Kimball turned to regard the psych coolly. “What’s reality, Steinhart? Do you know?”
The analyst flushed. “No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
“You lived pretty much in your mind when you were a child,” Steinhart went on doggedly. “You were a solitary, a lonely child.”
Kimball was watching the sky again.
Steinhart felt futile and out of his depth. “We know so little about the psychology of space-flight, Kim——”
Silence. The rumble of the tires on the packed sand of the road, the murmur of the command car’s engine, spinning oilily, and lit by tiny sunbright flashes deep in the hollows of the hot metal.
“You’re glad to be leaving, aren’t you—” Steinhart said finally. “Happy to be the first man to try for the planets——”
Kimball nodded absently, wishing the man would be quiet. Mars, a dull rusty point of light low on the horizon, seemed to beckon.
They topped the last hillock and dropped down into the lighted bowl of the launching site. The rocket towered, winged and monstrously checkered in white and orange, against the first flickerings of the false dawn.