Stopping at Slowyear

Chapter Ten

When they moved Deputy Captain Hans Horeger of the interstellar spaceship Nordvik to the adult terminal ward Murra went with him, though she could not have said why. By then there was no longer any chance that the man would regain consciousness again. He was in the deep sleep, or coma, or paralysis that marked the final stage of spongiform encephalopathy, and, though sometimes his eyes opened, she knew that there was nothing he saw. The eyes might work still, but that was the end of it. Horeger no longer had enough of a brain to know what die eyes were seeing.

Murra didn’t tarry in that depressing place. Twenty of its thirty-two beds were occupied now. Another twenty of Nordvik’s people had died already. By now they were smoke and ash in the crematorium, surviving only as some few harvested grams of cell cultures for the doctors to ponder over later. A handful were dead or dying on the spaceship itself, not worth the trouble of shipping down planetside; and so Nordvik’s long voyages were coming to an end.

Murra took the flowers she had brought and arranged them in a vase by Horeger’s bed. It was not a sensible thing to do, but, she was aware, it was a pretty one. Then she nodded to the attendant, drowsing in a chair by the door, and when she left the ward Deputy Captain Hans Horeger ceased to exist in her mind.

At the desk a friend hailed her to say that Blundy’s tractor had been sighted coming down the road from the pass. She accepted the news with thanks, and, of course, a certain amount of pleasure, and decided to wait to see him come in. So she went to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a bit of pastry, chatting with the others sitting around there. It was a more cheerful crowd there this day; after all, the influx of terminal cases were almost all from Nordvik, and it was not as though they were relatives, or friends. Across the long table from Murra a doctor who had just come down from the ship was holding court. He was tired, everyone could see that, but willing to indulge everyone’s natural curiosity. Yes, every remaining Nordvik person in orbit was now terminal or gone; he’d given the last of them soporifics to ease their passing. No, he didn’t think it was just as well to feed them a poison pill, as they did with babies in the last stages of SE; they were not in pain, they were very little trouble and they would die on their own quickly enough. No, it didn’t look as though any of Nordvik’s people had been among the very lucky very few who were naturally immune; outsiders so rarely were. He held up one of the little dry-ice-cooled boxes he’d brought with him. “Still, I’ve brought down all the tissue samples. This one was a woman named Betsy arap Dee; she was one of the first to die, and I checked her out myself. She never did get down to Slowyear,” he added, sounding almost sentimental.

“Do you think you’ll learn anything from the tissue samples?” one of the nurses on break asked. The doctor shrugged but didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

They all knew the answer was no but that they’d study them as carefully as they could anyway, because what else was there to do?

Then the conversation turned general. Yes, the doctor told them, the emptying of Nordvik - was coming along on schedule. All the shuttles were busily going back and forth, bringing down everything that could conceivably be worth keeping; the hastily erected storage tents by the landing strip were already bulging with the loot. Yes, the instrument and control people were nearly finished with installing the automatic controls in Nordvik. No, there was nothing unusual about the way SE had struck the ship’s people. It was just as it had always been. Every one of them had come down with the disease, and every one would die.

It was an interesting conversation, but a little sad, too. Everyone was feeling a little of that end-of-the-party letdown. The arrival of Nordvik had been exciting. It was a once in a lifetime event more than that, because many lifetimes came and went without the thrill of a visit from space but now it was over.

In a little while the last person from Slowyear would leave Nordvik, setting the automatic controls that would launch the old ship on its final trip, accelerating until the last of its fuel ran out, then going on endlessly, forever, never to be seen again by anyone.

“It does seem a kind of a waste,” a visitor said thoughtfully.

The doctor bent a curious look on him. “Waste?

But we’re stripping everything out that we can possibly use.”

The visitor flushed. “I was just thinking ” he said. “I mean, that’s a whole operating ship. We could refuel it, you know. The equipment’s all there, and the operating material’s in the datastores. Then we could send out an expedition somewhere “

“But where?” the doctor said impatiently, looking around in an aggrieved way, and of course there was no answer for that one, either.

By then Murra had finished her second cup of coffee. She glanced at her watch and decided it was time to look for Blundy. She gathered her robes around her, nodded a pretty goodbye to the others at the table and walked gracefully to the admitting room.

She had almost left it too late. Blundy had made better time than she expected. He was there before her, half carrying the stumbling Mercy MacDonald, whose eyes were wildly glancing around, who was whispering gibberish too softly for anyone to hear, who had soiled herself, whose head lolled helplessly against Blundy’s shoulder until the nurses eased her onto a gumey for her last trip.

Blundy hadn’t seen her, and Murra decided to leave it that way. There was a question she wanted to ask Blundy was he going to write something about Nordvik and its crew? And was there a part for her?

but she confidently knew those answers already. So inconspicuously she turned and went to the outside door, where she had no trouble finding a ride back to the summer city. He was, she thought kindly, entitled to his last moments alone with the MacDonald woman.

For herself, there were things to do. She planned the rest of her day with care. She would go to their comfortable, charming home and prepare a nice meal for him. He would be tired when he got home, and frayed from what had to have been a distressing experience. Choosing the menu was a bit of a problem, she reflected on the way down the hill. It would have to be something that could be kept ready for serving him at short notice. She didn’t know just when he would get there, but there was no doubt in her mind that, sooner or later, he would; for where else was there for him to go?