Death in Transit — Background and Themes

They had said it couldn't happen! But they had been wrong. Man's wisdom was not infinite after all. All the man-years of thought, all the endless whirring and clicking of the computers and calculators--all of it 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 a shattered bone. The needles of the organic analyzer would have told him what else he had to do.

But Karen had been dead for hours when he found her. Too long. The damage was irreparable, permanent. She was beyond recall. He might conceivably have animated her muscles, her glands, got her blood to flowing again. But her brain would have remained a vacuous, inert thing. You had to get reconstruction going in a matter of minutes when the brain, the anatomy's most perishable component, was involved. And in some cases he had known, the memories were never fully restored.

Why couldn't it have been a tumor? A deficiency disease? A nervous breakdown? Insanity.... There was nothing the medocenter couldn't handle. Its machines were right there on the ship, ready to be used--but Karen had to fall down the ventilator shaft, opening the door and walking into it as if it were her bedroom, and falling all the way down 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 he was engulfed in sudden pity and remorse and a feeling of loss, as if she 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 brightened his days? And the things they had shared.

He glared at her, suddenly angry that she should have done this to him, and he glared at the shaft and blew out his cheeks and clenched his hands again and roared a great cry that echoed deafeningly in the smallness of the shaft.

And then he shouted obscenities at the ship and the stars and the hundred people who lay as if dead in neat rows in the sleep locker and he pounded the walls until blood from his hands left imprints there.

But no one heard. There was no one to hear. Only the sleepers who lived their days with his years.

"Why?" he shouted, while his tears fell. And he thought: I haven't cried since I was a kid. Then, saying her name again and again, he knelt by her side to feel the silkiness of her jet black hair.

There had been no death aboard a Star Transit ship since the very beginning. From the first day of the Great Emigration more than a hundred years before, when the first captain and his wife stepped aboard to pilot the precious cargo of sleeping humans ten or more years across the vast stellar reaches to colonies on planets in a half dozen far-distant star systems, there had been no recorded death.

But now there would always be Karen.

He should have told them she walked in her sleep. But the Medical Examiners would have shrugged as they had with everything else he had told them. The medocenters would take care of it. You couldn't _cure_ sleepwalking with the devices in the medocenter, but they would have taken care of anything that happened as a result--if he had reached her in time. It was unforeseen, this business of her walking into the shaft. No one was to blame. No one, that is, except himself.

Clifton looked up from beside his wife to the circle of light at the top of the shaft. "All right," he called out, "I'm to blame, do you hear? I did it. She could be alive except for me."

There was no answer to his self-indictment.

"And where does it leave me?" he shouted bitterly. "I'm the one who has to live and I've got nine years to go. Nine years to Ostarpa and the small colony there. What am I supposed to do?"

He never remembered later how long he stood in the shaft shouting until he was hoarse, only recalling that at one point the walls seemed to close in on him and the ship seemed filled with an oppressive strangeness, and he was clawing his way up the ladder to the top. And there were blurred images of walls and rooms as he ran about the ship, and he remembered his jerking open the liquor cabinet and the stupor that followed.