I quit breathing. I didn't even suck another breath it seemed until the rocket was way out on the concrete meadow, followed by water-beetle tractors and great cylinders bearing hidden men, and all around, in asbestos suits, praying-mantis mechanics fiddled with machines and buzzed and cawwed and gibbered to each other on invisible, unhearable radiophones, but we could hear it all, in our heads, our minds, our hearts.
"Lord" I said at last. "The very good Lord" said Ralph Priory at my elbow. The others said this, too, over and over. It was something to "good Lord" about. It was a hundred years of dreaming all sorted out and chosen and put together Ito make the hardest, prettiest, swiftest dream of all.
Every line was fire solidified and made perfect, it was flame frozen, and lice waiting to thaw there in the middle of a concrete prairie, ready to wake with a roar, jump high and knock its silly fine great head against the Milky Way and knock the stars down in a full return of firefall meteors.
You felt it could kick the Coal Sack Nebula square in the midriff and make it stand out of the way. It got me in the midriff, too it gripped me in such a way I knew the special sickness of longing and envy and grief for lack of accomplishment. And when the astronauts patrolled the field in the final silent mobile-van, my body went with them in their strange white armor, in their bubble-helmets and insouciant pride, looking as if they were team-parading to a magnetic football game at one of the local mag-fields, for mere practice.
But they were going to the Moon, they went every month now, and the crowds that used to come to watch were no longer there, there was just us kids to worry them up and worry them off. "Gosh" I said.
"What wouldn't I give to go with them. What wouldn't I give". "Me" said Mac, "I'd give my one-year monorail privileges.".Yeah. Oh, very much yeah." It was a big feeling for us kids caught half between this morning's toys and this afternoon's very real and powerful fireworks.
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