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Title: Death of a Spaceman

Author: Walter M. Miller

Illustrator: Ernest Schroeder

Release Date: August 9, 2009 [EBook #29643]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH OF A SPACEMAN ***

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Illustrator: Ernest Schroeder

DEATH

OF A

SPACEMAN

BY WALTER M. MILLER, JR.

The manner in which a man has lived is often the key to the way he will die. Take old

man Donegal, for example. Most of his adult life was spent in digging a hole through

space to learn what was on the other side. Would he go out the same way?

Old Donegal was dying. They had all known it was coming, and they watched it come—his haggard

wife, his daughter, and now his grandson, home on emergency leave from the pre-astronautics

academy. Old Donegal knew it too, and had known it from the beginning, when he had begun to

lose control of his legs and was forced to walk with a cane. But most of the time, he pretended to let

them keep the secret they shared with the doctors—that the operations had all been failures, and that

the cancer that fed at his spine would gnaw its way brainward until the paralysis engulfed vital

organs, and then Old Donegal would cease to be. It would be cruel to let them know that he knew.

Once, weeks ago, he had joked about the approaching shadows.

"Buy the plot back where people won't walk over it, Martha," he said. "Get it way back under the

cedars—next to the fence. There aren't many graves back there yet. I want to be alone."

"Don't talk that way, Donny!" his wife had choked. "You're not dying."

His eyes twinkled maliciously. "Listen, Martha, I want to be buried face-down. I want to be buried

with my back to space, understand? Don't let them lay me out like a lily."

"Donny, please !"

"They oughta face a man the way he's headed," Donegal grunted. "I been up— way up. Now I'm

going straight down."

Martha had fled from the room in tears. He had never done it again, except to the interns and nurses,

who, while they insisted that he was going to get well, didn't mind joking with him about it.

Martha can bear my death, he thought, can bear pre-knowledge of it. But she couldn't bear thinking

that he might take it calmly. If he accepted death gracefully, it would be like deliberately leaving

her, and Old Donegal had decided to help her believe whatever would be comforting to her in such

a troublesome moment.

"When'll they let me out of this bed again?" he complained.

"Be patient, Donny," she sighed. "It won't be long. You'll be up and around before you know it."

"Back on the moon-run, maybe?" he offered. "Listen, Martha, I been planet-bound too long. I'm not

too old for the moon-run, am I? Sixty-three's not so old."

That had been carrying things too far. She knew he was hoaxing, and dabbed at her eyes again. The

dead must humor the mourners, he thought, and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so.

But it was harder, now that the end was near. His eyes were hazy, and his thoughts unclear. He

could move his arms a little, clumsily, but feeling was gone from them. The rest of his body was

lost to him. Sometimes he seemed to feel his stomach and his hips, but the sensation was mostly an

illusion offered by higher nervous centers, like the "ghost-arm" that an amputee continues to feel.

The wires were down, and he was cut off from himself.

He lay wheezing on the hospital bed, in his own room, in his own rented flat. Gaunt and unshaven,

gray as winter twilight, he lay staring at the white net curtains that billowed gently in the breeze

from the open window. There was no sound in the room but the sound of breathing and the loud

ticking of an alarm clock. Occasionally he heard a chair scraping on the stone terrace next door, and

the low mutter of voices, sometimes laughter, as the servants of the Keith mansion arranged the

terrace for late afternoon guests.

With considerable effort, he rolled his head toward Martha who sat beside the bed, pinch-faced and

weary.

"You ought to get some sleep," he said.

"I slept yesterday. Don't talk, Donny. It tires you."

"You ought to get more sleep. You never sleep enough. Are you afraid I'll get up and run away if

you go to sleep for a while?"

She managed a brittle smile. "There'll be plenty of time for sleep when ... when you're well again."

The brittle smile fled and she swallowed hard, like swallowing a fish-bone. He glanced down, and

noticed that she was squeezing his hand spasmodically.

There wasn't much left of the hand, he thought. Bones and ugly tight-stretched hide spotted with

brown. Bulging knuckles with yellow cigaret stains. My hand. He tried to tighten it, tried to squeeze

Martha's thin one in return. He watched it open and contract a little, but it was like operating a

remote-control mechanism. Goodbye, hand, you're leaving me the way my legs did, he told it. I'll

see you again in hell. How hammy can you get, Old Donegal? You maudlin ass.

"Requiescat," he muttered over the hand, and let it lie in peace.

Perhaps she heard him. "Donny," she whispered, leaning closer, "won't you let me call the priest

now? Please."

He rattled a sigh and rolled his head toward the window again. "Are the Keiths having a party

today?" he asked. "Sounds like they're moving chairs out on the terrace."

"Please, Donny, the priest?"

He let his head roll aside and closed his eyes, as if asleep. The bed shook slightly as she quickly

caught at his wrist to feel for a pulse.

"If I'm not dying, I don't need a priest," he said sleepily.

"That's not right," she scolded softly. "You know that's not right, Donny. You know better."

Maybe I'm being too rough on her? he wondered. He hadn't minded getting baptized her way, and

married her way, and occasionally priest-handled the way she wanted him to when he was home

from a space-run, but when it came to dying, Old Donegal wanted to do it his own way.

He opened his eyes at the sound of a bench being dragged across the stone terrace. "Martha, what

kind of a party are the Keiths having today?"

"I wouldn't know," she said stiffly. "You'd think they'd have a little more respect. You'd think they'd

put it off a few days."

"Until—?"

"Until you feel better."

"I feel fine, Martha. I like parties. I'm glad they're having one. Pour me a drink, will you? I can't

reach the bottle anymore."

"It's empty."

"No, it isn't, Martha, it's still a quarter full. I know. I've been watching it."

"You shouldn't have it, Donny. Please don't."

"But this is a party, Martha. Besides, the doctor says I can have whatever I want. Whatever I want,

you hear? That means I'm getting well, doesn't it?"

"Sure, Donny, sure. Getting well."

"The whiskey, Martha. Just a finger in a tumbler, no more. I want to feel like it's a party."

Her throat was rigid as she poured it. She helped him get the tumbler to his mouth. The liquor

seared his throat, and he gagged a little as the fumes clogged his nose. Good whiskey, the best—but

he couldn't take it any more. He eyed the green stamp on the neck of the bottle on the bed-table and

grinned. He hadn't had whiskey like that since his space-days. Couldn't afford it now, not on a

blastman's pension.

He remembered how he and Caid used to smuggle a couple of fifths aboard for the moon-run. If

they caught you, it meant suspension, but there was no harm in it, not for the blastroom men who

had nothing much to do from the time the ship acquired enough velocity for the long, long coaster

ride until they started the rockets again for Lunar landing. You could drink a fifth, jettison the bottle

through the trash lock, and sober up before you were needed again. It was the only way to pass the

time in the cramped cubicle, unless you ruined your eyes trying to read by the glow-lamps. Old

Donegal chuckled. If he and Caid had stayed on the run, Earth would have a ring by now, like

Saturn—a ring of Old Granddad bottles.

"You said it, Donny-boy," said the misty man by the billowing curtains. "Who else knows the

gegenschein is broken glass?"

Donegal laughed. Then he wondered what the man was doing there. The man was lounging against

the window, and his unzipped space rig draped about him in an old familiar way. Loose plug-in

connections and hose-ends dangled about his lean body. He was freckled and grinning.

"Caid," Old Donegal breathed softly.

"What did you say, Donny?" Martha answered.

Old Donegal blinked hard and shook his head. Something let go with a soggy snap, and the misty

man was gone. I'd better take it easy on the whiskey, he thought. You got to wait, Donegal, old lush,

until Nora and Ken get here. You can't get drunk until they're gone, or you might get them mixed up

with memories like Caid's.

Car doors slammed in the street below. Martha glanced toward the window.

"Think it's them? I wish they'd get here. I wish they'd hurry."

Martha arose and tiptoed to the window. She peered down toward the sidewalk, put on a sharp

frown. He heard a distant mutter of voices and occasional laughter, with group-footsteps milling

about on the sidewalk. Martha murmured her disapproval and closed the window.

"Leave it open," he said.

"But the Keiths' guests are starting to come. There'll be such a racket." She looked at him hopefully,

the way she did when she prompted his manners before company came.

Maybe it wasn't decent to listen in on a party when you were dying, he thought. But that wasn't the

reason. Donegal, your chamber-pressure's dropping off. Your brains are in your butt-end, where a

spacer's brains belong, but your butt-end died last month. She wants the window closed for her own

sake, not yours.

"Leave it closed," he grunted. "But open it again before the moon-run blasts off. I want to listen."

She smiled and nodded, glancing at the clock. "It'll be an hour and a half yet. I'll watch the time."

"I hate that clock. I wish you'd throw it out. It's loud."

"It's your medicine-clock, Donny." She came back to sit down at his bedside again. She sat in

silence. The clock filled the room with its clicking pulse.

"What time are they coming?" he asked.

"Nora and Ken? They'll be here soon. Don't fret."

"Why should I fret?" He chuckled. "That boy—he'll be a good spacer, won't he, Martha?"

Martha said nothing, fanned at a fly that crawled across his pillow. The fly buzzed up in an angry

spiral and alighted on the ceiling. Donegal watched it for a time. The fly had natural-born space-

legs. I know your tricks, he told it with a smile, and I learned to walk on the bottomside of things

before you were a maggot. You stand there with your magnasoles hanging to the hull, and the rest of

you's in free fall. You jerk a sole loose, and your knee flies up to your belly, and reaction spins you

half-around and near throws your other hip out of joint if you don't jam the foot down fast and jerk

up the other. It's worse'n trying to run through knee-deep mud with snow-shoes, and a man'll go

nuts trying to keep his arms and legs from taking off in odd directions. I know your tricks, fly. But

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