Short Fiction Algis Budrys (best large ereader TXT) 📖

know what kind of place this is, but⁠—” He stopped at the Receptionist’s wince, and looked around, his mouth open. The reception desk was solid enough. There were in and out and hold baskets on the desk, and the Receptionist seemed to see nothing extraordinary about it. But the room⁠—a big room, he realized⁠—seemed to fade out at the edges, rather than stop at walls. The lighting, too.⁠ ⁠…

“Let’s see your back!” he rapped out, his voice high.

She sighed in exasperation. “If you’d read the literature⁠ ⁠…” She swiveled her chair slowly.

“No wings,” he said.

“Of course not!” she snapped. She brushed her hair away from her forehead without his telling her to. “No horns, either.”

“Streamlined, huh?” he said bitterly.

“It’s a little different for everybody,” she said with unexpected gentleness. “It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he admitted slowly. Then he lost his momentary awe, and his posture grew tense again. He glanced down at his wrist. Six hours, forty-seven minutes, and no days to go.

“Who do I see?”

She stared at him, bewildered at the sudden change in his voice. “See?”

“About getting out of here! Come on, come on,” he barked, snapping his fingers impatiently. “I haven’t got much time.”

She smiled sweetly. “Oh, but you do.”

“Can it! Who’s your Section boss? Get him down here. On the double. Come on!” His face was streaming with perspiration but his voice was firm with the purpose that drove him.

Her lips closed into an angry line, and she jabbed a finger at a desk button. “I’ll call the Personnel Manager.”

“Thanks,” he said sarcastically, and waited impatiently. Odd, the way the Receptionist looked a little like Nan.

The Personnel Manager wore a perfectly-tailored suit. He strode across the lobby floor toward Ish, his hand outstretched.

“Martin Isherwood!” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’m very glad to meet you!”

“I’ll bet,” Ish said dryly, giving the Personnel Manager’s hand a short shake. “I’ve got other ideas. I want out.”

“That’s all he’s been saying for the past forty-five minutes, Sir,” the Receptionist said from behind her desk.

The Personnel Manager frowned. “Um. Yes. Well, that’s not unprecedented.”

“But hardly usual,” he added.

Ish found himself liking the man. He had a job to do, and after the preliminary formality of the greeting had been passed, he was ready to buckle down to it. Oh, he⁠—shucks?⁠—the Receptionist wasn’t such a bad girl, either. He smiled at her. “Sorry I lost my head,” he said.

She smiled back. “It happens.”

He took time to give her one more smile and a half-wink, and swung back to the Personnel Manager.

“Now. Let’s get this thing straightened out. I’ve got⁠—” He stopped to look at his watch. “Six hours and a few minutes. They’re fueling the beast right now.”

“Do you know how much red tape you’d have to cut?”

Ish shook his head. “I don’t want to sound nasty, but that’s your problem.”

The Personnel Manager hesitated. “Look⁠—you feel you’ve got a job unfinished. Or, anyway, that’s the way you’d put it. But, let’s face it⁠—that’s not really what’s galling you. It’s not really the job, is it? It’s just that you think you’ve been cheated out of what you devoted your life to.”

Ish could feel his jaw muscles bunching. “Don’t put words in my mouth!” he snapped. “Just get me back, and we’ll split hairs about it when I get around this way again.” Suddenly, he found himself pleading. “All I need is a week,” he said. “It’ll be a rough week⁠—no picnic, no pleasures of the flesh. No smoking, no liquor. I certainly won’t be breaking any laws. One week. Get there, putter around for two days, and back again. Then, you can do anything you want to⁠—as long as it doesn’t look like the trip’s responsible, of course.”

The Personnel Manager hesitated. “Suppose⁠—” he began, but Ish interrupted him.

“Look, they need it, down there. They’ve got to have a target, someplace to go. We’re built for it. People have to have⁠—but what am I telling you for. If you don’t know, who does?”

The Personnel Manager smiled. “I was about to say something.”

Ish stopped, abashed. “Sorry.”

He waved the apology away with a short movement of his hand. “You’ve got to understand that what you’ve been saying isn’t a valid claim. If it were, human history would be very different, wouldn’t it?”

“Suppose I showed you something, first? Then, you could decide whether you want to stay, after all.”

“How long’s it going to take?” Ish flushed under the memory of having actually begged for something.

“Not long,” the Personnel Manager said. He half-turned and pointed up at the Earth, hanging just beyond the wall of the crater in which they were suddenly standing.

“Earth,” the Personnel Manager said.

Somehow, Ish was not astonished. He looked up at the Earth, touched by cloud and sunlight, marked with ocean and continent, crowned with ice. The unblinking stars filled the night.

He looked around him. The Moon was silent⁠—quiet, patient, waiting. Somewhere, a metal glint against the planet above, if it were only large enough to be seen, was the Station, and the ship for which the Moon had waited.

Ish walked a short distance. He was leaving no tracks in the pumice the ages had sown. But it was the way he had thought of it, nevertheless. It was the way the image had slowly built up in his mind, through the years, through the training, through the work. It was what he had aimed the Navion at, that day over the Everglades.

“It’s not the same,” he said.

The Personnel Manager sighed.

“Don’t you see,” Ish said, “It can’t be the same. I didn’t push the beast up here. There wasn’t any feel to it. There wasn’t any sound of rockets.”

The Personnel Manager sighed again. “There wouldn’t be, you know. Taking off from the Station, landing here⁠—vacuum.”

Ish shook his head. “There’d still be a sound. Maybe not for anybody else to hear⁠—and, maybe, maybe there would be. There’d be people, back on Earth, who’d hear it.”

“All right,” the Personnel Manager said. His face was grave, but his eyes were shining a