M
any nights Fiorello Bodoni would awaken to hear the rockets sighing in the dark sky. He would tiptoe from bed, certain that his kind wife was dreaming, to let himself out into the night air. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river. For a silent moment he would let his heart soar alone into space, following the rockets.
Now, this very night, he stood half naked in the darkness, watching the fire fountains murmuring in the air. The rockets on their long wild way to Mars and Saturn and Venus!
“Well, well, Bodoni.”
Bodoni started.
On a milk crate, by the silent river, sat an old man who also watched the rockets through the midnight hush.
“Oh, it’s you, Bramante!”
“Do you come out every night, Bodoni?”
“Only for the air.”
“So? I prefer the rockets myself,” said old Bramante. “I was a boy when they started. Eighty years ago, and I’ve never been on one yet.”
“I will ride up in one someday,” said Bodoni.
“Fool!” cried Bramante. “You’ll never go. This is a rich man’s world.” He shook his gray head, remembering. “When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters:
THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE
! Science, Comfort, and New Things for All! Ha! Eighty years. The Future becomes Now! Do
we
fly rockets? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us.”
“Perhaps my
sons
—” said Bodoni.
“No, nor
their
sons!” the old man shouted. “It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!”
Bodoni hesitated. “Old man, I’ve saved three thousand dollars. It took me six years to save it. For my business, to invest in machinery. But every night for a month now I’ve been awake. I hear the rockets. I think. And tonight I’ve made up my mind. One of us will fly to Mars!” His eyes were shining and dark.
“Idiot,” snapped Bramante. “How will you choose? Who will go? If you go, your wife will hate you, for you will be just a bit nearer God, in space. When you tell your amazing trip to her, over the years, won’t bitterness gnaw at her?”
“No, no!”
“Yes! And your children? Will their lives be filled with the memory of Papa, who flew to Mars while they stayed here? What a senseless task you will set your boys. They will think of the rocket all their lives. They will lie awake. They will be sick with wanting it. Just as you are sick now. They will want to die if they cannot go. Don’t set that goal, I warn you. Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junkyard, not up to the stars.”
“But—”
“Suppose your wife went? How would you feel, knowing she had
seen
and you had not? She would become holy. You would think of throwing her in the river. No, Bodoni, buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces.”
The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.
“Good night,” said Bodoni.
“Sleep well,” said the other.
When the toast jumped from its silver box, Bodoni almost screamed. The night had been sleepless. Among his nervous children, beside his mountainous wife, Bodoni had twisted and stared at nothing. Bramante was right. Better to invest the money. Why save it when only one of the family could ride the rocket, while the others remained to melt in frustration?
“Fiorello, eat your toast,” said his wife, Maria.
“My throat is shriveled,” said Bodoni.
The children rushed in, the three boys fighting over a toy rocket, the two girls carrying dolls which duplicated the inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and Neptune, green mannequins with three yellow eyes and twelve fingers.
“I saw the Venus rocket!” cried Paolo.
“It took off,
whoosh!
” hissed Antonello.
“Children!” shouted Bodoni, hands to his ears.
They stared at him. He seldom shouted.
Bodoni arose. “Listen, all of you,” he said. “I have enough money to take one of us on the Mars rocket.”
Everyone yelled.
“You understand?” he asked. “Only
one
of us. Who?”
“Me, me, me!” cried the children.
“You,” said Maria.
“You,” said Bodoni to her.
They all fell silent.
The children reconsidered. “Let Lorenzo go—he’s oldest.”
“Let Miriamne go—she’s a girl!”
“Think what you would see,” said Bodoni’s wife to him. But her eyes were strange. Her voice shook. “The meteors, like fish. The universe. The Moon. Someone should go who could tell it well on returning. You have a way with words.”
“Nonsense. So have you,” he objected.
Everyone trembled.
“Here,” said Bodoni unhappily. From a broom he broke straws of various lengths. “The short straw wins.” He held out his tight fist. “Choose.”
Solemnly each took his turn.
“Long straw.”
“Long straw.”
Another.
“Long straw.”
The children finished. The room was quiet.
Two straws remained. Bodoni felt his heart ache in him. “Now,” he whispered. “Maria.”
She drew.
“The short straw,” she said.
“Ah,” sighed Lorenzo, half happy, half sad. “Mama goes to Mars.”
Bodoni tried to smile. “Congratulations. I will buy your ticket today.”
“Wait, Fiorello—”
“You can leave next week,” he murmured.
She saw the sad eyes of her children upon her, with the smiles beneath their straight, large noses. She returned the straw slowly to her husband. “I cannot go to Mars.”
“But why not?”
“I will be busy with another child.”
“What!”
She would not look at him. “It wouldn’t do for me to travel in my condition.”
He took her elbow. “Is this the truth?”
“Draw again. Start over.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he said incredulously.
“I didn’t remember.”
“Maria, Maria,” he whispered, patting her face. He turned to the children. “Draw again.”
Paolo immediately drew the short straw.
“I go to Mars!” He danced wildly. “Thank you, Father!”
The other children edged away. “That’s swell, Paolo.”
Paolo stopped smiling to examine his parents and his brothers and sisters. “I
can
go, can’t I?” he asked uncertainly.
“Yes.”
“And you’ll
like
me when I come back?”
“Of course.”
Paolo studied the precious broomstraw on his trembling hand and shook his head. He threw it away. “I forgot. School starts. I can’t go. Draw again.”
But no one would draw. A full sadness lay on them.
“None of us will go,” said Lorenzo.
“That’s best,” said Maria.
“Bramante was right,” said Bodoni.
With his breakfast curdled within him, Fiorello Bodoni worked in his junkyard, ripping metal, melting it, pouring out usable ingots. His equipment flaked apart; competition had kept him on the insane edge of poverty for twenty years.
It was a very bad morning.
In the afternoon a man entered the junkyard and called up to Bodoni on his wrecking machine. “Hey, Bodoni, I got some metal for you!”
“What is it, Mr. Mathews?” asked Bodoni, listlessly.
“A rocket ship. What’s wrong? Don’t you want it?”
“Yes, yes!” He seized the man’s arm, and stopped, bewildered.
“Of course,” said Mathews, “it’s only a mockup.
You
know. When they plan a rocket they build a full-scale model first, of aluminum. You might make a small profit boiling her down. Let you have her for two thousand—”
Bodoni dropped his hand. “I haven’t the money.”
“Sorry. Thought I’d help you. Last time we talked you said how everyone outbid you on junk. Thought I’d slip this to you on the q.t. Well—”
“I need new equipment. I saved money for that.”
“I understand.”
“If I bought your rocket, I wouldn’t even be able to melt it down. My aluminum furnace broke down last week—”
“Sure.”
“I couldn’t possibly use the rocket if I bought it from you.”
“I know.”
Bodoni blinked and shut his eyes. He opened them and looked at Mr. Mathews. “But I am a great fool. I will take my money from the bank and give it to you.”
“But if you can’t melt the rocket down—”
“Deliver it,” said Bodoni.
“All right, if you say so. Tonight?”
“Tonight,” said Bodoni, “would be fine. Yes, I would like to have a rocket ship tonight.”
There was a moon. The rocket was white and big in the junkyard. It held the whiteness of the moon and the blueness of the stars. Bodoni looked at it and loved all of it. He wanted to pet it and lie against it, pressing it with his cheek, telling it all the secret wants of his heart.
He stared up at it. “You are all mine,” he said. “Even if you never move or spit fire, and just sit there and rust for fifty years, you are mine.”
The rocket smelled of time and distance. It was like walking into a clock. It was finished with Swiss delicacy. One might wear it on one’s watch fob. “I might even sleep here tonight,” Bodoni whispered excitedly.
He sat in the pilot’s seat.
He touched a lever.
He hummed in his shut mouth, his eyes closed.
The humming grew louder, louder, higher, higher, wilder, stranger, more exhilarating, trembling in him and leaning him forward and pulling him and the ship in a roaring silence and in a kind of metal screaming, while his fists flew over the controls, and his shut eyes quivered, and the sound grew and grew until it was a fire, a strength, a lifting and a pushing of power that threatened to tear him in half. He gasped. He hummed again and again, and did not stop, for it could not be stopped, it could only go on, his eyes tighter, his heart furious. “Taking off!” he screamed.
The jolting concussion! The thunder!
“The Moon!” he cried, eyes blind, tight. “The meteors!”
The silent rush in volcanic light. “Mars.
Oh, yes! Mars! Mars!”
He fell back, exhausted and panting. His snaking hands came loose of the controls and his head tilted wildly. He sat for a long time, breathing out and in, his heart slowing.
Slowly, slowly, he opened his eyes.
The junkyard was still there.
He sat motionless. He looked at the heaped piles of metal for a minute, his eyes never leaving them. Then, leaping up, he kicked the levers. “Take off, blast you!”
The ship was silent.
“I’ll show you!” he cried.
Out in the night air, stumbling, he started the fierce motor of his terrible wrecking machine and advanced upon the rocket. He maneuvered the massive weights into the moonlit sky. He readied his trembling hands to plunge the weights, to smash, to rip apart this insolently false dream, this silly thing for which he had paid his money, which would not move, which would not do his bidding. “I’ll teach you!” he shouted.
But his hand stayed.
The silver rocket lay in the light of the moon. And beyond the rocket stood the yellow lights of his home, a block away, burning warmly. He heard the family radio playing some distant music. He sat for half an hour considering the rocket and the house lights, and his eyes narrowed and grew wide. He stepped down from the wrecking machine and began to walk, and as he walked he began to laugh, and when he reached the back door of his house he took a deep breath and called, “Maria, Maria, start packing. We’re going to Mars!”
“Oh!”
“Ah!”
“I can’t
believe
it!”
“You will, you will.”
The children balanced in the windy yard, under the glowing rocket, not touching it yet. They started to cry.
Maria looked at her husband. “What have you done?” she said. “Taken our money for this? It will never fly.”
“It will fly,” he said, looking at it.
“Rocket ships cost millions. Have you millions?”
“It will fly,” he repeated steadily. “Now, go to the house, all of you. I have phone calls to make, work to do. Tomorrow we leave! Tell no one, understand? It is a secret.”
The children edged off from the rocket, stumbling. He saw their small, feverish faces in the house windows, far away.
Maria had not moved. “You have ruined us,” she said. “Our money used for this—this thing. When it should have been spent on equipment.”
“You will see,” he said.
Without a word she turned away.
“God help me,” he whispered, and started to work.