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Read Ebook: Pariah by Marlowe Stephen
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Ebook has 119 lines and 6516 words, and 3 pages
"Nice trip back?"
"Long one."
"Weather bad? No, there's no weather up there."
"I can't complain."
"Did you have anything to eat?"
"Don't bother. I only wanted to say hello." Goodbye, he meant.
"Harry's asleep now."
"Harry?"
"Your son."
"Oh."
"He goes to bed at eight o'clock."
He made the automatic adjustment. Twenty hundred hours. "Is he well?"
"Couldn't be better. Eats well and everything."
"Like his old man, huh?"
"You want to come in?" But she stood blocking the doorway.
"No, don't bother. Have you a solidio of him or something?"
"I'll get it."
He stood there in the hall, awkwardly, waiting.
She came back. "Here."
The other Harry was a dimple-cheeked boy with blond hair and a small nose like his mother's. He was wearing a junior spaceman's suit and pointed a ray gun straight at you.
"Thank you."
"Sure you don't want anything to eat?" She wore a pleasant enough expression on her face, the same as she might use for a door to door solicitor or a visiting great-aunt from out of town.
"That's all right. I want to wish you good luck, Nancy."
"Thank you. Are you sure you don't want...." And then the pleasant look melted before tears, not slowly but all at once, so that this was a different person standing in the doorway and Harry Allerton wanted either to take her in his arms and comfort her or flee for the elevator but nothing in between. "Harry ... Harry ... I didn't know ... I couldn't ... we never...."
"That's all right," he said, settling for the in between and abruptly hating himself not for what was within him but for what was outside, for the world and its conventions and the things he had wanted to do but never could and the security he had wanted to earn but which now had eluded him.
"I'm sorry I carried on so," said Nancy, the conventional smile returning, the tears kleenex'd away.
"If there is something little Harry needs...?"
"Oh, no, thank you. His father, I mean my husband--Mr. Chambers is an engineer over at Grumman and everything is fine."
"I guess I'll be going."
"I'm glad you could come."
"Does the boy know about me?"
"No. I thought it would be better."
"Of course, Nancy. You did the right thing."
"I was hoping you would think so."
"You couldn't do anything else."
"Where will you go now? Are you going to make a career of space?"
"I haven't thought about it. There's no hurry."
"Well...."
"Well...."
"I hope you get whatever you want, Harry."
He wanted to say it no longer was available. "A man doesn't know what he wants, until he has it."
"Well...."
"Goodbye, Nancy."
"Goodbye, Harry."
The door shut. He fled with his picture.
"Come in, Allerton. Nice vacation?" Captain Greene peered at him through a blue haze of cigar smoke.
"Not particularly. There are too many people. Too many complications. A man can't think straight out there, with all that confusion. I don't know...."
"I said you were for space. When you've been around as long as I have, you'll be able to smell 'em, too. You think I'm kidding?"
"Probably not, sir."
"There is security and security, Allerton. It can't be explained to a man. He's got to find out for himself. Alone in space, with the ship and a frontier vaster than all the frontiers before it in history, a certain type of man can be secure. He's the man who's lost in a crowd. Confused and muddled by convention, he's not a hero. Basically, he's a lonesome man. Strangely, the psychologists tell you he's happy then--when he's lonesome. You see what I mean, Allerton?"
"No, sir. Not entirely."
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