Mass media -- Audiences -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight to the moon -- Fiction; Stowaways -- Fiction
Andy thought, briefly, of his wife. Very briefly. She was dead. It
didn't seem very important whether she was dead or not. She had stood
in his way; that had been important. There had never been anything
between them anyway but a silent bitter futile hatred for each other's
unattractiveness. She loved Clifford Marlowe, the great Actor; he
loved Glora Delar, the Actress. No mortal could compare with either
of them; no one felt any emotional regard for anyone else. Emotion
was confined to the Sensory Shows. A time for emotion and dreaming
and wish-fulfillment; a time for Working--the two never got mixed up.
That's what Personology had told him.
Brooks was trying to figure out what he would do when the rocket hit
the Moon, when it dropped into the depth of Theophilus' 18,000 foot, 65
mile-wide crater and into the City of Stars. He was concentrating on
that when the bulkhead door began to open.
* * * * *
Brooks gnawed at his lips as he crouched behind the door. The Security
Guard entered, checking probably for possible weight shift. Holstered
to the belt of his gray uniform was a neurotube and a meson blastgun.
The continuing cold war with the Eastern Alliance necessitated constant
preparedness against possible espionage. That's what Personology said.
As the Guard turned to exit, he saw Brooks. His eyes widened
remarkably. His hands moved out as though questioning Brooks' reality.
Without thinking, Brooks leaped, his breath breaking harshly. The Guard
grabbed wildly at Brooks' wrist and they fell back, scrambling and
grunting. The fall broke the Guard's hold; Brooks slammed the drill
against the Guard's chest and squeezed the trigger release.
The gentle whir of the drill was drowned by the Guard's short,
incredulous scream of pain. Blood spilled over the drill and ran down
Brooks' arm as the Guard rolled lifelessly against the wall, trembled
slightly with the dropping, decelerating motion of the rocket.
Brooks leaned against the wall. The silence was vast. He looked at his
fingers as he sensed the rocket settling. It was done, really done now;
he could not change it back. His wife's body falling into the blackness
had seemed a kind of unreal thing, but this was horribly real. The
Guard would never worry any more about dreams, or about reality,
either. Maybe he was luckier than most, maybe luckier than Andy Brooks,
the mechanic who had stopped machinery no mechanic could repair.
This was murder for which Andy would pay, but that didn't matter. He
had broken a Class-A Law when he boarded the moon rocket. There were
no degrees of guilt. The thought gave him a kind of freedom inside, a
sudden snapping of strings and singing of breaking wires.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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