The Day it Rained Forever

They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.

‘This is where it passes!’

They seized their lances with mailed fists, and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.

‘Lord!’

‘Yes, let us use His name.’

On the instant, the dragon rounded a hill. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armour in red glints and glitters. With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.

‘Mercy, God!’

The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Passing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.

‘Did you see it?’ cried a voice. ‘Just like I told you!’

‘The same! The same! A knight in armour, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!’

‘You goin’ to stop?’

‘Did once; found nothing. Don’t like to stop on this moor. I get the willies. Got a feel, it has.’

‘But we hit something !’

‘Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn’t budge.’

A steaming blast cut the mist aside.

‘We’ll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?’

Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished over cold earth, towards the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had passed and gone for ever.

The End of the Beginning (#ulink_8c869f4f-3ac2-509f-8ff5-e96e95507767)

HE stopped the lawnmower in the middle of the yard because he felt that the sun at just that moment had gone down and the stars come out. The fresh-cut grass that had showered his face and body died softly away. Yes, the stars were there, faint at first, but brightening in the clear desert sky. He heard the porch screen-door tap shut and felt his wife watching him as he watched the night.

‘Almost time,’ she said.

He nodded; he did not have to check his watch. In the passing moments he felt very old, then very young, very cold, then very warm, now this, now that. Suddenly, he was miles away. He was his own son talking steadily, moving briskly to cover his pounding heart and the resurgent panics as he felt himself slip into fresh uniform, check food supplies, oxygen-flasks, pressure helmet, space-suiting and turn, as every man on earth tonight turned, to gaze at the swiftly filling sky.

Then, quickly, he was back, once more, the father of the son, hands gripped to the lawnmower handle. His wife called, ‘Come sit on the porch.’

‘I’ve got to keep busy!’

She came down the steps and across the lawn. ‘Don’t worry about Robert; he’ll be all right.’

‘But it’s all so new,’ he heard himself say. ‘It’s never been done before. Think of it – a manned rocket going up tonight to build the first space-station. Good Lord, it can’t be done, it doesn’t exist, there’s no rocket, no proving-ground, no take-off time, no technicians. For that matter, I don’t even have a son named Bob. The whole thing’s too much for me!’

‘Then what are you doing out here, staring?’

He shook his head. ‘Well, late this morning, walking to the office, I heard someone laugh out loud. It shocked me so I froze in the middle of the street. It was me, laughing! Why? Because finally I really knew what Bob was going to do tonight; at last I believed it. Holy is a word I never use, but that’s how I felt stranded in all that traffic. Then, middle of the afternoon I caught myself humming. You know the song. A wheel in a wheel. Way in the middle of the air. I laughed again. The space-station, of course, I thought. The big wheel with hollow spokes where Bob’ll live six or eight months, then get along to the moon. Walking home, I remembered more of the song. Little wheel run by faith, Big wheel run by the grace of God. I wanted to jump, yell, and flame-out myself!’

His wife touched his arm. ‘If we stay out here, let’s at least be comfortable.’

They placed two wicker rockers in the centre of the lawn and sat quietly as the stars dissolved out of darkness in pale crushings of rock-salt strewn from horizon to horizon.

‘Why,’ said his wife, at last, ‘it’s like waiting for the fireworks at Sisley Field every year.’

‘Bigger crowd tonight….’

‘I keep thinking – a billion people watching the sky right now, their mouths all open at the same time.’

They waited, feeling the earth move under their chairs.

‘What time is it now?’

‘Eleven minutes to eight.’

‘You’re always right; there must be a clock in your head.’

‘I can’t be wrong, tonight. I’ll be able to tell you one second before they blast off. Look! The ten-minute warning!’

On the western sky they saw four crimson flares open out, float shimmering down the wind, above the desert, then sink silently to the extinguishing earth.

In the new darkness, the husband and wife did not rock in their chairs.

After a while, he said, ‘Eight minutes.’ A pause. ‘Seven minutes.’ What seemed a much longer pause. ‘Six …’

His wife, her head back, studied the stars immediately above her and murmured, ‘Why?’ She closed her eyes. ‘Why the rockets, why tonight? Why all this? I’d like to know.’

He examined her face, pale in the vast powdering light of the Milky Way. He felt the stirring of an answer, but let his wife continue.

‘I mean it’s not that old thing again, is it, when people asked why men climbed Mount Everest and they said, “Because it’s there”? I never understood. That was no answer to me.’

Five minutes, he thought. Time ticking … his wrist-watch … a wheel in a wheel … little wheel run by … big wheel run by … way in the middle of … four minutes! … the men snug in the rocket by now, the hive, the control board lit like Christmas morning….

His lips moved.

‘All I know is it’s really the end of the beginning. The Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age; from now on we’ll lump all those together under one big name for when we walked on Earth and heard the birds at morning and cried with envy. Maybe we’ll call it the Earth Age, or maybe the Age of Gravity. Millions of years we fought gravity. When we were amoebas and fish we struggled to get out of the sea without gravity crushing us. Once safe on the shore we fought to stand upright without gravity breaking our new invention, the spine; tried to walk without stumbling, run without falling. A billion years, Gravity kept us home, mocked us with wind and clouds, cabbage-moths and locusts. That’s what’s so god-awful big about tonight … it’s the end of old man Gravity and the Age we’ll remember him by, for once and all. I don’t know where they’ll divide the Ages, at the Persians who dreamt of flying-carpets, or the Chinese who all unknowing celebrated birthdays and New Years with strung ladyfingers and high skyrockets, or some minute, some incredible second in the next hour. But we’re in at the end of a billion years’ trying, the end of something long and to us humans, anyway, honourable.’

Three minutes … two minutes, fifty-nine seconds … two minutes fifty-eight seconds.…

‘Yes …’ He could hardly hear his wife’s voice. ‘Yes … I believe that’s true.’

Two minutes, he thought. Ready? Ready? Ready? The far radio voice calling. Ready! Ready! Ready! The quick faint replies from the humming rocket. Check! Check! Check!

Tonight, he thought, even if we fail with this first, we’ll send a second and a third ship and move on out to all the planets and, later, all the stars. We’ll just keep going until the big words like immortal and for ever take on meaning. Big words, yes, that’s what we want. Continuity. Since our tongues first moved in our mouths, we’ve asked, What does it all mean? No other question made sense, with death breathing down our necks. But just let us settle in on ten thousand worlds spinning around ten thousand alien suns and the question will fade away. Man will be endless and infinite, even as space is endless and infinite. Man will go on, as space goes on, for ever. Individuals will die, as always, but our history will reach as far as we’ll ever need to see into the future, and with the knowledge of our survival for all time to come, we’ll know security and thus the answer we’ve always searched for. Gifted with life, the least we can do is preserve and pass on the gift to infinity. That’s a goal worth shooting for.