Andre Norton (ed) (33 page)

Ken
laughed and waved a hand as they retreated from the house. "We'll be all
right. Don't worry about us. We like the rain."

The
light in his face was a joyous thing to see, and Sarah thought suddenly how
little there had been of it during the past years. She thought back over the
times that Rick had left them alone, and it seemed there had been nothing of
closeness or love between her and Ken. He had always pulled away in the direction
of his father's horizon—and she had pulled against almost everything he had
wanted.

They
walked past the steaming barns and the low grumbling noises of the cattle
within. The meadowland underneath their feet was squashy from the rain and she
had to grasp Ken's arm to keep her feet beneath her.

He
was big, like Rick, and the hardness of muscle in his arm startled her. He
seemed to have grown almost without her awareness, she thought in panic.

"I've
decided I won't go with Dad," Ken said abruptly. "I know how you feel
about it. I'm not going to ask any more. We talked about it last night. I told
him, and he said it was up to me.

She
couldn't see his face, but she knew how it must look. Yet her heart gave an
involuntary leap within her. He was offering the thing she most desired at this
moment—or so it appeared.

But
it was only appearance. She understood—as he didn't at this moment—that some
day he would hate her for the unspoken pressure by which she had forced him to
this decision.

"We'll talk about it more, later,"
she said. Her voice was hoarse and barely audible. "We may find another
answer."

They came to the low rise behind the barns
and followed the base of it towards the old creek bed, long dried up and
overrun with grass. There had once been a sizable stream here, but a dam in the
low hills beyond held back all the water that used to flow in spring freshets.
This was the fish pond where the runoff from the hills was trapped.

Across
the dry stream bed was a rise on which stood the first farmhouse of the place,
now long abandoned. The stream had once run behind the house, but one sudden
spring flood had washed a new course and left the house stranded on a tiny
island between the two branches. It did not matter, for the house had been long
abandoned even then.

Now Sarah and Ken turned their steps towards
it. Ken glanced at the sky. "It looks like Grandpa is about to get all the
rain he can use. I'll bet the forecasters are so tired of his grumbling that
they're really going to let him have it."

Sarah stopped and glanced anxiously for the
first time at the low gray ceiling that was settling with furious intensity.

"We'd better get back," she said.
"We'll be drenched if we get caught out here." But already the first
drops had started to fall.

T
think it's been raining quite a while over the hill there," said Ken,
nodding towards the rise that hid the fish pond. "We'd better go up to the
old house and wait it out."

It seemed the sensible thing to do. Sarah
hurried on, clutching Ken's hand for support. The bottom of the dry creek bed
held three or four inches of water already from the previous rain. They sank to
ankle depth in it, and tried to hop across on projecting rocks. Finally, they
scrambled up the opposite slope to the house. Their footsteps rattled like dry
bones on the old, weather-beaten porch.

From
the moment they set foot on it, the rain spurted in torrents. It hammered the
aged roof and began to pour through holes. Ken and Sarah dodged, clinging to
each other and glancing apprehensively upward.

And Sarah found that she
was laughing.

It
was a strange and startling discovery. Ken was laughing with her, and she
sensed that he, too, felt that they had not laughed together for a very long
time.

They
clung momentarily in this miracle of laughter, and then it slowly died away in
Ken's face. He relaxed his hold on his mother, and then it was there between
them again—the wonder and the agony of their divergent lives.

They
sat down close to each other on the porch floor, their backs against the wall.
Water fell and splashed on either side of them. They watched the sheeting rain,
and listened to its roar on the roof.

Their
own silence was long. Ken shifted uneasily. Sarah sensed his embarrassment in
not knowing what to say to her in this moment.

She
broke the silence. "Why do you want to go to Mars?" she asked
suddenly. "Can you tell me in just a single phrase that will make me
understand this thing?"

"It's
what I've got to do," he answered, forgetting his former promise to
abandon the plan. "There's one thing that each man in the world is born to
do, Grandpa says, and I believe him. Mine is out there in space.

"Think
of all there is yet to do
I
We haven't even reached
the last planet of our own System. Somebody living now is going to be the first
to make it. That could be me. And there are the other Systems like ours.

"They're
talking about an SOL—speed of light drive—out there on Mars now. Dad thinks he
may get in on some of the development work on that. We could reach the nearest
stars with it.

"I've
been born in the best age the world has ever knownl I can't turn my back on it.
You have no right to ask it of me."

"I won't ask it," said Sarah
quietly. "I'm going to let you go— you and Dad—you can go together."

"That
isn't what we want. We don't just want to go by ourselves. We need you,
too."

"No!"
Her voice was so shrill it startled her. "You'll never get me to agree to
anything like that. I'll give you all the freedom you want for yourselves, but
you can't ask any more of me than that."

From
a distance there came a sudden sound of thunder. It rose from somewhere in the
hills above them, and a gathering roar shook the old house on its rotten
underpinnings. Sarah and Ken glanced up the littie valley with wonder and
apprehension,
and the roaring grew.

"The
dam!"
Ken
cried. "Grandpa's pond—the dam's broken!"

Sarah recalled her mother's complaint about
ordering so much rainfall to drain behind the weakened dam. It was incredible
that her father should have underestimated such a risk. But now she could see
the gray tongue of water curling down the dry creek bed, widening swiftly, some
of it overflowing the banks and racing towards the barns and corrals across the
meadow.

Then
she saw it flowing through the other branch around the house.

"We
can't get out of here!" she exclaimed. "There's water all around the
house."

Ken
eyed the widening reaches of the water. "The bed's pretty well filled up
down below so that it won't drain, but it won't be more than six or seven feet
deep at the most."

"But how'll we ever get across?"

He grinned as if he were now in the midst of
something he could enjoy. "We'll swim, of course."

"No.
Your grandfather has the boat he takes to the lake for fishing. They can pull
it up here on the trailer and take us off."

"All that trouble? Come on, let's swim
across. There's no need to wait for the rain to quit. We couldn't get any
wetter than well be crossing."

Sarah looked down at the roiling water with
distaste. "They'll come looking for us soon. There's no sense in trying to
make it across now."

Ken
was halfway across the porch. He turned and looked back with boyish pleading in
his eyes. "Oh, come on, Mom. Let's not do it for sense. Let's do it for
funl"

For
a moment she had a chilling impression that somewhere a key had turned within a
lock. She halted in her movement towards him.

To
her eyes, resting on his, it seemed as if understanding flared between them—as
if some window had opened, letting her see for the first time through the murky
turmoil between them. Let's do it for fun-It was so simple she wanted to cry.
She had sought for a thousand complex answers to explain the lives of the men
who baffled her so.

Let's do it for fun—

They had crossed oceans and prairies in ages
past. And now they circled the Earth and reached out to the planets, and Ken
already had thoughts of other stars beyond the sun. Their far horizons—they
crossed them for fun.

Let's do it for fun—It was so simple, but was
it true? How long had it been since she had done anything for fun, for the
sheer pleasure of it? Her memory ranged back over the years and they seemed
barren of anything but a dread intensity that hovered in the sky on the wings
of rockets.

Ken
was alarmed by the sudden, half-hysterical giggle that escaped her as she put
her hands up to her face and hid her eyes from his sight for a moment.

"What is it, Mom? What's the
matter—?"

She
looked at him again, and her eyes were shining in a way that he had never seen
before.
 
"Come on—" she said.

It was a crazy thing—they
could just as well wait—and she knew if she stopped to think about it she would
never go through with it.

There was only one way to find out if it were
true—if it were possible to do anything for fun any more.

She stripped off her coat and outer clothing
and raced down the slope clad only in her underthings. She stopped at the edge
of the water and waved to Ken who struggled with his shirt on the porch. He was
grinning in pleased astonishment.

"Wait a minute," he called.
"We can put a rock in these and throw them across."

He
made a couple of bundles of their clothes and hurled them across the stream.
They landed with a squashy sound on the other side.

"Now we've got to
go!"

It
wasn't cold. The rain was still falling, and it seemed warm on her bare skin.
She looked down at herself. She wasn't old, but she couldn't remember another
time when she had stood almost naked in the rain. She opened her mouth to taste
it. She wondered how many other things that were fun she had missed.

Ken
took her hand and they walked into the water. It was colder than the raindrops
and closed like circling ice about her legs and waist and chest. But it felt
good. She felt as if thirty years' terror had been stripped away with her
clothes.

Her father had been so busy crossing his own
horizons that he had never thought to explain why they had to be crossed. He
had forgotten to tell her that it was fun and she had never sensed it through
her dread.

It
had taken Ken's impulsive, naive wisdom to explain it to her—and this simple
adventure to prove it. And now she knew it was true.

Ken
was grinning but puzzled. The puzzlement didn't matter, for she was seeing him
really alive for the first time in years. All his joy and life had been
suppressed in her presence before now, and she had not known it.

Abruptly, her feet slipped
on the grassy slope and she went down. Ken grabbed her and buoyed her up, and
then they were both laughing and swimming and sputtering their way towards the
opposite slope.

The sky was breaking as they started wading
again, and Sarah saw the figures coming towards them, her mother and father and
Rick. Rick broke into a run.

Ken
squeezed her hand hard, and looked at her as if he understood the feeling that
was in her. "Aren't you glad we didn't wait for them, Mom?"

Then
Rick was grasping her hand and pulling her towards him, wrapping his own dry
coat about her wet shoulders. She looked up into his worried face.

"I've got a surprise for you,
darling," she said. "We're going to Mars, all of us. It will be
funl"

He
scowled in wonder. "I don't know what that's got to do with this, but if
it's true it's wonderful."

She didn't get to say more. Her mother was
bustling up insisting that Ken take her coat against his wishes.

"Dad
knew that dam couldn't take a rain like this. He knew it was weak and ordered
rain anyway. Now look at the expense of building the pond again," she
complained.

At
first the words didn't register through the cold and unpleasantness that was
beginning to settle upon Sarah. Then their significance cut sharply. She looked
at her father and her son. She caught the momentary glance that passed between
them.