And the magic catch-phrase would come like a chant from between his twisted lips, "Spacemen are made ... spacemen are made!"
He really made a little headway. He got where he could move a little faster and could occasionally take a quick glance upward at the crystalline patchwork of the sky.
And what was that beautiful point of light out there?
Trase knew it was Saturn, and his eyes would be fixed upon it as a final mount of redemption, as the supreme goal of a well lived lifetime. He wheedled his way into the Moon-Station Astrodome and hungrily gulped in the sight of the ringed planet canted there in the scope view-finder. It was there! The rings were there, the huge planet was there, but the scope only showed you enough to make it just out of your reach; tantalizing, torturing—a pearl to melt through your fingers when you reached for it.
"Hi'ya Saturn!" he would cry. "God of Time that you are, you've waited a long time for me but I'll be there!"
Trase began going to the dispatcher's station, getting the schedules of arrivals and departures and destinations, and figuring the orbits. Then he could tell the exact time the space vessels were due to shoot the rings at Saturn, or burst through the 1,100 mile space between the crape ring and the middle one. Then he would be sitting there at the scope, imagining that he could see a ship—a so-small fleck of blackness skimming across the yellow of the watery hulk of Saturn. That was the way he saw the blow-up of the Andromeda, carrying a load of fissionable materials, when she burst in a flash of white-hot energy in a collision with some hunks of jet in the middle ring.
After he saw that, Trase walked home with something dead inside of him, with his head quiet, his shoulders drooping, his heart sobbing out the Saturn "Home Song" as he had heard his father sing it so often. For his father had been master of the Andromeda.
Trase was the one who had to tell his mother, and she took it, dry-eyed, for the first few minutes. But then she could stand it no longer, and she flung herself at her tall son, lean and muscular, and sobbed, "I'm glad you can't be a spaceman. I'm glad, I'm glad. It's a dirty life, and your reward is a flashing death in a fire-pit."
Trase held her while she sobbed out her grief. He had to keep swallowing down the lump in his own throat, but he could somehow keep seeing that white-hot burst of flame framed before the God of Time, and could imagine that his father's spirit was freed in the space he had loved, out there where he could live on forever, gazing on that magnificent scene.
After that, there wasn't any more studying medicine for Trase. He had to go to work. Because of his aptness with figures he got a job in the dispatcher's office as assistant calculator. It paid well, but somehow it didn't mean so much any more, for Trase seemed to be living in an emptiness greater than that of space. He clocked in and clocked out each shift, and his error index was smaller than that of any other clerk in the office. The other clerks used to look at him and grunt, "There goes Trase Barnes—never a mistake. He's just as infallible as the machine."