Edward W. Ludwig

Spacemen Die At Home by Edward W. Ludwig - One man's retreat is another's prison ... and it takes a heap of flying to make a hulk a home!

Forty days of heaven and forty nights of hell. That's the way it's been, Laura. But how can I make you understand? How can I tell you what it's like to be young and a man and to dream of reaching the stars? And yet, at the same time, to be filled with a terrible, gnawing fear—a fear locked in my mind during the day and bursting out like an evil jack-in-the-box at night. I must tell you, Laura.

Perhaps if I start at the beginning, the very beginning....

It was the Big Day. All the examinations, the physicals and psychos, were over. The Academy, with its great halls and classrooms and laboratories, lay hollow and silent, an exhausted thing at sleep after spawning its first-born.

For it was June in this year of 1995, and we were the graduating class of the U. S. Academy of Interplanetary Flight.

The first graduating class, Laura. That's why it was so important, because we were the first.

We sat on a little platform, twenty-five of us. Below us was a beach of faces, most of them strange, shining like pebbles in the warm New Mexican sunlight. They were the faces of mothers and fathers and grandparents and kid brothers and sisters—the people who a short time ago had been only scrawled names on letters from home or words spoken wistfully at Christmas. They were the memory-people who, to me, had never really existed.

But today they had become real, and they were here and looking at us with pride in their eyes.

A voice was speaking, deep, sure, resonant. "... these boys have worked hard for six years, and now they're going to do a lot of big things. They're going to bring us the metals and minerals that we desperately need."