The Planet Strappers Part 8

Charlie's and his eyes met for a second, in understanding.

"Thanks, Postman Roy," Charlie said. "Only you were right the first time. These letters shouldn't be delivered until your next trip around, tomorrow morning."

They both handed the envelopes back to Roy Harder.

The voices of their Bunch-mates jangled in a conflicting chorus.

"Ah--yuh damfools!" Two-and-Two bleated.

"Good for them!" Art Kuzak said, perhaps mockingly.

"Hey--they're us--they'll stay with us--shut up--didn't we lose enough people, already?" Gimp said.

Frank grinned with half of his mouth. "We always needed a name," he remarked. "How about _The Planet Strappers_? h.e.l.l--if the chairborne echelon of the U.S.S.F. is so slow and picky, let 'em go sit on a sunspot."

"I need some white paint and a brush, Paul," Ramos declared, running into the shop.

In a couple of minutes more, the name for the Bunch was crudely and boldly lettered on the sides of both trucks.

"Salute your ladies, shake hands with your neighbors, and then let's get moving," Charlie Reynolds laughed genially.

And so they did. Old Paul Hendricks, born too soon, blinked a little as he grinned, and slapped shoulders. "On your way, you lucky tramps...!"

There were quick movements here and there--a kiss, a touch of hands, a small gesture, a strained glance.

Frank Nelsen blew a kiss jauntily to Nance Codiss, the neighbor girl, who waved to him from the background. "So long, Frank..." He wondered if he saw a fierce envy showing in her face.

Miss Rosalie Parks, his high school Latin teacher, was there, too. Old J. John Reynolds appeared at the final moment to smile dryly and to flap a waxy hand.

"So long, sir... Thanks..." they all shouted as the diesels of the trucks whirred and then roared. J. John still had never been around the shop. It was only Frank who had seen him regularly, every week. It might have been impertinent for them to say that they'd make him really rich.

But some must have hoped that they'd get rich, themselves.

Frank Nelsen was perched on his neatly packed blastoff drum in the back of one of the trucks, as big tires began to turn. Near him, similarly perched, were Mitch Storey, dark and thoughtful, Gimp Hines with a triumph in his face, Two-and-Two Baines biting his lip, and Dave Lester with his large Adam's apple bobbing.

So that was how the Bunch left Jarviston, on a June evening that smelled of fresh-cut hay and car fumes--home. Perhaps they had chosen this hour to go because the gathering darkness might soften their haunting suspicions of complete folly before an adventure so different from the life they knew--neat streets, houses, beds, Sat.u.r.day nights, dances, struggling for a dream at Hendricks'--that even if they survived the change, the difference must seem a little like death.

Seeking the lifting thread of magical romance again, Frank Nelsen looked up at the ribbed canvas top of the truck. "Covered wagon," he said.

"Sure--Indians--boom-boom," Two-and-Two chuckled, brightening. "Wild West... Yeah--_wild_--that's a word I kind of like."

Up ahead, in the other truck, Ramos and Charlie Reynolds had begun to sing a funny and considerably ribald song. They made lots of l.u.s.ty, primitive noise. When they were finished, Ramos, still in a spirit of humor, corned up an old Mexican number about disappointed love.

_"Adios, Mujer--

Adios para siempre--

Adios..."_

Ramos wailed out the last syllable with lugubrious emphasis.

"Always it's girls," Dave Lester managed to chuckle. "I still don't see how they expect to find many, Out There."

"If our Eileen has--or will--make it, she won't be the first--or last,"

Frank offered, almost mystically.

"Hey--I was right about the word, _wild_," Two-and-Two mused.

"Yeah--we're all just plum-full of wanting to be wild. Not _mean_ wild, mostly--constructive wild, instead. And, d.a.m.n, we'll _do_ it...!

Cripes--we ought to come back to old Paul's place in June, ten years from now, and tell each other what we've accomplished."

"d.a.m.n--that's a fine idea, Two-and-Two!" David Lester piped up. "I'll suggest it to the other guys, first chance I get...!"

Of course it was another piece of callow whistling in the dark, but it was a buildup, too. Coming home at a fixed, future time, to compare glittering successes. Eldorados found and exploited, cities built, giant businesses established, hearts won, real manhood achieved past staggering difficulties. But they all had to believe it, to combat the icy sliver of dread concerning an event that was getting very near, now.

Mitch Storey sat with his mouth organ cupped in his hands. He began to make soft, musing chords, tried a fragment of Old Man River, s.h.i.+fted briefly to a spiritual, and wound up with some eerie, impromptu fragments, partly like the drums and jingling bra.s.s of old Africa, partly like a joyful battle, partly like a lonesome lament, and then, mysteriously like absolute silence.

Storey stopped, abashed. He grinned.

"Reaching for Out There, Mitch?" Frank Nelsen asked. "Music of your own, to tell about s.p.a.ce? Got any words for it?"

"Nope," Mitch said. "Maybe it shouldn't have any words. Anyhow, the tune doesn't come clear, yet. I haven't been--There."

"Maybe some more of Otto's beer will help," Frank suggested. "Here--one can, each, to begin." For once, Frank had an urge to get slightly pie-eyed.

"High's a good word," he amended. "High and sky! Mars and stars!"

"s.p.a.ce and race, nuts and guts!" Lester put in, trying to belong, and be light-minded, like he thought the others were, instead of a scared, pedantic kid. He slapped the blastoff drum under him, familiarly, as if to draw confidence from its grim, cool lines.

The whole Bunch was quite a bit like that, for a good part of the night, shouting l.u.s.tily back and forth between the two trucks, laughing, singing, wise-cracking, drinking up Otto Kramer's Pepsi and beer.

But at last, Gimp Hines, remembering wisdom, spoke up. "We're supposed to be under mild sedation--a devil-killer, a tranquilizer--for at least thirty hours. It's in the rules for prospective ground-to-orbit candidates. We're supposed to be sleeping good. Here goes my pill--down, with the last of my beer..."

Faces sobered, and became strained and careful, again. The guys on the trucks bedded down as best they could, among their gaunt equipment. Soon there were troubled snores from huddled figures that quivered with the motion of the vehicles. The mottled Moon rode high. Big tires whispered on damp concrete. Lights blinked past. The trucks curved around corners, growled up grades, highballed down. There were pauses at all-night drive-ins, coffees misguidedly drunk in a blurred, fur-tongued half wakefulness that seemed utterly bleak. Oh, h.e.l.l, Frank Nelsen thought, wasn't it far better to be home in bed, like Jig Hollins?

At grey dawn, there was a breakfast stop, the two truck drivers and their relief man grinning cynically at the Bunch. Then there was more country, rolling and speeding past. Wakefulness was half sleep, and vice-versa. And the hours, through the day and another night, dwindled toward blastoff time, at eleven o'clock tomorrow morning.

When the second dawn came, the Bunch were all tautly and wearily alert again, peering ahead, across dun desert. There wasn't much fallout from the carefully developed hydrogen-fusion engines of the GO rockets, but maybe there was enough to distort the genes of the cacti a little, making their forms more grotesque.

Along the highway there were arrows and signs. When the trucks had labored to the top of a ridge, the s.p.a.ceport installations came into view all at once:

Barbed-wire fences, low, olive-drab gate buildings, guidance tower, the magnesium dome of a powerhouse reactor, repair and maintenance shops, personnel-housing area carefully s.h.i.+elded against radiation by a huge stellene bubble, sealed and air-conditioned, with double-doored entrances and exits. Inside it were visible neat bungalows, lawns, gardens, supermarket, swimming pools, swings, a kid's bike left casually here or there.

The first suns.h.i.+ne glinted on the two rockets and their single, attendant gantry tower, waiting on the launching pad. The rockets were as gaunt as sharks. They might almost have been natural spires on the Moon, or ruined towers left by the extinct beings of Mars. At first they were impersonal and expected parts of the scene, until the numbers, ceramic-enamelled on their striped flanks, were noticed: GO-11 and GO-12.

"They're us--up the old roller coaster!" Charlie Reynolds shouted.

Then everybody was checking his blastoff ticket, as if he didn't remember the number primly typed on it. Frank Nelsen had GO-12.

GO--Ground-to-Orbit. But it might as well mean go! glory, or gallows, he thought.

The trucks reached the gate. The Bunch met the bored and cynical reception committee--a half-dozen U.S.S.F. men in radiation coveralls.