He thought of his father—and there was bitterness in his heart and frustration, and a rebellious, smouldering anger. The old man would never know how close he had come to cracking up.
For a moment he wondered fearfully if his father's cold and precise appraisal of his character and courage had been correct. Suppose he was unable to stand the rigid strains and pressures of a real emergency. Suppose— He tightened his lips in defiant self-justification. What did they expect of a twenty-year-old kid anyway? He was, after all, the youngest and probably the greenest mail pilot in the entire Universal Run.
Suddenly the defensive barriers his mind had thrown up against the grievous flaw in his character, which made him feel uncertain of himself when he should have felt strong and capable, crumbled away completely. He could no longer pretend, no longer deceive himself. He hated his father because the elder Burnett had never known a moment of profound self-distrust in his entire life.
He remembered his father's favorite line of reasoning with a sudden, overwhelming resentment. "Fear can and must be controlled. If you have your objective clearly in mind a new experience, no matter how hazardous, will quickly become merely a routine obstacle to be surmounted, a yardstick by which a man can measure his own maturity and strength of purpose. You'll find peace of mind in doing your work ably and well and by ignoring all danger to yourself."
It was so easy to say, so hard to live up to. How, for instance, could a twenty-year-old kid on his first mail run hope to completely outwit fatigue, or even forget, for a single moment, that it was his first run. Fatigue had caused his undoing, but had he been completely fearless he might have found a way to save himself, might have managed somehow to prevent the small, navigational errors from piling up until they had carried him past the point of no return.
A constant re-checking of every one of his instruments might have saved him. But he had been too terrified to think straight, and too ashamed of his "first-run" inexperience to send out a short wave message requesting emergency instructions and advice. Now he was hopelessly off his course and it was too late. Too late!
He could almost feel the steadily-growing pull of his mindless enemy in the distant sky. Floating and kicking his way over to the Tele-screen, he quickly switched the instrument on. Rotating the control dials, he brought the blinding white image of the onrushing solar disk into perfect focus. Automatically he adjusted the two superimposed polaroid filters until the proper amount of light was transmitted to his viewing screen. They really built ships and filters these days, he reflected wryly. Now if they could only form a rescue squad just as easily—
Even through the viewing screen he could almost feel the hot blast of white light hit his face with the physical impact of a baseball bat. With what was almost a whimper of suppressed fear he rocked backward on his heels.
The Sun's ghastly prominences seemed to reach beckoning fingers toward him, as its flood of burning, radiant light seared through the incalculable cold of space, and its living corona of free electrons and energy particles appeared to swell and throb menacingly.
Fearfully he watched the flaming orb draw closer and closer, and as its pull grew more pronounced he wondered if it were not, in some nightmarishly fantastic fashion becoming malignantly aware of him. It resembled nothing so much as a great festering sore; an infection of the very warp-and-woof stuff of space.