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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Death of a Spaceman, by Walter M. Miller
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Death of a Spaceman
+
+Author: Walter M. Miller
+
+Illustrator: Ernest Schroeder
+
+Release Date: August 9, 2009 [EBook #29643]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEATH OF A SPACEMAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Illustrator: Ernest Schroeder]
+
+
+ DEATH
+    OF A
+      SPACEMAN
+
+BY WALTER M. MILLER, JR.
+
+
+    _The manner in which a man has lived is often the key to the way he
+    will die. Take old man Donegal, for example. Most of his adult life
+    was spent in digging a hole through space to learn what was on the
+    other side. Would he go out the same way?_
+
+
+Old Donegal was dying. They had all known it was coming, and they
+watched it come--his haggard wife, his daughter, and now his grandson,
+home on emergency leave from the pre-astronautics academy. Old Donegal
+knew it too, and had known it from the beginning, when he had begun to
+lose control of his legs and was forced to walk with a cane. But most of
+the time, he pretended to let them keep the secret they shared with the
+doctors--that the operations had all been failures, and that the cancer
+that fed at his spine would gnaw its way brainward until the paralysis
+engulfed vital organs, and then Old Donegal would cease to be. It would
+be cruel to let them know that he knew. Once, weeks ago, he had joked
+about the approaching shadows.
+
+"Buy the plot back where people won't walk over it, Martha," he said.
+"Get it way back under the cedars--next to the fence. There aren't many
+graves back there yet. I want to be alone."
+
+"Don't _talk_ that way, Donny!" his wife had choked. "You're not dying."
+
+His eyes twinkled maliciously. "Listen, Martha, I want to be buried
+face-down. I want to be buried with my back to space, understand? Don't
+let them lay me out like a lily."
+
+"Donny, _please_!"
+
+"They oughta face a man the way he's headed," Donegal grunted. "I been
+up--_way_ up. Now I'm going straight down."
+
+Martha had fled from the room in tears. He had never done it again,
+except to the interns and nurses, who, while they insisted that he was
+going to get well, didn't mind joking with him about it.
+
+Martha can bear my death, he thought, can bear pre-knowledge of it. But
+she couldn't bear thinking that he might take it calmly. If he accepted
+death gracefully, it would be like deliberately leaving her, and Old
+Donegal had decided to help her believe whatever would be comforting to
+her in such a troublesome moment.
+
+"When'll they let me out of this bed again?" he complained.
+
+"Be patient, Donny," she sighed. "It won't be long. You'll be up and
+around before you know it."
+
+"Back on the moon-run, maybe?" he offered. "Listen, Martha, I been
+planet-bound too long. I'm not too old for the moon-run, am I?
+Sixty-three's not so old."
+
+That had been carrying things too far. She knew he was hoaxing, and
+dabbed at her eyes again. The dead must humor the mourners, he thought,
+and the sick must comfort the visitors. It was always so.
+
+But it was harder, now that the end was near. His eyes were hazy, and
+his thoughts unclear. He could move his arms a little, clumsily, but
+feeling was gone from them. The rest of his body was lost to him.
+Sometimes he seemed to feel his stomach and his hips, but the sensation
+was mostly an illusion offered by higher nervous centers, like the
+"ghost-arm" that an amputee continues to feel. The wires were down, and
+he was cut off from himself.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He lay wheezing on the hospital bed, in his own room, in his own rented
+flat. Gaunt and unshaven, gray as winter twilight, he lay staring at the
+white net curtains that billowed gently in the breeze from the open
+window. There was no sound in the room but the sound of breathing and
+the loud ticking of an alarm clock. Occasionally he heard a chair
+scraping on the stone terrace next door, and the low mutter of voices,
+sometimes laughter, as the servants of the Keith mansion arranged the
+terrace for late afternoon guests.
+
+With considerable effort, he rolled his head toward Martha who sat
+beside the bed, pinch-faced and weary.
+
+"You ought to get some sleep," he said.
+
+"I slept yesterday. Don't talk, Donny. It tires you."
+
+"You ought to get more sleep. You never sleep enough. Are you afraid
+I'll get up and run away if you go to sleep for a while?"
+
+She managed a brittle smile. "There'll be plenty of time for sleep
+when ... when you're well again." The brittle smile fled and she
+swallowed hard, like swallowing a fish-bone. He glanced down, and
+noticed that she was squeezing his hand spasmodically.
+
+There wasn't much left of the hand, he thought. Bones and ugly
+tight-stretched hide spotted with brown. Bulging knuckles with yellow
+cigaret stains. My hand. He tried to tighten it, tried to squeeze
+Martha's thin one in return. He watched it open and contract a little,
+but it was like operating a remote-control mechanism. Goodbye, hand,
+you're leaving me the way my legs did, he told it. I'll see you again in
+hell. How hammy can you get, Old Donegal? You maudlin ass.
+
+"Requiescat," he muttered over the hand, and let it lie in peace.
+
+Perhaps she heard him. "Donny," she whispered, leaning closer, "won't
+you let me call the priest now? Please."
+
+He rattled a sigh and rolled his head toward the window again. "Are the
+Keiths having a party today?" he asked. "Sounds like they're moving
+chairs out on the terrace."
+
+"Please, Donny, the priest?"
+
+He let his head roll aside and closed his eyes, as if asleep. The bed
+shook slightly as she quickly caught at his wrist to feel for a pulse.
+
+"If I'm not dying, I don't need a priest," he said sleepily.
+
+"That's not right," she scolded softly. "You know that's not right,
+Donny. You know better."
+
+Maybe I'm being too rough on her? he wondered. He hadn't minded getting
+baptized her way, and married her way, and occasionally priest-handled
+the way she wanted him to when he was home from a space-run, but when it
+came to dying, Old Donegal wanted to do it his own way.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He opened his eyes at the sound of a bench being dragged across the
+stone terrace. "Martha, what kind of a party are the Keiths having
+today?"
+
+"I wouldn't know," she said stiffly. "You'd think they'd have a little
+more respect. You'd think they'd put it off a few days."
+
+"Until--?"
+
+"Until you feel better."
+
+"I feel fine, Martha. I like parties. I'm glad they're having one. Pour
+me a drink, will you? I can't reach the bottle anymore."
+
+"It's empty."
+
+"No, it isn't, Martha, it's still a quarter full. I know. I've been
+watching it."
+
+"You shouldn't have it, Donny. Please don't."
+
+"But this is a party, Martha. Besides, the doctor says I can have
+whatever I want. Whatever I want, you hear? That means I'm getting well,
+doesn't it?"
+
+"Sure, Donny, sure. Getting well."
+
+"The whiskey, Martha. Just a finger in a tumbler, no more. I want to
+feel like it's a party."
+
+Her throat was rigid as she poured it. She helped him get the tumbler to
+his mouth. The liquor seared his throat, and he gagged a little as the
+fumes clogged his nose. Good whiskey, the best--but he couldn't take it
+any more. He eyed the green stamp on the neck of the bottle on the
+bed-table and grinned. He hadn't had whiskey like that since his
+space-days. Couldn't afford it now, not on a blastman's pension.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He remembered how he and Caid used to smuggle a couple of fifths aboard
+for the moon-run. If they caught you, it meant suspension, but there was
+no harm in it, not for the blastroom men who had nothing much to do from
+the time the ship acquired enough velocity for the long, long coaster
+ride until they started the rockets again for Lunar landing. You could
+drink a fifth, jettison the bottle through the trash lock, and sober up
+before you were needed again. It was the only way to pass the time in
+the cramped cubicle, unless you ruined your eyes trying to read by the
+glow-lamps. Old Donegal chuckled. If he and Caid had stayed on the run,
+Earth would have a ring by now, like Saturn--a ring of Old Granddad
+bottles.
+
+"You said it, Donny-boy," said the misty man by the billowing curtains.
+"Who else knows the gegenschein is broken glass?"
+
+Donegal laughed. Then he wondered what the man was doing there. The man
+was lounging against the window, and his unzipped space rig draped about
+him in an old familiar way. Loose plug-in connections and hose-ends
+dangled about his lean body. He was freckled and grinning.
+
+"Caid," Old Donegal breathed softly.
+
+"What did you say, Donny?" Martha answered.
+
+Old Donegal blinked hard and shook his head. Something let go with a
+soggy snap, and the misty man was gone. I'd better take it easy on the
+whiskey, he thought. You got to wait, Donegal, old lush, until Nora and
+Ken get here. You can't get drunk until they're gone, or you might get
+them mixed up with memories like Caid's.
+
+Car doors slammed in the street below. Martha glanced toward the window.
+
+"Think it's them? I wish they'd get here. I wish they'd hurry."
+
+Martha arose and tiptoed to the window. She peered down toward the
+sidewalk, put on a sharp frown. He heard a distant mutter of voices and
+occasional laughter, with group-footsteps milling about on the sidewalk.
+Martha murmured her disapproval and closed the window.
+
+"Leave it open," he said.
+
+"But the Keiths' guests are starting to come. There'll be such a
+racket." She looked at him hopefully, the way she did when she prompted
+his manners before company came.
+
+Maybe it wasn't decent to listen in on a party when you were dying, he
+thought. But that wasn't the reason. Donegal, your chamber-pressure's
+dropping off. Your brains are in your butt-end, where a spacer's brains
+belong, but your butt-end died last month. She wants the window closed
+for her own sake, not yours.
+
+"Leave it closed," he grunted. "But open it again before the moon-run
+blasts off. I want to listen."
+
+She smiled and nodded, glancing at the clock. "It'll be an hour and a
+half yet. I'll watch the time."
+
+"I hate that clock. I wish you'd throw it out. It's loud."
+
+"It's your medicine-clock, Donny." She came back to sit down at his
+bedside again. She sat in silence. The clock filled the room with its
+clicking pulse.
+
+"What time are they coming?" he asked.
+
+"Nora and Ken? They'll be here soon. Don't fret."
+
+"Why should I fret?" He chuckled. "That boy--he'll be a good spacer,
+won't he, Martha?"
+
+Martha said nothing, fanned at a fly that crawled across his pillow. The
+fly buzzed up in an angry spiral and alighted on the ceiling. Donegal
+watched it for a time. The fly had natural-born space-legs. I know your
+tricks, he told it with a smile, and I learned to walk on the bottomside
+of things before you were a maggot. You stand there with your magnasoles
+hanging to the hull, and the rest of you's in free fall. You jerk a sole
+loose, and your knee flies up to your belly, and reaction spins you
+half-around and near throws your other hip out of joint if you don't jam
+the foot down fast and jerk up the other. It's worse'n trying to run
+through knee-deep mud with snow-shoes, and a man'll go nuts trying to
+keep his arms and legs from taking off in odd directions. I know your
+tricks, fly. But the fly was born with his magnasoles, and he trotted
+across the ceiling like Donegal never could.
+
+"That boy Ken--he ought to make a damn good space-engineer," wheezed the
+old man.
+
+Her silence was long, and he rolled his head toward her again. Her lips
+tight, she stared down at the palm of his hand, unfolded his bony
+fingers, felt the cracked calluses that still welted the shrunken skin,
+calluses worn there by the linings of space gauntlets and the handles of
+fuel valves, and the rungs of get-about ladders during free fall.
+
+"I don't know if I should tell you," she said.
+
+"Tell me what, Martha?"
+
+She looked up slowly, scrutinizing his face. "Ken's changed his mind,
+Nora says. Ken doesn't like the academy. She says he wants to go to
+medical school."
+
+Old Donegal thought it over, nodded absently. "That's fine. Space-medics
+get good pay." He watched her carefully.
+
+She lowered her eyes, rubbed at his calluses again. She shook her head
+slowly. "He doesn't want to go to space."
+
+The clock clicked loudly in the closed room.
+
+"I thought I ought to tell you, so you won't say anything to him about
+it," she added.
+
+Old Donegal looked grayer than before. After a long silence, he rolled
+his head away and looked toward the limp curtains.
+
+"Open the window, Martha," he said.
+
+Her tongue clucked faintly as she started to protest, but she said
+nothing. After frozen seconds, she sighed and went to open it. The
+curtains billowed, and a babble of conversation blew in from the terrace
+of the Keith mansion. With the sound came the occasional brassy discord
+of a musician tuning his instrument. She clutched the window-sash as if
+she wished to slam it closed again.
+
+"Well! Music!" grunted Old Donegal. "That's good. This is some shebang.
+Good whiskey and good music and you." He chuckled, but it choked off
+into a fit of coughing.
+
+"Donny, about Ken--"
+
+"No matter, Martha," he said hastily. "Space-medic's pay is good."
+
+"But, Donny--" She turned from the window, stared at him briefly, then
+said, "Sure, Donny, sure," and came back to sit down by his bed.
+
+He smiled at her affectionately. She was a man's woman, was
+Martha--always had been, still was. He had married her the year he had
+gone to space--a lissome, wistful, old-fashioned lass, with big violet
+eyes and gentle hands and gentle thoughts--and she had never complained
+about the long and lonely weeks between blast-off and glide-down, when
+most spacers' wives listened to the psychiatrists and soap-operas and
+soon developed the symptoms that were expected of them, either because
+the symptoms were _chic_, or because they felt they should do something
+to earn the pity that was extended to them. "It's not so bad," Martha
+had assured him. "The house keeps me busy till Nora's home from school,
+and then there's a flock of kids around till dinner. Nights are a little
+empty, but if there's a moon, I can always go out on the porch and look
+at it and know where you are. And Nora gets out the telescope you built
+her, and we make a game of it. 'Seeing if Daddy's still at the office,'
+she calls it."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Those were the days," he muttered.
+
+"What, Donny?"
+
+"Do you remember that Steve Farran song?"
+
+She paused, frowning thoughtfully. There were a lot of Steve Farran
+songs, but after a moment she picked the right one, and sang it
+softly ...
+
+    "O moon whereo'er the clouds fly,
+    Beyond the willow tree,
+    There is a ramblin' space guy
+    I wish you'd save for me.
+
+    "_Mare Tranquillitatis_,
+    O dark and tranquil sea,
+    Until he drops from heaven,
+    Rest him there with thee ..."
+
+Her voice cracked, and she laughed. Old Donegal chuckled weakly.
+
+"Fried mush," he said. "That one made the cats wilt their ears and wail
+at the moon.
+
+"I feel real crazy," he added. "Hand me the king kong, fluff-muff."
+
+"Keep cool, Daddy-O, you've had enough." Martha reddened and patted his
+arm, looking pleased. Neither of them had talked that way, even in the
+old days, but the out-dated slang brought back memories--school parties,
+dances at the Rocketport Club, the early years of the war when Donegal
+had jockeyed an R-43 fighter in the close-space assaults against the
+Soviet satellite project. The memories were good.
+
+A brassy blare of modern "slide" arose suddenly from the Keith terrace
+as the small orchestra launched into its first number. Martha caught an
+angry breath and started toward the window.
+
+"Leave it," he said. "It's a party. Whiskey, Martha. Please--just a
+small one."
+
+She gave him a hurtful glance.
+
+"Whiskey. Then you can call the priest."
+
+"Donny, it's not right. You know it's not right--to bargain for such as
+that."
+
+"All right. Whiskey. Forget the priest."
+
+She poured it for him, and helped him get it down, and then went out to
+make the phone-call. Old Donegal lay shuddering over the whiskey taste
+and savoring the burn in his throat. Jesus, but it was good.
+
+You old bastard, he thought, you got no right to enjoy life when
+nine-tenths of you is dead already, and the rest is foggy as a thermal
+dust-rise on the lunar maria at hell-dawn. But it wasn't a bad way to
+die. It ate your consciousness away from the feet up; it gnawed away the
+Present, but it let you keep the Past, until everything faded and
+blended. Maybe that's what Eternity was, he thought--one man's
+subjective Past, all wrapped up and packaged for shipment, a single
+space-time entity, a one-man microcosm of memories, when nothing else
+remains.
+
+"If I've got a soul, I made it myself," he told the gray nun at the foot
+of his bed.
+
+The nun held out a pie pan, rattled a few coins in it. "Contribute to
+the Radiation Victims' Relief?" the nun purred softly.
+
+"I know you," he said. "You're my conscience. You hang around the
+officers' mess, and when we get back from a sortie, you make us pay for
+the damage we did. But that was forty years ago."
+
+The nun smiled, and her luminous eyes were on him softly. "Mother of
+God!" he breathed, and reached for the whiskey. His arm obeyed. The last
+drink had done him good. He had to watch his hand to see where it was
+going, and squeezed the neck until his fingers whitened so that he knew
+that he had it, but he got it off the table and onto his chest, and he
+got the cork out with his teeth. He had a long pull at the bottle, and
+it made his eyes water and his hands grow weak. But he got it back to
+the table without spilling a bit, and he was proud of himself.
+
+The room was spinning like the cabin of a gyro-gravved ship. By the time
+he wrestled it to a standstill, the nun was gone. The blare of music
+from the Keith terrace was louder, and laughing voices blended with it.
+Chairs scraping and glasses rattling. A fine party, Keith, I'm glad you
+picked today. This shebang would be the younger Keith's affair. Ronald
+Tonwyler Keith, III, scion of Orbital Engineering and Construction
+Company--builders of the moon-shuttle ships that made the run from the
+satellite station to Luna and back.
+
+It's good to have such important neighbors, he thought. He wished he had
+been able to meet them while he was still up and about. But the Keiths'
+place was walled-in, and when a Keith came out, he charged out in a
+limousine with a chauffeur at the wheel, and the iron gate closed again.
+The Keiths built the wall when the surrounding neighborhood began to
+grow shabby with age. It had once been the best of neighborhoods, but
+that was before Old Donegal lived in it. Now it consisted of sooty old
+houses and rented flats, and the Keith place was really not a part of it
+anymore. Nevertheless, it was really something when a pensioned blastman
+could say, "I live out close to the Keiths--you know, the _Ronald_
+Keiths." At least, that's what Martha always told him.
+
+The music was so loud that he never heard the doorbell ring, but when a
+lull came, he heard Nora's voice downstairs, and listened hopefully for
+Ken's. But when they came up, the boy was not with them.
+
+"Hello, skinny-britches," he greeted his daughter.
+
+Nora grinned and came over to kiss him. Her hair dangled about his face,
+and he noticed that it was blacker than usual, with the gray streaks
+gone from it again.
+
+"You smell good," he said.
+
+"You don't, Pops. You smell like a sot. Naughty!"
+
+"Where's Ken?"
+
+She moistened her lips nervously and looked away. "He couldn't come. He
+had to take a driver's lesson. He really couldn't help it. If he didn't
+go, he'd lose his turn, and then he wouldn't finish before he goes back
+to the academy." She looked at him apologetically.
+
+"It's all right, Nora."
+
+"If he missed it, he wouldn't get his copter license until summer."
+
+"It's okay. Copters! Hell, the boy should be in jets by now!"
+
+Several breaths passed in silence. She gazed absently toward the window
+and shook her head. "No jets, Pop. Not for Ken."
+
+He glowered at her. "Listen! How'll he get into space? He's got to get
+his jet licenses first. Can't get in rockets without 'em."
+
+Nora shot a quick glance at her mother. Martha rolled her eyes as if
+sighing patiently. Nora went to the window to stare down toward the
+Keith terrace. She tucked a cigaret between scarlet lips, lit it, blew
+nervous smoke against the pane.
+
+"Mom, can't you call them and have that racket stopped?"
+
+"Donny says he likes it."
+
+Nora's eyes flitted over the scene below. "Female butterflies and
+puppy-dogs in sport jackets. And the cadets." She snorted. "Cadets!
+Imagine Ron Keith the Third ever going to space. The old man buys his
+way into the academy, and they throw a brawl as if Ronny passed the
+Compets."
+
+"Maybe he did," growled Old Donegal.
+
+"Hah!"
+
+"They live in a different world, I guess," Martha sighed.
+
+"If it weren't for men like Pops, they'd never've made their fortune."
+
+"I like the music, I tell you," grumbled the old man.
+
+"I'm half-a-mind to go over there and tell them off," Nora murmured.
+
+"Let them alone. Just so they'll stop the racket for blast-away."
+
+"Look at them!--polite little pattern-cuts, all alike. They take
+pre-space, because it's the thing to do. Then they quit before the
+pay-off comes."
+
+"How do you know they'll quit?"
+
+"That party--I bet it cost six months' pay, spacer's pay," she went on,
+ignoring him. "And what do real spacers get? Oley gets killed, and Pop's
+pension wouldn't feed the Keiths' cat."
+
+"You don't understand, girl."
+
+"I lost Oley. I understand enough."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He watched her silently for a moment, then closed his eyes. It was no
+good trying to explain, no good trying to tell her the dough didn't mean
+a damn thing. She'd been a spacer's wife, and that was bad enough, but
+now she was a spacer's widow. And Oley? Oley's tomb revolved around the
+sun in an eccentric orbit that spun-in close to Mercury, then reached
+out into the asteroid belt, once every 725 days. When it came within
+rocket radius of Earth, it whizzed past at close to fifteen miles a
+second.
+
+You don't rescue a ship like that, skinny-britches, my darling daughter.
+Nor do you salvage it after the crew stops screaming for help. If you
+use enough fuel to catch it, you won't get back. You just leave such a
+ship there forever, like an asteroid, and it's a damn shame about the
+men trapped aboard. Heroes all, no doubt--but the smallness of the
+widow's monthly check failed to confirm the heroism, and Nora was bitter
+about the price of Oley's memory, perhaps.
+
+Ouch! Old Donegal, you know she's not like that. It's just that she
+can't understand about space. You ought to make her understand.
+
+But did he really understand himself? You ride hot in a roaring
+blastroom, hands tense on the mixer controls and the pumps, eyes glued
+to instruments, body sucked down in a four-gravity thrust, and wait for
+the command to choke it off. Then you float free and weightless in a
+long nightmare as the beast coasts moonward, a flung javelin.
+
+The "romance" of space--drivel written in the old days. When you're not
+blasting, you float in a cramped hotbox, crawl through dirty mazes of
+greasy pipe and cable to tighten a lug, scratch your arms and bark your
+shins, get sick and choked up because no gravity helps your gullet get
+the food down. Liquid is worse, but you gag your whiskey down because
+you have to.
+
+Stars?--you see stars by squinting through a viewing lens, and it's like
+a photo-transparency, and if you aren't careful, you'll get an eyeful of
+Old Blinder and back off with a punch-drunk retina.
+
+Adventure?--unless the skipper calls for course-correction, you float
+around in the blast-cubicle with damn little to do between blast-away
+and moon-down, except sweat out the omniscient accident statistics. If
+the beast blows up or gets gutted in space, a statistic had your name
+on it, that's all, and there's no fighting back. You stay outwardly sane
+because you're a hog for punishment; if you weren't, you'd never get
+past the psychologists.
+
+"Did you like horror movies when you were a kid?" asked the psych. And
+you'd damn well better answer "yes," if you want to go to space.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tell her, old man, you're her pop. Tell her why it's worth it, if you
+know. You jail yourself in a coffin-size cubicle, and a crazy beast
+thunders berserk for uncontrollable seconds, and then you soar in
+ominous silence for the long, long hours. Grow sweaty, filthy, sick,
+miserable, idle--somewhere out in Big Empty, where Man's got no business
+except the trouble he always makes for himself wherever he goes. Tell
+her why it's worth it, for pay less than a good bricklayer's. Tell her
+why Oley would do it again.
+
+"It's a sucker's run, Nora," he said. "You go looking for kicks, but the
+only kicks you get to keep is what Oley got. God knows why--but it's
+worth it."
+
+Nora said nothing. He opened his eyes slowly. Nora was gone. Had she
+been there at all?
+
+He blinked around at the fuzzy room, and dissolved the shifting shadows
+that sometimes emerged as old friendly faces, grinning at him. He found
+Martha.
+
+"You went to sleep," said Martha. "She had to go. Kennie called. He'll
+be over later, if you're not too tired."
+
+"I'm not tired. I'm all head. There's nothing much to get tired."
+
+"I love you, Old Donegal."
+
+"Hold my hand again."
+
+"I'm holding it, old man."
+
+"Then hold me where I can feel it."
+
+She slid a thin arm under his neck, and bent over his face to kiss him.
+She was crying a little, and he was glad she could do it now without
+fleeing the room.
+
+"Can I talk about dying now?" he wondered aloud.
+
+She pinched her lips together and shook her head.
+
+"I lie to myself, Martha. You know how much I lie to myself?"
+
+She nodded slowly and stroked his gray temples.
+
+"I lie to myself about Ken, and about dying. If Ken turned spacer, I
+wouldn't die--that's what I told myself. You know?"
+
+She shook her head. "Don't talk, Donny, please."
+
+"A man makes his own soul, Martha."
+
+"That's not true. You shouldn't say things like that."
+
+"A man makes his own soul, but it dies with him, unless he can pour it
+into his kids and his grandchildren before he goes. I lied to myself.
+Ken's a yellow-belly. Nora made him one, and the boots won't fit."
+
+"Don't, Donny. You'll excite yourself again."
+
+"I was going to give him the boots--the over-boots with magnasoles. But
+they won't fit him. They won't ever fit him. He's a lily-livered
+lap-dog, and he whines. Bring me my boots, woman."
+
+"Donny!"
+
+"The boots, they're in my locker in the attic. I want them."
+
+"What on earth!"
+
+"Bring me my goddam space boots and put them on my feet. I'm going to
+wear them."
+
+"You can't; the priest's coming."
+
+"Well, get them anyway. What time is it? You didn't let me sleep through
+the moon-run blast, did you?"
+
+She shook her head. "It's half an hour yet ... I'll get the boots if you
+promise not to make me put them on you."
+
+"I want them on."
+
+"You can't, until Father Paul's finished."
+
+"Do I have to get my feet buttered?"
+
+She sighed. "I wish you wouldn't say things like that. I wish you
+wouldn't, Donny. It's sacrilege, you know it is."
+
+"All right--'anointed'," he corrected wearily.
+
+"Yes, you do."
+
+"The boots, woman, the boots."
+
+She went to get them. While she was gone, the doorbell rang, and he
+heard her quick footsteps on the stairs, and then Father Paul's voice
+asking about the patient. Old Donegal groaned inwardly. After the
+priest, the doctor would come, at the usual time, to see if he were dead
+yet. The doctor had let him come home from the hospital to die, and the
+doctor was getting impatient. Why don't they let me alone? he growled.
+Why don't they let me handle it in my own way, and stop making a fuss
+over it? I can die and do a good job of it without a lot of outside
+interference, and I wish they'd quit picking at me with syringes and
+sacraments and enemas. All he wanted was a chance to listen to the
+orchestra on the Keith terrace, to drink the rest of his whiskey, and to
+hear the beast blast-away for the satellite on the first lap of the run
+to Luna.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It's going to be my last day, he thought. My eyes are going fuzzy, and I
+can't breathe right, and the throbbing's hurting my head. Whether he
+lived through the night wouldn't matter, because delirium was coming
+over him, and then there would be the coma, and the symbolic fight to
+keep him pumping and panting. I'd rather die tonight and get it over
+with, he thought, but they probably won't let me go.
+
+He heard their voices coming up the stairs ...
+
+"Nora tried to get them to stop it, Father, but she couldn't get in to
+see anybody but the butler. He told her he'd tell Mrs. Keith, but
+nothing happened. It's just as loud as before."
+
+"Well, as long as Donny doesn't mind--"
+
+"He just says that. You know how he is."
+
+"What're they celebrating, Martha?"
+
+"Young Ronald's leaving--for pre-space training. It's a going-away
+affair." They paused in the doorway. The small priest smiled in at
+Donegal and nodded. He set his black bag on the floor inside, winked
+solemnly at the patient.
+
+"I'll leave you two alone," said Martha. She closed the door and her
+footsteps wandered off down the hall.
+
+Donegal and the young priest eyed each other warily.
+
+"You look like hell, Donegal," the padre offered jovially. "Feeling
+nasty?"
+
+"Skip the small talk. Let's get this routine over with."
+
+The priest humphed thoughtfully, sauntered across to the bed, gazed down
+at the old man disinterestedly. "What's the matter? Don't want the
+'routine'? Rather play it tough?"
+
+"What's the difference?" he growled. "Hurry up and get out. I want to
+hear the beast blast off."
+
+"You won't be able to," said the priest, glancing at the window, now
+closed again. "That's quite a racket next door."
+
+"They'd better stop for it. They'd better quiet down for it. They'll
+have to turn it off for five minutes or so."
+
+"Maybe they won't."
+
+It was a new idea, and it frightened him. He liked the music, and the
+party's gaiety, the nearness of youth and good times--but it hadn't
+occurred to him that it wouldn't stop so he could hear the beast.
+
+"Don't get upset, Donegal. You know what a blast-off sounds like."
+
+"But it's the last one. The last time. I want to hear."
+
+"How do you know it's the last time?"
+
+"Hell, don't I know when I'm kicking off?"
+
+"Maybe, maybe not. It's hardly your decision."
+
+"It's not, eh?" Old Donegal fumed. "Well, bigawd you'd think it wasn't.
+You'd think it was Martha's and yours and that damfool medic's. You'd
+think I got no say-so. Who's doing it anyway?"
+
+"I would guess," Father Paul grunted sourly, "that Providence might
+appreciate His fair share of the credit."
+
+Old Donegal made a surly noise and hunched his head back into the pillow
+to glower.
+
+"You want me?" the priest asked. "Or is this just a case of wifely
+conscience?"
+
+"What's the difference? Give me the business and scram."
+
+"No soap. Do you want the sacrament, or are you just being kind to your
+wife? If it's for Martha, I'll go _now_."
+
+Old Donegal glared at him for a time, then wilted. The priest brought
+his bag to the bedside.
+
+"Bless me, father, for I have sinned."
+
+"Bless you, son."
+
+"I accuse myself ..."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Tension, anger, helplessness--they had piled up on him, and now he was
+feeling the after-effects. Vertigo, nausea, and the black confetti--a
+bad spell. The whiskey--if he could only reach the whiskey. Then he
+remembered he was receiving a Sacrament, and struggled to get on with
+it. Tell him, old man, tell him of your various rottennesses and vile
+transgressions, if you can remember some. A sin is whatever you're sorry
+for, maybe. But Old Donegal, you're sorry for the wrong things, and this
+young jesuitical gadget wouldn't like listening to it. I'm sorry I
+didn't get it instead of Oley, and I'm sorry I fought in the war, and
+I'm sorry I can't get out of this bed and take a belt to my daughter's
+backside for making a puny whelp out of Ken, and I'm sorry I gave Martha
+such a rough time all these years--and wound up dying in a cheap flat,
+instead of giving her things like the Keiths had. I wish I had been a
+sharpster, contractor, or thief ... instead of a common laboring spacer,
+whose species lost its glamor after the war.
+
+Listen, old man, you made your soul yourself, and it's yours. This young
+dispenser of oils, substances, and mysteries wishes only to help you
+scrape off the rough edges and gouge out the bad spots. He will not
+steal it, nor distort it with his supernatural chisels, nor make fun of
+it. He can take nothing away, but only cauterize and neutralize, he
+says, so why not let him try? Tell him the rotten messes.
+
+"Are you finished, my son?"
+
+Old Donegal nodded wearily, and said what he was asked to say, and heard
+the soft mutter of Latin that washed him inside and behind his ghostly
+ears ... _ego te absolvo in Nomine Patris_ ... and he accepted the rest
+of it lying quietly in the candlelight and the red glow of the sunset
+through the window, while the priest anointed him and gave him bread,
+and read the words of the soul in greeting its spouse: "I was asleep,
+but my heart waked; it is the voice of my beloved calling: come to me my
+love, my dove, my undefiled ..." and from beyond the closed window came
+the sarcastic wail of a clarinet painting hot slides against a rhythmic
+background.
+
+It wasn't so bad, Old Donegal thought when the priest was done. He felt
+like a schoolboy in a starched shirt on Sunday morning, and it wasn't a
+bad feeling, though it left him weak.
+
+The priest opened the window for him again, and repacked his bag. "Ten
+minutes till blast-off," he said. "I'll see what I can do about the
+racket next door."
+
+When he was gone, Martha came back in, and he looked at her face and was
+glad. She was smiling when she kissed him, and she looked less tired.
+
+"Is it all right for me to die now?" he grunted.
+
+"Donny, don't start that again."
+
+"Where's the boots? You promised to bring them?"
+
+"They're in the hall. Donny, you don't want them."
+
+"I want them, and I want a drink of whiskey, and I want to hear them
+fire the beast." He said it slow and hard, and he left no room for
+argument.
+
+When she had got the huge boots over his shrunken feet, the magnasoles
+clanged against the iron bedframe and clung there, and she rolled him up
+so that he could look at them, and Old Donegal chuckled inside. He felt
+warm and clean and pleasantly dizzy.
+
+"The whiskey, Martha, and for God's sake, make them stop the noise till
+after the firing. Please!"
+
+She went to the window and looked out for a long time. Then she came
+back and poured him an insignificant drink.
+
+"Well?"
+
+"I don't know," she said. "I saw Father Paul on the terrace, talking to
+somebody."
+
+"Is it time?"
+
+She glanced at the clock, looked at him doubtfully, and nodded. "Nearly
+time."
+
+The orchestra finished a number, but the babble of laughing voices
+continued. Old Donegal sagged. "They won't do it. They're the Keiths,
+Martha. Why should I ruin their party?"
+
+She turned to stare at him, slowly shook her head. He heard someone
+shouting, but then a trumpet started softly, introducing a new number.
+Martha sucked in a hurt breath, pressed her hands together, and hurried
+from the room.
+
+"It's too late," he said after her.
+
+Her footsteps stopped on the stairs. The trumpet was alone. Donegal
+listened; and there was no babble of voices, and the rest of the
+orchestra was silent. Only the trumpet sang--and it puzzled him, hearing
+the same slow bugle-notes of the call played at the lowering of the
+colors.
+
+The trumpet stopped suddenly. Then he knew it had been for him.
+
+A brief hush--then thunder came from the blast-station two miles to the
+west. First the low reverberation, rattling the windows, then the rising
+growl as the sleek beast knifed skyward on a column of blue-white hell.
+It grew and grew until it drowned the distant traffic sounds and
+dominated the silence outside.
+
+_Quit crying, you old fool, you maudlin ass ..._
+
+"My boots," he whispered, "my boots ... please ..."
+
+"You've got them on, Donny."
+
+He sank quietly then. He closed his eyes and let his heart go up with
+the beast, and he sank into the gravity padding of the blastroom, and
+Caid was with him, and Oley. And when Ronald Keith, III, instructed the
+orchestra to play Blastroom Man, after the beast's rumble had waned, Old
+Donegal was on his last moon-run, and he was grinning. He'd had a good
+day.
+
+Martha went to the window to stare out at the thin black trail that
+curled starward above the blast-station through the twilight sky. Guests
+on the terrace were watching it too.
+
+The doorbell rang. That would be Ken, too late. She closed the window
+against the chill breeze, and went back to the bed. The boots, the
+heavy, clumsy boots--they clung to the bedframe, with his feet half out
+of them. She took them off gently and set them out of company's sight.
+Then she went to answer the door.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+    This etext was produced from _Amazing Stories_ March 1954. Extensive
+    research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on
+    this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical
+    errors have been corrected without note.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Death of a Spaceman, by Walter M. Miller
+
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