THE BAD LIFE

Originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, Feb. 1963.

They made a sort of statue out of the spacesuit, just by not moving it, just by letting it stand there in the back of Turk’s Repair Shop, right on the spot where it had gotten Thorens. Not that the rough men of Limbo were the type who’d have any qualms about handling an object with so eerie a history. Nor did they consider it any kind of hoodoo.

It appealed to their sense of humor.

New convicts came to stare at it, and soon it figured in certain colorful practices of initiation. It came to be the subject of a spacemen’s ballad, a vulgar ditty intended not to be sung but roared:

Oh-h-h, Svenson’s Spacesuit had a hell of a night—

It caught three men, and it mucked ’em up right!

Goldy Svenson absolutely refused to have anything ever to do with the suit again, and so the Patrol issued him another without complaint, knowing that a Swede in space is more trouble than an Irishman once his superstitions have been churned.

The story of that night is no story, for it has no plot. Rather, it is a few nasty incidents whose only connection is a three-hundred pound, mercury-steel, Space Patrolman’s bulger. But, since you ask…

* * * *

The Maestro was old, vintage 2080 or so. The contralto whose voice swelled from it had died long before that, around 1970. The song was a wiring of one of those antique modulated-groove “records” that gave their impulse to a “needle” and thence to a diaphragm-type speaker. Thorens could faintly hear the “surface-noise” behind the music…sweet and low, sweet and low:

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child—

Thorens’ discolored, half-closed left eye ached. He held his drink to his lips, elbow on table, his head bent forward a little over the soiled cloth. This shielded his face from the lamp overhead and kept Turk and the others from seeing the tears that might trigger one of them—or all of them—into coming over and knocking his head off.

Far—far—from home…

Thorens’ chin moved under its sandy beard as he tried to soften the lump that was hurting his throat. He took a quick unpleasing sip of the whiskey, winced as it knifed into his cut lips, set the glass on the table. Then he looked hesitantly at Turk, knowing somehow that the fat man was studying him.

Five months on Limbo had taught him that the best defense was a reasonable pretense. He cleared his throat and said falteringly, “Kind of gets you, doesn’t it?”

Turk stared at him unwinkingly. Thorens’ eyes sheered away, ran the length of the floor, up and along the dirty mirror that hung behind the bar—in it, his own reflection, dark shadows and smudgy faces, dingy chromium, the amber monotony of bottles, cigarette and marijuana smoke coiling, the spider-shaped bloodstain on the wall where the little Spaniard’s high blood-pressure had geysered through his cut throat.

“It don’t get me,” Turk rumbled. He got up, wheezing, flat dark face glistening, carefully plucked eyebrows arched into the satanic shape that pleased him. “This is home. Don’ you like Limbo? I like Limbo. Don’ you? You make your friends feel bad!”

Thorens’ head lowered again. Turk chuckled and moved to the bar—big, slow man whose bulk had no solidity but instead ran to pouches and blobs that bulged sleekly in Limbo’s .63 Earth gravity. He thumped for a refill, and Potts turned and said sharply, “Keep your pants on, boy. I’ll get to you when.”

Watching them from shadowed eye-sockets, Thorens thought fiercely how stupid they were, with Turk a little more exquisitely so than Potts—and how he loathed them both, and feared them both, as he loathed and feared all the half-men here on Limbo.

Suddenly Thorens closed his eyes, making the shadowed eye-sockets darker…the old, old fear that somebody was reading his mind. Not really reading it, but detecting from visible signs what his thoughts were about. Covertly he brushed a hand across his forehead, up into his thin hair, down again, bringing with it a workable shield of hair from behind which his eyes flickered, searching for the clenched fist, the boot, the knife—

Nothing. Shadows. Men drinking.

He released his hate. It filled his mind and exploded against the far corners of his skull. Turk—fat strong-arm artist, with glands for brains! Potts—wife carver! Of all on Limbo, I hate you most! His eyes flickered again. They hadn’t “heard.” He sat there, hating. Why do I hate you most? Because you have hurt me most…

“I ain’t a boy,” Turk said. He leaned over the bar, his belly rolling onto it like a squeezed balloon. “I’m a man.”

Potts spun a beer at him. Turk picked it up and turned around. His muddy eyes brushed Thorens, and he decided to sit elsewhere. He went over to the front window, where there was a booth that Potts kept a little neater and cleaner because business was still business, even on Limbo, and sat down, inching himself along until he sat almost pressing the window.

Thorens was reminded of a captive hippo, stinking and streaked, looking dully through bars at a world it hadn’t the brains to realize was there and strange.

“I bet he’s a liar,” said one of the men at the bar. The man turned toward Turk, hand on knife. He was drunk and out to bury his steel—his left hand made the challenge-sign. “Tell us what you are.”

Turk didn’t look at him.

“No good, Sammy. Old Turk’s too slow for knives.” (He carried spring-knives up his sleeves, but the other was too far away. Just a little closer Sammy, he chuckled silently to himself.)

“Y’ain’t too slow to bleed.”

Another man said, from the shadows, “Sammy, is it? Well, I’m a stranger here, Sammy, and I don’t know you—but I’ll tell you something. I’m not too slow.” Sammy’s knife was out. “You know what else you are?”

“Not slow.”

They moved toward each other, coming to a crouch. Potts leaned over the bar and broke a bottle of bourbon over Sammy’s head. Sammy shrieked and dropped his knife. He fled for the door, blood and whiskey masking his face.

The stranger drew back his knife for the throw.

Potts said harshly, “Outside, damn it! I run a friendly place. Why do you think I bumped in?”

Sammy slammed through the door. The stranger cursed and followed. Footsteps faded.

Thorens allowed his gaze to fall beyond the specter of knives, out the window and across the glistening concrete roadway and the fog-shrouded fields of tobacco and marijuana to the spaceport. The gray shapes of its administration-building and hangars were beaded with faint strings of window-lights. Its cradles slanted up like fingers pointed at the stars—giant fingers that could unleash the Jovian lightning of rocket-power to reach those stars.

Now a glow washed into Limbo’s thin air. It widened and brightened, beating down from the night. The bottles on Potts’ shelves behind the bar began to vibrate. The trembling grew, and Thorens shifted as the bench tickled his rear. Men looked up, listened. Potts came around from behind the bar and went to stand beside Turk’s table, looking out through the metaglass.

Turk said, not looking at Thorens, “Patrol ship. Maybe the Hand got his transfer. Maybe he’ll take off pretty soon. Maybe he wants a so-long present.”

Thorens’ belly twisted hotly into itself. He kept his face down, eyes in hiding. The whiskey in the bottom of his glass danced. His trembling hand forced the glass flat on the table, released it, fell limp. He sat and waited.

Outside, the glare was bright as day. High in the air, a roaring pinpoint appeared, lowering, spitting out light like a fragment of the Sun. Fog boiled around it. Above it the sky was night. As the speck descended, night followed it down through the fog almost respectfully until, as the ship hovered over the pitted apron of the port, its rocket-glare had contracted to a blinding conical affair only a few hundred yards across.

Thorens dared to glance up.

It had been just talk. Turk’s heavy features, disinterested in Thorens, were reflected in the window as he looked out.

* * * *

Rocket-sound thundered, slammed, snarled. The ship touched a cradle, rocked, and the magnetics took hold to fit it tight. The pilot boomed the tubes once, unnecessarily—maybe he was just glad he’d worlded his ship. The boom lit the scene like a flash-bulb, then there was blackness into which the distant dim windows of the port slowly faded as pupils dilated.

Potts was back at his bar, setting up bottles, opening new ones and sticking spouts into them. Solar-system cash was good on Limbo. The wife carver would make money tonight.

A far, faint, dying bleat cut the night. Sammy’s? Impossible to tell. Turk gazed dully out the window and Thorens wondered if the man could see in the dark. Nothing of the beast in Turk would surprise him. Turk had forcibly taken a girl, back on Earth—a very young girl—and while he might prefer to be elsewhere than on Limbo, the preference depended on no major discontent. Turk functioned. There were the monthly supply ships, and the frequent stopovers of ships making the Callisto freight-run. There would sometimes be, with so many ships worlding on Limbo, a young and curious passenger who, prepared by the dark lonely months of space, could be persuaded to new adventure. And Turk could be convincing, even likable, when he put his mind to it. He kept, Thorens knew, a small hoard of handkerchiefs, buttons, dog-tags, carefully worded notes, personal jewelry, clothing, souvenirs.

With a hand that was heavier for the ring it had lost, Thorens picked up his drink, mouth twisting bitterly at the rim of the glass. His eyes closed again. He began to assemble words in the darkness, slowly, carefully, picturing them in the cramped pencil strokes that would be realized later when he returned to his office and added them to this manuscript:

The always dubious coin of sensitivity and intellect amounts to less than ever when you are forty and undersized and alone in a cultural cesspool. Brutality it buys, without being tendered, and ridicule and violation, mixed to a poison whose taste is Fear—

No, no no, he thought—too flowery, too abstruse…

He opened his eyes slightly. In the space of a second they went from side to side, registering the murky room, the men. Then they closed again in hopelessness.

If only I could join you, be one of you, just like you—without conscience or intelligence, as far from God as you are, as close to the slime. Then I would not be set apart—I would not be a target—the hare could run with the hounds. But I could never be like you, or anything like any part of you, you scum, you filth, you animals. I could not be like you in a million years…

II

Sixty years ago the Solar Council, during the tenure as Chairman of the shrewd Ghaz of Venus, had been persuaded to launch Limbo as a money-saving proposition—a prison asteroid, undisciplined and self-sustaining, whose only upkeep would amount to the salaries of a few rookie Patrolmen assigned to orbit their ships within ’scope range and keep a bored eye out…

Ah, God! Thorens thought. Why had the Helping Hand sent him here! Why not to Neptune, or Ganymede, or Callisto, or Tethys, for the frontier duties he had expected when he’d signed on!

Council Engineers had scouted the Trojan Asteroids, selecting at last a body with adequate size and soil—one of the few fragments of Planet X’s outer surface that hadn’t been blown clean out of the System in that eons-ago catastrophe. Altering the asteroid’s core to create a decent gravity, at the same time hopping it up to function as a central heating system, they had atmospherized it, deloused it of inimical micro-organisms, installed a balanced ecology, and two weeks later blasted off, leaving some two hundred thousand crates of essentials on its twitching surface. Within another month, every male lifer in the System had been transported to Limbo to fend for himself, each new group being abruptly depleted on arrival by the settling of countless black scores…

The Helping Hand! Thorens tore at the words with his mind, shredded them with hate. The great HH! Was he, John Thomas Thorens, on file in some drawer in some office on some level of one of HH’s giant headquarters buildings in New Jersey, marked Discontent—Refer to Transfer? No, by all the nonexistent gods of Space—not even that! Not even a long wait to be endured, while the wheels of bureaucracy ground out his fate. The hated words boiled up out of memory: Transfer denied. Transfer denied. Transfer denied.

Within a year Limbo had sprouted landowners, six slapdash towns, a caste system, inter-urban warfare, and a gang-rule throne whose cushions bore the dark stains of a dozen deposed. Within five, Limbo had shaken down. Gone was the throne, for none could hold it. Warfare had ceased (having been largely a matter of indecisive knife and hatchet forays anyway, no deadlier weapons being permitted). Famine and disease had at last brought the Limbos to the realization that pull together they’d damned well better, or die of perfectly natural causes. A Council of Limbo was formed, a Plan was drawn, some shaky, jury-rigged shops thrown together, some atrocious furniture and fair-to-middling ceramics were produced, and Limbo made an earnest bid for System trade. Sanctioned by the pleased Solar Council, a valid monetary exchange sprang into being, based on Solar dollars but subject to devaluation should Limbo need chastising. The spaceport was built, and a Patrol squadron moved in to sit casually on top of the new order. Limbo bought machinery, parlayed its gains, built factories, manufactured and exported mostly—of all things—toys.

The great HH!…which “Watched Over its Flock in Distress and Disaster” (Our Hands Are on Venus, and They’re Helping on Mars), but which could not note the predicament of one lone, terror-bound field-worker, nor stretch red tape to free him, in its concentration on its main objective: Campaign and Collect (And They’ll Be Right There. When We Reach—the—Stars! )

Thorens sought to assemble saliva in his dry mouth, wishing he could spit his hatred.

Helping along the frontiers, maybe, where the seed of publicity might be planted to bear plump financial fruit at home—but certain as death, no HH benevolence ever came this way, out across space to Thorens’ rat-hole office on Limbo where he was a Beam of Light in the Outer Darkness.

Eventually, there being plenty of room, the life-term inmates of the Tycho Women’s Penitentiary were removed to Limbo, there to live beside and among the males to the satisfaction of both.

Thus Limbo functioned—unpoliced, autonomous, even profitable. There was no slightest sign of moral or spiritual rehabilitation among its populace, however. If the Limbos applied themselves to the matter of collective survival, it was only that they might survive as happy hellhounds in the biggest, goriest padded cell in history. Limbo outdid in sheer social savagery any lawless frontier that had ever existed. Frontiers always attract a percentage of misfits, outcasts and crackpots; but here was saturation. Dog snapped, snarled, chewed, and eagerly ate dog. Murder was the way of life. To hear a scream was to shrug at somebody’s clumsiness, for it is simple to kill quietly. To step in blood was to curse, for it rots shoes.

The largest town was Damn Earth. It had seven sprawling square miles of sloppily paved streets, three hundred and forty-two saloons including Potts’, four distilleries, ninety-four gambling palaces, three toy factories, a general warehouse-store, several thousand scattered huts and cabins, seventeen joy-houses (possibly the best living to be made on Limbo), a psychotic German who lived in a cave and collected skulls and the Patrol Spaceport, the latter being the only thing on the tiny planet that the Limbos had not themselves built. About the Spaceport was a network of tall silver towers—a crackling violet wall of death, if need be. But the Limbos displayed no tendency to storm the port, slay its personnel, blast off toward freedom in stolen ships—

They liked Limbo.

It was their oyster, their raw meat, their cup of bloody tea. It was as vicious, as mad, as loose and twisted as they. Paradoxically, it was their prison and the one place between Heaven and Earth where they could roam free, brawl, bay at the stars, kill, live the good life.

Any non-Limbo could, for this reason, walk the streets unescorted in perfect safety. His Visitor’s Armband was his shield and security. If he happened on a scene of battle, knives would cease flashing to allow him to pass. And anyone so thoughtless as to threaten him would be cut down by friend and foe alike. For Limbo wanted no reprisals, no curtailments, no kill-joy Patrol teams stalking its surface.

The word regarding visitors was: Leave them alone.

This did not apply to John Thorens—who had arrived five months ago, with some thirty books, a few games (checkers, Space-lanes, Guess-an-Element), a three months’ salary advance (bait conceals the point on the hook) and a twelve-week course (Encompassing the Humanities) under his belt that made him a “constructive and rehabilitative force among the unfortunate.”

He had busily cleaned the HH office, rousting vermin, painting over filth in cheerful colors. He had then thrown open the doors to the unfortunate, a few of whom took notice.

All the books had been lent out the first day, and were seen no more. The games had generated more interest, but the Limbos played rough. When at first he had sincerely tried to talk up the straight and narrow to these men, he was told that his predecessor had ended up in the quarry with his face torn off, because he’d had brown eyes and the Blue-Eyed Gang collected brown eyes.

(Not precisely so, other Limbos had told him later—the man had disrupted an orgy at the South Pole Arena, with loud complaints that these were Satan’s activities. His more specific comments had angered female participants, so they’d dragged him back to Damesville, where, with luck, he eventually managed suicide. When the Patrol investigated, accompanied by an HH representative, they were permitted to discover evidence that the deceased had had a sideline involving a third H, with the catch that the stuff he peddled had been sugared down to substandard. Apparently a customer had complained. End of investigation.)

Thorens naturally had tried to get out. In reply to his first frightened spacegram, HH had said: Unfortunate demise of predecessor due to involvement in prison intrigue. In no way result of duties you are expected to perform. Patrol denies conditions you describe. Extend the Hand. The essence of the reply to his second plea was that in view of the contract he had signed it was to be hoped that he might experience a change of sentiment. Extend the Hand.

Outraged, Thorens had sought a more direct means of self-preservation. His HH card brought him to the desk of the secretary of the personal aide to the secretary of the Lieutenant Commander of the Spaceport—a bored-eyed man in neat civvies who had listened carefully to Thorens’ story, managing at the same time to make Thorens feel like daddy’s little boy, and then, glancing idly out the foot-thick, ray-proof, pellet-proof window at the twisting streets of Damn Earth, candidly admitted that Limbo was a bit rough at first, but, after all, some of the Limbos, at least, were struggling along the difficult path toward readjustment and certainly deserved a Hand, and all Thorens needed to do to insure his own well-being was to be friendly, mix with those who showed interest, and, above all, keep his nose clean.

To Thorens’ last question, as he ushered the Hand out the anything-proof steelite door, the secretary had answered, No, Patrol regulations forbade any civilian communication over Patrol radio apparatus.

Thorens had next systematically buttonholed the captains of the freight ships that sat down every week or so—a simple matter of hanging around bars, since liquor was not permitted aboard ship. He would pay his fare—twice that—ten times that. But soon he came to anticipate their reply: No passage off Limbo without Patrol authorization. HH authorization, authorization, authorization…

They had seemed somewhat understanding, however—and one in particular had sympathized. Thorens had promptly tried to stow away on that one’s ship, believing he had detected in the man’s manner tacit approval of the measure. He was caught and sympathetically turned over to the Patrol. Back in the bored-eyed man’s office, he was told that that was scarcely the way to keep his nose clean…did he want to end up as a Limbo himself, charged as a stowaway?

“What am I now?” Thorens said dully. “They are your prisoners, and I am theirs. Give me sanctuary.”

“Nothing will happen to you if you keep your head.”

“Do you know what happened to my predecessor’s head? Do you see these bruises? Help me!”

“Roughed up a little, eh? Well, I’ll tell you, I personally don’t think too much missionary zeal will pay off here. Better just sit it out.”

“The worst torture is the threats.”

“You’ve been threatened?”

“Every moment is a threat. Every look is a threat. Everyone I meet is a threat. It’s not only the bruises… God, it’s the fear of bruises!”

“Fear can do strange things to one’s imagination, eh?”

“How often have you been outside these walls? And for how long?”

“I get out occasionally. I don’t have much reason—”

“I’ve told you what is happening”

“Surely you’ve exaggerated.”

* * * *

Ushered out, Thorens cringed against the wall of a hangar, staring around through the ever-night at the vast, waiting, murmuring, neon-lit, death-shot psychopathy that was Limbo. Then he darted into the building, into depths cool with the presence of positives—discipline, order, repair, precaution, direction, rational quantities, and qualities in rational degree. He veered this way and that through the darkened silver forest of Patrol steel—cranes, engine-pits, fuel storage tanks, machine-shops, great trolleys, giant vaulted ceilings cobwebbed with girders—and hid.

Next morning he was found and ejected.

Temporarily unbalanced, he got drunk. Three bars later, he was smashed. A grinning Limbo shoved a weed under his nose, and Thorens experienced his first flight, during which he challenged three men to a fistic duel and won hands-down when they all collapsed laughing. This was the first, vague, exciting glimpse of the unique “value” he might have to the Limbos. He grabbed at it frantically. He stayed drunk for three days, and bought drinks for the house in every dive from Damn Earth to Saintsville, in an effort to buy more good will as a dividend. He bought pack after pack of reefers from the machines, and distributed them lavishly. He bought six kits of Harrigan’s Horse (powder, self-heating water capsule, disposable hardware) in the General Store in Virtue, and gave them to those whom he considered his closest buddies. By this time he had attracted quite a coterie. They wound up their blast by driving to Virgin Springs, down in the southern hemisphere.

The next six hours were quite unforgettable.

Thorens knew this to be true. He tried to forget them—and failed.

III

The HH records—all of them; the records of nineteen years of HH activity on Limbo; quite irreplaceable, if hardly of any significant worth—made quite a fire in the potbelly stove in Thorens’ office. Until the wee hours, he tore the contents of six filing-cabinets and his desk into thumbnail-size pieces and fed them to the flames. He crouched before the pot-belly, face contorted, eyes glazed to a mica finish, mouth busy (pursed, stretched to gargoyle width, pursed again), like some alchemist working a miracle of hate. Then he danced around the room, laying about him with a poker, creating dents and splinters in the woodwork and breaking every pane of glass in the place.

He then set fire to the desk and lay down to die.

When the smoke became too much to bear, he got up and doused the fire with water from the sink. Death might be a welcome end—but too much discomfort preceded it.

At that moment, and in the days that followed, he set himself to survive. The nightmares of that task refuted Darwin.

He must polish dirty apples, lick boots, take every kind of filth and violence the diseased minds of Limbo could dish out. He must be the mascot of maniacs, the whipping-boy of a collective Id, the creature around explicitly to be hurt, bullied, tormented, used; for this gave him a functional value not easily duplicated on this little world of paranoid sadists. He was the goat among the Judas wolves; he gave them something they needed, the sight of abject fear, and it bought his life from day to day, for the Limbos held everything but themselves in hate and contempt, and “everything” was so far away—except John Thorens.

* * * *

He won scars, hideous memories, and the continuation of life. His first serious beating was at the hands of Turk. Thorens was bedridden for three days, with hot pads on his abdomen and groin. Turk came around on the second night for some more of the same, took one look at Thorens’ haunted eyes and went away muttering something about “necrophilia”—possibly the only five-syllable word the man knew; certainly in a predictable category.

His value as patsy begot Thorens champions: it was circulated that the man who killed him would be buried all around him as a garnish; and when one day a visitor from the nearby town of Freedom had thumbed his knife and advanced to whittle Thorens for the sin of stumbling against him, another knife, flipped expertly from sheath and halfway across the street into the back of the visitor’s skull, had ended that. Two days later Thorens’ rescuer got whopped at blackjack and worked off his annoyance by beating Thorens into a state of gibbering half-consciousness and throwing him at the mirror behind Potts’ Bar. Potts, in order to save the mirror, had hastily interposed his own body. Staggered by the impact, he had missed his first knife-throw at the offender. Not so the second. Then, upset by the entire episode, he had himself completed the job on Thorens and thrown him out.

Of course, not all the Limbos were as totally vicious and depraved as Turk, Potts, and their crowd.

Some were scarcely more than brutally playful. Others were as often as not oblivious of Thorens’ existence, unless he made the mistake of attracting their attention. In all, however, was the corrupt vein of cruelty, whether manifested by sins of commission or omission…a cruelty born of not-caring, of detachment from things human, of ruthless self-interest. They had stepped out of society and out of history to live their lives as a whim. They could not be predicted.

So he couldn’t count on protectors—except on an unpredictable basis, where a wrong guess might be fatal. Nor, failing human bulwarks, could he find shelter, haven, sanctuary—for there was no place on Limbo to hide.

On a few occasions, Thorens thought he had made friends—especially among the newcomers who arrived in batches now and then. There was even camaraderie. But always came betrayal. At last he grew to understand the contamination factor in this world where the floodgates were down and the newcomer quickly inundated. He developed an instinct that told him that now was the time to step out of the path of one he had befriended, for another superego had gasped its last and another brawling madman been born.

Unlike his predecessor, Thorens had no devout religious convictions to sustain him (or, for that matter, to cause his immediate downfall).

No protectors. No physical escape. No mystical source of courage and strength…

Naturally, then, Thorens had a project underway, as sensitive men will have when forced to exist under conditions which they cannot bear but must. To it he devoted the predictable amount of fanatic concentration. Its title was LIMBO—Hell in Space, and some forty thousand words were completed in first draft. Thorens had a knack for literary expression. But the book, growing as it did from daily torment and indignation, was jumbled, incoherent, chaotic. Into it he poured his boundless hatred, his piteous cries, his curses and protests all unuttered in actuality. In it were masses of words bundled into sobs; scalding portraits of his individual tormentors, and descriptions in vivid and anatomical detail of the punishments he wished he could visit upon them; lengthy, sprawling psychosocial analyses that would not have satisfied a more objective eye. The book was a monstrous panorama which, drawn in the convulsive strokes of his agony, had even a certain power. With words as weapons, he slew his tormentors; and without that outlet he might have gone mad.

Or perhaps the book was itself his madness, externalized.

So far—so far—from home.…

Three hundred million miles.

Turk shifted heavily (the hippopotamus responding to what?) His eyes turned to stare back into the room, seeking Thorens. “Patrol ship,” he said sourly, disappointedly. “Tough guys.” (That was what.) Then he kept his eyes on Thorens. Savoring melodrama, he grinned a slow grin.

At the bar, Potts cackled like a hen and said, “Hooray—those babies drink hard!”

Thorens got up stiffly and went toward the rear of the bar. He heard Turk wheeze behind him, the scrape of the fat man’s boots on the floor—trying to get up—and he walked faster. He reached the washroom and locked the door behind him, leaned against the wall. He stood that way for a few minutes, face wet, throat tight, stomach churning. Still nailed to the wall was the pageless binding of his copy of Paradise Lost. He put his hand on it.

Milton had lived and written (and had written Regained!)—there was an Earth, somewhere—there was a human spirit…

Finally the, nausea passed.

Turk, chuckling, had gone away too.

* * * *

They trooped in, the tough young men in Patrol uniforms. As usual, they sat around the front end of the bar, laughing, raising a hubbub, ignoring the scowling Limbos. One reached up to the shelf and turned off the maestro…

—feel like a motherless—

…and turned on the trivision. Hot, atonal music. A painted girl (gold, orange and green) dancing against a swirling, color-organ background. Whistles, laughter. Hands uplifted in the “I’ve-been-in-Space-and-I-need-it!” sign.

Back at his table, Thorens’ head bowed to his hands. Then it proceeded to the table—a terrible bereavement welling up to add mass to his present misery. He remembered a voice singing London Bridge is Falling Down, remembered clearly from childhood (or thought he did) warmth and loving caresses; a smile from close above, and sweet breath—

Strong, soft arms that now were husks, and the only truly understanding eyes in the Universe were closed and desiccated, and the last sound-wave of her voice had dispersed to become only air molecules, and the incredible goddess of every man vanishes, vanishes, save from her castle—the tortured subconscious of her son. In compound gear, where Oedipus engages Death, Thorens had wandered that night a month ago, the space-gram from his father crumpled in his hand, and for some reason—perhaps it was his eyes—the Limbos had let him alone. The next night he had been beaten twice, and started his book.

“Thorens!”

Thorens flinched and slowly raised his head. One of the Patrolmen had spotted him and got up—now came around the end of the bar lithely, one hand braced on the shoulder of a comrade. Thorens watched him come, struggling up out of his welter of tangled, miserable introspection.

“Hi!” The Patrolman dropped into a seat and in the same motion poured a little of his drink into Thorens’ empty glass. “Still alive, I see, eh?”

“Still alive, Lieutenant.”

“Not as bad as you thought at first, eh?”

“Not as bad.”

Lieutenant Mike Burman was blocky and space-burned; head well shaped, mouth wide, eyes just a little too closely set; about 26; less than a year out of the Space Academy at Gagaringrad. This was his sixth stop-over on Limbo. He had met Thorens on his first, four months ago, and each time since. In him seemed to stir a vague sympathy for the little man—as vague and unformed as his comprehension of Thorens’ true predicament on Limbo. Over any comprehension rode a Boston-bred suspicion that all such phenomena as Limbo and its gutterbums weren’t quite real, or at least shouldn’t be. But he admired the Helping Hand. His family contributed regularly. He supposed things were fairly disordered on Limbo, poor devils. It was good to see a Hand out here, on the job. When you came right down to it, it all had rather a touch of romance. Thorens’ tales of woe he chose, for the most part, to discredit. After all, there was a limit. Space, he knew, bred strange types—strong men, eccentric men—men possessed of some personal Hell. Like Thorens.

Looking at the young idiot, Thorens managed a smile. “It’s good to see you. How’s Earth?”

“Oh…still there, the last time I looked!” Burman laughed at his wit, and Thorens moved his lips to join in.

“Y’know, I’ve asked around a little,” Burman said. “None of the Patrolmen stationed here has ever seen anyone lay a finger on you!” He grinned, his expression somehow sly. “You were putting it on a little, eh?”

“Maybe a little.” You fool! Of course they leave me alone when the Patrol is around!

Now Mike Burman frowned suddenly, exaggeratedly, as if he had just remembered something. “Hey, that reminds me, Thorens. I’ve got a message for you. You’re supposed to go in and see the Lieutenant-Com.”

A burst of laughter from the bar had drowned out his last few words. Thorens was blinking in that direction. Burman repeated the message: “You’re supposed to go in and see the 2nd C. O.”

* * * *

Thorens looked at him. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” Mike Burman lied. You’re shipping out, Thorens. Earthside. I know, because you’re going back on my ship. That’s what the Old Man wants to tell you.

“You didn’t get the message at your office,” Burman explained, “so they told me to look you up.”

“I haven’t been there for three days.” In the dark universe behind John Thorens’ eyes there appeared the tiniest, most hesitant flicker of animation—the stirring of some minute, slumbering particle; a particle that might become a flame…a light…a sun. The creation of suns from empty nothingness is mysterious; the creation of Hope is mystery itself. But the stirring primal particle in John Thorens’ Universe darkened to nothingness again.

Your mother’s last wish, Thorens—and then your father got to some softie in the HH. So back you go, for the atomicremation. Frankly, though, don’t you think you’re kind of running out on the job?

Thorens had lived with the “message” for about ten seconds now. The particle of sub-Hope dared to stir again, since no inimical forces had put in an appearance.

“Why should the Old Man want to see me?” he whispered.

“Your packet,” Burman said. “I think that’s what it’s about.” He winked at himself in the mirror. Tomorrow, after all, was soon enough for Thorens to know the facts. Besides, Burman had no authorization to pass the real dope along. The packet—clever.

“My packet?” Thorens said, still whispering. “My packet? What about it?”

(The packet was the monthly HH mailing to all its Hands, containing: Instructions [if any]; pay-check; report forms; requisition-slips for needed supplies [if any]; and the monthly news-bulletin, Brotherly Love.)

“It came open, during shipping,” Burman said casually. “You’re supposed to check it over, see that it’s all in order. Regulations.”

No icy, rushing, negative forces were required to extinguish the particle. It simply went out.

“That’s funny,” Thorens whispered.

Burman milked it. “Speaking of Earth, it’s spring now in New York.”

“Lord,” said Thorens, after a moment, in a starving voice, “the heat’ll be coming along.…”

“Bad winter. Twenty-eight inches of snow one time. You couldn’t drive a bug.”

“I know. You told me last time. How are the new model bugs?”

“Chrysler’s finally bringing out that one-wheel job.”

Thorens shook his head. “I wouldn’t trust it. You hit two hundred and the gyro goes out and you start turning thirty-foot cartwheels.”

Tears gleamed on his cheeks. Burman shot him a look and pursed his lips, feeling a slight twinge.

The trivision began to chant out a spaceman’s song, describing the average spacehand’s affection for his superior officers. The Patrolmen at the bar set up a roar, and one shouted to Mike Burman, “Hey, loot! This one’s dedicated to you!” Then they took up the song:

“Just tell him for me, he’s an ess-uva-bee,

“And his mother’s a Martian monstros-s-sity!”

Thorens blinked—(Sometimes I feel…)—and shifted in his seat, feeling the comfortable if temporary security provided by the presence of these men.

A woman came in. Tall, hard-faced, green-eyed, with clipped dark hair. She wore two knives, handles forward. Her leather breastplates were neither new nor badly scarred, which meant her steel was fast. Eyes of Limbos brushed her up and down appreciatively, but no one made the sign. The tough ones were unpredictable. She got her drink, moved to a corner table.

At the bar a big young Patrolman new to Limbo, singing, had not taken his eyes off her ample curves. His chest had swelled. Now her eyes caught his gaze and became icy green flames. He looked away hastily, remembering a briefing.

Thoren’s lips curled in loathing, hatred, contempt. The women of Limbo were even more repellent than the men. Especially the swaggering, strutting, leather-garbed alleycats of Damesville, with their cruel eyes and filthy mouths. That they should continue to live—

Mike Burman had been smiling at the song, and at his men’s loud endorsement of the fact that he was a ess-uva-bee. “Speaking of S.O.B.’s,” he grinned, “two real beauts are heading Earthside!” He almost added: “—with you, on my ship—” but fortunately he caught himself.

Thorens still glared at the woman, head down, eyes up. “Paroles?” he asked, not caring.

“In one case,” Burman nodded. “For him.” He pointed to Potts. “The other one’s going back so the shrinkers can have another look. Him.” He pointed to Turk.

It took a moment to sink in—a process of appalled disbelief to furious rejection of fact to bitter acceptance that shriveled to numbness. Music blared from the trivision as the song ended. Applause, more laughter. Thorens’ face sagged off the front of his skull—his voice seemed wrenched out of him—“Those two?”

Burman stared at Thorens, not realizing (hate) what he had done. The trivision started (hate) a new wham ’n bam song hit, and the two singers (hate) began to fake their blows at each other.

It canceled John Thorens’ mind, shuddered down through his body to explode at his extremities. It was stronger than any other emotion he had ever known. He contracted in his chair, elbows and knees doubling. Half-huddled thus, he trembled violently. Hate Turk, hate Potts, bite lips, taste blood, fight, hate, hate—

Those two. Flying up out of Hell to the distant blue-green world that was Heaven. No—no!

Mike Burman searched the distorted features of the little, sandy-bearded man who sat opposite him. He talked, feeling uncomfortably that there seemed little else to do: “Potts—lack of conclusive evidence of premeditation. Changed to second degree, sentence commuted to what he’s already served. And Turk—recalled for psychiatric—”

He said a few more words, hesitantly, barely audible under the general din, while he studied Thorens’ face.

Thorens seemed to catch fire. He thrust up out of his chair, overturning it. “Damn you!” he gasped. “No… Not them… Get me a transfer… Get me a parole…me…me—me—” His eyes bulged. He leaned far over the table, his breath causing strands of Burman’s hair to move, and shrieked at the top of his lungs: “Take me to Earth—not them!”

An interested silence fell over the bar, save for the trivision’s wham ’n bam. Hands of Limbos went to knives, anticipating action. The Patrolmen instantly, but casually, grouped to leave, as protocol required.

But this was an unusual situation. Little Thorens, the Hand, was blowing his stack at the Patrol loot. Expressions became uncertain.

Mike Burman was rearing back in dismay, as if Thorens’ cry had boosted him under the chin. “What? What? Why, I don’t—Thorens, I really—”

Thorens swayed there, shoulders forward, hands working. His half-closed, watering eyes caught a flicker of movement outside the window—and even in his extreme agony he could chill at a strange sight.

Two giants.

Then details registered and became not strange. He heard, from far away, someone at the door say, “Somebody bringing a spacesuit in here.”

* * * *

Eyes, turning from the tableau at the table to the door, saw a gigantic spacesuit float from the darkness. Gleaming, shining, towering, it resembled a deep-sea diving suit with its great windowed helmet, its claw gloves, its massive body three feet across, seven and one half feet high. A big man carried the suit, his right arm about its waist, his left arm grasping its left arm.

In this manner, holding it erect like a dancing-partner or more like someone getting a gentle bum’s-rush, he walked the suit across the fog-shrouded concrete roadway, up onto the curb toward Potts’ Bar. With one hand he opened the door. With the other he easily jumped the suit across the sill. The suit would have weighed at least three hundred pounds on Earth.

The voice said, “Fixin’ job, Turk.”

Turk nodded, his small admiring eyes fastened on the huge figures in the door.

Handsome, golden-haired, the newcomer—six feet nine inches tall and grinning. He stood there, balancing his specially built suit with its sprung demand-valve.

“Where fat man?” he rumbled.

Thorens was stumbling toward the door. Mike Burman looked after him, eyes bright with bewilderment, pique, vague sympathy. Then, whistling tunelessly between his teeth, he started back for his fellows at the end of the bar. He called to 1st Engineer’s Mate “Goldy” Svenson to join them as soon as he got rid of the suit.

Thorens scooped a bottle off the bar, evading its owner’s indignant grab, and in perfect silence threw it at the head of the Damesville woman with all his might. It smashed against the wall by her head—or rather where her head had been, for she was on her feet, screaming and pulling her steel. Glass from the bottle still skittered and tinkled as she drew back full-arm for the throw that would skewer Thorens. A roar and a whoop had gone up from the bar. Men doorwise from the woman scattered from the line of fire. Men behind her watched, heads turned and wary.

Mike Burman shouted an order in single-syllable Patrol Code. Three Patrolmen sprang to positions between Thorens and the woman. They didn’t draw their guns—they didn’t have to. The woman’s throw was already started. She couldn’t hold it back; so she clung to the blade in a balk-throw and sank its point two inches into the floor at her feet. Instantly she snatched her second knife from sheath, on guard against the Limbo men. Glaring around, she cursed the grinning Patrolmen.

“Where fat man?” rumbled “Goldy” Svenson again. He had not moved.

Turk said, “Right here, cop.” As he began to wheeze, preparatory to getting up, his eyes clamped on the giants at the door, a third figure, small and furtive, dodged around them into the night.

Watching Thorens go, Mike Burman thought: “I almost wish I’d told him….”

* * * *

Across the roadway from Potts’ Bar was a steep, rocky slope that led down to darkened fields some thirty feet below, and the flat gray expanse of the Spaceport beyond. A barbed-wire fence ran along the edge of the road, to discourage drunken Limbos from brawling through the fields and trampling the crops. Thorens bent down the top strand, tearing his forefinger to the bone.

He stepped over. He took two blind steps, put a foot over the incline to encounter nothingness and spilled, rolled, flopped to the bottom. He lay on his back in the rain-ditch, face barely out of the filthy water, and cried.

The seconds and minutes of his grief wore on. An occasional star winked down through the chill, slow-moving fog.

Thorens squinted up at each and sobbed the louder, wishing that mysterious forces could mesh to make him a vanished man, could transport him to each speck’s vast flaming surface, push or pull him into the nuclear inferno of its interior, plunge him into the sweet methane or ammonia or formaldehyde of the atmosphere of its planets, if it had planets, or send him hurtling onto the bitter, airless surface of any of its planets’ satellites—or rush him away to a point midway between the two suns that were Mira (which he recognized), there to hang suspended as a mote that once had lived but now took its motion, its vectors, its orbit, its course through Infinity and Eternity, as the product of forces that were not consciously cruel.

Footsteps above. Thorens choked a sob into utter silence. His hands, under water, clenched at mud. His legs tightened in terror, and developed a cramp.

“Hear it?” a voice said, from the road.

“Yeah.”

“See anything?”

“Too dark. Sounded like crying.”

“Let’s look.”

Thorens heard the wire creak as it was stretched down, and, clearly, the whisper of a long knife from sheath. He gulped in air and sank his face under the water—it murmured in his eardrums, transmitting his own tiny movements.

When his lungs could stand it no longer, he bobbed his head up and gasped through his burning throat, “Kill me! Why am I hiding? Please, oh, my God, please, kill me!”

He lay with wide eyes staring up; he saw Mira appear, then disappear again into the fog. He saw the suns, the worlds, the moons, the vacuums and infernos that filled the reaches of space, but could not notice him nor help him to die. He waited, with a mixture of mud and gastric juices in his mouth, for the fist, the boot, the knife.

The fog around him was empty. Footsteps faded far down the road. They had not been curious enough to come down—or perhaps they had thought it was a muggers’ trap.

If the latter, Thorens thought frantically, they might be going to get some friends together, so they could come back and fight. His arms and legs grasped, pumped, scrambled, flailed.

He crawled up the slope. He did not want to die.

* * * *

Turk’s Repair Shop was located in a shack behind Potts’ Bar. In it were a tool bench, some metal-working machinery and a cot on which Turk slept when he was too tired or too drunk to make his way home.

Even though the Patrol naturally maintained its own repair facilities for spacesuits and all other equipment, Turk was an expert and dependable. And he would work at night, when the Patrol machine-shops were closed. Also, when Patrolmen patronized Turk, they received a bonus in addition to good workmanship, i.e., tips on what bars were or were not watering their liquor that week, and where the cleanest girls were to be found, and at what gambling-dive the tables were running against the house. So Turk prospered. And no Limbo objected. What Turk did was, in the long run, good public relations.

Now, in the light of overhead ’tomics, Turk labored to repair “Goldy” Svenson’s spacesuit—but he was thinking about John Thorens.

What a funny little jerk the Hand was! Sure, he got clobbered, day after day. But he asked for it! The crummy little milksop asked for it. He never talked to you straight from the shoulder. He hid in the back of his skull and played angles. He looked at you with rubbery little face, and you knew he expected you to murder him, so you got mad and did it. All he cared about was out. He ran around Limbo like a turpentined pup, squawking to life-termers about out. It was a drag. He’d make it off Limbo sooner or later, and good riddance. Right now, he was just exactly where everybody else was, except for one thing—he looked at you that way and you had to cream him.

Then Turk started thinking about “Goldy” Svenson, all six feet nine inches of him, and that was Turk’s mistake.

He undid eight screws and lifted a curved plate away from the back of the suit…

* * * *

Thorens turned the last corner. His office was burning.

“We read your book,” a voice said from the shadows. “It started a good fire.”

That’s Joe Moore’s voice, Thorens thought. Joe. Joe. I bought you a drink on your second night on Limbo, and you said you were sorry for me. You said you were innocent of any crime. You hated the place as I do. What made you run with the pack?

“When you start yelling at the law,” another voice said, “that’s bad. Creates a scene. Draws attention. You need a lesson.”

“But we won’t kill you, you little bastard,” another voice said. “You’re too much fun to have around.”

Thorens screamed, and for the second time since his arrival on Limbo dared to run. This time, he thought agonizedly, he must get away.

But that was before a belt-buckle, aimed low, lashed out of the darkness ahead of him.

* * * *

They gathered around in Turk’s Repair Shop and looked down at the large, sprawled, melted-looking, half-boiled, red and gray thing with staring, milky eyes that had been Turk.

Here and there white showed, where flesh had sagged in blobs away from bone. The cracked skin glistened with oil, cooked up out of Turk’s enormous supply of fat.

“Christ!” said one. “Did you hear him scream!”

The spacesuit stood where it had killed Turk. But now it was harmless. Potts’ frantic call to the Spaceport had brought a Radiation Squad on the double. (Wild radiation was one of the very few things on Limbo that the Patrol would tend to, mainly to insure the safety of their own men stationed there.) An officer in protective clothing had gone into Turk’s shack and closed the small plate that covered the spacesuit’s atomic-power-pack. The radiation, though it had killed Turk quickly and then cooked him through prolonged exposure, counted its half-life in mere minutes; so now the room was safe to enter.

The officer was removing the radiation suit. His companion said casually, “You know how it happened, anybody?”

Heads shook no. One man snickered and the officer looked at him: “What’s funny?”

“What isn’t?”

“Do you know what happened?” (Ordinarily, the officers wouldn’t have given a damn what happened; but since Patrol equipment was involved, they had to shape up a report.)

The man shrugged. “Those plates are close together…the one on the power, and the one to the oxy-system. I guess he got careless.”

“What’s funny?”

“I owed him eighty bucks on blackjack,” the man smirked. “He was gravving me for it. I was going to kill him myself, and he saves me the trouble!”

The officers looked around, mouths curled in wry distaste. The Limbos grinned back, disliking them, wishing they could kill them—but no one could be safer anywhere than a Patrolman on Limbo.

Without another word the Patrolmen left. Over the motor-noise of their bug fading down the street, Potts cursed as he looked at the mess on the floor: “How do I clean this up?”

“Bring in stray clogs,” one man said.

Potts nodded appreciatively. “That’s sharp.” He kicked the mess in the ribs and went over to the spacesuit. “Somebody help me get this damn thing outa the way!”

Two men joined him, and they inched the heavy bulger toward a wall.

Lieutenant Mike Burman was among the watchers, with some of his buddies. He stared down at the mess, thinking, He never even knew he was going back.

Potts wrestled with the spacesuit. Another step, and his foot slipped on the wrench that Turk had dropped in dying, and he lurched sideways. He made the error of hanging onto the suit, trying to right himself, and his added weight overbalanced it and took it out of the hands of the other two helping him. For a second they made an effort to hold it back, but the mass was great and slippery, and so they let go, with the suggestion of shrugs.

In mid-air, falling, Potts began to scream.

The suit followed him down in the same arc, not very quickly, it seemed, stiffly, like an inexperienced lover bending to the loved. The heavy angle of a shoulder-plate shoved into Potts’ mouth as the back of his head hit the floor, and his scream cut off with a crackling of bone.

They watched his hands twitch until finally every part of him was dead. The big young Patrolman who had looked at the woman was in a corner, holding his stomach with folded arms and swallowing excess saliva. Mike Burman was standing in front of him, thoughtful-eyed, as if not wanting the Limbos to see that Patrolmen had nerves.

He had another reason for being thoughtful. Tonight Mike Burman was very near to believing in Fate.

The Limbos looked at the spacesuit. One whistled.

* * * *

Thorens takes a step, and somewhere in the cauldron of pain, humiliation, and fear that is melting down his mind and nervous system to basic animal responses, float fragmentary memories of this last half-hour he has endured.…

Another step.

Let him go. A shape moves aside. He’s had it.

One more.

A blow—somewhere in his back.

Lay off the kidneys. We don’t want to kill him.

Please kill me.

Poker game at Charlie’s…how about it?

Thought you were looking for Cat Red field, to slice him.

Ah…I don’t feel like it. Come on—let’s go.

A nudge in Thorens’ back, and he falls down. Drooling blood he gets up, takes a step.

Voices fade.

Another step.…

Walk through darkness, walk through pain, walk through fog past shadows that are things half-known, down winding, wet-gleaming streets, past lighted doors and windows, past jags and whirls and bursts of rainbow neon, under humming power lines, past toy factories whose tall smokestacks flicker at the tops with red-shot smoke (and through the walls a Teddy-bear grins; a shiny fire-engine blinks its headlight eyes and sirens a hello; an electric monorail whirs on its figure-8 to nowhere; a sleek rocketship charts a course for a far-off, better world; a hundred, harmless, joyous games play noisily all by themselves; a Chem-Craft Set percolates a panacea, while an Erector Set places the last shining girder in its bridge to Elsewhere; a Limbo night-watchman sprawls, bottle in hand, surrounded by the Answer apparent to any boy—and through the walls a wistful touch, a loving recollection)—and now along a fence, over dirt, across sand, past stunted plants that never have seen day, past looming dark hills and silent mineral diggings with gaunt machinery like poised skeletons, past a silver Spaceport that is a door to Heaven that has no key, past men who stare and squint through foggy darkness and nudge each other and laugh, past sight and sound of men talking, laughing, breathing, and their hearts pumping blood that rushes noisily through tiny tubes surrounded by muscles that whisper against one another as they gather to give pain…walk past life, or around it, or over it, or any way but through it, to some other place.

Walk crying, walk bleeding, walk hurting, through and then beyond the veil of thoughts that govern thought to keep the Universe real.

* * * *

An alley. Muddy water cool around ankles. An alley, somewhere off behind the world, containing its refuse, its secrets, its littered history. An alley, closer to the past than a street…on the dark other side of Now. A building gray-crouched in the fog—a dirt-encrusted back window—a searching…

Her.

Thorens stopped, swayed, stared.

Her.

Giant shape waiting against the wall inside, outlined in reflected flickerings from the Spaceport across the way as a ship prepared to take devils to Heaven; and now it could go, and nobody cared, for an Angel had walked with love across the stars, and the Universe had heard, and now a giant shape, strong, exuding warmth, concern, a solidity—

Thorens’ mind squirted out through the sutures of his skull.

Smash of window-glass—cut hands— Has darling hurt himself? Let’s see!—Toward the huge, longed-for shape, and that smile like the birth of a Sun: Did you think Mummy was lost?

Thorens was murmuring. His fists hurt from clenching. He lay down beside her. His head rested on the wide shoulder, his nose in the socket of the great neck. Outside, the rocket blared, took off, yellow flash, up fast, faster, dying, echoes.

Mom, a big noise!

It’s all right, dear.

Rubbing his cheek against the shining right arm, his left arm behind her back—close to the cool, sure strength.

Close doors, slam hatches, lock windows, pull shades, dig moats, build dikes, fasten gates—eyelids shut and everything’s outside. Pictures through a kaleidoscope—white mountains with pink-candy tops—checkerboard fields and green, fragrant trees and little animals that stare with bright friendly eyes. Childhood was a wonderful place, even with the dead bird—so fun, so safe, so hurt to remember. Blanket tucked in warm, and the Sandman is coming; the sky rips down the middle, falls shining, and the world is sliced into (Happy) birthday (to you!) cake with roast turkey; the song-voice rises, and London Bridge topples finally and forever across the Thames, amid waves and enveloping splashes of want-her—

Warm. Little legs drawn up against round little belly. Finger poked into limp little mouth. He’s the living image of his mother. Oh, look. He’s smiling!

* * * *

“What the hell is that racket?”

“It’s coming from over here. The suit…”

“You’re crazy.”

“Listen.”

“Open the belly-clamps.”

“You open them.”

“They already are.” (Grunt.) “What the hell? Something’s holding it shut from inside.” (Louder grunt.)

“What’s he doing in there?”

“Look at his face!”

“Hey—come on out, stupid! Come outa there—” (Pause.) “He bit me!” (Slug!) “Somebody call the Patrol…” (Slap!)

“Wa-aa-a-a-aa-a-a-a!”

* * * *

Two Patrol bugs through the dawn-light on a howling Code Three. Laughing, chatting Limbos evicted for the steel Caesarean. A half-hour battle—sick tenderness, and flaring tempers too.

Lieutenant Mike Burman never in his life stopped dreaming of the wailing, flailing, sweating, oversized foetus born of Swenson’s spacesuit.