“As I told Alex, I’m kin to Captain John Smith,” Ebbs said as she served the space dessert—angel food cake. “What he went through on his trip was probably worse than what you’ll go through. Know much about him?” She looked at Chuck.
“No.”
“The man who saved Jamestown? You don’t know about him?”
“Oh, well, yeah,” Chuck said. “A little.”
“That’s him over there,” Ebbs said.
Chuck went over and stared at Smith’s grizzled face like he was sizing him up.
Ebbs came and stood beside him. “When he started out all he had in mind was getting away. Any idea what made him want to go?”
“To make his name,” Ebbs said. “To prove himself. When he was a boy they teased and snubbed him because he talked big about what he was going to do. ‘I’ll show them!’ he said to himself. That’s what drove him—he was going to make a name for himself, get respect. No matter what it took.”
Chuck’s eyes were bright.
“Smith was an explorer,” Ebbs continued, “going out of bounds, escaping the gravity of the known world in a leaky wooden spacecraft they had to pump and caulk to keep afloat on a voyage of six weeks if they were lucky, three months or never depending on pirates and the weather. Going to the New World in his time was as new and risky as going to the Moon is in ours.”
Alex fidgeted. Ebbs noticed. She went over to the card table and handed Alex a wad of marked-up typewritten pages.
“Here’s what I’ve taken from his books and journals. I’ve edited it some, to make up his story for someone like you and Chuck. You’ve come along just in time—I just finished it. You’ll see Smith knew his business, but the knowledge didn’t come easy. He worked at learning what he needed to know.”
* * *
That night in the Moon Station, Alex started reading aloud.
My parents were dead. I was thirteen and in the way of my guardians’ spending what was mine, so they apprenticed me to an old seaport merchant, not a bad man, but there was nothing in that place to hold me. I wanted to go to the places I’d heard men talking about at night when they were drunk and dreaming out loud about Russia, Africa, Constantinople, Virginia—boasting of the rare things they’d seen and found and done, the fortunes they’d won. I wanted adventures of my own, and fortune. I was sick of being an orphaned brat in hand-me-downs.
For a year I had a passing-through schoolmaster not much older than me who taught me to wrestle, cartwheel, juggle, and do magic tricks like whisking a man’s handkerchief from his pants pocket and making a penny appear on his shoulder without his knowing.
I wasn’t like the others. I never fit in. No home ever felt familiar or comfortable. I heard men talk about home like it was a person, somebody they loved. I didn’t know what they were talking about. Anything strange appealed to me more than anything familiar. I realized I was destined to live among strangers when I discovered that foreign tongues came easier to me than to my schoolmates. All my life I’ve had the knack of picking up strangers’ speech almost as quickly as I heard it.
Sure that I was born for something better and bigger than a shop, after my teacher left I sold my school satchel and made up a kit for travel, saving bits of dried beef and biscuit as I waited for my chance. The morning my shop master rushed out distracted to have a rotten tooth pulled, I took what little silver I found in his till, rolled up his heavy blue wool cape, and slipped out the back as if headed to the privy.
I was a week walking and running, heading inland always because I knew they’d look for me along the coast, sleeping in fields rolled up in the stolen cape that went twice around me. I avoided all other travelers, hiding when I saw them, begging milk and bread and morsels of meat and cheese from countrywomen in the late mornings when their men were out in the fields.
The night I got too weak to go on I gave myself up where a faint yellow light drew me. The old woman there took me in and gave me soup and strong tea with cream. She was my angel, asked no questions, took me for what I was. I blessed her in my prayers and left for Portsmouth before dawn the next morning.
When I got there, judging from the hubbub, the next vessel to depart was a boatload of Catholic pilgrims fleeing to Rome, a place I’d heard men at home talk about as older and grander than London even if it was Catholic, so I picked that ship. At the boarding the company was all hurly-burly and confused together, old and young, women and children, topsy-turvy as to who was whose, so it wasn’t hard for me to stow away, but I knew stowing away was a dangerous business: stowaways are thought to curse a ship, and me being a Protestant would count as a double curse, so I hid myself well under an overturned lifeboat.
Alex quit reading. The flashlight had grown too dim for her to go on.
“I like him,” Chuck said. “I know how he felt about having to get out. Maybe that’s why Ebbs gave me his story.”
“Us,” Alex corrected. “She gave it to us. Smith was just a year older than me when he ran away.”
“It’s not the same for girls,” Chuck said.
“Because it’s harder,” Alex retorted. “Mother’s after me all the time about what I can’t do, mustn’t, shouldn’t. It’s a pain, her going on about growing-up stuff. She says I’m ‘unformed,’ need shaping, says my character is like a lump of unbaked bread, no way to tell how it will come out unless you shape it, and now she’s worked up about Ebbs, thinks she’s some sort of religious crank, but Ebbs doesn’t talk religious stuff at all. With her it’s all about space work.”
Chuck peered at Alex, trying to make her out in the darkness. “That what you want to do?”
“Yes,” said Alex. “Like Amelia Earhart. How about you?”
“Smith. I want to go out like him.”
“Right,” Alex said, getting up and reaching for the rope. “I gotta get back to my room in case Mother comes up to tuck me in.”
“Remember, we gotta go fix Reggie’s car,” Chuck said. “I’ll come get you later. I jimmied the garage door lock this afternoon. We’ll get in tonight OK.”
Alex’s father was waiting when she came in. “Mrs. King came by while you were up in the Moon Station. Something about her microphone. Somebody saw you going into the assembly room. She put two and two together—she taught Chuck too, you know. She wants an apology and she wants her microphone fixed. Meanwhile, you’re on probation.
“You guys!” He sighed, giving Alex a hug.
“She’s really mad at me?” Alex asked.
“No, it’s not that. You embarrassed her.”
Alex felt bad.