Second Chance Read Online Free PDF Page A

“floor,” swinging the hatch shut behind me as required by protocol. Being just one door away from vacuum made it all feel more real, somehow; it put me more in touch with the fact that I was really in space.
    But that wasn’t the main reason I liked it there.
    The window in the center of the outer hatch was round, twenty centimeters in diameter—I could easily span it with one hand—and already slightly scratched and smeared with fingerprints. And the view was nothing special, to be honest... spectacular ringed Balzac was farther from our current location than Saturn was from Earth at closest approach, the other planets even farther away. In fact, I couldn’t see anything through the window but a few bright dots, and those only if I pressed my face to the window and shielded my eyes with my hands. I didn’t know which of those dots were planets; I hadn’t tried to correlate the view with the orbital charts. But the sun whose rays warmed my skin through that window was not the Sun—it was Tau Ceti.
    I was one of only seven human beings ever to bathe in the light of another star.
    I floated there for a while, the window’s plastic cold against my forehead, soaking in that alien sunlight. But then my reverie was interrupted by a muffled curse. It was followed by another curse, this one loud enough to be clearly audible through the plastic of the inner airlock door.
    Curious, I returned to the habitation bay, where I saw light leaking around the door to Matt’s room. That door was also the source of a continuing muttering and scuffling sound. “Are you okay in there?” I called.
    Matt’s voice was curiously muffled. “Actually, I’d appreciate it if you’d give me a hand...”
    I’d never been in Matt’s personal space before. The walls were bright with photographs of Matt and his wife, and various other trim, muscular people, on mountains, rock walls, trails, and beaches. He must have used his entire paper allowance for the first month on them. Matt himself floated awkwardly in one corner, holding his left bicep firmly with his right hand.
    The hand was wet with blood. Small drops of blood floated all around it... blood, and something else. Something black.
    “Can you snag me that bottle there?” he said, gesturing with his chin. He was clutching some kind of instrument between his teeth.
    I grabbed the indicated bottle from where it floated near the air vent—the place where all dropped items accumulated—and tossed it to Matt. He caught it with his bloody hand and squirted clear liquid onto his bicep, drawing in his breath with a hiss as he did so. A sharp tang of alcohol hit my nostrils.
    As Matt daubed away the alcohol with a fabric wipe, I saw that the injured bicep bore the outline of a four-leafed clover, cut into the skin and oozing blood. The whole area was stained black with ink.
    “A tattoo ?” I said. “You can’t be serious.”
    “What does it look like?” he replied, and squirted more alcohol onto the cut.
    “But...” I’d never understood why anyone would get a tattoo at all, never mind doing it to himself with a sharpened pair of tweezers. “I don’t get it. There’s nobody here to impress.”
    He inspected the damaged area with a hand mirror, then started rolling a fabric gauze bandage around his arm. “I didn’t do it to impress anyone. I did it for me. Tear me off some of that tape, would you?” I did as he asked, handing him strips of tape one at a time. “Every tat I had, back on Earth, commemorated a significant experience in my life. This one is to remind me how lucky I am to be here. And to remind me who I am.” He patted a plastic covering sheet onto the bandage; a little blood was already seeping through the fabric.
    “And who are you?”
    Matt looked me right in the eye. “I’m me. Me, here, now. Not the man who had three red and gold koi put on his left bicep in Kauai when he was twenty-three. That man was an astrophysicist, and he probably died at the