Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction May 1952. Extensive
research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this
publication was renewed.
[Illustration]
TO EACH HIS STAR
_by_ BRYCE WALTON
_"Nothing around those other suns but ashes and dried
blood," old Dunbar told the space-wrecked, desperate men.
"Only one way to go, where we can float down through the
clouds to Paradise. That's straight ahead to the sun with
the red rim around it."_
_But Dunbar's eyes were old and uncertain. How could they
believe in his choice when every star in this forsaken
section of space was surrounded by a beckoning red rim?_
* * * * *
There was just blackness, frosty glimmering terrible blackness, going
out and out forever in all directions. Russell didn't think they could
remain sane in all this blackness much longer. Bitterly he thought of
how they would die--not knowing within maybe thousands of light years
where they were, or where they were going.
[Illustration]
After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated and
drifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like small
individual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for each
other and by the "gravity-rope" beam.
Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a face
wrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns of
worlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command.
Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knew
where they were going.
They could talk to one another through the etheric transmitters inside
their helmets. They could live ... if this was living ... a long time,
if only a man's brain would hold up, Russell thought. The suits were
complete units. 700 pounds each, all enclosing shelters, with
atmosphere pressure, temperature control, mobility in space, and
electric power. Each suit had its own power-plant, reprocessing
continuously the precious air breathed by the occupants, putting it
back into circulation again after enriching it. Packed with food
concentrates. Each suit a rocket, each human being part of a rocket,
and the special "life-gun" that went with each suit each blast of
which sent a man a few hundred thousand miles further on toward
wherever he was going.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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