R is for Rocket

“Something’s up somewhere. I had two calls at work today. One from your teacher. One from—I can’t say. I don’t want to say until things happen—”

My heart started talking again, slow and warm.

“Don’t tell me, then, Jhene. Those calls—”

She just looked at me. She took my hand between her two soft warm ones. “You’re so young, Chris. You’re so awfully young.”

I didn’t speak.

Her eyes brightened. “You never knew your father. I wish you had. You know what he was, Chris?”

I said, “Yeah. He worked in a Chemistry Lab, deep underground most of the time.”

And, my mother added, strangely, “He worked deep under the ground, Chris, and never saw the stars.”

My heart yelled in my chest. Yelled loud and hard.

“Oh, Mother. Mother—”

It was the first time in years I had called her mother.

When I woke the next morning there was a lot of sunlight in the room, but the cushion where Priory slept when he stayed over, was vacant. I listened. I didn’t hear him splashing in the shower-cube, and the dryer wasn’t humming. He was gone.

I found his note pinned on the sliding door.

“See you at formula at noon. Your mother wanted me to do some work for her. She got a call this morning, and said she needed me to help. So long. Priory.”

Priory out running errands for Jhene. Strange. A call in the early morning to Jhene. I went back and sat down on the cushion.

While I was sitting there a bunch of the kids yelled down on the lawn-court. “Hey, Chris! You’re late!”

I stuck my head out the window. “Be right down!”

“No, Chris.”

My mother’s voice. It was quiet and it had something funny in it. I turned around. She was standing in the doorway behind me, her face pale, drawn, full of some small pain. “No, Chris,” she said again, softly. “Tell them to go on to formula without you—today.”

The kids were still making noise downstairs, I guess, but I didn’t hear them. I just felt myself and my mother, slim and pale and restrained in my room. Far off, the weather-control vibrators started to hum and throb.

I turned slowly and looked down at the kids. The three of them were looking up, lips parted casually, half-smiling, semantic-tabs in their knotty fingers. “Hey—” one of them said. Sidney, it was.

“Sorry, Sid. Sorry, gang. Go on without me. I can’t go to formula today. See you later, huh?”

“Aw, Chris!”

“Sick?”

“No. Just—Just go on without me, gang. I’ll see you.”

I felt numb. I turned away from their upturned, questioning faces and glanced at the door. Mother wasn’t there. She had gone downstairs, quietly. I heard the kids moving off, not quite as boisterously, toward the monorail station.

Instead of using the vac-elevator, I walked slowly downstairs. “Jhene,” I said, “where’s Ralph?”

Jhene pretended to be interested in combing her long light hair with a vibro-toothed comb. “I sent him off. I didn’t want him here this morning.”

“Why am I staying home from formula, Jhene?”

“Chris, please don’t ask.”

Before I could say anything else, there was a sound in the air. It cut through the very soundproofed wall of the house, and hummed in my marrow, quick and high as an arrow of glittering music.

I swallowed. All the fear and uncertainty and doubt went away, instantly.

When I heard that note, I thought of Ralph Priory. Oh, Ralph, if you could be here now. I couldn’t believe the truth of it. Hearing that note and hearing it with my whole body and soul as well as with my ears.

It came closer, that sound. I was afraid it would go away. But it didn’t go away. It lowered its pitch and came down outside the house in great whirling petals of light and shadow and I knew it was a helicopter the color of the sky. It stopped humming, and in the silence my mother tensed forward, dropped the vibro-comb and took in her breath.

In that silence, too, I heard booted footsteps walking up the ramp below. Footsteps that I had waited for a long time.

Footsteps I was afraid would never come.

Somebody touched the bell.

And I knew who it was.

And all I could think was, Ralph, why in heck did you have to go away now, when all this is happening? Blast it, Ralph, why did you?

The man looked as if he had been born in his uniform. It fitted like a second layer of salt-colored skin, touched here and there with a line, a dot of blue. As simple and perfect a uniform as could be made, but with all the muscled power of the universe behind it.

His name was Trent. He spoke firmly, with a natural round perfection, directly to the subject.

I stood there, and my mother was on the far side of the room, looking like a bewildered little girl. I stood listening.

Out of all the talking I remember some of the snatches:

“… highest grades, high IQ. Perception A-1, curiosity Triple-A. Enthusiasm necessary to the long, eight-year educational grind.…”

“Yes, sir.”

“… talks with your semantics and psychology teachers—”

“Yes, sir.”

“… and don’t forget, Mr. Christopher …”

Mister Christopher!

“… and don’t forget, Mr. Christopher, nobody is to know you have been selected by the Astronaut Board.”