Floor of Heaven

By T. D. HAMM
Illustrated by ADKINS
The three crew members of the Ad Astra looked at one another, grinning weakly, in the whispering silence after the motors had kicked off. This was the culminating point of a half-century of preparation; behind them was the satellite launching station—ahead of them, a faint red dot, was Mars.
Bryan, nominal head of the expedition, touched the shutter studs that opened their windows on the universe. They stood silently, the three of them; Bryan and Hughes looking back at the majesty of the retreating Earth—Williams, rigid with ecstasy at the forward port.
The stars were his passion and his joy. Women filled a momentary need, men he accepted or rejected as they could help him to achieve his goal. Now, as astrogator of the Ad Astra he had fulfilled his dream; and now before him Canopus, Rigel, Cassiopeia and Aldebaran lay jewel-like on the dark velvet of space.
How stars had absorbed the thoughts of mankind since the beginning, he thought happily, and what dreams had the ancient Chaldeans known as they mapped the routes of the galleons of space? And the poets.... See how the floor of Heaven is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold— he quoted softly.
My, that's pretty, Bryan said solemnly behind him. Who said that?
Williams did— returned Hughes equally dead-pan.
Williams flushed under their good-natured grins. Shakespeare said it, you uneducated yokels, he said loftily. How come you aren't cheating each other at gin rummy yet? Last I heard one of you owed the other a million dollars.
It was only six hundred thousand, Hughes grinned, and I'm about to take him double or nothing!
The weeks passed slowly. Barely audible, the computers ticked, keeping the ship on course. Bryan and Hughes wrangled amiably over their interminable card-games, throwing an occasional, joking aside to Williams watching the stars, absorbed as a miser fingering his jewels.
Mars, from a minute speck, grew to a planet lying bloody in the cold rays of the distant sun. Strapped down in obedience to the computer-given signal, the ship reversed, fired its rockets and touched down on her supporting pillars of flame and became only a shining needle dwarfed in the immensity of the pinkish-red desert.