Tom W. Harris

“ Pete manipulated the button. Then he held his breath, glanced at Murph, and slipped into the pilot's cradle. It was too wide and deep but he imagined that he filled it. He imagined the switchboard alive and winking and his body weighing a thousand tons, then weighing nothing at all. The Hester had passed escape velocity, cast off gravity, and earth lay already ten thousand miles behind her. The board showed she had slewed a little because of the slight warp in the hull. ”

“ And after the war thousands of the rockets had been sold, and many had gone to the young men like Murph whom the war had made into spacemen before they had a chance at any other business and who did not want now, ever, to be anything but spacemen, rocketmen. They went about the country selling rocket rides. Tradition had given them a name from another postwar epoch: barnstormers.
Pete handed the wrench to the barnstormer. "Which are the dark-light controls?"
"Holy tubes," grinned Murph, pushing the black hair from his eyes, "If you weren't such a handy kid you'd be a nuisance. Here." ”

“ Pete basked in the shared male moments. "What was it you were telling me about hyperspace yesterday?"
Murph told him more about hyperspace, the untapped dimension which had to exist, the magic hole in space into which a ship would slip someday and emerge not in new systems but new galaxies. "When we find hyperspace and get the photon drive—then we'll really be making 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." ”