The Illustrated Man

One way or the other, thought Hollis. The moon or Earth or meteors will kill him, so why not now?

He smashed the man’s glass mask with his iron fist. The screaming stopped. He pushed off from the body and let it spin away on its own course, falling.

Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.

‘Hollis you still there?’

Hollis did not speak, but felt the rush of heat in his face.

‘This is Applegate again.’

‘All right. Applegate.’

‘Let’s talk. We haven’t anything else to do.’

The captain cut in. ‘That’s enough of that. We’ve got to figure a way out of this.’

‘Captain, why don’t you shut up?’ said Applegate.

‘What!’

‘You heard me, Captain. Don’t pull your rank on me, you’re ten thousand miles away by now, and let’s not kid ourselves. As Stimson puts it, it’s a long way down.’

‘See here, Applegate!’

‘Can it. This is a mutiny of one. I haven’t a damn thing to lose. Your ship was a bad ship and you were a bad captain and I hope you break when you hit the Moon.’

‘I’m ordering you to stop!’

‘Go on, order me again.’ Applegate smiled across ten thousand miles. The captain was silent. Applegate continued, ‘Where were we, Hollis? Oh yes, I remember. I hate you too. But you know that. You’ve known it for a long time.’

Hollis clenched his fists, helplessly.

‘I want to tell you something,’ said Applegate. ‘Make you happy. I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago.’

A meteor flashed by. Hollis looked down and his left hand was gone. Blood spurted. Suddenly there was no air in his suit. He had enough air in his lungs to move his right hand over and twist a knob at his left elbow, tightening the joint and sealing the leak. It had happened so quickly that he was not surprised. Nothing surprised him any more. The air in the suit came back to normal in an instant now that the leak was sealed. And the blood that had flowed so swiftly was pressured as he fastened the knob yet tighter, until it made a tourniquet.

All of this took place in a terrible silence on his part. And the other men chatted. That one man, Lespere, went on and on with his talk about his wife on Mars, his wife on Venus, his wife on Jupiter, his money, his wondrous times, his drunkenness, his gambling, his happiness. On and on; while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.

It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the centre of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.

‘Are you angry, Hollis?’

‘No.’ And he was not. The abstraction had returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.

‘You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.’

‘That isn’t important,’ said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, ‘There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,’ the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?

One of the other men, Lespere, was talking. ‘Well, I had me a good time: I had a wife on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Each of them had money and treated me swell. I got drunk and once I gambled away twenty thousand dollars.’

But you’re here now, thought Hollis. I didn’t have any of those things. When I was living, I was jealous of you, Lespere; when I had another day ahead of me I envied you your women and your good times. Women frightened me and I went into space, always wanting them and jealous of you for having them, and money, and as much happiness as you could have in your own wild way. But now, falling here, with everything over, I’m not jealous of you any more, because it’s over for you as it is for me, and right now it’s like it never was. Hollis craned his face forward and shouted into the telephone.

‘It’s all over, Lespere!’

Silence.

‘It’s just as if it never was, Lespere!’

‘Who’s that?’ Lespere’s faltering voice.

‘This is Hollis.’

He was being mean. He felt the meanness, the senseless meanness of dying. Applegate had hurt him; now he wanted to hurt another. Applegate and space had both wounded him.

‘You’re out here, Lespere. It’s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?’

‘No.’

‘When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?’

‘Yes, it’s better!’

‘How?’

‘Because I got my thoughts, I remember!’ cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.

And he was right. With a feeling of cold water rushing through his head and body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.

‘What good does it do you?’ he cried to Lespere. ‘Now? When a thing’s over it’s not good any more. You’re no better off than me.’

‘I’m resting easy,’ said Lespere. ‘I’ve had my turn. I’m not getting mean at the end, like you.’

‘Mean?’ Hollis turned the word on his tongue. He had never been mean, as long as he could remember, in his life. He had never dared to be mean. He must have saved it all of these years for such a time as this. ‘Mean.’ He rolled the word into the back of his mind. He felt tears start into his eyes and roll down his face. Someone must have heard his gasping voice.

‘Take it easy, Hollis.’

It was, of course, ridiculous. Only a minute before he had been giving advice to others, to Stimson; he had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock. Now he was trying to pack a lifetime of suppressed emotion into an interval of minutes.

‘I know how you feel, Hollis,’ said Lespere, now twenty thousand miles away, his voice fading. ‘I don’t take it personally.’

But aren’t we equal? he wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a thing’s over, it’s done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was like trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other – an aura, a mysterious element.

So it was with Lespere and himself; Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were kinds of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

It was a second later that he discovered his right foot was cut sheer away. It almost made him laugh. The air was gone from his suit again. He bent quickly, and there was blood, and the meteor had taken flesh and suit away to the ankle. Oh, death in space was most humorous. It cut you away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher. He tightened the valve at the knee, his head whirling into pain, fighting to remain aware, and with the valve tightened, the blood retained, the air kept, he straightened up and went on falling, falling, for that was all there was left to do.