ugh."

* * * * *

He watched her silently for a moment, then closed his eyes. It was no
good trying to explain, no good trying to tell her the dough didn't mean
a damn thing. She'd been a spacer's wife, and that was bad enough, but
now she was a spacer's widow. And Oley? Oley's tomb revolved around the
sun in an eccentric orbit that spun-in close to Mercury, then reached
out into the asteroid belt, once every 725 days. When it came within
rocket radius of Earth, it whizzed past at close to fifteen miles a
second.

You don't rescue a ship like that, skinny-britches, my darling daughter.
Nor do you salvage it after the crew stops screaming for help. If you
use enough fuel to catch it, you won't get back. You just leave such a
ship there forever, like an asteroid, and it's a damn shame about the
men trapped aboard. Heroes all, no doubt--but the smallness of the
widow's monthly check failed to confirm the heroism, and Nora was bitter
about the price of Oley's memory, perhaps.

Ouch! Old Donegal, you know she's not like that. It's just that she
can't understand about space. You ought to make her understand.

But did he really understand himself? You ride hot in a roaring
blastroom, hands tense on the mixer controls and the pumps, eyes glued
to instruments, body sucked down in a four-gravity thrust, and wait for
the command to choke it off. Then you float free and weightless in a
long nightmare as the beast coasts moonward, a flung javelin.

The "romance" of space--drivel written in the old days. When you're not
blasting, you float in a cramped hotbox, crawl through dirty mazes of
greasy pipe and cable to tighten a lug, scratch your arms and bark your
shins, get sick and choked up because no gravity helps your gullet get
the food down. Liquid is worse, but you gag your whiskey down because
you have to.

Stars?--you see stars by squinting through a viewing lens, and it's like
a photo-transparency, and if you aren't careful, you'll get an eyeful of
Old Blinder and back off with a punch-drunk retina.

Adventure?--unless the skipper calls for course-correction, you float
around in the blast-cubicle with damn little to do between blast-away
and moon-down, except sweat out the omniscient accident statistics. If
the beast blows up or gets gutted in space, a statistic had your name
on it, that's all, and there's no fighting back. You stay outwardly sane
because you're a hog for punishment; if y