1 files changed, 218 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/78725-0.txt b/78725-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..08bd430
--- /dev/null
+++ b/78725-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,218 @@
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78725 ***
+
+
+
+
+                                Incident
+
+                          by Thomas J. O’Hara
+
+
+
+
+  _A prize-winning story emanating from a college course eminently
+successful and pioneering will, we are sure, be of paramount interest
+to our readers. The idea was happily suggested and guided by our
+book critic, Mr. Robert Frazier and by another editor, Mr. Samuel
+Moskowitz, who conduct in able association the SCIENCE FANTASY WRITERS'
+WORKSHOP at the College of the City of New York (School of General
+Studies, Extension Division, Fall-Winter Semester recently concluded).
+Mr. Frazier and Mr. Moskowitz made a careful selection of the most
+promising stories submitted by their students and the editors of
+FANTASTIC UNIVERSE acted in a further advisory capacity in deciding on
+a winning entry to be published in our May issue. We think you'll agree
+that Thomas O'Hara's fine story was a most felicitous choice._
+
+
+  =A floating coffin was the ship, its lone survivor specter-gaunt and
+adrift in a pitiless universe.=
+
+
+
+
+He was, now, the last one left alive.
+
+The captain had gone first, quietly and without preparation.
+
+There had been no hint of the plague’s coming--no slightest premonition
+of death.
+
+There had been only the briefest of preliminaries: the sudden, burning
+fever; the quick decay of flesh and the bright-hued, bursting sores.
+Then had come the terrible vertigo and the brief mindless interval
+before the agonizing end.
+
+The next two had gone a little easier.
+
+The second mate had simply not awakened one morning, and the third
+victim, the engineer who guarded and supervised the workings of the
+great uranium-fission chambers that drove the mighty star-ship, had
+noticed at first only a mounting vertigo which was swiftly followed by
+a fever which brought a bright flush to his cheeks.
+
+Reeling, he had clutched at the rail guarding the edge of the
+power-machines, then, before he could sound an alarm or cry out for
+help, a sudden fatal spasm convulsed him. With a soundless shriek he
+plunged headlong into the mass of throbbing machinery, and burning,
+radio-active material.
+
+A moment later, like a great burst of flame, his remains dissolved into
+a million tiny, glowing fragments that flashed from the great exhaust
+tubes to a final end in the cold wastes of space. Like a glowing
+nimbus, his final, mortal atoms spun round the ship--a halo of radiant
+death cleansed and purified by the absolute-zero cold and the burning
+heat of energy-breakdown.
+
+The fourth victim was wiser by far--he killed himself before he became
+infected.
+
+There had been six of them plunging headlong at tremendous speeds
+through the darkness of a night that was beyond all reckoning, plunging
+endlessly through a sea that knew no charting, nor had heard of any
+shore-line. The flames of endless giant suns had shot past, the tiny,
+beckoning eyes of a thousand planets, and yet they had passed onward to
+a greater goal.
+
+Six of them, hermetically sealed in a vast metal argosy--a giant
+trireme sailing the interstellar seas of a vast and pitiless universe
+in search of new worlds undreamed of; a galactic ship that had now
+become a self-contained coffin without even an atmosphere for the dead
+and dying to breathe as their desperation increased.
+
+This was, for the crew, an interlude in an expanding saga of
+exploration and discovery, a single incident in the cosmic drama
+important to them alone.
+
+The ship had been checked and double-checked and checked once more at
+the start of her great odyssey.
+
+“We have explored and conquered the nearer planets.” The captain had
+reminded them. “But who can guess what lies beyond in other systems,
+other galaxies?”
+
+How remote now seemed the skyport in the dawn, and all of that far-off
+day’s activities.
+
+Where had the sickness come from? They had no way of knowing, beyond
+their certainty that it had not originated in their own world. Was
+the answer to be found in an improper diet, the too sudden adjustment
+in atmospheric content and volume, or even in a minute frozen spore
+lodged in some tiny crevice in the exhaust tubes or the hull--a frozen
+bacillus brought to the ship on some tiny chunk of rock from some
+unknown world?
+
+A daring surmise worthy of further research and investigation.
+Tomorrow, on another world perhaps, but certainly not here and now
+in this flying missile of death; this tragically doomed and expiring
+space-giant.
+
+Their hopes and expectations had soared in the beginning, but now the
+great dream was dead and lying with the bodies of the spacemen. It had
+been man’s first dream of galactic empire; and might well be his last.
+
+True, there would be other space-flights, but they could never be the
+same. This was the first, the virgin voyage--and beyond it was the
+bitterness of a lost hope, of a broken dream.
+
+For the hopes and aspirations of a whole race, of a great people,
+to break and settle in a trough of frustration, was in itself an
+incredible sin. It was a sin against the Mind that had created and
+breathed life into the vast and lonely emptiness of the interstellar
+void.
+
+And now, plague-ridden, the vast ship plunged downward toward the
+surface of a strange new world.
+
+Its seas stretched wide and blue across the televiewing screen, and
+its rich brown earth stretched out a warm and welcoming hand. Its very
+youth sounded a clarion call to rest and dream from the weariness of
+the long voyage.
+
+Light-aureoled clouds stretched about it, girdling and shielding it in
+clinging, wispy fragments of dream-traceries.
+
+The ship’s lone survivor cried out--in agony, and not as a protest
+against the beauty of the world below, and the memory of his comrades,
+dead only hours before. Once again the strange sickness twisted a
+sharp, agonizing knife against his vitals. Once again the vertigo
+gripped him, and pulled him to the floor with a giant hand.
+
+The tele-view screen, the controlroom, the universe itself seemed to
+melt beneath him, so that for a full, terrible moment he felt himself
+to be without support, plunging toward the spinning, twisting mass of
+the approaching planet.
+
+Clouds and skies, the blueness of seas and the harsher greens and
+browns of vegetation spun vertiginously as he stared and became a
+tortured nightmare to his inflamed senses.
+
+Crying out again, he sank to the floor and sobbed his bitter loneliness
+to the darkness of the long night.
+
+It must have been hours later when consciousness returned to him.
+
+He lay on the floor, obscurely aware of the muffled throb of the
+powerful engines vibrating through the ship, and grateful for that
+awareness.
+
+Finally his faculties steadied and he got weakly to his feet, only
+to be reminded again that he had but a few short hours left. In the
+tele-view screen he could see the new planet plainly, its bulk swelling
+the view screen with its nearness.
+
+All at once his true position became clear to him. It had seemed for
+an instant as if this strange world might offer some release from his
+suffering. But, now, he realized that the hope was a mockery and a
+snare.
+
+What would it matter if he succeeded in landing safely and the planet’s
+atmosphere could support his kind of life?
+
+His fate was already decided. A few brief hours of freedom and
+then--death, swift and remorseless.
+
+There was no known cure for his disease. And the chances of the
+inhabitants of an alien planet possessing such a cure, or even being
+familiar with the disease itself, seemed infinitely remote.
+
+His face set in hard lines.
+
+He thought of the plague sweeping the green world like some ravening
+specter of the night. In his mind he could picture the inhabitants
+dying in agony, crying out in bitter despair as the terrible vertigo
+came upon them.
+
+To the right of the televiewing screen was the small control-unit which
+regulated the output of the atomic generators. It was an output that
+could be doubled and tripled--that could turn the ship into a flaming
+mass of raw energy and destroy it, or bring it to a controlled and
+gentle landing.
+
+Deliberately, gently, he reached out and shifted the control handle--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a green valley far below, a girl with spun-gold hair raised her head
+from her companion’s shoulder.
+
+“Robert,” she murmured, contentedly. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
+
+The boy’s arm tightened around her slender waist. “It’s only a
+shooting-star, darling,” he said. “It doesn’t mean a thing--”
+
+In the distance a steeple bell started chiming, and the twilight
+deepened above the green hills and valleys of Earth.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s note:
+
+
+ This etext was produced from Fantastic Universe, May 1955 (Vol. 3, No.
+ 4.). Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
+ copyright on this publication was renewed.
+
+ Obvious errors have been silently corrected in this version, but minor
+ inconsistencies have been retained as printed.
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78725 ***