Comets by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science fiction; American, Comets, Short Stories (Single Author), Science Fiction, Comets Fiction
ISBN: 9780451141293
Google: 9FioAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 0451141296
Goodreads: 78015
Publisher: Roc
Published: 1986-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

"Do you have the measles?"

"No. Silly. You know."

"But they run all the way... down to... here."

"Ye-- Ah."

A pause, and

"Why don't you lie back down? Or are you... through?"

"No. Little nervous--"

"About us? I mean."

"Uh. Not likely. It has happened before, you understand."

"Well."

"No, relax."

"I wonder what Elias was planning to do?"

"Him? Nothing. He can't get his shoes on without a guide book."

"His speeches are--"

"A cataract of lies and omissions, as some poet said."

"I think he--"

"Let's see, this arm goes here; a leg there, and..."

For a while he wandered, corridors moving like slow glaciers, passing the viewing rooms; on impulse, he paused to watch. The mammoth 3D mounted on one wall had been scrounged out of spare parts several years after the Zephyr expedition was launched. Paul had spent hours here, watching Neptune sweep Inajestically by, or simply studying the stars. Now he looked instead at the void, letting its black hands clutch at his stilled senses.

This was the only way to see the void without going out in a shuttle. The life of the expedition depended upon the layer of methane and ammonia snow that sealed them into the rock. The snow itself was covered with a flexible plastaform coat that prevented most gas from escaping. The society inside the rock core melted the snow for raw materials--nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen--that'fed the hydroponics farms and fueled the fusion reactors. We live off the west wind itself, Paul thought. And the void feeds on us.

Paul turned to the image of Earth. Thick white clouds; past them, brilliant blue seas and glimpses of brown, barren land. Seeing it, he failed to understand. It was lovely, beautiful, shining with human life. But the 3D tapes he'd seen: people jammed together like dogs in a kennel; food rationed; wars and riots; shades of bleak, shades of gray.

Most of the people in the 3D room were first generation, and they looked at the screen with something that approached hunger. Paul watched them stare. Then he left.

Remembering corners and turns in the warren men had carved from rock. Places where he'd studied--friends made and lost-- sweaty games with a first young girl. And hadn't she trembled when he'd touched her? And hadn't he trembled, too?

And here--yes--where Randall had faced down a mob of rebels, angry over the numbing hours required when the hydroponics tanks went sour.

The old days. As he lightly walked the corridors, he remembered them.

He rapped at the door and heard Randall's crisp voice answer.

He stepped into the large room (reproductions of the twisted hells of Bosch; green wallpaper with red tulips) and closed the door quietly behind him.

Randall was seated at a large desk, speaking slowly into a hooded microphone. When he finished, he turned, smiling, mass of white hair, eyebrows like fur, and said, "I think I remember you. Aren't you my grandson?"

Paul nodded carefully, grin concealed, and said, "And aren't you some sort of wheel?"

Randall laughed. "Where you been keeping yourself lately?"

"Here and there," said Paul. "You know how it is."

"I know," Randall said.

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