They had missed our small communications reactor unit. We sent out our
call, and we all huddled around the small reactor. There might be enough
heat out of it to let us live five hours. If we were lucky. It was the
third hour when Yuan Saltario began to talk. Maybe it was the nearness
of death.
"I was twenty-two. Portario was the leader on our planet. He found the
error when we had one ship ready. We had three days. No time to get the
other ships ready. He said we were lucky, the other planets didn't have
even one ship ready. Not even time for United Galaxies to help. Portario
chose a thousand of us to go. I was one. At first I felt very good, you
know? I was really happy. Until I found out that my wife couldn't go.
Not fit enough. United Galaxies had beamed the standards to us. Funny
how you don't think about other people until something hurts you. I'd
been married a year. I told them it was both of us or neither of us. I
told Portario to tell United Galaxies they couldn't break up a family
and to hell with their standards. They laughed at me. Not Portario, the
Council. What did they care, they would just take another man. My wife
begged me to go. She cried so much I had to agree to go. I loved her too
much to be able to stay and see the look on her face as we both died
when she knew I could have gone. On the ship before we took off I stood
at a port and looked down at her. A small girl trying to smile at me.
She waved once before they led her away from the rocket. All hell was
shaking the planet already, had been for months, but all I saw was a
small girl waving once, just once. She's still here, somewhere down
there under the ice."
The cold was slowly creeping into us. It was hard to move my mouth, but
I said, "She loved you, she wanted you to live."
"Without her, without my home, I'm as dead as the planet. I feel frozen.
She's like that dead sun out there, and I'll circle around her until
someone gets me and ends it." Saltario seemed to be seeing something.
"I'm beginning to forget what she looked like. I don't want to forget! I
can't forget her on this planet. The way it was! It was a beautiful
place, perfect! I don't want to forget her!"