Ambition, William L. Bade [buy e reader .txt] 📗

right. But it is terribly discouraging. Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to go home to the fiord...."

Now, sitting in the sunset glow, Maitland was in a philosophic mood. "The color of grass, the twilight, the seasons, the stars—those things haven't changed." He gestured out the window at the slumbering evening prairie. "That scene, save for unessentials, could just as well be 1950—or 950. It's only human institutions that change rapidly...."

"I'll be awfully sorry when you go back," she sighed. "You're the first person I've met here that I can talk to."

"Talk to," he repeated, dissatisfied. "You're just about the finest girl I've ever met."

He kissed her, playfully, but when they separated there was nothing playful left about it. Her face was flushed and he was breathing faster than he had been. Savagely, he bit the inside of his cheek. "Two days! A lifetime here wouldn't be long enough!"

"Bob." She touched his arm and her lips were trembling. "Bob, do you have to go—out there? We could get a couple of horses tomorrow, and we would have two days."

He leaned back and shook his head. "Can't you see, Ingrid? This is my only chance. If I don't go tomorrow, I'll never get to the Moon. And then my whole life won't mean anything...."

He woke with Ingrid shaking him. "Bob! Bob!" Her voice was an urgent whisper. "You've got to wake up quick! Bob!"

He sat up and brushed the hair out of his eyes. "What's the matter?"

"I didn't really believe that Swarts would let you go into space. It wasn't like him. Bob, he fooled you. Today is when your time runs out!"

Maitland swallowed hard, and his chest muscles tightened convulsively. "You mean it was all a trick?"

She nodded. "He told me just now, while he was putting something in your milk to make you sleep." Her face was bitter and resentful. "He said, 'This is a lesson for you, Ching, if you ever do any work with individuals like this. You have to humor them, tell them anything they want to believe, in order to get your data.'"

Maitland put his feet on the floor, stood up. His face was white and he was breathing fast.

She grasped his arm. "What are you going to do?"

He shook her hand off. "I may not get to the Moon, but I'm going to teach one superman the advantage of honesty!"

"Wait! That won't get you anywhere."

"He may be bigger than I am," Maitland gritted, "but—"

She squeezed his arm violently. "You don't understand. He would not fight you. He'd use a gun."

"If I could catch him by surprise...."

She took hold of his shoulders firmly. "Now, listen, Bob Maitland. I love you. And I think it's the most important thing in the world that you get to see the stars. Swarts will never let me time travel, anyway."

"What are you thinking?"

"I'll go down to the village and get a vliegvlotter. It won't take twenty minutes. I'll come back, see that Swarts is out of the way, let you out of here, and take you—" she hesitated, but her eyes were steady—"wherever you want to go."

He was trembling. "Your career. I can't let you...."

She made as if to spit, then grinned. "My career! It's time I went home to the fiord, anyway. Now you wait here!"

The vliegvlotter was about 50 feet long, an ellipsoid of revolution. Maitland and Ingrid ran hand in hand across the lawn and she pushed him up through the door, then slammed it shut and screwed the pressure locks tight.

They were strapping themselves into the seats, bathed in sunlight that flooded down through the thick plastic canopy, when she stopped, pale with consternation.

"What's the matter?" he demanded.

"Oh, Bob, I forgot! We can't do this!"

"We're going to," he said grimly.

"Bob, sometime this morning you're going to snap back to 1950. If that happens while we're up there...."

His jaw went slack as the implication soaked in. Then he reached over and finished fastening the buckle on her wide seat belt.

"Bob, I can't. I would be killing you just as surely as...."

"Never mind that. You can tell me how to run this thing and then get out, if you want to."

She reached slowly forward and threw a switch, took hold of the wheel. Seconds later they were plummeting into the blue dome of the sky.

The blue became darker, purplish, and stars appeared in daylight. Maitland gripped the edge of the seat; somewhere inside him it seemed that a chorus of angels was singing the finale of Beethoven's Ninth.

There was a ping and Ingrid automatically flicked a switch. A screen lit up and the image of Swarts was looking at them. His eyes betrayed some unfamiliar emotion, awe or fear. "Ching! Come back here at once. Don't you realize that—"

"Sorry, Swarts." Maitland's voice resonated with triumph. "You'll just have to humor me once more."

"Maitland! Don't you know that you're going to snap back to the 20th Century in half an hour? You'll be in space with no protection. You'll explode!"

"I know," Maitland said. He looked up through the viewport. "Right now, I'm seeing the stars as I've never seen them before. Sorry to make you lose a case, Swarts, but this is better than dying of pneumonia or an atomic bomb."

He reached forward and snapped the image off.

Twenty minutes later, Maitland had Ingrid cut the drive and turn the ship, so that he could see the Earth. It was there, a huge shining globe against the constellations, 10,000 miles distant, 100 times the size of familiar Luna. North America was directly below, part of Canada covered with a dazzling area of clouds. The polar ice-cap was visible in its entirety, along with the northern portions of the Eurasian land mass. The line of darkness cut off part of Alaska and bisected the Pacific Ocean, and the Sun's reflection in the Atlantic was blinding.

And there was Venus, a brilliant, white jewel against the starry blackness of interstellar space, and now he could see the Sun's corona....

The ship was rotating slowly, and presently the Moon, at first quarter, came into view, not perceptibly larger than seen from Earth. Maitland heaved a sigh of regret. If only this could have been but the beginning of a voyage....

Ingrid touched his arm. "Bob."

He turned to look at her golden beauty.

"Bob, give me one more kiss."

He loosened his seat strap and put his arms around her. For a moment he felt her soft lips on his....

Then she was gone, and the ship had vanished. For perhaps as long as a second, alone in space, he was looking with naked, unprotected, ambition-sated eyes at the distant stars.

The luring white blaze of Venus was the last image he took with him into the night without stars.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Ambition, by William L. Bade