Revolt on Alpha C Page 10

  He had redeemed himself, he felt, not only in his own eyes, but in his father’s eyes. What was it his father had said so often? “A Space Patrolman must be able to make decisions and keep to them.”

  He began to walk slowly through the streets.

  He came upon a jetcopter parked in the street. He looked at it, and slowly drew the radio tube from his pocket. He reflected that it was still in his power to fly back to Chicago Colony, to the Carden, return the tube, and end the revolution before it was really under way.

  Larry looked at the tube, smiling, and at the ‘coptor. “A Space Patrolman must be able to make decisions,” he said aloud. “And keep them,” he added.

  He looked up at the sky. The stars were beginning to come through the darkness now, and he stared at them. Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri had set, of course, but there was still the spectral crimson light of Proxima C staining the streets.

  He looked at the stars, knowing that he was giving them up. All his childhood dreams of the Patrol, of racing from star to star, of seeing everything, of being everywhere, were coming to an end. He was giving up Deneb, and Rigel, and Procyon, and the other stars; giving them up for a wild and strange planet.

  Somewhere out there, he thought, was Earth—Earth, that planet where he had been born, the planet he had loved, the planet he could never call home again. He tried to find the old familiar Sun and its nine planets, but they were lost among the great sprinkling of stars on the velvet black bowl of the sky.

  He could not find the Sun. Perhaps it was just as well, he thought.

  The final trumpet call sounded. He looked up at the stars.

  “A Space Patrolman must be able to make decisions,” he whispered. “And keep them.”

  Somehow he knew his father would approve after all. For he was being true, not to Earth or the Patrol, but to himself. And that was what really mattered.

  He looked at the gleaming little tube he had taken from the radio, and fingered its shining sides. Then he lifted it and dashed it against the ground.

  It broke into a million tiny splinters that scattered over the concrete. They gleamed faintly red in the weird light from Proxima Centauri.

  He glanced at the wreckage of the tube for a moment, and then broke into a run, running to catch up with the angry, honest men who were beginning the march on Chicago Colony.