Desire No More — Reading Notes

She was a woman scorned. She had to lie to herself. She broke out of the press section and ran over to him. "Marty!" She brushed past a technician.

He looked at her with faint surprise on his face. "Well, Nan!" he mumbled. But he did not put his hand over her own where it touched his shoulder.

"I'm sorry, Marty," she said in a rush. "I didn't understand. I couldn't see how much it all meant." Her face was flushed, and she spoke as rapidly as she could, not noticing that Ish had already gestured away the guards she was afraid would interrupt her.

"But it's all right, now. You got your rockets. You've done it. You trained yourself for it, and now it's over. You've flown your rocket!"

He looked up at her face and shook his head in quiet pity. One of the shocked technicians was trying to pull her away, and Ish made no move to stop him.

Suddenly, he was tired, there was something in him that was trying to break out against his will, and his reaction was that of a child whose candy is being taken away from him after only one bite.

"Rocket!" he shouted into her terrified face. "_Rocket!_ Call that pile of tin a rocket?" He pointed at the weary Mark VII with a trembling arm. "Who cares about the bloody _machines_! If I thought roller-skating would get me there, I would have gone to work in a _rink_ when I was seventeen! It's _getting there_ that counts! Who gives a good goddam _how_ it's done, or what with!"

And he stood there, shaking like a leaf, outraged, while the guards came and got her.

"Sit down, Ish," the Flight Surgeon said.

_They always begin that way_, Isherwood thought. The standard medical opening. Sit down. What for? Did somebody really believe that anything he might hear would make him faint? He smiled with as much expression as he ever did, and chose a comfortable chair, rolling the white cylinder of a cigarette between his fingers. He glanced at his watch. Fourteen hours, thirty-six minutes, and four days to go.

"How's it?" the FS asked.

Ish grinned and shrugged. "All right." But he didn't usually grin. The realization disquieted him a little.

"Think you'll make it?"

Deliberately, rather than automatically, he fell back into his usual response-pattern. "Don't know. That's what I'm being paid to find out."

"Uh-_huh_." The FS tapped the eraser of his pencil against his teeth. "Look--you want to talk to a man for a while?"

"What man?" It didn't really matter. He had a feeling that anything he said or did now would have a bearing, somehow, on the trip. If they wanted him to do something for them, he was bloody well going to do it.

"Fellow named MacKenzie. Big gun in the head-thumping racket." The Flight Surgeon was trying to be as casual as he could. "Air Force insisted on it, as a matter of fact," he said. "Can't really blame them. After all, it's _their_ beast."

"Don't want any hole-heads denting it up on them, huh?" Ish lit the cigarette and flipped his lighter shut with a snap of the lid. "Sure. Bring him on."

The FS smiled. "Good. He's--uh--he's in the next room. Okay to ask him in right now?"

"Sure." Something flickered in Isherwood's eyes. Amusement at the Flight Surgeon's discomfort was part of it. Worry was some of the rest.

MacKenzie didn't seem to be taking any notes, or paying any special attention to the answers Ish was giving to his casual questions. But the questions fell into a pattern that was far from casual, and Ish could see the small button-mike of a portable tape-recorder nestling under the man's lapel.

"Been working your own way for the last seventeen years, haven't you?" MacKenzie seemed to mumble in a perfectly clear voice.

The corners of Isherwood's mouth twitched, and he said "Yes" for the recorder's benefit.

"Odd jobs, first of all?"

"Something like that. Anything I could get, the first few months. After I was halfway set up, I stuck to garages and repair shops."

"Out at the airports around Miami, mostly, wasn't it?"

"Took some of your pay in flying lessons."

MacKenzie's face passed no judgements--he simply hunched in his chair, seemingly dwarfed by the shoulders of his perfectly tailored suit, his stubby fingers twiddling a Phi Beta Kappa key. He was a spare man--only a step or two away from emaciation. Occasionally, he pushed a tired strand of washed-out hair away from his forehead.

Ish answered him truthfully, without more than ordinary reservations. This was the man who could ground him He was dangerous--red-letter dangerous--because of it.