Like a Fox on the Run, стр. 125
“What do you think they’re building up there in those shipyards, Tiger? Men and women are training right now to leave their families … to never see them again. They’ll spend the rest of their life aboard a ship. They’ll never see the Promised Land. The kids they have may never even see it. It may be two generations … maybe more … before they find inhabitable worlds. Isn’t that about as ‘final frontier’ as it gets?”
“Too little, too late,” he waved her off. She suspected the whiskey was leading now, loosening his tongue and frustrations. “They should’ve been built decades ago. Not a dozen, but hundreds. Not to take away thousands, but millions. Not exploration vessels, but arks. Shouldn’t be voluntary. Mandatory. Just put people on them and send them to find new worlds for man to settle.”
“Like the British did?” she asked. “Like they sent their convicts, debtors and peasants to the New World and Australia?”
“No, I’m not talking about punishing people. I’m talking about saving our race.”
“Or sending millions to their death in uncharted space.”
“The progress of the human race was fueled by blood. Lanson never intended for us to stop at the moon or Mars … or even the ‘roids. His vision was much greater. You have to see that. Yes, New Exodus is a step in the right direction, but only a baby step.”
“You gotta start somewhere,” she countered. He’s had too much to drink and too much time to think! I hate it when he gets this way! When he hit the bottle hard, and used a little self-pity as a mixer, it was all gloom and doom. Everything in the universe had gone wrong. The glass was not only half-empty, it was cracked, and the water polluted and poisoned. “I’d prefer to think, better late than never.”
But then again, she had to. She had to believe the glass was half-full, that there was a future, a bright future for her children. Wasn’t that her job as a mother? Yes, the gap between the have and have-nots was widening at a pace never before seen in the modern history of mankind. The crime rate outside secure neighborhoods was astronomical, but she didn’t live in Rocket Town. She lived in a walled community that paid their private security force well. And yes, unemployment was high and going up, but people were still working. People with the right skills and training. Jobs lost to one technology were balanced out by jobs created by another technology. At least that’s what the talking heads, the politicians, and the bureaucrats assured everyone. Wasn’t she a prime example? She’d lost her job with NASA due to change and she’d done okay.
“Man survives,” she continued. “We always have. It may take rising from the gutter, but we as a civilization, we always seem to walk to the edge before deciding that building a bridge sure as hell beats falling off.”
“I just think one day people will look back on us … our generation … and say, ‘those fools … they had a chance and they blew it!’”
Jesus, Tiger! You can’t change how people are gonna view what we’ve done a hundred years from now. Why do you even care? We’re all gonna be long dead and gone.”
“Because I wanna be remembered for something more than being just a damned space trucker. I went to space to be a hero. People who fly rockets and go to other worlds should be heroes. At least that’s what we believed once.”
“You were a hero, Tiger,” said Lulah as she moved to him, looking him in the eye, her big blue eyes wide and convincing. “We … me … all of us … we just never told you enough.”
He laughed, trying to lighten the atmosphere. “Aw hell, who am I kidding? If I had to do it all over again … be a rocket tramp, a hillbilly rockhopper … I’d do it all over again.”
“I want you to know that I was happy to be a part of it too. Time and age can never take that away from us.” She moved closer, drawn to him now, as her eyes fell to the floor. “Truly. Even if we got a chance to do it all over again and we still ended up right here where we are now. “I’d still treasure every second we did spend together.”
It was then that he realized she felt the same as he did. They were two kindred spirits, lonely and feeling obsolete. Their time had come and gone and neither was dealing well with that fact. Only now, for the first time ever, he was finally coming to realize he wasn’t seeing a twenty-five-year-old NASA Traffic Management Officer. The façade was crumbling, the dam breaking, the years suddenly rushing through. Those days are over and they ain’t ever coming back! No, she wasn’t a young woman sauntering across a dance floor in a bar full of drunken pilots, but she was still beautiful, just in another way. Her eyes hadn’t lost any of the sparkle, they were just a little more wizened, a little worldlier. The smile was not as girlish. It was now that of a woman; a woman who’d lived, loved, and lost; tinged with tender sadness and the slightest touch of cynicism. Young Lulah was gone forever, but the Lulah of now was very much alive and