Married people -- Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories; Space flight -- Fiction
"I'm coming," he said. A big old Bartson Cruiser tumbled by end over
end, a thousand tonner, the largest ship he had seen in here so far. At
some of the portholes as he flashed by he could see faces, dead faces
staring into space forever.
Then Diane's voice suddenly: "Is that you, Ralph?"
"I'm still about fifty miles out," he said automatically, and then cold
fear, real fear, gripped him. _Is that you, Ralph?_
"Ralph, is that--oh, Ralph. Ralph--" she screamed, and was silent.
"Diane! Diane, answer me."
Silence. She had seen someone--something. Alive? It hardly seemed
possible. He tried to notch his rocket controls further toward full
power, but they were straining already--
The dead ships flashed by, scores of them, hundreds, with dead men and
dead dreams inside, waiting through eternity, in no hurry to give up
their corpses and corpses of dreams.
He heard Diane again then, a single agonized scream. Then there was
silence, absolute silence.
Time seemed frozen, frozen like the faces of the dead men inside the
ships, suspended, unmoving, not dropping into the well of the past. The
ships crawled by now, crawled. And from a long way off he saw the
Gormann eighty-five. He knew it was the right ship because the outer
airlock door had swung open again. It hung there in space, the lock
gaping--
But it was a long way off.
He hardly seemed to be approaching it at all. Every few seconds he
called Diane's name, but there was no answer. No answer. Time crawled
with the fear icy now, as cold as death, in the pit of his stomach, with
the fear making his heart pound rapidly, with the fear making it
impossible for him to think. Fear--for Diane. I love you, Di, he
thought. I love you. I never stopped loving you. We were wrong. We were
crazy wrong. It was like a sargasso, inside of us, an emptiness which
needed filling--but we were wrong. Diane--
* * * * *
He reached the Gormann and plunged inside the airlock, swinging the
outer door shut behind him. He waited. Would the pressure build up
again, as it had built up for Diane? He did not know. He could only
wait--
A red light blinked over his head, on and off, on and off as pressure
was built. Then it stopped.
Fifteen pounds of pressure in the airlock, which meant that the inner
door should open. He ran forward, rammed his shoulder against it,
tumbled through. He entered a narrow companionway and clomped awkwardly
toward the front of the ship, where the radarscope would be located.
He passed a skeleton in the companionway, like the one he had seen in
another ship. For the same reason, he thought. He had time to think
that. And then he saw them.
Diane. On the floor, her spacesuit off her now, a great bruise,
blue-ugly bruise across her temple. Unconscious.
And the thing which hovered over her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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