Desire No More Read online

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  He had but one ambition, one desire: to pilot the first manned rocket tothe moon. And he was prepared as no man had ever prepared himselfbefore....

  DESIRE NO MORE

  by Algis Budrys

  (_illustrated by Milton Luros_)

  "_Desire no more than to thy lot may fall...._" --Chaucer

  The small young man looked at his father, and shook his head.

  "But you've _got_ to learn a trade," his father said, exasperated. "Ican't afford to send you to college; you know that."

  "I've got a trade," he answered.

  His father smiled thinly. "What?" he asked patronizingly.

  "I'm a rocket pilot," the boy said, his thin jaw stretching the skin ofhis cheeks.

  His father laughed in the way the boy had learned to anticipate andhate. "Yeah," he said. He leaned back in his chair and laughed so hardthat the Sunday paper slipped off his wide lap and fell to the floorwith an unnoticed stiff rustle.

  "A _rocket_ pilot!" His father's derision hooted through the quietparlor. "A ro--_oh, no!_--a rocket _pilot_!"

  The boy stared silently at the convulsed figure in the chair. His lipsfell into a set white bar, and the corners of his jaws bulged with thetension in their muscles. Suddenly, he turned on his heel and stalkedout of the parlor, through the hall, out the front door, to the porch.He stopped there, hesitating a little.

  "_Marty!_" His father's shout followed him out of the parlor. It seemedto act like a hand between the shoulder-blades, because the boy almostran as he got down the porch stairs.

  "What is it, Howard?" Marty's mother asked in a worried voice as shecame in from the kitchen, her damp hands rubbing themselves dry againstthe sides of her housedress.

  "Crazy kid," Howard Isherwood muttered. He stared at the figure of hisson as the boy reached the end of the walk and turned off into thestreet. "_Come back here!_" he shouted. "A _rocket_ pilot," he cursedunder his breath. "What's the kid been reading? Claiming he's a rocketpilot!"

  Margaret Isherwood's brow furrowed into a faint, bewildered frown."But--isn't he a little young? I know they're teaching some very oddthings in high schools these days, but it seems to me...."

  "Oh, for Pete's sake, Marge, there aren't even any rockets yet! _Comeback here, you idiot!_" Howard Isherwood was standing on his porch, hisclenched fists trembling at the ends of his stiffly-held arms.

  "Are you sure, Howard?" his wife asked faintly.

  "Yes, I'm _sure_!"

  "But, where's he going?"

  "_Stop that! Get off that bus! YOU hear me?_ Marty?"

  "_Howard!_ Stop acting like a child and _talk_ to me! Where is that boygoing?"

  Howard Isherwood, stocky, red-faced, forty-seven, and defeated, turnedaway from the retreating bus and looked at his wife. "I don't know," hetold her bitterly, between rushes of air into his jerkily heaving lungs."Maybe, the moon," he told her sarcastically.

  Martin Isherwood, rocket pilot, weight 102, height 4', 11", had come ofage at seventeen.

  The small man looked at his faculty advisor. "No," he said. "I am notinterested in working for a degree."

  "But--" The faculty advisor unconsciously tapped the point of a yellowpencil against the fresh green of his desk blotter, leaving a rough arcof black flecks. "Look, Ish, you've got to either deliver or get off thebasket. This program is just like the others you've followed for ninesemesters; nothing but math and engineering. You've taken just aboutevery undergrad course there is in those fields. How long are you goingto keep this up?"

  "I'm signed up for Astronomy 101," Isherwood pointed out.

  The faculty advisor snorted. "A snap course. A breather, after you'vestudied the same stuff in Celestial Navigation. What's the matter, Ish?Scared of liberal arts?"

  Isherwood shook his head. "Uh-unh. Not interested. No time. And thatAstronomy course isn't a breather. Different slant from Cee Nav--theywon't be talking about stars as check points, but as things inthemselves." Something seemed to flicker across his face as he said it.

  The advisor missed it; he was too engrossed in his argument. "Still asnap. What's the difference, how you look at a star?"

  Isherwood almost winced. "Call it a hobby," he said. He looked down athis watch. "Come on, Dave. You're not going to convince me. You haven'tconvinced me any of the other times, either, so you might as well giveup, don't you think? I've got a half hour before I go on the job. Let'sgo get some beer."

  The advisor, not much older than Isherwood, shrugged, defeated. "Crazy,"he muttered. But it was a hot day, and he was as thirsty as the nextman.

  The bar was air conditioned. The advisor shivered, half grinned, andsoftly quoted:

  "Though I go bare, take ye no care, I am nothing a-cold; I stuff my skin so full within Of jolly good ale and old."

  "Huh?" Ish was wearing the look with which he always reacted to theunfamiliar.

  The advisor lifted two fingers to the bartender and shrugged. "It's apoem; about four hundred years old, as a matter of fact."

  "Oh."

  "Don't you give a damn?" the advisor asked, with some peevishness.

  Ish laughed shortly, without embarrassment. "Sorry, Dave, but no. It'snot my racket."

  The advisor cramped his hand a little too tightly around his glass."Strictly a specialist, huh?"

  Ish nodded. "Call it that."

  "But _what_, for Pete's sake? What _is_ this crazy specialty that blindsyou to all the fine things that man has done?"

  Ish took a swallow of his beer. "Well, now, if I was a poet, I'd say itwas the finest thing that man has ever done."

  The advisor's lips twisted in derision. "That's pretty fanatical, isn'tit?"

  "Uh-huh." Ish waved to the bartender for refills.

  The _Navion_ took a boiling thermal under its right wing and buckedupward suddenly, tilting at the same time, so that the pretty brunettegirl in the other half of the side-by-side was thrown against him. Ishlaughed, a sound that came out of his throat as turbulently as thatsudden gust of heated air had shot up out of the Everglades, andcorrected with a tilt of the wheel.

  "Relax, Nan," he said, his words colored by the lingering laughter."It's only air; nasty old air."

  The girl patted her short hair back into place. "I wish you wouldn't flythis low," she said, half-frightened.

  "_Low?_ Call _this_ low?" Ish teased. "Here. Let's drop it a little, andyou'll _really_ get an idea of how fast we're going." He nudged thewheel forward, and the _Navion_ dipped its nose in a shallow dive,flattening out thirty feet above the mangrove. The swamp howled with thechug of the dancing pistons and the claw of the propeller at theprotesting air, and, from the cockpit, the Everglades resolved into adirty-green blur that rocketed backward into the slipstream.

  "Marty!"

  Ish chuckled again. He couldn't have held the ship down much longer,anyway. He tugged back on the wheel suddenly, targeting a cumulous bankwith his spinner. His lips peeled back from his teeth, and his jaw set.The _Navion_ went up at the clouds, her engine turning over as fast asit could, her wings cushioned on the rising thrust of another thermal.

  And, suddenly, it was as if there were no girl beside him, to be teased,and no air to rock the wings--there were no wings. His face lost allexpression. Faint beads of sweat broke out above his eyes and under hisnose. "Up," he grunted through his clenched teeth. His fists locked onthe wheel. "Up!"

  The _Navion_ broke through the cloud, kept going. "Up." If he listenedclosely, in just the right way, he could almost hear ...

  "Marty!"

  ... the rumble of a louder, prouder engine than the Earth had ever known.He sighed, the breat
h whispering through his parting teeth, and theaircraft leveled off as he pushed at the wheel with suddenly lax hands.Still half-lost, he turned and looked at the white-faced girl. "Scareyou--?" he asked gently.

  She nodded. Her fingertips were trembling on his forearm.

  "Me too," he said. "Lost my head. Sorry."

  "Look," he told the girl, "You got any idea of what it costs to maintaina racing-plane? Everything I own is tied up in the Foo, my ground