Dusk, and more people gathering. Silent, most of them. Most of us. Silent in wonder at the thing that was to happen.
Dusk and the bright floodlights down there, down where it was going to start to happen, down there where a man with a light in his eyes like the light in Billy’s eyes was getting ready to leave Earth, to escape from this poor two-dimensional surface upon which we three-dimensional beings crawl.
Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape—outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy.
I thought of the distant future and the things we’d have, and discounted my wildest guesses as inadequate. Immortality? Achieved in the nineteenth millennium X. R. and discarded in the twenty-third because it was no longer necessary. Reverse entropy to rewind the universe? Obsolete with the discovery of nolanism and the concurrent cognate in the quadrate decal. Sounds wild? How would the word quantum or the concept of a matter-energy transformation sound to a Neanderthaler? We’re Neanderthalers, to our descendants of a hundred thousand years from now. You’ll sell them short to make the wildest guess as to what they’ll do and what they’ll be.
The stars? Hell, yes. They’ll have the stars.
Dark now. «What time is it, Uncle Max?»
«Four minutes to go, Billy.»
The floodlights go off. There is a breathless hush. Thousands of people and a breathless hush.
Oh God, Ellen, if you could be here with me, to watch our rocket take off. Our rocket. But more yours than mine. You died for it.
Here waiting in the breathless dark I feel humble before it and before you, before man and his future, before God if there is a God before mankind becomes one.