Death in Transit
By JERRY SOHL
Illustrated by EMSH
There was one, and only one, thing
Clifton could do. Even so, he made
the worst of 100 possible choices!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity Science Fiction, June 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Clifton stood at the bottom of the shaft, his face white, his eyeswide, his stance against the bulkhead that of a man who needed only aslight push to slump to the floor.
"Karen," he murmured. "Karen."
He had been standing there a long time.
He was staring at his dead wife, a heap of broken bones and blood onthe floor. But he was not seeing her—at least not as she was now. Hewas seeing her the way his mind kept bringing her back to him: thewhite evenness of her teeth when she smiled, the fury of her brightblue eyes when she was angry, the way she had uncomplainingly slept onthe wrinkled sheets of the bed he had made when she had been ill tenyears before, and the way they had laughed about that when she remindedhim of it years later. He moved to stand erect, wondering why he shouldhave thought about that at a time like this, and then, as he looked ather again and saw what the fall had done to her, he clenched his handsin anger.
They had said it couldn't happen! But they had been wrong. Man's wisdomwas not infinite after all. All the man-years of thought, all theendless whirring and clicking of the computers and calculators—all ofit had not taken into account what might happen to Karen.
His hands fell open. He knew that actually, they had never been wrong.If he had found her right away, he could have put her back together.He could have utilized the synthesizer for anything really bad, like ashattered bone. The needles of the organic analyzer would have told himwhat else he had to do.
But Karen had been dead for hours when he found her. Too long. Thedamage was irreparable, permanent. She was beyond recall. He mightconceivably have animated her muscles, her glands, got her blood toflowing again. But her brain would have remained a vacuous, inertthing. You had to get reconstruction going in a matter of minutes whenthe brain, the anatomy's most perishable component, was involved. Andin some cases he had known, the memories were never fully restored.
Why couldn't it have been a tumor? A deficiency disease? A nervousbreakdown? Insanity.... There was nothing the medocenter couldn'thandle. Its machines were right there on the ship, ready to beused—but Karen had to fall down the ventilator shaft, opening the doorand walking into it as if it were her bedroom, and falling all the waydown and breaking half the bones in her body.
And he had found her too late. Hours too late.
"Too late," he said, and he nodded his head in agreement. And then hewas engulfed in sudden pity and remorse and a feeling of loss, as ifshe had snatched a vital part of him in her going. And hadn't she?Hadn't she taken her laughter with her, the laughter that brightenedhis days? And the things they had shared.
He glared at her, suddenly angry that she should have done this tohim, and he glared at the shaft and blew out his cheeks and clenchedhis hands again and roared a great cry that echoed deafeningly in thesmallness of the shaft.
And then he shouted obscenities at the ship and the stars and thehundred people who lay as if dead in neat rows in the sleep locker andhe pounded the walls until blood from his hands left impr