Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction May 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
TO EACH HIS STAR
by BRYCE WALTON
"Nothing around those other suns but ashes and driedblood," old Dunbar told the space-wrecked, desperate men."Only one way to go, where we can float down through theclouds to Paradise. That's straight ahead to the sun withthe red rim around it."
But Dunbar's eyes were old and uncertain. How could theybelieve in his choice when every star in this forsakensection of space was surrounded by a beckoning red rim?
here was just blackness, frosty glimmering terrible blackness, goingout and out forever in all directions. Russell didn't think they couldremain sane in all this blackness much longer. Bitterly he thought ofhow they would die—not knowing within maybe thousands of light yearswhere they were, or where they were going.
After the wreck, the four of them had floated a while, floated anddrifted together, four men in bulbous pressure suits like smallindividual rockets, held together by an awful pressing need for eachother and by the "gravity-rope" beam.
Dunbar, the oldest of the four, an old space-buster with a facewrinkled like a dried prune, burned by cosmic rays and the suns ofworlds so far away they were scarcely credible, had taken command.Suddenly, Old Dunbar had known where they were. Suddenly, Dunbar knewwhere they were going.
They could talk to one another through the etheric transmitters insidetheir helmets. They could live ... if this was living ... a long time,if only a man's brain would hold up, Russell thought. The suits werecomplete units. 700 pounds each, all enclosing shelters, withatmosphere pressure, temperature control, mobility in space, andelectric power. Each suit had its own power-plant, reprocessingcontinuously the precious air breathed by the occupants, putting itback into circulation again after enriching it. Packed with foodconcentrates. Each suit a rocket, each human being part of a rocket,and the special "life-gun" that went with each suit each blast ofwhich sent a man a few hundred thousand miles further on towardwherever he was going.
Four men, thought Russell, held together by an invisible string ofgravity, plunging through a lost pocket of hell's dark where there hadnever been any sound or life, with old Dunbar the first in line,taking the lead because he was older and knew where he was and wherehe was going. Maybe Johnson, second in line, and Alvar who was third,knew too, but were afraid to admit it.
But Russell knew it and he'd admitted it from the first—that oldDunbar was as crazy as a Jovian juke-bird.
A lot of time had rushed past into darkness. Russell had no idea nowhow long the four of them had been plunging toward the red-rimmed sunthat n