News From Elsewhere Read Online Free PDF Page B

liquer brandy. The brandy was a special bottle that  had been optimistically saved for a celebration banquet. As he sipped it luxuriously, Captain Mauris thought of all the guests who were unable to attend. Gravely, he included Kobler, Phylo, and all the rest of the Santa Maria’s personnel in the toast: “Absent friends!” Then he took the old corncob pipe from his pocket and lit up. Presently Captain Mauris was feeling almost human.
    He spent the rest of the “day” launching dead bodies into space. Wearing his combination pressure suit, Captain Mauris lugged them one after another through the airlock and gave them a shove. Kobler, Phylo, and the rest went sailing smoothly out into the starry darkness. To each one, Captain Mauris gave a personal farewell, as if he might have been expecting an answer.
    Presently die Santa Maria was surrounded by a slowly dispersing shoal of flying corpses whose presence was suggested only where they blotted out the background of unwinking stars.
    Finally, when all that unwelcome furniture had been jettisoned, the Captain went back to the navigation deck and made the ship accelerate for three seconds on her auxiliary rockets, thus leaving the shoal behind. Having accomplished this disagreeable task, Mauris felt much better.
    But as he clambered into the astrodome for a further check on the unfamiliar star positions, it dawned on him that he had probably looked on a human face for the last time.
    Nine “days” later by the ship’s electrochron, Captain Mauris became convinced that he would not have to wait much longer. The star on the port bow had grown to the size of a penny. Presently it would grow to the size of a football. Presently the Santa Maria and her Captain would reach the end of their journey—in the purification of celestial fire.
    He had already resigned himself calmly to his destiny and was, in truth, a little pleased that Fate had arranged a definite appointment with death for him. It was certainly preferable to drifting aimlessly for months, waiting until the food supply was exhausted, waiting until he went mad or plucked up enough courage to make the appointment on his own initiative.
    The condemned man continued to eat hearty break fasts, and settled down to enjoy in Ms last days what he had never yet experienced throughout his life—a period of sustained leisure. A period of rest and tranquility, interrupted by nothing more serious than the push-button operations necessary for providing first-class meals.
    Captain Mauris spent more and more time in the ship’s library, projecting the microfilms of books he had never had the time to read. Intuitively he went to the old writers, ranging at a leisurely pace through fiction and nonfiction, from Plato to Dickens, from Homer to H.G. Wells. He also browsed through the Bible, and amused himself by translating its profound convictions into the sort of language that Kobler used.
    By die eighteenth day Captain Mauris was confused, disappointed, excited, and afraid. The now brilliantly blinding sun had changed its position from port bow to starboard quarter. Its place on the port bow had been taken by what seemed to be a green marble. Captain Mauris knew it was not another sun, and tried desperately not to allow himself to hope that it might be a habitable planet. Better to die by falling into an alien sun than survive, a castaway, on an unknown planet in some alien galaxy. . . . His reason said so, but his emotions remained unconvinced.
    It was then, for no reason at all, that he suddenly remembered the voice and the dreamlike laughter he had experienced in the total darkness, the absolute stillness of the galactic jump.
    And Captain Mauris had a premonition.
    On the twenty-fifth day the possibility became a certainty. The Santa Maria was falling toward the green planet. There remained the problem of choice between two courses of action. Captain Mauris could either allow the ship to