BARNSTORMER
By Tom W. Harris
Murph was a man to be admired, Pete knew,
for Murph had a silver rocket and a passport to
the stars. Now Murph had promised him a ride....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1957
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Careful to keep trees and bushes between himself and the cottage, the boy legged it across the fields toward the glass rocket poised in Johnson's pasture, glittering and slim like a dark, slender dancer. To Pete it was all the promise in the world distilled into a pointed black glass bottle. But to the women in the cottage....
He glanced back. Apparently they hadn't seen him. He had to hurry, because he had something to ask Murph Vanderpool, the rocketman, and sometime tomorrow the rocket would be gone.
His grandmother and his mother would be glad when it was gone. To them it was a monstrous and terrible symbol of something, and, like an evil woman, most terrible because of its beauty.
"Just can't get away from them," his grandmother had said at lunch, gazing irefully out the window toward where it stood. She was a stiffbacked old lady with a valentine face where something wintry mixed with something mild. "I moved out here on the edge of a little town and thought I'd got away from 'em—and the television's full of 'em—and the magazines full of 'em—and now this barnstormer sets one down practically in the backyard!"
Pete curled his brows in a way that made the women remember his father. "What's wrong with rockets, Grammy?"