S Is for Space

“Sam,” Bittering said. “Your eyes—”

“What about them, Harry?”

“Didn’t they used to be gray?”

“Well now, I don’t remember.”

“They were, weren’t they?”

“Why do you ask, Harry?”

“Because now they’re kind of yellow-colored.”

“Is that so, Harry?” Sam said, casually.

“And you’re taller and thinner—”

“You might be right, Harry.”

“Sam, you shouldn’t have yellow eyes.”

“Harry, what color eyes have you got?” Sam said.

“My eyes? They’re blue, of course.”

“Here you are, Harry.” Sam handed him a pocket mirror. “Take a look at yourself.”

Mr. Bittering hesitated, and then raised the mirror to his face. There were little, very dim flecks of new gold captured in the blue of his eyes.

r /> “Now look what you’ve done,” said Sam a moment later. “You’ve broken my mirror.”

Harry Bittering moved into the metal shop and began to build the rocket. Men stood in the open door and talked and joked without raising their voices. Once in a while they gave him a hand on lifting something. But mostly they just idled and watched him with their yellowing eyes.

“It’s suppertime, Harry,” they said.

His wife appeared with his supper in a wicker basket.

“I won’t touch it,” he said. “I’ll eat only food from our Deepfreeze. Food that came from Earth. Nothing from our garden.”

His wife stood watching him. “You can’t build a rocket.”

“I worked in a shop once, when I was twenty. I know metal. Once I get it started, the others will help,” he said, not looking at her, laying out the blueprints.

“Harry, Harry,” she said, helplessly.

“We’ve got to get away, Cora. We’ve got to!”

The nights were full of wind that blew down the empty moonlit sea meadows past the little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shallows. In the Earthmen’s settlement, the Bittering house shook with a feeling of change.

Lying abed, Mr. Bittering felt his bones shifted, shaped, melted like gold. His wife, lying beside him, was dark from many sunny afternoons. Dark she was, and golden-eyed, burnt almost black by the sun, sleeping, and the children metallic in their beds, and the wind roaring forlorn and changing through the old peach trees, the violet grass, shaking out green rose petals.

The fear would not be stopped. It had his throat and heart. It dripped in a wetness of the arm and the temple and the trembling palm.

A green star rose in the east.

A strange word emerged from Mr. Bittering’s lips.

“Iorrt. Iorrt.” He repeated it.