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The
Four
by John Steinbeck
Reed awakened in the near dark. The stars still shone and the day had
drawn only a pale wash of light in the lower sky to the east. His long
arms wrapped around his wife’s feet and up her waist. His hands
stroked her blonde hair. He turned his head to Sue, his wife, her deep
blue uniform over her breast and across the small of her back. In other
places it was invisible. He wondered if she did this on purpose, for his
benefit, or unintentionally in her sleep. She had full rouged lips and
wide-spaced eyes. Her eyes opened and she glanced from Reed to the hanging
box where Franklin slept. When she returned her gaze to her husband he
saw reflected in them little stars. He knew the light just now reaching
them came from suns long expired. Reed’s mind tried to travel back
in time along the path of that light, to a time before Sue, before Johnny,
before they were four.
Reed walked across golden foothill slopes. He was tall and quick, with
restless eyes and sharp strong features. Every part of him was well defined:
small strong hands, slender arms and a bony nose. Behind him walked his
opposite, a huge man, shapeless of face, with large pale blue eyes, with
wide sloping shoulders: and he walked heavily, dragging his feet a little
as a bear drags his paws.
“Where we goin’ Reed?”
“The rocket test range. You forgot already?”
“I aint forgot about the rockets.”
“We gotta get us the rest of our crew, Bennie. You remember that,
alright?”
“Bah. Yeah sure, Reed.”
“The only person I know can handle navigation for us is here. We
need her on our team or the whole job’s off. So when we meet her
what are you gonna say?”
“I aint gonna say a word.”
“Damn right. We don’t need no troubles like we had on Yancey
Street.”
They came to the guard shack at the entrance of the test range. Bennie
began fishing around his pockets.
“Reed?”
“What now Bennie?”
“I aint got my security clearance card.”
“You never had none you crazy bastard. I got both of ours right
here. Think I’d let you carry your own security pass?”
Bennie hung his head low and Reed got them both through the gates onto
the flat sands of the testing range.
“I get to tend the rockets, right Reed?”
“Yeah Bennie. You’re the damn payload specialist, you’ll
tend the rockets.”
The research center was a long, rectangular building. In three walls there
were small square windows on the fourth was an industrial metal roll-away
door. Inside while not a model of neatness it was a miracle of technology.
The sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of these windows across
the forms of Reed and Bennie sitting in an empty office. Reed watched
as in and out of the beam, flies shot like rushing stars. Bennie sat at
a desk with an old computer on it. He rolled the mouse back and forth
across the desktop and then rolled it across the palm of his hand. The
computer began to beep repeatedly.
“Ah Christ Bennie, whadaya done now?”
“I aint done nothin’ Reed. I was just playin’ ‘round
with the mouse.”
“You was just playin’ around with the mouse. Well, aint I
told ya not to?”
“Yeah, yer always tellin’ me”
Reed tapped furiously at some keys on the computer and the beeping stopped.
“I aint tellin’ ya out of spite. It’s just you mess
with stuff like this you get us fired before we start.”
The door opened. Both men glanced up for the rectangle of sunshine in
the doorway was cut off. A girl was standing there looking in.
“I’m looking for Reed Richards.”
“I’m Reed and this here’s Bennie Grimm”
“Sue Storm. And you’re looking for an ace navigator?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She was aces alright thought Reed.
“Nobody can’t blame a person for lookin’,” she
said. There were footsteps behind her, going by. She turned her head.
“Hey, hotshot,” she said.
At that moment a young man came into the office; a thin young man with
a tan face and a thick head of tussled blonde hair. He wore a racing glove
on his left hand.
“Johnny, these boys want to take the rocket up. Boys, this here’s
Johnny Storm. He’s our pilot.” Her face had a hardness.
“Oh so it’s that way is it?” said Reed.
“Yeah it’s that way. If I’m your navigator, my brother’s
your pilot.”
Now Johnny looked Bennie over. His glance was at once calculating and
pugnacious.
“Who are you?”
“That’s Bennie Grimm.”
“He don’t look so grim.”
Johnny was right. Bennie had a soft openness about him.
“Whadaya do Grimm?”
“He’s our payloader.”
“Let the big guy answer.”
Bennie looked at Reed and Reed nodded.
“I’m gonna tend the rockets,” said Bennie.
“He aint much of a talker but he’s sure a helluva worker.
He’ll do the work of two men easy.”
Johnny rocked back on the ball of his feet and some of the fire in his
eyes died down.
“So it’s us four,” said Reed. And they all nodded agreement.
Although there was evening brightness shining through the windows of the
cockpit, inside it was dusk. The instruments cast pale orange light on
the faces of the four crew members. Each of them fell to work. They were
voyaging and Reed was the leader. They felt they were living in a heroic
time whether or not they were made of heroic timber. If Reed hadn’t
been there someone else would have taken the head. But the thing had to
have a head. An elaborate quietness was pierced only by the launch countdown.
Reed was afraid. He was terrified of the monster of strangeness they called
deep space. Every strange terrible mile was frightening. But his dream
of the future was real and never to be destroyed, and he had said “I
will go,” and that made a thing real too. To determine to go and
to say it was to be halfway there.
The second half of the journey was more difficult. The rocket sailed out
from the atmosphere like a glider. Johnny’s piloting was far cooler
than his temperament. Around them was the dull rushing sound of space
and silence. They burst beyond the horizons to cold and lonely space.
Out the cockpit the view had the sharp clarities of a dream. A distant
nebula shown clear and telescopically defined, no longer a hazy black-red
blob. The moon, never before so close, shown as perfect as a great pearl.
It captured light and refined it and gave it back in silver incandescence.
The stars were cold in a black sky.
Suddenly the horizons were kicked out, strange cosmic rays bombarded the
ship. They glowed hot yellow-green and pierced the not only the windows
but the hull in shimmering scarves in the air so that the air vibrated
and vision was insubstantial. The rays’ hot lucence promised a permutation.
This light was a danger to them.
Reed stretched his will and strength to their limits to wrap his head
around this new twist. Johnny burst into a blaze where he sat at the controls.
Sue’s navigator’s chair was suddenly empty.
Bennie glowed fiercely and his muscles hardened and his will hardened.
“No,” he said “I will fight this thing. I will win over
it.” A freak accident was happening to this man, a grain or rock
lie in the folds of his muscles, and now irradiated it irritated his flesh
until in self-protection the flesh coated the grain with a layer of smooth
cement. Bennie was already making a hard skin for himself and having made
one he could never destroy it. Once started the orange cement continued
to coat the foreign body. He could feel a shell of hardness drawing over
him. If they could survive they would no doubt be half insane –
half gods.
Reed wrapped his elastic arms tighter around his waking wife. She smiled
the smile that meant she had watched him drift away deep in thought and
was glad he had returned. A burst of flame trailed across the their window.
Johnny was out for his morning flight. Where Johnny went a magnificent
madness followed. It is passionately averred in town that the clouds flamed
and spelled JOHNNY in tremendous letters and that the wolf of the world
bayed prophetically from the mountains of the Milky Way.
Sue stood and became fully visible.
“Lucky us,” said Reed.
“Lucky us?” asked Sue.
“Some guys got no fambly. The got nobody in the worl’ gives
a hoot in hell about ‘em—“
“But not us.”
“But not us, because e I got you –“
“And I got you.”
“We’re lucky. Fantastically lucky.”
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