead of time—yes, you can give reasons for that; you can finagle something that will get the director himself off the grounds so you’ll be in full charge at the crucial time. But still so many things could go wrong, so many things…
Still a chance in a thousand. But a chance to go on eight times as far as Mars, ten times as far out into space as man had ever been before.
A little closer to the stars, the far far stars that someday we’re going to reach, the billion billion billion stars that are waiting for us.
Ellen came back in the middle of July.
We saw one another, of course, the night she got back, but then not again for a week. I was so close to being ready for my exam in metallurgy that we agreed not to see one another again until I had it over with. That gave me a double incentive to burn midnight oil and I really burned it. The seeing was bad that week, too, so I wasn’t even tempted to the roof, and I skipped my usual evening with Klocky.
So it was just seven days on the head after Ellen’s return that I was able to phone Ellen that I’d passed my second last exam and had only one subject left between me and the degree.
«Wonderful, darling,» she said. «And you’re not going to start the last subject right away, are you? You’re way ahead of schedule.»
«Right, Ellen. And here’s another item of good news. Klocky has been more than satisfied with the way I’m handling the maintenance department. Says he’ll use my getting that degree as occasion for making me assistant supervisor. That’ll give me at least several months of experience before he takes off for a while and leaves me as acting super.»
«Max, things are really working out. Just as they are in Washington. Coming over tonight to celebrate?»
«Is that a new word for it?»
«Don’t be vulgar, darling. I’ve got some champagne. Does that tempt you?»
«It would, except that I’ve got a better idea. I can take a week off at the rocket port, starting as of now. What are your plans?»
«Why—I have a few appointments, one viddy appearance, a meeting or two—»
«Could you cancel them? We could run down to Mexico City for a week. We can be there in time for dinner this evening.»
We went down to Mexico City for a week.
It was a wonderful week, and also a restful one. We were both tired and got plenty of sleep, slept till noon every day and sometimes even later. Evenings, but never into the small hours of the night, we saw the sights and went the round of the bright spots. Ellen wore a skin mask, of course—one of the new Ravigos that can hardly be detected even in daylight—whenever we were outside our suite. The price of being famous.
I really got to know Senator Ellen Gallagher that week. She told me just about everything important that had ever happened to her.
She’d had a kind of rough early life. She’d been born Ellen Grabow, and she’d never seen her father; he’d been a casualty in fifty-two in that mess we were embroiled in then in Korea, just a few weeks before she was born. Her mother had died two years later; the grandparents on her father’s side had tried to take care of her but they were too poor to have a nurse or governess, too old and one of them too ill to raise her themselves. They’d had to put her in an orphanage.
She’d been an ugly duckling, a sickly, unattractive child with chronic skin trouble and frequent colds. Also, she admitted, pretty much of an unmanageable brat because of her dissatisfaction with herself and her overcompensations for her feelings of inferiority. She’d been adopted on a trial basis three times between the ages of three and eight and turned back to the orphanage at the end of the trial period or before.
The fourth offer, when she was ten, she effectively turned down herself with a tantrum that frightened off the prospective adopters. She stayed at the orphanage until she was fifteen; she was then released—on parole, as it were—to take a job, or the conditions that she must live at a girls’ club until she was of age and that she must continue her studies at night school until she had a high school diploma. Her job was in the package room of a department store and she stuck at it two weeks until she got her first pay check. All of this had been in Wichita, Kansas.
She so thoroughly hated Wichita and the conditions of her parole that she used that first money she got to jump parole and take a bus to Hollywood. She was enamoured of acting and wanted to get into the booming viddy field. (That was the year they’d built the second space station, the telestation for viddy only, and it had gone up right over her head in Kansas.) She was still unattractive at fifteen and knew it, but thought she had a great acting ability and that she could do character parts and brat roles, possibly even become a comedienne.
Perhaps, she admitted, thinking of herself as being funny or potentially funny had been her defense against her own unattractiveness during adolescence. Instead of admiring herself in her mirror, she used to practice making funny faces at herself.
«Intermission,» I said.
I got up and made us each a drink, brought them back to bed. Ellen had propped up pillows for us and we lay back against them. We sipped our drinks.
«Have I been boring you, Max?» she asked.
«You never have and you never will,» I told her. «Go on.»
She went on. She went on, to California and to what she hoped would be sudden success in the viddies.
But two years in Hollywood, working as a waitress, convinced her that she wasn’t going to get a chance to try; then she did get a couple of chances and failed to get either part or any encouragement whatsoever, and that convinced her she’d better start looking for something more likely than a viddy career.
Something more likely turned out to be Ray Connor, a young man only a year older than she, who wanted to marry her. At eighteen he was an orphan too, but a recent one who had a little money and a small income from his parents’ estate. He wanted to become a lawyer and a statesman, and he was just starting to put himself through law school. When they were married he suggested that she enter college too and was a little horrified to learn that she was a year and a half short of having finished high school. Ellen was beginning by then to be aware of the shortcomings of her education and readily agreed to study high school subjects at home, with her husband’s help, until she could take college entrance examinations.
She was surprised to find that she enjoyed studying and learning, now that she was doing it because she wanted to and not because she had to. She made the college examinations in only six months—sooner than she’d have gotten a diploma if she’d stayed in Wichita and had continued going to night school there. She entered college only a term behind her husband and she too decided to study law. She’d become interested in it through his interest and had begun to see herself as a Portia, perhaps even as a states-woman; that was in the early seventies when women were going more and more into politics.