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.This place gets to me, Mikey.” He pointed upward.“Up there was close to holy ground for me.Here, all it is, is haunted.”“I’m willing to listen if you want to talk about it.”Bubba fidgeted, then shrugged.“Okay.M’sister Alice died when I was sixteen.Not my fault, I wasn’t even there.I’d left home by then.But my pop,” he said with a touch of bitterness in his voice, “figured that somehow I was to blame for it.I didn’t know about it until I got a letter from my aunt a couple of weeks after it happened, delivered to me right here.” He shrugged again.“I never went home.”“What happened to the rest of your family?”“Well, mom died a dozen years later.My pop, well, I dunno.He’s in one of those retirement communities, got his own little bungalow.Never been there, myself, but he’s got the money for a nice one.Hell, he’s over eighty now.”“And you’ve never contacted him?”Bubba crammed his hands in his pockets.“Called him a few times over the years.Last time was more than three years ago.I never know what to say to him, Mike, and he don’t know what to say to me.Not after all this time.I called him when Mom died, but there was too much between us, and he just couldn’t talk to me.” He rocked back and forth on his feet.“My aunt called me, gave me the bad news.I was living up in Washington State then, working on an apple farm.I went back, of course, but the train only goes so fast.Mom had been in the ground most of a week by the time I got there.”“Did you see him while you were home?”“I wish I had, now, but.I went by the house, but I couldn’t go in.Couldn’t even ring the damn bell.” He walked slowly over to where the broken piece of the rock lay and brushed idly at the sand and dirt covering it.“Hell, I wish I’d called him a lot more often in the past half century, Mike.He’s a smart guy, smart enough to run a large company all by himself.There’s been plenty of times in my life I could have used his advice.” He shook his head with a grimace.“I miss him still.I wish I could just.go see him, talk to him.I can’t imagine what I’d say to him, though.‘Hiya, Pop! How’s it hanging?’ I don’t think so.”“Yes, I can see where it might be extremely uncomfortable.And I can see why this place has its bad associations for you.”“It’s been almost fifty years, Mike.Fifty goddam years.That’s a long time for us Earthers.Christ, I’m old.It didn’t seem to take any time at all, and I got so damn old.” He smiled mirthlessly.“Next thing you know I’ll be wearin’ the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”“Bubba, I’m sorry.This should have been a happier place for you to come back to.”“Yeah, well, I wonder if there’s ever anywhere happy to come back to.If there was, nobody’d leave there in the first place.” He clasped his hands together and cracked his knuckles, then stretched.“Anyhow, it don’t mean shit to a tree now.I just want to be done with this.”It took less than a half hour for Kermit to drive up with the big flatbed tow truck, then they set to work.Bubba began by erecting the two large chain hoists that had been stowed on the back of the truck, one at each end of the ship.When he had them where he wanted them and they were firmly seated against the ground, he attached Y-shaped chains to the four corners of the Rover.With both human and robotic help, it took less than an hour to arrange matters so that the Rover was evenly supported by the chains.They worked as carefully in the desert heat as they had on the Moon, drinking frequently from bottles of water taken from the cab of the truck.Mike rolled back into the ship and sealed it up while Bubba and Kermit set about transferring the Rover from the ship to the truck.Bubba raised the bed of the truck as high as it would go, then backed it up close to the ship.He got out and carefully hoisted the Rover, cradle and all, up about a foot above the truck bed.“Okay, Mike!” he yelled.“Take ‘er away!”Mike activated the ship and slowly moved it out from under the cradle as it hung suspended by the hoists.As he did so, Bubba backed the truck up until it was completely under the Rover; at no point was the NASA vehicle ever directly over the desert floor.Bubba stopped the truck, set the brake, and got out to examine the relative positions of tow-er and tow-ee.Satisfied that all was well, he gingerly lowered the Rover to the bed of the truck, then dismantled and stowed the hoists.It took most of an hour to secure the Rover to the truck bed.The three worked by inches, making certain that it wouldn’t budge once the truck got rolling [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]