This was Burnett's last trip. Three more
shelves to fill with space-slain warriors--and
he would be among the living again.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws
groping into space, and then the star-port closed.
There was another dead man aboard the _Constellation_.
Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and
quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;
machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see
anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of
the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,
keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.
Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical
gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all
tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.
Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor
warrior's body out of the void.
He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and
forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back
full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,
who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a
decent burial.
"Number ninety-eight." Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice
from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.
"Number ninety-eight," Burnett repeated. "Working on ninety-five,
ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight
surgery." Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded
deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.
Rice said:
"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day
drunk!"
Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them
into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and
shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one
another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,
salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.
Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred
other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.
Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots
inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the
husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved
for action.
This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!
"Sam!"
Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative
lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator
shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to
life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.
"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!"
Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was
worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred
thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood
cooling in it.
* * * * *
Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed
up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed
without making any noise on the rungs.
He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.
_You never catch up with the war._
All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across
stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the
titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited
glory are always a million miles ahead.
He bit his teeth together.
_You never catch up with the war._
You come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped
trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the
dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of
its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see
it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your
ribs.
You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by
grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over
feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space
suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred
billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you
extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.
That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering
silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up
all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.
You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be.
After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing
your job with mechanical hands.
But even a machine breaks down....
* * * * *
"Sam!" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder.
Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy
official. "Take a look at this!"
Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong
with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it
was.
Maybe it was because the body looked a little _too_ dead.
Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way,
stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as
delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly
blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed
close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a
cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed
completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.