Far enough to touch
Date: 2023-12-04T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction; Astronauts -- Fiction

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Title: Far enough to touch

Author: Stephen Bartholomew

Illustrator: George Schelling

Release date: December 4, 2023 [eBook #72312]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FAR ENOUGH TO TOUCH ***

far enough to touch

By STEPHEN BARTHOLOMEW

Illustrated by SCHELLING

Rene Duport was the quiet member of the moonship's
crew. So quiet that it took several minutes before
anyone noticed that he jumped overboard—into space.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories December 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The ship had a crew of six, and Rene Duport was the youngest. The pilot, who held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force and Master Pilot in the United Nations Space Corps, was one of the two Americans aboard. The co-pilot was Russian, the navigator a Finn, the engineer an African, and the research observer was the other American. Rene Duport was a Belgian, and he was the radioman, and the youngest ever to go to the Moon.

It had been a routine flight since the ship had lifted from the lunar surface. In a little less than six hours they were due to enter parking orbit. Twelve hours later, with a minimum of luck, the ferry ship would dive to its landing area near the Marianas, and the six crew members would be once again on Ground. Rather, they would be floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but that was far more solid than space. All the Earth was sacred Ground to them, including the sea. Each of them anticipated the moment when they would scoop salt water up in their hands and fling their oxygen masks into the depths and raise their faces to the burning ocean sun, yet they tried not to think of the moment, they kept it in the backs of their minds, as if thinking of it consciously could bring bad luck.

All except Rene Duport, who was nineteen years old, and the youngest ever to enter space. He had loved it out there, on the Moon, and he loved being here in the ship. He wanted to go back out again, and he was the only one of the six who was reluctant to return to Ground. Perhaps if the spacemedics had known of this unnatural—almost inhuman—state of Rene Duport's mind, they would never have let him go out. Then again, perhaps he was one of a new breed of men, born under new signs in the Zodiac, the signs of Gagarin and Glenn, equipped with a kind of mind and soul never known before. He was the only one of the six who did not want to go Home.

The American pilot turned to mutter something to his Russian co-pilot, seated next to him at the front of the ship. The Russian nodded and adjusted a dial. By formal agreement the crew spoke in French between themselves. But the pilot's accent was bad, and Duport would have preferred to talk to him in English. He could not help smiling to himself whenever the American said something. Frowning, Duport moved his headphone slightly and changed the frequency of his receiver. The Azores tracking station had begun to fade with the rotation of the Earth, but he had no trouble picking up Hawaii. He wrote down the latest fix and passed the slip of paper forward to the navigator. He switched on his transmitter to give Hawaii an acknowledgement.

Forward, the American pilot heard Duport speaking to Hawaii. This is the moonship Prospero acknowledging transmission.... The American pilot did not like using French either. He would have preferred speaking English or Russian. There was something poetic about French. The phrase bateau du lune, moonship, always gave him a quiver. It made him think of some kind of ghost ship, with a moss-covered hull and gossamer sails, floating silently in a midnight sky. There was something—fragile about the language, especially as Duport spoke it in his smooth, pure accents.

The American glanced into a mirror that gave him a view of the cabin behind him. Duport sat by himself at the extreme rear of the cabin, the radio console hiding most of his body. The headphones and mike covered most of his face, so that only his nose and eyes were visible. His eyes were light blue and seemed to glisten, unnaturally bright, as if the boy had been taking some kind of drug. He was only nineteen years old. The pilot had had misgivings about Duport from the beginning when the crew was first formed. It wasn't only his youth, he didn't quite know what it was. There was something about Duport, something deep in his personality that he did not trust. But he did not know how to name it.

Still, Duport had functioned all right so far. And the Selection Board should know its business. The crew had been chosen, as usual, by competitive examination, and if there was any flaw in Duport's character it would have turned up sometime during the six-month training period. Probably Duport was as good as any of them. He had been a child prodigy, he'd taken his Master's in physics at the age of seventeen. He knew as much as any of them, and he had made no mistakes so far.

Still, the American remembered the first time he had seen Duport. It had been right after the Selection Board published the crew list. Out of the two hundred who finished the training program, the Board had given Duport highest rating. He was not only the youngest ever to enter space, he was the only crew-member of the Prospero who had never been in space before, except of course for the ballistic shoots which were part of training. The American himself had been aboard the Quixote on the first moonshot directed by the U.N. Space Corps. Then they had built the Prospero, and he had piloted it on its shakedown cruise in orbit. And the Board had chosen him to fly the ship on its first trip to the Moon. Altogether, it was the fourth shot of the U.N. Space Corps, and the second time he had been on the Moon. He, the American, was the veteran, he had spent more hours in space than any other human being alive.

And he remembered the first time he had seen Duport. The veteran and the kid. He had met him in the briefing room at the launching site at Christmas Island. The veteran had been studying a thrust table, and the kid had come into the room, half an hour early for the first briefing. The American did not hear him come in. He looked up from his desk, and there he was, Duport, standing at attention in his blue Corps uniform with the silver sunburst in his lapel, indicating active commission.

"Christ!" the American had burst out, forgetting himself and speaking in English. "Are you Duport? They told me you were young...." He already knew each of the other crewmen.

"Yes sir," Duport answered in English. "I'm afraid I am rather young. Corpsman Duport reports for briefing, sir. I just arrived on the island an hour ago."

The American recovered himself. He leaned back in his chair to study the boy. He was blond and had light blue eyes that glittered, and he looked like a high school kid.

"Eh bien, parlons francais," the American said at last. "Sorry, Duport, I didn't mean to offend you. It's just that it was a shock.... Why are you smiling like that?"

"Nothing, sir." Duport's mouth straightened itself out.

"What do you mean rien? No, tell me, Duport. You should know by now that the Corpsman's first law is that we tell each other what's on our minds. If we're going to be sealed up together in a tin can for two weeks...."

"I'm sorry sir, it was your accent. I found it amusing."

"Oh, that. You're not the first one. Eh bien. Have you been assigned quarters yet, Duport?"

"No, sir."

"I'll see to it myself after the briefing. You'll find conditions are rather primitive on the island, but you won't be here long. The ferryboat leaves in six days."

"Yes, sir."

The American was fascinated by Duport's eyes, their unnatural, bright glaze. The boy never seemed to blink. He yet stood at attention, looking down at the older man with unshifting eyes.

"Stand at ease, Duport. As long as you're early, we might as well start the briefing now." On an impulse, he went to the projection screen and touched a switch which flashed on a photomap of the lunar landing area. He pointed to a particular object which was visible only because of the long shadow it cast.

"As you are well aware, Duport, the research station is here, near the center of the Crater of Copernicus. The three trips so far by the Quixote have been sufficient to set up the dome and to land enough equipment to keep the colony independent for several months if necessary. So far, there aren't any men there. That's our job, the Prospero's. We're going to have five passengers with us, research scientists, I haven't met them yet. All I know about them is that one is American and one Russian. Our job is to get them into the station, alive, and then bring back the ship. What they do up there afterward is none of our business."

"Yes, sir," Duport answered, still at attention. "I have already been told this."

"Yes, I haven't told you anything that you don't already know. And of course you also know that the bottom of Copernicus Crater, like all other flat areas on the Moon, is a kilometer deep with nearly molecular dust, micrometorite residue. You know that before the first landing by the Quixote, it was necessary to explode a hydrogen bomb in order to fuse the surface of the dust into a thick crust of glass, in order to get a stable landing stage." The American paused, turned away from the photomap, and looked at Duport again.

"Yes sir."

"But something you don't know is that certain automatic instruments left at the station by the Quixote have given an indication that this landing crust was weakened by the last lift-off. The instruments may be wrong, or they may be right. We're going to find out."

"I—see."

"Yes." The veteran leaned against the wall and looked at the boy's eyes. "The Quixote is a heavy ship, and the Prospero is heavier. We're going to have to set her down easy. Very easy. That crust is hard, but thin. You know what will happen if the ship breaks through. The rocket nozzles will clog with dust, and the ship will sink to the cabin bubble. We'll be stuck on the Moon."

"Yes sir," was all that Duport said.

"Yes sir! The point is, Duport, that every member of the crew is going to have to function as part of the machine, the radioman included. The slightest error could be crucial on this one. You're going to have to leave your nerves behind. Once we set her down, we should be all right. But I hope to God your training program has really got you ready for this."

"I know it has, sir." Duport stood there, silent, at attention, perhaps waiting for something else. But the American did not know what else to tell him. He was trying to figure Duport out. Even then he had a feeling that there was something about the boy that was wrong. Something he could not understand. He stared at his cold blue eyes.

At last Duport said, "Once the research station really gets going, the results should be magnificent, sir."

The American moved away. "Yes, but don't be naive, Duport. Don't believe what you read in the papers. The real reason for the station—the reason for the U.N. Space Corps—is practical politics. If the Corps didn't exist, the U.S. and Russia would go to the Moon separately. And neither side would tell the other what they were doing there. A joint effort is the only way to make sure that nobody plants missiles up there. Science is secondary. We're like two gunmen afraid to turn our backs on each other."

"Yes sir, of course you are right," Duport said. And as the American moved toward the desk he glanced back at Duport and saw the boy staring at the lunar photomap, his eyes coldly reflecting light. The muscles of his jaw were working visibly, slowly tightening and then relaxing again. It was as if he were trying to memorize every detail of the map.

And thinking back on that day, the American pilot wondered if he were any closer to understanding Duport. Suddenly he thought he was. For the first time he thought about the way the muscles of Duport's jaw moved. He had never really considered that before. The brightness of the boy's eyes had always distracted his attention. He looked into the mirror again, at Duport seated by himself at the rear of the cabin, bowed over his console and listening to his headphones. The pilot could see only part of Duport's left lower jaw. But yes, the muscles were working. Slowly they contracted until they stood out like knots, then slowly relaxed again.

Nerves, that was the word. Now the pilot knew what name to give it. Why hadn't he seen it before? Duport seemed cold, efficient, the pilot thought, always he seemed to function like part of the machine, part of the ship. But always the muscles of his jaw were working, and the shine of his eyes kept you from looking at his mouth, kept you from noticing the one sign that Duport had a nervous system. The pilot saw that under Duport's cool, steady surface, the boy was wound to nearly the snapping point, to the uttermost limit of his nervous system's tensile strength. It was his nerves that gave Duport his machinelike efficiency, his quick response time, his endurance. As long as he kept them under control. It was his nerves, too, that made his eyes glitter, like the eyes of a madman masquerading as sane. Why hadn't the medics ever seen it? The pilot wondered what would happen if Duport ever, for a moment, were to forget himself and lose control of his nerves.

Well, the boy had lasted this far. During the tense moments of the lunar touchdown he hadn't cracked. He had responded to orders as if he were an electric relay. He had done his job. It had turned out that the landing crust was not weakened after all, but none of them had known that then. Duport had passed that test. Perhaps, the pilot thought, he was wrong about Duport, perhaps he was really what he seemed to be, cool and nerveless. At any rate, he would tell his suspicions to the medics, back on Ground. Time enough, he thought, time enough.

The research observer, the other American in the crew, had been busy taking pictures for several hours. He straightened from his camera sight, rubbed at his eyes, and stretched.

"When we hit that ocean," he said in English, "I'm going to break out the raft, strip naked, and go for a swim, sharks or no...."

"Ta geule," someone said, "shut up."

The observer looked around, embarrassed at what he'd said. It was as if they were all superstitious, as if talking about Ground, even thinking about it, would bring bad luck. Each of them would have denied this hotly. But for a moment the observer looked as if he would have knocked on wood, had there been a piece of wood in the ship. After a minute the observer pulled out some processed film plates and began examining them through a lens.

Rene Duport had looked up from his radio console. There was nothing for him to do at the moment. He thought that he would have liked to be in the observer's place, or the navigator's, able to look through one of the periscopes directly into deep space. He had loved the Moon, he had loved to suit up and walk out onto the lunar dust and look upward at the sky, at the stars that did not flicker, at the Magellanic Clouds, close enough to touch. But even there, on the surface of the Moon, he had always been standing on something. He thought of the vacuum that was all around the ship, on every side, just beyond the hull, just beyond the escape hatch behind his back. He wondered what it would be like to look directly into space, standing on nothing, to see not merely a dome of stars, but an entire sphere of them, bright and unblinking. All his life he had wanted to go into space, and all his life he had known that he would. Now he did not want to go back, he wished that he could leave the Earth forever.

The research observer leaned toward the African engineer and began discussing one of the film plates with him. Rene Duport listened to them, only half interested. He thought that the African and the Russian were the only crewmen besides himself who could speak French without sounding ridiculous.

He saw the pilot abruptly bend over the control panel and make an adjustment. He said something to the Russian that Duport did not catch, the Russian co-pilot nodded and began turning a knob slowly, his eyes on a vernier dial. For several minutes the American and the Russian worked steadily at the controls, frequently glancing at each other. Once the Russian rose to open an access plate in the overhead and inspect some wiring, then he strapped himself in again and continued working his controls. The engineer left his seat and pulled himself forward to begin talking to the pilot in low tone. After a minute the engineer opened a technical manual and began reading off a series of numbers.

The research observer was watching a dial on the cabin wall.

"She's heating up," he said.

Then Rene Duport noticed it. The cabin temperature had risen during the last few minutes, already he was beginning to sweat profusely.

"C'est trop," the Russian said. It's too much.

The pilot turned to look back at his crew. "Pile's overheating," he said. "I'm going to blow the cabin pressure so we won't roast. Suit up."

Everyone sealed their helmets and plugged into their air supplies. In a few seconds they had each pressurized and tested their suits. The pilot reached for a red lever, and then there was a quick hissing sound that lasted only for a moment.

Rene Duport waited, wondering what was going to happen. Nothing like this had ever happened to the Quixote. And the Prospero followed the other ship's general design, so that it shouldn't be happening to her either. Both ships used water as a reaction mass, superheated by a nuclear pile, which was separated from the cabin bubble and attached to it only by steel girders. Duport knew what would happen if the overheating didn't stop. Either the pile would blow like a bomb, or those girders would continue conducting heat into the cabin until the cabin walls turned red hot and then melted. Blowing the cabin pressure could only keep the crew from roasting for a few minutes. Perhaps some damping rods had blown out; whatever it was, Duport knew the pile was heating fast.

Over the intercom, Duport could hear the co-pilot muttering, "Trop vite! Trop vite!" Too fast, too fast.

"She's going to blow," someone else said.

There was a silence that lasted several seconds. Everyone waited.

Then the pilot said, "No good. I'll have to eject."

But Duport did not hear that.

When the temperature was down to normal, the pilot reached for a valve to begin pressurizing. But a safety device prevented the valve from operating, and he looked around to see why. "Christ!" his voice came over the intercom. "He jumped!"

The rest of the crew turned their heads to look toward the rear of the cabin. The escape hatch behind Duport's seat was open, and Duport was gone.

"But why did he do it?" The research observer lounged against the aft bulkhead, he had been watching a chess game between the Russian and the Finn. The Prospero was in orbit, there was little to do now but wait for the ferry ship to lift off from Christmas Island and make rendezvous. After the pilot had ejected the nuclear fuel, the ship had of course simply coasted into orbit. With no power left for course correction, it was not a good orbit, but it was close enough for the ferry to reach. There was nothing to do now but wait, and play chess. The research observer shook his head. "It was stupid, there was no reason. Why did he go out the hatch like that?"

The pilot was tired. He rubbed his face with both hands. He did not want to have to think about it. He looked at the other American's face.

"Nerves. He lost his nerve, that's all."

The research observer watched the Finn capture one of the Russian's rooks with a knight.

"He jumped out of the ship." It was as if he were trying to convince himself that it had really happened. "Why did he do it? I can't figure it out."

The pilot covered his eyes. "Call it cowardice if you like. Or panic. The kid chickened out."

Then they were in the ferry ship, waiting for the engineers to finish inspecting the Prospero before casting off and going into a re-entry spiral, towards the Pacific landing area. Meanwhile, the medic had finished his preliminary physical of each of the crew. Most of the men rested quietly, reading newspapers and waiting. The American pilot had strapped himself to one of the crash couches and taken a short nap. Then he got up to look through a periscope at the three engineers working near the Prospero's power tank.

The ferry ship's radioman, a young Englishman, tapped him on the shoulder. The pilot turned away from the eyepiece, and his face was drawn and white.

"They've picked up his track," the radioman said.

"What?"

The radioman handed the pilot a piece of paper. "Just got the news. His suit transmitter, the beacon's working. The station at Leningrad picked up the signal, they're going to compute his orbit."

It was a few seconds before the American understood what he was talking about.

"Duport, you mean? They're tracking him?" He hesitated. "But why? Why are they computing his orbit?"

The Englishman grinned. "They're going to try to pick him up. Rescue him, you know."

The American stared.

"Be a few hours before they have an exact plot," the radioman went on. "The rough estimate is that they'll be ready to launch within forty-six hours. They're going to send up the Wabash Cannonball. If his beacon keeps operating, there's a fifty-fifty chance they'll catch him. Just thought you'd want to know, sir. You may not have lost a Corpsman after all." The Englishman turned to go back to his post, and the American stared at his back as he moved away.

"Why?" he whispered. "Why?" The pilot did some rough calculations in his head. He remembered the ship's approximate position and velocity at the time that Duport had jumped. Duport's body would of course have about the same orbital velocity as that of the ship, though the impetus of his leap would have been enough to carry him into some completely different direction. Somewhere out there Duport was swinging around the Earth in a wide, elliptical orbit. For some reason it had not occurred to the pilot that he might still be alive. Since the moment that he had turned and seen the open hatch he had been thinking of Duport as a casualty, already dead. But in fact, the American realized, Duport was probably still alive. His suit was equipped for just this kind of emergency; it had an oxygen regenerating system that could supply him with air to breathe as long as the photocells kept his battery charged. The catch was that no one had ever lived in a suit before for more than twelve hours at a stretch. Six hours was considered the normal safety limit. In theory the suit would keep Duport alive until he died of thirst or starvation. In theory.

But why were they going to try to rescue him? It made no sense. The Wabash Cannonball was the smallest ship in the Space Corps' fleet. It carried a crew of two, and was used for ferrying small cargoes into orbit. If she left behind her reserve oxygen tanks and emergency equipment, it should be possible to reduce her weight load sufficiently to get her into an orbit as high as Duport was. Then there was perhaps one chance in ten of getting him down alive. No doubt the Corps Center had decided to send the Cannonball up because it would involve the least possible fuel expenditure. But the operation would still cost close to half a million dollars, to say nothing of the risk to the ship and crew. Nothing of the kind had ever been done, or attempted, before. Why had the Corps decided to gamble two lives on a long chance of saving one?

Suddenly the American felt an intense, irrational hatred of Duport. If his suit beacon was operating, it could only be because he had turned it on. Why hadn't he left it off, rather than risk the lives of others to save his own hide? He had jumped ship. They ought to leave him there, the pilot thought.

The ferry ship broke atmosphere, her heat shield and fins glowing red. She fell to an altitude of ten thousand feet before her velocity fell to a little less than two thousand miles per hour. Then the collapsible wing unfolded like the wing of a moth, it was half wing, half parachute. The ship glided toward the sea.

It struck the water with an explosion of spray, dived under, bobbed to the surface again, rolling like a porpoise. Someone opened a hatch and climbed out onto the hull. Ten minutes later, the helicopter appeared.

Back at Christmas Island, the American pilot was still asking why. He asked it of Dr. Valdez, a grey-haired man, chief of the spacemedic team.

"You're right," Dr. Valdez said. He was sitting in a chair on the veranda of the infirmary, hands folded behind his head, looking out to sea. "The Center did ask my advice on this matter. I told them what I thought the odds were against a successful rescue operation. I also told them that, for scientific reasons alone, I thought it was worth attempting."

"But why?" The American looked down at him.

Dr. Valdez looked at the sea. "It is now just about twenty-four hours since Duport jumped into space. His beacon is still operating, and the orbital plot has been completed. The rescue ship will launch in about thirty hours from now. Estimating six hours between lift-off and rendezvous, this means that Duport will have been alone in space for a total of about sixty hours. Two and a half days."

The American said nothing, waiting for him to go on.

"Think of him up there." Dr. Valdez closed his eyes. "Completely alone. Total silence except for the sound of his own breathing. He sees nothing but stars, intensely bright, above him, beneath his feet, on all sides, the silver smear of the Milky Way, the Clouds of Magellan, the nebulae. The Earth is a great, swollen balloon that swings past his field of vision now and then, the Moon a smaller bubble. Without a reference point there is no sense of depth, no perspective. He can reach out and touch the stars. He swings in space, beyond time and distance, completely alone."

"So what?" the pilot said at last.

Dr. Valdez straightened in his chair and leaned his elbows on his knees.

"So there are some things we—I—would like to know. I'd like to know what is happening to him, out there. What he has seen, perhaps heard. The effects on his body, if any. Above all, the effect on his mind. No human being has ever experienced anything like it before. There's something else I'd like to know. We worked with him for nearly a year. He finished with the highest rating in his class. We never would have sent him out if we hadn't been sure about him. But somewhere we made a mistake, there was something we failed to see. I'd like to know what made him jump."

This time the American looked out to sea. He was silent.

The doctor took out an old briar pipe and began filling it from a leather pouch. "Strange. His radio beacon is functioning normally. There's no reason why his transmitter and receiver shouldn't be working too. Yet we've been trying to contact him by means of voice communication, and he doesn't answer. Maybe he's dead already. There's no way to tell."

"Do you think he's worth saving?" the pilot asked after a minute.

"I'd like to know why he jumped."

In the briefing room, the American listened intently to the sounds coming from the speaker. Dr. Valdez and the other members of the Prospero's crew also listened. Dr. Valdez listened with his eyes closed, drawing slowly on his pipe.

"Orbital ship Wabash Cannonball acknowledging Azores transmission," the voice said. "Our condition is still AOK, repeat, condition is still normal. We are still tracking survival beacon. Range, 10,000 kilometers and closing." There was another burst of radio noise that momentarily drowned out the voice. The men in the briefing room had been listening for nearly six hours now. Occasionally one of them would go out for coffee or fresh air, but he always returned within a few minutes. The American pilot had not moved from his place since lift-off. Outside, it had begun to rain.

At last, the critical moment came.

"Range is now five hundred kilometers and closing," the voice said. "I now have a visual sight. Repeat. I have a visual sight. I can see him. Switching from computer to manual control." Several minutes of silence. The pilot was jockeying closer to Duport, making delicate adjustments in his ship's orbital path. He had a small target. A single wrong judgement could cause him to drift hundreds of kilometers off course, wasting a critical amount of fuel.

At last the report came, "Range is now five hundred meters. We are suiting up and blowing cabin pressure. Stand by for further transmission." Ten minutes passed. The crew was too busy to broadcast now. The rain drummed softly on the roof of the briefing room and ran in slow curtains down the windowpanes.

Finally the voice came on the air again.

"Orbital ship Wabash Cannonball resuming transmission. Rescue operation is successful. Repeat, operation is successful. We have him aboard. He's alive."

The American pilot looked up at the faces around him. Dr. Valdez was rubbing his mouth thoughtfully. The other men stared at the speaker with blank looks. The American noted that no one was cheering.

Later, the pilot of the Cannonball described the rescue. When he had first reported his visual sighting, he had been seeing the sunlight reflected from the surface of Duport's suit. Duport was a white spark, shining out among the stars like a meteor or nova. The sight had given the rescue pilot a peculiar feeling, he mentioned later, seeing this blue-white star slowly growing in the sky until it was brighter than Venus, seeing this new star rise, a point of white fire, and knowing the star was a man.

Then they had suited up and blown the cabin pressure. The co-pilot had gone out the hatch while the pilot remained at his controls. Watching through the periscope, he could see Duport spread-eagled against the sky, the left side of his body a glare of sunlight, the right side in shadow. Duport had not moved his arms or legs since they had first seen him, neither did he acknowledge with his suit transmitter. He was about five hundred meters from the ship and drifting slowly closer. The co-pilot tethered himself to the hull, then tossed out a line with a magnetic grapple on its end. He missed, hauled in, and tossed again. On the third try the end of the line passed within half a meter of Duport's body. Duport moved his arm, took the end of the line, and hooked it to his belt. The co-pilot hauled him in.

About a month later, the American pilot saw Rene Duport for the first time since he had jumped from the Prospero. It was at the space medicine laboratories at Walter Reed.

Dr. Valdez stood near the window, looking down at the sunlit lawn. In the shade of a tall shrub a man was sitting in a lawn chair, his head back, completely relaxed. He wore a blue denim hospital uniform. His back was to the window.

"Physically he was in good condition when they brought him down," the doctor said, "except for a slight case of dehydration."

"Can I talk to him?" the pilot asked.

Dr. Valdez looked at him sharply, as if surprised by the request.

"You can talk to him if you like. But he won't answer you."

The pilot followed the doctor out of the room and down to the lawn. They came up from behind the lawn chair and stood looking down at the man sitting in it. His eyes were closed.

The pilot saw that Duport's jaw was slack. He could not tell whether he was asleep. The flesh in his cheeks was sunken. He looked older.

Dr. Valdez said, "Catatonia, schizophrenia, it's like no condition I've ever seen before. He is perfectly aware of what is going on around him, you see. Bring him food and he eats. Stick him with a pin and he jumps. All his responses are normal. He took the cable and attached it himself, remember. But he will make no more than the minimum necessary effort to survive." The doctor chewed his lip, thinking. "If only he would say something."

"Have you decided why he jumped?" the pilot asked, not realizing that he was whispering. "What made him panic?"

"No." The doctor shook his head. "Not panic, it wasn't fear alone, I think. There was something else. We put him through equally critical moments in training, and he didn't panic then. Fear was part of it, but there was something else too."

"Well, what then?"

"I don't know the word. It's something new. Maybe Duport is a new kind of human being. If not fear, call it—love, or desire. He jumped into space because, I think, he wanted to."

"I don't understand that," the pilot said.

"I don't either—yet." Dr. Valdez moved a step closer to the man in the chair. "Rene. Rene Duport."

Without moving his head, Duport opened his eyes.

"Stand up."

Duport got up and stood looking at some point half way between the two men. His eyes no longer glistened.

"It's as if something has gone out of him," the doctor said.

"Do you know who I am?" the pilot asked. Rene Duport turned his head until the pupils of his eyes were pointed at the American's face. But his eyes did not seem to focus on him. Rather they were focused at some point far beyond him.

"Why did you jump?" the pilot said. Moving a step closer, he looked into the blank, dull eyes, that continued looking through him, focused on some strange horizon. The eyes no longer seemed blue, but light grey. The pilot tried to remember where he had seen eyes like that before. Then he remembered one day, years before, when he had looked down into the open eyes of a dead man. He shuddered and turned away.

"If only he would talk," the doctor said.

The pilot had turned his back on Duport. "Why? If he could talk, what would you ask him?"

It was two or three minutes before the doctor answered.

"I would ask him what it feels like to be a star."

And as the two men walked away, Rene Duport remained standing where they left him. He was watching. The pupils of his eyes never shifted, but he was always watching. The Earth, a swollen balloon, floated past his field of vision. Slowly his right arm rose until his arm was horizontal from his shoulder. Then the corners of his mouth lifted in a faint smile, as his fingers touched the Clouds of Magellan.

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