Part 2

Oh, the beauty of open space! Though he couldn't get out of his bunk to see it, Trase knew that they were way out in the middle of nowhere, and Irinia would come around to tell him about it.

The time passed, and then Saturn began gradually to fill the screen of the ship's vision-plate, and Irinia began to worry. For to shoot the rings required plenty of deft acceleration and deceleration, and Irinia knew that Trase couldn't stand the maneuvering.

"How about just a look at Saturn from a distance, Trase?" Irinia would ask.

"We've got to shoot the rings," he would reply grimly.

So Irinia knew he wouldn't be satisfied with anything less, and she went busily about the procedure of lining up the polyglot crew for the ring-shooting.

At fifty million miles from Saturn she fired two small braking blasts, and Trase cried out from his bunk and was sick again. She ran back to him and said, "Oh, Trase, let me drug you till we get there."

His white suffering face showed clenched teeth. He grabbed her arm and said, "I'll make it, Irinia, I'll make it. Just let me know when the view gets good."

So she let him alone and went about the business of braking. She heard no more groans from Trase. But when she went back to see him, there he would be with his hands gripped until the knuckles showed white, with the bedclothes gripped between his teeth. "I'll make it, Irinia," he would gasp. Then sometimes she would hear him cry, "I'll be there, God of Time, I'll be there!"

Space-sickness and nausea.... Those it doesn't kill generally try to kill themselves.

Well, from fifty million miles it's a four-day trip to shoot the rings and get started away again, and there was Trase with the universe spinning around his ears, suffering as much as anyone can suffer.

They went in under the darkness of the huge outside ring, for the rings were canted at that time almost their total 28 degrees to the ecliptic.

And then out of the misery and the eons of suffering Trase suddenly heard a voice, "Trase! Trase! Come to the Astrodome, we're shooting the rings! Trase, we're shooting the rings!"

Trase prayed. His hands reached out for the bunk straps and he felt Irinia helping him. He had long ago lost everything on his stomach but the world whirled in a wild clanging clatter of craziness and he had to be guided along the passageway.

"I can't make it!" he cried at once, and Irinia had to drag him back to his feet, and then he said, "Yes, I can--I'll be there."

Well, that was the way Trase made it. His clothes reeking with his sickness, his body wasted away from inaction, his eyes dimmed and glazed over from suffering, his face a mask of thin ferocity from his determination. But he made it.

There's Saturn, Trase.

He looked out over the burning brilliant flatness of the crape ring to the huge yellow hulk of the God of Time towering over him. The light and majesty of what he saw swam to his brain out of the fogs of bitterness that had shrouded his soul and he saw it--one magnificent reason why men go to space.

Personal Saturn, unreachable Saturn ... yellow, streaked with purple streamers, fading away at the edges into the blackness that is eternal space. From there at the edge of the crape ring it is as though you were standing on a plain of golden dust, staring up into the face of destiny. The features of the face are plain, formed out of the whirling evanescent colors of the gases whipped around on the surface by cyclonic winds. You can see rainbows and pots of gold fashioned and then whipped away to change to greater things. The breath of eternal mystery blows on the spirit, and spacemen say you can see anything you desire.

The ship lurched this way and that as the jets kept it on its course, and Trase suddenly realized that the sickness had dropped away from him like a fetter. The ship headed back towards Titan for a refueling stop, but Trase sat there and stared at Saturn until the Astrodome got around to the front and the jet trails obscured the view at the rear. He was not sick while he looked at Saturn.

His clear-headedness lasted about half-an-hour. Then Trase got sick again. He was sick for a day and a half, until the ship began to come in on Titan.

But the drifter crew had hid out some Mercurian liquor and got drunk before landing. They failed to cut the jets. Irinia cursed until the spaceship bulkheads turned red hot, but she fell and knocked herself out running down from the pilot's compartment to the engine-room. And so there was the ship headed wide-open into Titan with the crew drunk, Irinia unconscious, and Trase dead-sick in his bunk.

Well, you'll know now that Trase saved the day. He began to think of Saturn as he had seen it. He staggered down to the engine-room, cut the jets, then ran up to the pilot's room where the rough surface of Titan stared him in the face. And he wasn't sick while he thought of Saturn.

The ship cracked up but nobody was killed. They hadn't been able to get any insurance with an unlicensed crew, so that left Trase flat-broke. He wasn't a veepee anymore since he had no stock in Air-Lanes, and Irinia got fired for taking the extended leave.

So things were kind of tough for a while, but.... Where are they now? Oh, you know, you've heard all about it. They found a backer, and now they're out on Pluto with a space-drive job, getting ready to set out for Centauri. And Trase has never been sick again.

What does it prove?

Well, see those words written right there over the entrance to the spacemen's mess? Those are the words Trase used when they pulled him out of the wreck on Titan. I'll read them for you. "I've seen Saturn! And to you who have seen it, I don't need to say whether spacemen can be made. To others, to millions of youngsters who want to be spacemen, I'll say now that spacemen _are_ born. But to each of them I'll say this--If you want to be a spaceman, you don't need a spaceman's ear, all you need is a spaceman's soul."

So the spacemen took that and added another verse to the Saturn "Home Song," and it's the one that really makes me hurt because I can't go to space again. Sometimes late at night I hear them singing it from far out on the field when a crew is coming in off a run, and that's when I know you can't stop them. You can't stop the born spacemen until they reach the stars. The verse goes like this:

"Oh, Saturn, the God of Time, May your majesty never fade. For your beauty is final proof, Spacemen are born not made."