Androids -- Fiction; Diseases -- Fiction; Enslaved persons -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space ships -- Fiction
He made corrections in the directional tape. The ship began to groan.
It swung into a new course. Caffrey took one final look at Mars,
thinking of the quiet days shuttling people to the Temple Ruins west of
Red Sands, of the liquor and the warm, laughing women. But no more.
The sun lay dead ahead.
Caffrey sat down and poured himself a drink. Then he remembered
something. If the disease hit him, he might alter the course.
He smashed the machinery, ripping it apart with his great hands,
tearing it, so that the course could never be changed. Wires lay
severed and bare all over the floor.
He picked up the bottle for another drink. The sun was a living ball of
flame. He could not look at it.
The green sign went crazy. EXERCISE PERIOD, it blinked, EXERCISE....
Caffrey tried to throw the bottle at it. His hand twitched. The bottle
fell to the floor and broke. Caffrey looked at his hands, at the hairs
whitened with sun glow. The hand twitched again. Dillman stirred where
he lay. His leg flapped once or twice.
Caffrey sat there while the heat began to melt the walls. He felt his
body writhing, but it did not matter, in the heat. There was only
a blinding whiteness all around. He thought about the androids. He
thought about Skolnik. He thought, at last, about Mars.
He was still thinking about Mars when the ship fell into the burning
maw of the sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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