Big Hogey blinked after it, rubbing the back of his neck. “Nice people,” he said. “Nice buncha people. All hoofers.”
With a grunt and a lurch, he got to his feet, but his legs wouldn’t work right. With his tumbler’s reflexes, he fought to right himself with frantic arm motions, but gravity claimed him, and he went stumbling into the ditch.
“Damn legs, damn crazy legs!” he cried.
The bottom of the ditch was wet, and he crawled up the embankment with mud-soaked knees, and sat on the shoulder again. The gin bottle was still intact. He had himself a long fiery drink, and it warmed him deep down. He blinked around at the gaunt and treeless land.
The sun was almost down, forge-red on a dusty horizon. The blood-streaked sky faded into sulphurous yellow toward the zenith, and the very air that hung over the land seemed full of yellow smoke, the omnipresent dust of the plains.
A farm truck turned onto the side-road and moaned away, its driver hardly glancing at the dark young man who sat swaying on his duffle bag near the culvert. Hogey scarcely noticed the vehicle. He just kept staring at the crazy sun.
He shook his head. It wasn’t really the sun. The sun, the real sun, was a hateful eye-sizzling horror in the dead black pit. It painted everything with pure white pain, and you saw things by the reflected pain-light. The fat red sun was strictly a phoney, and it didn’t fool him any. He hated it for what he knew it was behind the gory mask, and for what it had done to his eyes.
*
With a grunt, he got to his feet, managed to shoulder the duffle bag, and started off down the middle of the farm road, lurching from side to side, and keeping his eyes on the rolling distances. Another car turned onto the side-road, honking angrily.
Hogey tried to turn around to look at it, but he forgot to shift his footing. He staggered and went down on the pavement. The car’s tires screeched on the hot asphalt. Hogey lay there for a moment, groaning. That one had hurt his hip. A car door slammed and a big man with a florid face got out and stalked toward him, looking angry.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, fella?” he drawled. “You soused? Man, you’ve really got a load.”
Hogey got up doggedly, shaking his head to clear it. “Space legs,” he prevaricated. “Got space legs. Can’t stand the gravity.”
The burly farmer retrieved his gin bottle for him, still miraculously unbroken. “Here’s your gravity,” he grunted. “Listen, fella, you better get home pronto.”
“Pronto? Hey, I’m no Mex. Honest, I’m just space burned. You know?”
“Yeah. Say, who are you, anyway? Do you live around here?”
It was obvious that the big man had taken him for a hobo or a tramp. Hogey pulled himself together. “Goin’ to the Hauptman’s place. Marie. You know Marie?”
The farmer’s eyebrows went up. “Marie Hauptman? Sure I know her. Only she’s Marie Parker now. Has been, nigh on six years. Say—” He paused, then gaped. “You ain’t her husband by any chance?”
“Hogey, that’s me. Big Hogey Parker.”
“Well, I’ll be—! Get in the car. I’m going right past John Hauptman’s place. Boy, you’re in no shape to walk it.”
He grinned wryly, waggled his head, and helped Hogey and his bag into the back seat. A woman with a sun-wrinkled neck sat rigidly beside the farmer in the front, and she neither greeted the passenger nor looked around.
“They don’t make cars like this anymore,” the farmer called over the growl of the ancient gasoline engine and the grind of gears. “You can have them new atomics with their loads of hot isotopes under the seat. Ain’t safe, I say—eh, Martha?”
The woman with the sun-baked neck quivered her head slightly. “A car like this was good enough for Pa, an’ I reckon it’s good enough for us,” she drawled mournfully.
Five minutes later the car drew in to the side of the road. “Reckon you can walk it from here,” the farmer said. “That’s Hauptman’s road just up ahead.”
He helped Hogey out of the car and drove away without looking back to see if Hogey stayed on his feet. The woman with the sun-baked neck was suddenly talking garrulously in his direction.
It was twilight. The sun had set, and the yellow sky was turning gray. Hogey was too tired to go on, and his legs would no longer hold him. He blinked around at the land, got his eyes focused, and found what looked like Hauptman’s place on a distant hillside. It was a big frame house surrounded by a wheatfield, and a few scrawny trees. Having located it, he stretched out in the tall grass beyond the ditch to take a little rest.
Somewhere dogs were barking, and a cricket sang creaking monotony in the grass. Once there was the distant thunder of a rocket blast from the launching station six miles to the west, but it faded quickly. An A-motored convertible whined past on the road, but Hogey went unseen.
When he awoke, it was night, and he was shivering. His stomach was screeching, and his nerves dancing with high voltages. He sat up and groped for his watch, then remembered he had pawned it after the poker game. Remembering the game and the results of the game made him wince and bite his lip and grope for the bottle again.
He sat breathing heavily for a moment after the stiff drink. Equating time to position had become second nature with him, but he had to think for a moment because his defective vision prevented him from seeing the Earth-crescent.
Vega was almost straight above him in the late August sky, so he knew it wasn’t much after sundown—probably about eight o’clock. He braced himself with another swallow of gin, picked himself up and got back to the road, feeling a little sobered after the nap.
He limped on up the pavement and turned left at the narrow drive that led between barbed-wire fences toward the Hauptman farmhouse, five hundred yards or so from the farm road. The fields on his left belonged to Marie’s father, he knew. He was getting close—close to home and woman and child.
He dropped the bag suddenly and leaned against a fence post, rolling his head on his forearms and choking in spasms of air. He was shaking all over, and his belly writhed. He wanted to turn and run. He wanted to crawl out in the grass and hide.
What were they going to say? And Marie, Marie most of all. How was he going to tell her about the money?
Six hitches in space, and every time the promise had been the same: One more tour, baby, and we’ll have enough dough, and then I’ll quit for good. One more time, and we’ll have our stake—enough to open a little business, or buy a house with a mortgage and get a job.
And she had waited, but the money had never been quite enough until this time. This time the tour had lasted nine months, and he had signed on for every run from station to moon-base to pick up the bonuses. And this time he’d made it. Two weeks ago, there had been forty-eight hundred in the bank. And now . . .
“Why?” he groaned, striking his forehead against his forearms. His arm slipped, and his head hit the top of the fencepost, and the pain blinded him for a moment. He staggered back into the road with a low roar, wiped blood from his forehead, and savagely kicked his bag.
It rolled a couple of yards up the road. He leaped after it and kicked it again. When he had finished with it, he stood panting and angry, but feeling better. He shouldered the bag and hiked on toward the farmhouse.
They’re hoofers, that’s all—just an Earth-chained bunch of hoofers, even Marie. And I’m a tumbler. A born tumbler. Know what that means? It means—God, what does it mean? It means out in Big Bottomless, where Earth’s like a fat moon with fuzzy mold growing on it. Mold, that’s all you are, just mold.
A dog barked, and he