"James E. Gunn - Station In Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

He slung the spacepack over his arm the way spacemen did. As they went down the stairs, he put his left
arm clumsily around her waist. "Now, Mom, I don't want anything to eat, honest. I couldn't eat a bite."

"You aren't going away from home empty, young man!"

"Sure, Mom. All right. Whatever you say." He dropped the bag on a chair in the hall and let himself be
led into the kitchen.

She watched him eat, her eyes never leaving his face. He forced down the apple pie, not wanting it,
fighting the eagerness to be gone, to be on his way.

The kitchen was a place peculiarly his mother's. There she was in command of things; there she had the
courage to say what she had been wanting to say. "I just can't understand why anyone would want to go
flying off into nothing. Seems like there's enough trouble right here on Earth without hunting up more.
Every time I turn on the television"тАФher eyes moved to the repeater screen flat against the kitchen
wallтАФ"it seems there's some new crisis or the cold war is colder or hotter. . ."

"Oh, Mom! You know I've always wantedтАФever since I was a little boy, dreaming, playing rockets. . ."

"Little boys I can understand. Grown men are something else again. Like you said upstairs, you expect
them to put away childish things. Why?тАФthat's all I want to know. . ."

"Because it's there," he said, knowing that to her this was no reason at all. But it was the reason men had
always given their women for chasing a dream, not really able to explain.

"It's important," he went on evenly, "tackling something really worth the doing. It's the dreamтАФlike the
one that led the settlers into the wilderness, that pulled the wagon trains across the prairies. It's where
men are making the future, men who really count, men like Rev McMillen and Bo Finch and Frank
Pickrell. It's putting something out there where nothing has ever beenтАФthe Doughnut. Courage built it out
of dreams. Guts holds it up. And that's just the beginning. It's the future out there."

"It's death out there." Absently, she brushed a wisp of graying hair back into place. "Like McMillen in his
tomb, frozen, going around and around the Earth forever. The first man out; the first man to die. That
should have warned us. It used to be war that took our men from us; now it's that." She looked up at the
ceiling as if she were staring through it, as if she could see the little plastic-and-nylon wheel spinning up
there in the sun, where the sky is black and death is never far away.

"Good-by, Mom." He stood up abruptly, kissed her. Her lips were cold. "Don't worry. I'll be all right."

He walked quickly through the house, taking his cap from the closet shelf, picking up the spacepack from
the chair. He stopped outside, hesitated and looked back.

Already the house seemed unreal, fading, like everything in it. Even his mother.

He looked up, not seeing the small, swift glint of the Doughnut, not expecting it. The satellite wasn't
visible here until 0319.

He walked a little, letting the Earth tug at him for the last time, thinking that this was fantasy now, soon it
would be all as unreal as fiction.