I watched him walk down the drive and turn
toward his house before I went to the bag, and removed the holster. I took out
the gun and removed its magazine. Then I thumbed the rounds out of it, pulled
back the slide action to eject the live round from the chamber, and put the
bullets in a drawer in the dining room cabinet. I slammed the empty magazine
back into the gun, returned the gun to its holster, and put it back in my bag.
I made myself a cup of coffee and
contemplated the mission I was about to attempt. This led me to think about my
conversation with Nick earlier. He did have a point: I didn’t know any of the
people I was about to fly halfway across the solar system to pick up and
transport back to Mars. I had no idea what psychological pressures they had had
to endure or how those pressures may have affected their powers of reasoning.
True, our crew had also witnessed the rampant and irrational destruction of our
home planet and our people—and we weren’t homicidal maniacs. But then we had
witnessed it all from far out in space, and on a television monitor, so the
impact would have been considerably less than watching it all happening just
below you through the windows of the space station.
There was also another consideration to
ponder: the slow but relentlessly growing realization on the part of the space
station crew that they were doomed to die themselves, slowly but surely and no
doubt horribly, when their remaining supplies were exhausted. There would be no
hope of help or rescue from Earth or anywhere else in the universe, so they had
undoubtedly had to face the fact that they were alone in a sardine can for the
rest of their very short lives. They would have been carrying these thoughts
with them for a very long time, until a chance radio transmission from them
reached across the void of space and was intercepted and answered from an
extremely unexpected corner of the universe. Mars! I could only imagine (but
didn’t want to) the extreme rollercoaster ride of emotions and thoughts they
had endured to this point and how adversely it surely would have affected them.
No comments:
Post a Comment