Far from Home | Page 5

must,
considering the expense of a probably fruitless search, abandon him.
There came the moment when Johnny accepted this in full. This was
directly after the time when, sliding down the long hill to the perigee of
his orbit, he turned on his radio and cried for help. It was a bare
hundred miles or less to that wonderful world below, but there was the
Heaviside layer, and the weak signals beat but feebly against it. All that
seeped through by some instant's freak of transmission was a fragment
of incoherent babble to reach the uncomprehending ear of an Arkansas
ham and give that gentleman uneasy sleep for some time to come.
He kept calling mechanically even after perigee was long past, praying
for an answer from the powerful transmitters below or from a searching
ship. But when there was no slightest whisper in his phones or

answering flare among the stars, Johnny came to the end of faith. Even
of awareness, for his own ears did not register the transition of his calls
to an insane howling of intermixed pleas, threats, condemnation--a
sewer flood of foul vilification against those who had betrayed him.
Bright and beautiful, Earth rolled blandly beneath him, the sun was a
remote impersonal thing and the stars mocked silently. After a while
the radio carried only the agonized sounds of a man who had forgotten
how to cry and must learn again. There were times after this when he
observed incuriously a parade of mind pictures, part memory, part pure
hallucination and containing nothing of reason; other times when he
thought not at all. The sun appeared to dwindle, retreating and fading
far away into a remote place where there were no stars at all. It became
a feeble candle, guttered unsteadily a moment and suddenly winked out.
Abruptly Johnny was asleep.
* * * * *
He opened his eyes and surveyed the scene with an oddly calm and
dispassionate curiosity, not that he expected to find his status changed
in any way but because he had awakened with a queer sense of
unreality about the whole business. He knew vaguely that he'd had a
bad time in the last few hours but could remember little of the details
save that it was like one of those fragmentary nightmares in the instant
between sleeping and waking when it is difficult to divide the fact from
the dream. Now he must reassure himself that this facet of it was real
and when he had done so, realized with a faint shock that he was no
longer afraid.
Fear, it seemed, had by its incessant pressure dulled its own edge. The
acceptance of inevitable death was still there, but now it seemed to
have little more significance than the closing of a book at the last page.
It is possible that Johnny was not wholly sane at this point, but there is
no one to witness this and Johnny, not given to introspection at any
time, felt no spur to self-analysis, beyond a brief mental registration of
the fact.

So he made his visual survey, saw that it was real, nothing had changed;
noted with mild surprise that he'd somehow remained in the shadow of
his screen this time. He had lost track of time entirely but the suit's air
supply telltale was in the yellow indicating about two hours more or
less to go on breathing. In quick succession he reviewed the events,
accepted the probability of the abandoned search without a qualm and
made his decision. There was no need to wait about any longer.
A quick flip of the helmet lock, a moment's unpleasantness perhaps,
and out. As for the rest--a spaceman needs no sanctified ground, the
incorruptible vault of space is as good a place as any and perhaps the
more fitting for one of the first to travel its ways.
Well then--quickly. Johnny raised his hands.
But still--
Man has his pride and his vanity. Johnny, though not necessarily prone
to inflated valuation of himself still has just enough vanity left to resent
the thought of this anonymous snuffing out in the dark. There should be,
he thought, at least some outward evidence of his passing, something
like--a flare of light perhaps, that would in effect say, if only to one
solitary star gazer: "Here at this position, at this instant, Johnny
Melland, Spaceman, had his time."
The whimsy persisted. Johnny, casting about mentally for some means
to the end recalled the thermite bomb for the WD cylinder and was
hauling himself in to it when he remembered the charges for this lot
had gone up with Sally Uncle One two days before. But now he'd
actually touched the metal cylinder and, as though the brief contact had
completed some obscure mental circuit,