"Here I scrimp and save on that measly paycheck you bring home," she wailed, "and you go out and buy luxuries we don't need if we could afford them. Look at this dress! It's old—all my clothes are old. And you know why? You want to know why?"
Sam Meecham already knew why. It was because as a manager of his financial affairs Dorothy was a flop. Often he had wanted to tell her so, but the more times he attempted to open his mouth the louder she had wailed. It was a lot easier just to let her explode and then fizzle out. Even now he had the desire to shout at her to see what would happen. But her shrieks made him grow sullen and unsure of himself. Perhaps he had wasted the money. After all, the engine they had in their outdated model rocket was good for a few years more. But for a long trip through space—it would never do.
The explosion was over and she was merely sizzling. She had folded her arms resolutely, determined that he should cancel the order for the engine immediately.
Sam Meecham felt a wave of helplessness surge over him. He felt lost and bewildered. Perhaps she was right; maybe it was foolish. Here he was: Sam Meecham, thirty-five, whose mediocre living was made attaching two wires to two terminals day after day, week after week—a man who suddenly saw a pointer go unexpectedly beyond the fifty mark, and who immediately began having delusions of grandeur. He was a dreamer—but dreams and reality were two different things, and sometimes he confused them. He shook his head, feeling like a fool.
"Well?" Dorothy's face was before him, determined, demanding.
Sam said, "All right, I'll take it back."
She smiled condescendingly, like a mother does when a child admits a wrongdoing.
Conditioned responses, Sam thought bitterly; that was the whole trouble. This cravenness, this kowtowing before any idiot with a louder voice, certainly wasn't in his genes. The trouble was in his conditioning, started when he was an adolescent. Give somebody an inch and they'll take two. Pretty soon they're walking all over you, and you've become so used to it you don't complain.
He thought of his job, of the eternal fitting of two wires in place. He was a cog and nothing more—a cog that could be replaced as swiftly, as efficiently as any part of an assembly-line atomic engine could be replaced. He looked up into the blank, smiling, self-satisfied face of his wife. He thought of the stars beckoning overhead. The stars!
"No," he said suddenly, decisively. The word fell like a sledgehammer blow in the stillness of the room.