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Like most people, Robby Lerman at fifteen knew far better than his elders about many things. Unlike most people, Robby did something about it.
It started, in a sense, the day of his brother Harry's funeral. Robby hardly heard the minister's droning, and the overwhelming smell of flowers almost put him to sleep. His eyes couldn't leave the closed, flag-draped casket, and his mind roamed freely over all the years leading up to this moment.
He hadn't actually seen Harry for over a year, since before he went off to the war that was never declared. Because of what happened over there, he would never see him again; but in his mind's eye he saw him over and over. A towering Harry leading a tiny, stumbling Robby across the fields, pointing out thistles and grasshoppers and awakening in him a wonder at life. A less towering Harry trading outrageous puns with a somewhat older Robby across a dinner table heaped with fried chicken and corn on the cob and fresh biscuits, convulsing their parents with mirth. In the early days Robby missed half the puns, but as he grew he understood more and more, and started making his own. He remembered long talks in which he tried to make Harry feel the excitement of frontiers that were opening up in space, and Harry tried to make Robby feel the excitement of running a football eighty yards for a winning touchdown. Neither ever fully succeeded, but that never changed the respect and affection each held for the other.
Only the war had begun to do that. They both read the papers; their social studies teachers saw to that. But Robby saw what it meant more clearly than Harry. Robby had felt a growing fear that Harry would be drafted and end up . . . as he had. Harry had never seemed to care. Every time Robby tried to tell him how he worried about him, Harry had shrugged it off. "If my country needs me," he had said, "I'll go. If I don't come back -- them's the breaks."
And so he had gone. And this -- Robby stared at the polished mahogany box through moist, unfocused eyes -- was how he had come home.
He helped his father and uncles and cousins carry the box, though he was still too small to be much help. Sleet stung his face as they stood by the grave, listening to useless platitudes and the tolling bell in the tower. A clever mechanism started lowering Harry into the ground, and the minister led everyone away so they wouldn't have to watch.
And then it was over -- for Harry. Robby sat in the back seat of the Pontiac as Dad drove past the city limits and along arrow-straight roads to the family farm. Nobody said anything until they were out in the country, driving past flat fields still too frozen to plow. Then Mom wiped away a tear and said softly, "Well, at least we can be proud of him."
That broke something in Robby. Ever since the messenger had brought the bad news, he'd been unsure whether what he felt was more sadness or loss, frustration or despair, anger or fear. Now they all came bursting out at once. "But there was no reason for him to die!" he half- wailed.
His mother turned around to stare at him. "What did you say, young man?"
"There was no reason for him to die. Weren't you listening to that Mark Twain show on television last week? That could have been written the morning it was broadcast!"
Mom was frowning deeply. "I don't see what--"
"'Only when the republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it's wrong,'" Robby quoted. "The republic's life is not in danger. The government is wrong. The government killed Harry."
"Robby!"
"Well, son," his father drawled, "I know it must seem that way to you now. We're all very upset. But I think the government knows better than we can--"
"We have no business there," Robby interrupted. "It's not our war."
Mom started to cry. Dad said, "I don't think this is the time to discuss this."
"Well, I won't let it happen to me. If I have to go to Cana--"
"I said, this is not the time to discuss this. Robby, shut up."
Robby shut up, but he had to chew hard on his lower lip to keep from bursting into tears himself. Nobody said anything until they pulled into the driveway and parked next to the big old yellow brick house a few minutes later. Then Robby ran upstairs, locked himself in his room, and let the dam break.
Half an hour later he had calmed down just a bit. "Can't they see?" he thought incredulously. "Do they just swallow everything they hear? How did they get that way?"
Lying on his stomach on the bed, he turned on the radio on the bookshelf headboard, hoping to find something that would help calm him. But station after station had nothing but drivel. In the midst of some inanely cheerful songster crooning, "I'm going to sit right down and write myself a letter," he shut it off in disgust.
He didn't do it then, but that was the germ of the idea. His alienation from parents and government grew slowly but inexorably with each passing month. It wasn't that he loved either any less than he ever had. Indeed, it was because he loved them so much that he felt such sadness at the ways they had changed. "Who is the country?" Mark Twain had asked through Hal Holbrook on television that night. "Is it the government? In a republic, the government is merely a servant -- a temporary one. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them."
That seemed to Robby one of those "self-evident truths" they liked to talk about in social studies classes. So how was it that on the same day he had watched that show -- probably the most electrifying hour he had ever spent in front of the tube -- the President had unilaterally announced that he was abolishing draft deferments for graduate students? Didn't Congress have to decide things like that?
I m scared, Robby thought. Do we have a dictator on our hands?
Not that Robby was a graduate student, but he would be eventually. He had had his eyes on the stars, literally and figuratively, from a very early age. He vividly remembered the news of Sputnik's launch. He was only in the first grade then, and assumed that was why he couldn't understand the reactions he heard from adults. "How horrible that the Russians should do it before us," they said, while young Robby exulted, "Yes! People can go to the stars!"
And he would help make it happen. His science and math teachers all agreed that he had "the right stuff." Until quite recently, his mind had held a clear, bright vision of his future, and just assumed that that was how it would be. Robby -- no, by then he'd probably call himself "Rob" -- Rob Lerman, astrophysicist, would help build the great rockets that would help mankind hatch from the egg of Earth and go forth to become all it could be. Perhaps someday he would even ride the rockets himself. In the meantime, he would come home from the lab each day to a family that was everything a family should be: two brilliant, loving parents guiding their even more brilliant children on a steady course toward independence, creativity, and thorough competence to handle whatever life dealt them.
He even had their mother picked out: Rachel Flanagan, who sat three rows over in English and at the front of the next row in science. She was pretty, in a quiet sort of way, with long, light brown hair and barely visible freckles; but what really attracted Robby, trite as it sounded, was her mind: she had one. She didn't say much in class, and when she did he sometimes had to strain to hear her. Most of her contemporaries seemed to him airheads, with no interests beyond hairstyles and dances, but Rachel had thoughts worth hearing.
He had never actually talked to her, face to face, one on one. A couple of times he had almost worked up the nerve to say something to her between classes, but each time the sight of another boy talking to her had sent him into hasty retreat. But the right moment would come. When it did, one thing would lead to another and they would live happily ever after.
Raising their own kids right would be a start, but Robby had a far larger vision than that. When the road to the stars opened up -- with his help -- the few intelligent, sane people in the world would go off and found their own colony somewhere, free of the stupidities and lunacies that had wrecked every civilization yet on Earth.
But if this war went on, would he even live long enough to do any of that -- or would he, like Harry, be drafted and killed in a war where he had no business? Would his country turn into a place with no room or tolerance for dreams?
Might he have to go somewhere else?
He didn't want to. The prospect was scary, and there was too much that he'd hate to leave behind. But he began listening more intently whenever he heard about draft-prone students going to Canada. He might have to consider that himself in a couple of years. There were good colleges in Canada, too.
At the merest hint of that, Dad blew up, calling Robby a coward. That hurt. Couldn't Dad understand that it would take as much courage to leave everything behind and embark on an uncertain and unpopular course as to blindly follow orders? Couldn't he or Mom understand that Robby was only trying to build the best possible future for himself and the family he would someday have, no matter how painful the sacrifices that required?
Did they ever have dreams like this? he asked himself after an angry confrontation one bright day in early spring. How did they get to be the way they are?
That phrase sent a shiver of déjà vu through him, casting his mind back to the day they buried Harry. Now, with the added wisdom of an additional year, he discovered an unnerving new insight. His parents must have had dreams like this, but somehow had lost them and forgotten what they were like.
That led him to an even more chilling question: How do I make sure I don't get like that?
Suddenly that seemed like a real, terribly urgent problem. As his mind continued to replay that painful scene from a year ago, it got to the part where the song on the radio had made him reach out angrily to shut it off. But now he heard in the song's words an answer to his problem.
With grim determination he made sure the door of his room was securely closed. Then, sitting down at his crowded desk with stationery pad, envelope, and pen, he began the most important letter he had ever written.
March 22, 1968
Dear Rob,
I don't know if you'll remember writing this, but please read it carefully. I'm writing because of a painful rift that's opened up between me and Mom and Dad lately. I guess it's that "generation gap" we're always hearing about. But I think I've figured out why generation gaps happen: as people get older, they forget things that were obvious when they were younger.
Now that you're almost as old as Mom and Dad were when I wrote this. I want to remind you of some things. You may have heard some of what I'm going to tell you from your own kids and shrugged it off. But you can't shrug it off from me. This is you talking, Rob, and if you cast your mind back maybe you can remember how you felt when. . .
He put the pen down an hour later, drained. He read the letter over once, then sealed it an envelope and addressed it:
To Rob Lerman
CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT
To Be Opened On
My 35th Birthday
Then he buried it deep in a box full of old rocket drawings and such, its exterior covered with warnings like PRIVATE -- KEEP OUT and TOP SECRET. He wouldn't want Mom or Dad to stumble onto it, but he trusted them not to dig in his secret place, and he trusted himself to find it when the time came.
Then he sealed the box, returned it to the back of his closet, and forgot about it. He never dreamed that he might get an answer -- until he did.
Even after all these years, Robert Lerman didn't need to think much about the straight Indiana roads that led to his parents' house. That was good, because he had too much on his mind to give them much attention. He noticed once-familiar houses and the black skeletons of scattered late November trees just enough to know when to turn. Most of his mind was back at work.
Pereira, he thought over and over. Pereira, Pereira, Pereira! You're my best physicist. Why can't you concentrate on something we can sell to the folks with the money, instead of pie in the sky?
Part of Robert -- a part that had once been far more active, but now seldom stirred in its sleep -- had to admit that there was a certain fascination, even excitement, in what Pereira wanted to try. If he was right, it could open up space in a way that poor old sleepy NASA could hardly imagine. But that was the problem: if they couldn't imagine it, they wouldn't fund it. One of the hardest lessons he'd had to learn to become a successful CEO had been that you figure out what you can get funding for, and don't waste time on what you can't.
So how could he keep from losing Pereira, and at the same time keep him working on things that paid? It was a vexing problem, on which he should be concentrating all his efforts. This call from his mother could hardly have come at a worse time -- but he owed her, and he didn't want anyone else going through his things.
So here he was, speeding past denuded cornfields and finally turning into the old gravel driveway. He would do what he must, and get back as quickly as he could.
He greeted Mom with a perfunctory kiss and they traded a few polite words. He wished fleetingly that they could regain more of the warmth they had shared when he was small, but it was much too late for that. Now he could only give her what help he could and try to ease her remaining years. It saddened him to see how she had begun to shrink and shrivel, and how visibly the process had accelerated since Dad died last year. She was right: she needed to get out of this big old house, even though she had not yet found a buyer for it and the farm. No matter; she had found a cozy apartment, and Robert would at least help clear this place out and get her settled there.
She fixed chicken soup and biscuits for lunch, and they talked of Gloree and the kids and his job as they ate. The old cuckoo clock in the front room ticked a quiet accompaniment, and when the small bird came out and uttered its trademark twice Robert pushed himself away from the table. "Well, that was delicious, Mom, but I'd better get down to work. Is the heat on in my room?"
"Oh, yes, I saw to that last night." She climbed with him to the second-floor bedroom he'd shared with Harry. "Everything's just the way you left it, except I brought in a big wastebasket. If you need anything else, just holler."
She went out and left him alone. With a sigh he opened the closet, still full of clothes he hadn't worn in decades. He pulled those out unceremoniously and piled them on the bed. Then he pulled out several boxes from the back, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and started digging through his past.
They brought back memories, all right. He started with some boxes he'd filled himself with early school papers and his first scrawled drawings of spaceships. As he worked through the years, watching them improve, he debated whether any of this was worth keeping. At best, its interest was historic. Would anyone ever care? He'd already resigned himself to being no more than a footnote, if that, in histories written for the world.
Gloree might be interested, and Jerry and Kathy; but would he really want to show them such intimate glimpses of such an early him? Not now; but he could always take the boxes with him and decide later. . . .
Occasionally, something he found gave him a small twinge of wistful melancholy. There were school papers there that impressed him surprisingly -- math and science papers marked A+, with comments like, "Keep at it and you'll go far!" He found himself thinking, I could have been a real scientist, actually doing great things instead of just supervising them! If the war hadn't. . .
He tried sternly to squelch the restless stirrings. The aroma of slow-simmering stew and dumplings drifted up the stairs, evoking the warmest parts of his past.
He came to a notebook where academic notes were interspersed with jotted notes about times and places of antidraft rallies -- and childish fantasies written in a private code about things he hoped someday to do with Rachel Flanagan.
He put the first one down, grinning with amusement. Rachel Flanagan, he thought. I haven't thought about her in a coon's age! I wonder what ever became of her?
He found a few more references to her, reminding him that he never had traded more than a few words with her. There were letters from Harry in Viet Nam that brought back real pain, and then a steadily growing barrage of letters from Gloree. Those were heady days! He could hardly believe that she, the definitive glamor queen, had come on to him, the nerd par excellence. But she had, in no uncertain terms. The sheer intoxication of her attention had led to a whole series of surprising turns in his life: drifting away from the antidraft and antiwar movements and into a more conventional sort of patriotism, even letting himself be drafted and going off To Serve His Country.
Unlike Harry, he'd lived to come home. He hadn't even been wounded, at least physically. But he had seen enough to scar his mind, and when he came home, it no longer worked quite the way it had. Now, in spite of himself, he found it pondering disturbing "what-ifs"? If the war hadn't interrupted his schooling, might he now be a genuine, hands-on scientist -- maybe even a creative and important one? If he hadn't met Gloree, might he have stuck to his original determination to stay out of the war at all costs? If -- Stop that! he shouted inside his mind. It can't do you any good to wonder about that now! He slammed that notebook shut and reached out for a new box -- one he didn't recognize.
He held it for a long time, a plain bronze-tinted shoebox with his name -- Robby Lerman -- written on top. But the writing was in a neat feminine hand, and the printed label said the box had held a pair of girl's shoes. Robby had never had a sister, and Robert found himself oddly reluctant to open the box. Finally he stood up, carried it downstairs, and held it out to his mother with a frown. "Mom," he asked quietly, "what is this? Where did it come from?"
"Oh, that," she said. "Didn't I ever tell you? I thought I sent you the clipping. You remember Rachel Flanagan, who went to school with you? She died in a terrible accident while she was still in college, poor girl. Her mother found this box with a note saying Rachel wanted you to have it if anything happened to her. So I saved it for you."
"Oh," said Robert, somehow keeping his voice steady. "Thank you." But he heard his heart pounding with unexpected emotion. Rachel's dead? he thought numbly, wondering why that should hit him so hard now. And she wanted me to have this? Why would she want me to have anything?
He turned quickly and took the box back upstairs.
What he found inside was astonishing. Clippings by and about Rachel from her college paper alternated with diary-like essays in the same handwriting as his name on the box lid. Together they formed a vivid, intimate portrait of her. In a half hour of reading things she'd written, and things others had written about her, Robert came to feel that he knew her better than most people he'd known face to face. He almost wished he hadn't, because the picture that emerged was very close to what he had imagined her to be. She'd gone to college somewhere in Canada, and had done very well in her studies despite a broad spectrum of activities from writing for school publications to participating in the antidraft movement. He came away fighting the feeling that she really would have been a better soul-mate for him than Gloree -- and might well have given him the support he needed to become what he really wanted instead of a mere administrator.
The last item in the box was a handwritten note, short and to the point -- and to him.
August 19, 1970
Dear Rob,
If you're reading this, something's happened to me. That's OK; it's the risk we all run, every day. I hope you don't think it's too silly that I asked Mom to give you these papers, but I wanted you at least once in your life to know what I never had the nerve to tell you in mine. I always thought you were pretty special, Rob, all the way through school. I always wanted to get to know you better, always wished you would show some sign of wanting to get to know me. But you never did, and I could never bring myself to make the first move. That's my one regret. but it's a big one. I think I could have done it now, if we were both in the same place. But I had to get away from the kids I grew up with to start developing the self-confidence to do things like that.
Anyway, I wanted you to know how I felt, and to get to know at least a little someone who always thought the world of you, even if it's too late now. I wish you a wonderful life, Rob, and a much longer one than mine.
Love,
Rachel