Detachment was all very well, but it could change so easily to indifference.
He sometimes wondered if it was a good thing for any man to work at such an altitude above his fellow humans. The Secretary-General of the United Nations stood motionless by the great window, staring down at the crawling traffic on 43rd Street. All that the past ages had achieved was as nothing now: only one thought echoed and re-echoed through Reinhold’s brain: This was the moment when history held its breath, and the present sheared asunder from the past as an iceberg splits from its frozen, parent cliffs, and goes sailing out to sea in lonely pride. He had labored to take man to the stars, and, in the moment of success, the stars-the aloof, indifferent stars-had come to him.
He felt no regrets as the work of a lifetime was swept away. For a moment that seemed to last forever, Reinhold watched, as all the world was watching, while the great ships descended in their overwhelming majesty-until at last he could hear the faint scream of their passage through the thin air of the stratosphere. The huge and silent shadows driving across the stars, more miles above his head than he dared to guess, were as far beyond his little “Columbus” as it surpassed the log canoes of paleolithic man. And he knew that he had lost it, not by the few weeks or months that he had feared, but by millennia. Then Reinhold Hoffmann knew, as did Konrad Schneider at this same moment, that he had lost his race. Puzzled, he glanced from land to sea and back again: it was some little time before he thought of looking at the sky.
He had almost reached the narrow road along the edge of the sands when some premonition, some half-glimpsed movement, made him stop. Only the projecting prow of the ship lay like a dark shadow across the stars.Ī radio was blaring dance music from the living quarters, and unconsciously Reinhold’s feet accelerated to the rhythm. Out at sea, the “Forrestal” was still sweeping the water with her fingers of light, while further along the beach the scaffolding round the “Columbus” had transformed itself into an illuminated Christmas tree. The stars were all around him as Reinhold descended the little hill.
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