And Miles to Go Before I Sleep -...
William F. Nolan
And Miles to Go Before I Sleep by William F. Nolan - He knew, to the exact minute, when he was going to die. And Earth was too far away to reach....
Alone within the humming ship, deep in its honeycombed metal chambers, Murdock waited for death. While the rocket moved inexorably toward Earth—an immense silver needle threading the dark fabric of space—he waited calmly through the final hours, knowing that the verdict was absolute, that hope no longer existed.
Electronically self-sufficient, the ship was doing its job perfectly, the job it had been built to do. After twenty years in space, the ship was taking Robert Murdock home.
Home. Earth. Thayerville, a small town in Kansas. Clean air, a shaded street, and a white, two-story house at the end of the block. Home—after two decades among the stars.
Sitting quietly before the round port, seeing and not seeing the endless darkness surrounding him, Murdock was remembering.
He remembered the worried face of his mother, her whispered prayers for his safety as he mounted the rocket ramp those twenty years ago; he could still feel the final, crushing handshake of his father moments before the outer airlock slid closed. His mother had been 55 then, his father 63. It was almost impossible to believe that they were now old and white-haired.
And what of himself?
He was now 41, and space had weathered him as the plains of Kansas had weathered his father. He, too, had labored as his father had labored—but on strange, alien worlds, under suns far hotter than Sol. Murdock's face was square and hard-featured, his eyes dark and deep under thrusting ledges of bone. He had changed as they had changed.
He was a stranger going home to strangers.
Carefully, Murdock unfolded his mother's last letter, written in her flowery, archaic hand, and received just before Earth take-off.
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