Runaway by Alfred Coppel

I recall that when I was just a boy hanging around the old Mojave space yards, there was an old timer there who used to sing an old song. He learned it from his father and he from his grandfather who used to prospect for gold in the Death Valley country.

Oh, my darling, oh my darling,

Oh, my darling Clementine,

You are lost and gone forever,

Dreadful sorry, Clementine!...

The old timer was really ancient when I knew him, because he could remember the war with the Federal States that used to be called Germany and Japan. There was a strangeness about him, or so it seems to me now. Listening to him sing those pioneer ballads caught at the imagination and woke dreams. Of course, I was young then, and impressionable. But his tales were my gospel. There were some among the yard hands who claimed he was a survivor of the first crew back from Luna, but that was probably loose talk. In those days every yard had its "Selenite man."

It was from him, though, that I heard my first spaceman's yarns. Yarns about the ships that were built when Venus and Mars were the outposts of the system ... the frontier.

He used to tell of the strange ways in which those old ships took on personality ... character, if you like ... in the eyes of the men who crewed them. When he spoke I could almost feel the thrill of those punishing vertical takeoffs, and I could smell the stink of gasoline and feel the icy nimbus of liquid oxygen. I could feel too the throbbing of the first crotchety atomics under my feet and the quivering sense of aliveness it gave....

Somehow, I don't believe the old man was embroidering fantasies for me. I think even then he knew.