"No reason for them! No reason for men to want to go way off hundreds of miles from earth, getting lost, getting killed! We had jets—we should have been satisfied."
She sighed, and her daughter-in-law echoed it. Looking out the window their thoughts ran to space and rockets and their men, who had been rocketmen and who would never come back. What was left of them was still out there, moving eternally through lonesome space in straight lines or circling some dead moon or planet. The gray-haired woman's thoughts ran to the husband torn and destroyed when the early test ship burst on the moon-run, and the other woman's mind reached grieving toward her own husband, the gray-haired woman's son, whose ship had turned in an instant to a molten glob when its white metal coating suddenly peeled and it took the full, brutal hammer of the sun.
The younger ran her fingers through Pete's spiky hair. "Petey, you're not to see that barnstormer any more."
"Aw—fooher! Fooner!"
His grandmother raised her hands. "Where do they pick up that awful slang?"
Pete scowled out the window, thinking of the rocket, the knobs and slings and dials within it, the feel of speed and space and war about it, the slash-grinned young god who rode it. He had something to ask Murph.
"Aw fooner," he muttered.
His mother swung him to her lap. "Shall we tell him about the surprise?"
Pete thought he caught something odd—a nearly invisible craft or knowingness—in the glance they traded.
"You didn't get much for your birthday last week, Pete," his mother beamed, "so we decided to give you a kind of late birthday party. You're going to have that picnic on Indian Hill. It'll be an all-day picnic, with all the youngsters you know, hunting for arrowheads and relics. We're going in Mr. Fobey's copter."