“Everyone knows when you do, Steve,” teased Carrie Princip, trying to brush back her long hair, finding it was floating in a sea of static.
Pete Turner, the Aquila’s second pilot, was practicing some of his martial-arts kicks and punches, grunting with the effort. “I don’t feel so bad.” He glanced at the shadowed pod immediately behind him. “Typical of Topeka’s finest. Still dead to the world. Come on, Bob!”
“Rise and shine, Bob,” called Ryan O’Keefe. “Or we’ll set Mom on you.”
Jim Hilton was moving toward the main part of the control module. “Get Bob up, will you, Pete? He’s supposed to check us all out on reanimation. Then join me in the hot seats.”
“Sure, Captain Hilton, sir.” Snapping off a crisp salute, Pete bent over the adjacent pod. “Get some lead in your pencil, buddy. Come on and— Oh, no. Holy shit!”
“What, dead to the world?” said Mike Man, pulling on a pair of soft-soled sneakers.
“Yeah,” said Pete. “Very.”
They gathered and stood around in silence, looking at the corpse, glaringly lit by the overhead strip lamps. Jed had turned down Mom’s spasmodic muttering until it was just a background murmur.
Bob Rogers had been a heavily built man with a narrow black mustache. He’d worn contact lenses in his dark brown eyes.
“How long?” asked Carrie Princip, breaking the silence.
“He was the doctor. Shame we can’t ask him for a postmortem.”
“Not funny, Jeff.” Jim Hilton shook his head. “State of the body, I’d say he’s been dead for weeks. Skin like leather.”
The brown eyes were gone, melted back into the cavernous sockets. The lips had shrunken and peeled off the excellent teeth. The plumpish cheeks were sunk inward, and the lower jaw gaped, accentuating the skull-like appearance. Bob Rogers’s hands had turned into crooked claws, the nails digging into the hard skin of the palms.
“Weeks! Jesus, how come mission control never picked up anything wrong on their monitors and scanners?” Steve Romero turned angrily away. “Got to be some real major communications foul-up. Some gold-star asshole needs an ass kicking.”
Jim Hilton looked over at his number two. “What d’you reckon, Marcey?”
She pursed her lips. “Mom’s speech was screwed up, as well. Something out of the park here. Maybe we ought to contact mission control right away.”
“Makes sense. Pete, you and Ryan cover him up. Just lower the capsule lid on him and seal it. Will do for the time being.”
“Sure.”
“And turn up the air freshener.” Jeff Thomas pinched his nose.
The dead man didn’t smell all that much. The various chemicals that had been pumping through him had helped suppress some of the processes of putrefaction. But there was still the distinct sour-sweet odour of decay.
“Let’s get to it, ladies and gentlemen.” Jim Hilton sighed. “Poor way to return. Still… Everyone to command positions, and we’ll start to fly the old eagle home again.”
THE WHOLE CREW were seated in their regulation deep-space flying configuration.
Jim was in the captain’s chair, with Marcey at his left side, both facing forward through the vid ports. Kyle Lynch, the navigating officer, sat immediately behind Jim, and communications operator Steve Romero was jammed in next to him.
The others were sitting farther aft in Aquila, everyone conscious of the rotted corpse of Bob Rogers, which was hidden inside its capsule.
“Testing intercom,” said Jim. “Everyone receiving me?”
There was a chorus of muttered affirmatives, all the way down the line to the supercargo journalist, Jeff Thomas.
“All right, everyone, now hear this. Bob’s death’s cast a giant shadow over this mission. Up to now it’s gone well. We got there. We did what we had to do, and we’re on the way back. Just one of those things, I guess. Seems like there was an equipment failure and he just… figure he just stopped breathing.”
“Still like to hear the answers to some questions from some lard-ass at control as to why it wasn’t monitored and fixed,” said McGill, his voice crackling through the quiet vessel.
Jed Herne’s voice slipped in. “Only been awake for a few minutes, but there’s other things gone wrong on the electronics front, Skip, that need some thought. Looks like a failure in communications between us and Earth.”