Distress Signal by Ross Rocklynne

The years passed relentlessly, ticked off—one, two three, four—by the big lone planet Worta as it moved with ponderous sureness around the dying red star. Sometimes, in the first year after they were marooned, the two runaway boys, Carl Wyant and Rex Oberling, crawled from the grottoes, chambers and labyrinthine tunnels which the Wortans had driven deep beneath the planet's crust, and with a chill lonesomeness looked out into the vastness of space where the stars brooded. One of those stars, thirty-five light-years away, was Sol, around which swung the planet Earth! They could not think of Earth without a brightness coming to their eyes.

Sometimes the younger boy, then seventeen, would whisper, "I wish we'd never left home, Carl."

And Carl would say, "But we left. So let's take our medicine like men."

Yes, their leaving home, leaving their parents, their friends, their whole world, could not be changed. Yet it seemed to them that their punishment was out of all proportion to their crime. Thinking back on it, Carl Wyant no longer remembered the petty grievance against his parents which made him decide to run away.

Mainly, of course, it had been because his father dropped his keys to the interstellar space-ship he had recently requisitioned from the Space Council. Both Carl and his buddy, Rex, the young fellow who lived next door and belonged to the same Scout Troop, had been caught up with the idea of visiting the stars, without parental supervision. To visit the stars! That was a thrilling thought.

At first they planned to be gone a month.