"The only thing that matters, really," she murmured, "is your walking again. We'll try this afternoon. Okay?"
"Okay," he said.
When she left, his eyes were still turned toward Jacob's photo.
He was like two people, he thought.
Half of him was an officer of the Space Corps. Perhaps one single starry-eyed boy out of ten thousand was lucky enough to reach that goal.
He remembered a little picture book his mother had given him when she was alive. Under the bright pictures of spacemen were the captions:
"A Space Officer Is Honest" "A Space Officer Is Loyal." "A Space Officer Is Dutiful."
Honesty, loyalty, duty. Trite words, but without those concepts, mankind would never have broken away from the planet that held it prisoner for half a million years.
Without them, Everson, after three failures and a hundred men dead, would never have landed on the Moon twenty-seven years ago.