I held the box in my hands. "Is this all you could get?"
"It's all there was. Look at them, if you want."
"That's all right. We'll be leaving in half an hour."
He shook his head. "Not now. They're all around. If you move, they'll find us."
He waited for me to open the shoe box, then grimaced and went out into the pale light.
We stayed for another four days, as the Army patrols searched the surrounding dunes. Day and night, the half-tracks lumbered among the wrecked cars and cabins. Once, as I watched with Quinton from a fallen water tower, a half‑track and two jeeps came within 400 yards of the basin, held back only by the stench from the settling beds and the cracked concrete causeways.
During this time, Judith sat in the cabin, the shoe box on her lap. She said nothing to me, as if she had lost all interest in me and the salvage‑filled hollow at Cape Kennedy. Mechanically, she combed her hair, making and remaking her face.
On the second day, I came in after helping Quinton bury the cabins to their windows in the sand. Judith was standing by the table.
The shoe box was open. In the center of the table lay a pile of charred sticks, as if she had tried to light a small fire. Then I realized what was there. As she stirred the ash with her fingers, gray flakes fell from the joints, revealing the bony points of a clutch of ribs, a right hand and shoulder blade.
She looked at me with puzzled eyes. "They're black," she said.
Holding her in my arms, I lay with her on the bed. A loud‑speaker reverberated among the dunes, fragments of the amplified commands drumming at the panes.
When they moved away, Judith said: "We can go now."
"In a little while, when it's clear. What about these?"
"Bury them. Anywhere, it doesn't matter." She seemed calm at last, giving me a brief smile, as if to agree that this grim charade was at last over.
Yet, when I had packed the bones into the shoe box, scraping up Robert Hamilton's ash with a dessertspoon, she kept it with her, carrying it into the kitchen while she prepared our meals.
It was on the third day that we fell ill.
After a long, noise‑filled night, I found Judith sitting in front of the mirror, combing thick clumps of hair from her scalp. Her mouth was open, as if her lips were stained with acid. As she dusted the loose hair from her lap, I was struck by the leprous whiteness of her face.
Standing up with an effort, I walked listlessly into the kitchen and stared at the saucepan of cold coffee. A sense of indefinable exhaustion had come over me, as if the bones in my body had softened and lost their rigidity. On the lapels of my jacket, loose hair lay like spinning waste.
"Philip…" Judith swayed toward me. "Do you feel – What is it?"
"The water." I poured the coffee into the sink and massaged my throat. "It must be fouled."
"Can we leave?" She put a hand up to her forehead. Her brittle nails brought down a handful of frayed ash hair. "Philip, for God's sake – I'm losing all my hair!"
Neither of us was able to eat. After forcing myself through a few slices of cold meat, I went out and vomited behind the cabin.
Quinton and his men were crouched by the wall of the settling tank. As I walked toward them, steadying myself against the hull of the weather satellite, Quinton came down. When I told him that the water supplies were contaminated, he stared at me with his hard bird's eyes.
Half an hour later, they were gone.
The next day, our last there, we were worse. Judith lay on the bed, shivering in her jacket, the shoe box held in one hand. I spent hours searching for fresh water in the cabins. Exhausted, I could barely cross the sandy basin. The Army patrols were closer. By now, I could hear the hard gear changes of the half‑tracks. The sounds from the loud‑speakers drummed like fists on my head.
Then, as I looked down at Judith from the cabin doorway, a few words stuck for a moment in my mind.
"…contaminated area… evacuate… radioactive…"
I walked forward and pulled the box from Judith's hands.
"Philip…" She looked up at me weakly. "Give it back to me."
Her face was a puffy mask. On her wrists, white flecks were forming. Her left hand reached toward me like the claw of a cadaver.
I shook the box with blunted anger. The bones rattled inside. "For God's sake, it's this! Don't you see – why we're ill?"
"Philip – where are the others? The old man. Get them to help you."
"They've gone. They went yesterday, I told you." I let the box fall onto the table. The lid broke off, spilling the ribs tied together like a bundle of firewood. "Quinton knew what was happening – why the Army is here. They're trying to warn us."
"What do you mean?" Judith sat up, the focus of her eyes sustained only by a continuous effort. "Don't let them take Robert. Bury him here somewhere. We'll come back later."
"Judith!" I bent over the bed and shouted hoarsely at her. "Don't you realize – there was a bomb on board! Robert Hamilton was carrying an atomic weapon!" I pulled back the curtains from the window. "My God, what a joke. For twenty years, I put up with him because I couldn't ever be really sure…"
"Philip…"
"Don't worry, I used him – thinking about him was the only thing that kept us going. And all the time, he was waiting up there to pay us back!"
There was a rumble of exhaust outside. A half‑track with red crosses on its doors and hood had reached the edge of the basin. Two men in vinyl suits jumped down, counters raised in front of them.
"Judith, before we go, tell me… I never asked you –"
Judith was sitting up, touching the hair on her pillow. One half of her scalp was almost bald. She stared at her weak hands with their silvering skin. On her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of betrayal.
As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my answer.
FB2 document info
Document ID: aa3cb758-ac08-4cfb-9433-2a123eacf76c
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 06 June 2008
Created using: FB Editor v2.0 software
Document authors :
Eugene Greit
Document history:
1.0 - Create FB2 by Eugene Greit
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The Dead Astronaut Page 2