So he went up. Assistant calculator to calculator, to assistant dispatcher to dispatcher. In seven years he was chief dispatcher and in three more he ran the Moon-Station space-port. Twenty-nine years old, vice-president of Air-Lanes, Inc., owned a block of Marsopolis, Inc., stock, and had never been off the moon.
In later years, it kind of quit bothering him, except sometimes when some of his pilots came in to make a report and they'd seen a flashing meteor on Io, or had screamed through the blue, thin, upper atmosphere of Jupiter—and they simply could not hide their feelings in the language of official reports. At times like that, Trase would sometimes slip on the air-suit, go through his old routine out there on the forgotten dust of Mare Imbrium, and mutter his phrase about "Spacemen are made!"
But it was just a ritual, just an escape, just a way of breathing an occasional bit of life into an empty dream, and Trase knew it. Where was that feeling of yesterday, that lift in his breast, that catch in his throat, that wild calling from out there among the white stars that made his legs tremble, his heart hammer, and his spirit cry out, "I'll be there"?
Where, indeed, had the ghosts gone, those ghosts that fought so bitterly the mound-bound vision of himself, sitting at his desk and never leaving the moon?
Trase had just come in from one of those visits one afternoon when Irinia Custer walked into his office unannounced, and caught him there in an unlighted office, staring out at the constellations low on the horizon.
Now, Irinia was almost a legend. Her reaction time was the fastest of any pilot employed by Air-Lanes Inc. Her hardness and cynicism in the face of danger, death, and the accepted ideals of life made top story-telling material wherever spacemen gathered. She wouldn't have needed to be beautiful, but on top of it all she was; for her sensuous figure and black hair, with equally coal-black eyes, made her wild beauty as legendary as her deeds. Yet Trase Barnes was known to be twice as cold-blooded as she, an automaton who sent pilots into danger with nothing but money in mind.
So Irinia eased quietly into Trase's office that afternoon, and there the tough man sat, with his back to the door, staring out the huge lucite port into the jewelled splendor of the clear night sky—seeing the constellations that to Trase were as familiar as the walls of his office.
Irinia stood quietly behind him for a moment, then she spoke. "So the v.p. likes the stars," she breathed slowly, but her voice was not scornful. "The big, moon-bound executive, with ice-water in his veins, has got a spark of romance."
Trase turned to her slowly, a part of his mind still out there among the stars where strange kings and queens fought for galactic empires.