"Doesn't the company correct mistakes, Conductor?"
"Not mistakes the passengers make," said the conductor sourly. "I'm sorry, boy, I'll have to take that ticket."
The woman's eyes flashed and, as the conductor moved on, she said, "The nasty thing. They have no consideration at all. Look, child." For a moment Plato thought she was going to offer him flight fare from Space Junction to Venusberg, but she was not, he discovered, as motherly as that. "You know what you'll do when you get off? Send a 'gram, collect, to your people in Venusberg. They'll wire you your fare. And you'll reach them in a couple of hours."
"Thank you, ma'am," he said, not feeling thankful at all. So it was all right to be sympathetic, he thought indignantly, up to the point where sympathy might cost her money. Like most people, she was free-handed only with advice.
Who wanted advice?
At Space Junction he waved her a shy farewell, and then turned and disappeared into the station crowd.
At the takeoff grounds, his heart sank. As he might have expected, the entrance to the space tarmac was well guarded. How was he going to become a stowaway on a spaceship if he couldn't even get close to it?
He wandered around outside, staring through the charged wire fence at the crowds, the spacemen, the ships inside. They were gigantic shining things, those wonderful ships, each so long that he realized for the first time how far away they must have been and how rapidly they must have traveled, for those he saw had seemed to him like shooting stars. They were pointed almost straight up. Near the stern of each ship was a vacuum-pit to absorb the radioactive exhaust gases.
His eye caught an old tub, its shininess dulled, its hull faintly scarred. Just such a ship, he thought with a thrill, as the one on which Comets Carter had been shanghaied on that momentous occasion when ...