The words of the boy were still in his brain, and he could still see the very clean-cut, very young, very dead face. So many times he'd thought of Jones as he had been himself, twenty years ago. It was almost as though he'd died up there himself. Worse, was the realization that what the boy had told him was right. Somehow, this was all his own fault. With his age and knowledge and experience, he'd taken the confidence out of the boy. The fears, the distrust, during the whole trip, had been communicated to Jones and so this was the result.
He shook his head a little and pushed himself away from the rocket. He began walking, step after step, unknowing of his movement. Jones had been right about another thing, too. Hurtz's one-track obsession. That was true, and it had been his motivation for everything he had done. To get one thing. A lifetime of blindness to everything else, while he lived through one day after another, year after year, to reach one individual day that was as surely lost now as the life of that boy in the rocket.
And so this is life. You fight your blind way through an entire lifetime, and when you get to the end there isn't anything at all. His hands knotted at his sides, and he walked with anger and a rising bitterness.
All at once he stopped, his eyes widening. The rim of trees had disappeared, and now in front of him lay the entire length and breadth of it. Detail for detail. His land, with its silent rolling hills and quiet green valleys. His land, with the sweet sloping clearing and the rippling brook singing softly beside it. His land right in front of his eyes.
But it couldn't be. A mirage, perhaps? Shock twisting the responses of his brain?
Yet when he had stood there, wide-eyed, examining, he knew that what he saw was reality and every blade of grass, every leaf, every drop of water in the singing brook was physically there. Inch for inch.
Lord, he thought, dropping to his knees. How could this be?
He thought about it as he looked and felt and thrilled. Perhaps, he thought, this was the way it was on other planets, when I couldn't see anything but a long-distant dream. Perhaps I could have had this a dozen times in my life, and all I would have had to do was take it. But why didn't I? Why couldn't I see this before? Did it take twenty years for me to start seeing what was in front of my eyes?
And why twenty years? Why this time and moment? Because for once in my life I forgot about my own damned desires and thought about something and someone else? Is that it?
Hurtz climbed to his feet slowly. He didn't know and he asked no more questions of himself. He simply walked forward to it, forgetting the broken rocket and boy who broke it. He simply breathed deep of the perfumes of the hills and the valleys, and he stepped onto the sloping clearing, listening to the singing of the brook.