This was Burnett's last trip. Three more
shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and
he would be among the living again.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories Summer 1944.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal clawsgroping into space, and then the star-port closed.
There was another dead man aboard the Constellation.
Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid andquiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him;machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't seeanything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall ofthe laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet,keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.
Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgicalgown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling alltight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship.Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poorwarrior's body out of the void.
He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back andforth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went backfull-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke,who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for adecent burial.
"Number ninety-eight." Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voicefrom the ceiling radio hit Burnett.
"Number ninety-eight," Burnett repeated. "Working on ninety-five,ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slightsurgery." Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It soundeddeep. It didn't belong to him anymore.
Rice said:
"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-daydrunk!"
Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped theminto a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around andshoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted oneanother in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships,salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.
Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundredother men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.
Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggotsinside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under thehusk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starvedfor action.
This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!
"Sam!"
Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservativelab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigeratorshelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap tolife, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.
"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!"
Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing wasworth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundredthousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with bloodcooling in it.
Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamedup into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbedwithout making any noise on the rungs.
He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.
You never catch up with the war.
All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces acrossstars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, thetitanic exp