The trembling died away at last.
‘Well,’ said Captain Forester, ‘it didn’t quake for us, so it must be that it doesn’t approve of your philosophy.’
‘Coincidence,’ Chatterton smiled. ‘Come on now on the double. I want the Drill out here in a half-hour for a few samplings.’
‘Just a moment.’ Forester stopped laughing. ‘We’ve got to clear the area first, be certain there’re no hostile people or animals. Besides, it isn’t every year you hit a planet like this, very nice; can you blame us if we want to have a look at it?’
‘All right.’ Chatterton joined them. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
They left a guard at the ship and they walked away over fields and meadows, over small hills and into little valleys. Like a bunch of boys out hiking on the finest day of the best summer in the most beautiful year in history, walking in the croquet weather where if you listened you could hear the whisper of the wooden ball across grass, the click through the hoop, the gentle undulations of voices, a sudden high drift of women’s laughter from some ivy-shaded porch, the tinkle of ice in the summer tea-pitcher.
‘Hey,’ said Driscoll, one of the younger crewmen, sniffing the air. ‘I brought a baseball and bat; we’ll have a game later. What a diamond!’
The men laughed quietly in the baseball season, in the good quiet wind for tennis, in the weather for bicycling and picking wild grapes.
‘How’d you like the job of mowing all this?’ asked Driscoll.
The men stopped.
‘I knew there was something wrong!’ cried Chatterton. ‘This grass; it’s freshly cut!’
‘Probably a species of dichondra, always short.’
Chatterton spat on the green grass and rubbed it in with his boot. ‘I don’t like it, I don’t like it. If anything happened to us, no one on Earth would ever know. Silly policy: if a rocket fails to return, we never send a second rocket to check the reason why.’
‘Natural enough,’ explained Forester. ‘We can’t waste time on a thousand hostile worlds, fighting futile wars. Each rocket represents years, money, lives. We can’t afford to waste two rockets if one rocket proves a planet hostile. We go on to peaceful planets. Like this one.’
‘I often wonder,’ said Driscoll, ‘what happened to all those lost expeditions on worlds we’ll never try again.’
Chatterton eyed the distant forest. ‘They were shot, stabbed, broiled for dinner. Even as we may be, any minute. It’s time we got back to work, Captain!’
They stood at the top of a little rise.
‘Feel,’ said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely. ‘Remember how you used to run when you were a kid, and how the wind felt? Like feathers on your arms. You ran and thought any minute you’d fly, but you never quite did.’
The men stood remembering. There was a smell of pollen and new rain drying upon a million grass blades.
Driscoll gave a little run. ‘Feel it, by God, the wind! You know, we never have really flown by ourselves. We have to sit inside tons of metal, away from flying, really. We’ve never flown like birds fly, to themselves. Wouldn’t it be nice to put your arms out like this –’ He extended his arms. ‘And run.’ He ran ahead of them, laughing at his idiocy. ‘And fly!’ he cried.
He flew.
Time passed on the silent gold wrist-watches of the men standing below. They stared up. And from the sky came a high sound of almost unbelievable laughter.
‘Tell him to come down,’ whispered Chatterton. ‘He’ll be killed.’
Nobody heard. Their faces were raised away from Chatterton; they were stunned and smiling.
At last Driscoll landed at their feet. ‘Did you see me? My God, I flew!’
They had seen.
‘Let me sit down, oh Lord, Lord.’ Driscoll slapped his knees, chuckling. ‘I’m a sparrow, I’m a hawk, God bless me. Go on, all of you, try it!’
‘It’s the wind. It picked me up and flew me!’ he said, a moment later, gasping, shivering with delight.
‘Let’s get out of here.’ Chatterton started turning slowly in circles, watching the blue sky. ‘It’s a trap, it wants us all to fly in the air. Then it’ll drop us all at once and kill us. I’m going back to the ship.’
‘You’ll wait for my order on that,’ said Forester.