THE OLD MAN AND THE SKY
Astronaut; a word derived from an archaic language which literally translates into sailor of the stars. Sailors of the stars, zero gravity wayfarers, moonlight wranglers, those desperados of the stratosphere, for over half a century they had dared the dark unknown with unflinching boldness, had walked aboard shuttle after shuttle with a proud swagger and unconquered gait, had straddled countless rockets and blasted off into the very visage of danger and mystery with nothing but the timeless constellations above and their own bravado to guide them. They were the last real cowboys, riding the cold, silence-soaked ranges of the final frontier.
Or so it had been when he was young. Now, in a field quickly becoming dominated by inhuman technology and NASA bureaucrats, it sometimes felt as if he really were the last of his kind, the final, stubborn strand of a dying breed, a life-raft of humanity adrift in a sea of stars and cold, blinking machines. He sighed, perhaps that was the reason why he had accepted the mission in the first place, even though he had seen it for what it was, which was a fool's errand, a simple publicity stunt to supplant the graying, likeable face of an old man onto the 'new step in space age exploration' which meant more machinery and less humans. Oh well, it was an old game and he was an old player, it seemed right for them to go out together. So he had smiled and shaken hands and climbed into the seat of ‘the last manned space-flight of the twenty-first century' and flown off to accompany the new robotic, completely self-piloted crew on their first mission. He was babysitting somewhere near a billion dollars worth of technology.
He could just sit back and enjoy the ride, they had said, the Sparrow was one-hundred percent foolproof, there was no possible way that the computers could fail.
They had. Now she was sinking. Fast.
The stars, though, how they sparkled. Apparently, some impish hand had scattered diamonds across bucketfuls of jet-blank ink, and then splashed it all over the walls of the universe. That's what he would miss most about space, about life, that glittering wonder that whispered in his dreams, that feeling of utter isolation amid galaxies of cold-burning light and splendor older than time, the indescribable awe of being surrounded by thousands upon thousands of light-years of barren space stretching out around him, of looking upon things and going places none before him had seen or been. Before him and his lot, men had only been able to gaze longingly up towards the heavens and grasp helplessly at them with empty hands, filled with spurned thoughts and a pulsing, dreaming ache. Now men walked on the moon, now they soared through the skies and burned through the night. Now they glowed with star-fire.
That was somehow the most unfair part of the whole washout, that all that misty majesty would now be wasted on soulless machines. It was true, they could calculate distance and time with pinpoint precision, and they could analyze distant atmospheres and hunt for microscopic life forms with the push of a few buttons. It was easy to understand their usefulness from the sage shores of logic and reason.
But they couldn't tell you how the rings around Saturn looked like angel-highways, how they glittered a frosty blue and stretched on for ever and ever. They didn't feel anything when they saw galactic solar-winds mix with clusters of heat-ions to create thunder storms of color that stretched on for endless miles in long wavy banners that danced through the vacuum of space, alien tapestries of melting rainbows strung up across the obsidian. They wouldn't know anything about the sudden, gut-wrenching exhilaration of takeoff or the weightless marvel of flight, and they had no idea what Earth looked like through a cockpit window, how and entire planet could be shrunk down into a little blue-berry that fit inside such a miniscule view. When they gazed upon the Pillars of Creation, they saw only fire and gas and dead stars, instead of the very hand of God. They didn't understand things like the utter mystic of moon-shadows, or missing home, or that feeling that there just might be something more out there, something exotic and new, something that they didn't know anything about, something bizarre and undiscovered, caked in obscurity and lost in the impossible...and they didn't know how it felt to want that something more than life itself. The corners of their eyes and hearts would never be graced by that quicksilver, vagabond glimmer of stardust as it drifted through the vast emptiness of space, roaming dunes of silver-gray magic that were forever clinging to the corners of oblivion.
No more ground control. The Sparrow was going down, and the first friction-flames of resistance started to form around her outer hull as she entered Earth's atmosphere, diving with insane speed towards a swim in the Pacific. He had two choices; the first was to pull up and rise into Earth' orbital field, where he could kill the engines and dump the fuel, where malfunctioning computers didn't matter anymore. There he would sit peacefully and safely in slow revolution, cradled in the gentle hold of gravity, eating freeze-dried cornmeal out of a tube and waiting patiently until a rescue operation could be manned to come and tow him home, which meant waiting to die a slow and drawn-out death alone and cold in the darkness. The second one was attempting to land manually, by hand, into the ocean and with a craft he had never flown before, a feat rising far above the definition of impossible. That meant a relatively quick death with no freeze-dried cornmeal. Both ways he was checking out and the long strange trip would be over.
He had always felt at home in the stars, had fallen in love with their shy, secret light during childhood and had pursued the romance throughout his entire life, but that kind of death wouldn't justify them, and their sparkling purity would be marred. He wouldn't do that with his last breath, couldn't cast a rock through the stained- glass window he had spent his entire life exploring. No, if he was going down then he'd go down in a blaze of glory, out in style, leaving life as he had lived it; daring the impossible. The idea even had its own mad appeal, what with no sad funerals or long speeches, weepy-eyed congregations or scattered flower petals flying in the cemetery wind. Just a threadbare jet stream high in the sky for an epitaph, and a fire-ball splash for a eulogy, a send-off for the stars. That would be his farewell tribute to the dark ranges above, one last hooray in their name.
So with a gleam in his eye and a goodbye smile on his lips, he took hold of the rocket-throttle and aimed her low, eyes set on the drink.
Two days later a search and rescue ship found him in the middle of the night, floating around the Pacific in an inflatable life-raft, stretched out with his hands behind his head and a pile of unused rocket-flares and hand-flares resting nearby, empty survival-ration containers lying all about and a rain-catcher rigged up to a makeshift canopy with a long rubber hose leading from it to a plastic container. After he had been brought aboard and fed, wrapped in a warm blanket with all his medical problems seen to and his story told, relatives and loved one contacted and informed of his safety, he was asked by a curious attendant why he had failed to signal his position to them as they had approached.
He replied in a sleepy, happy haze, that he had been stargazing, and hadn't wanted to be disturbed.
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