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Fear of Falling Forever
The first thing he saw as he awoke was a pattern of pale pink ovals. Eight of them, spread in an arc in front of his face. Behind them, he could discern two more ovals. It was dark, and it took him a few seconds to realise that the arc was made up of her fingertips pressed against the plastic. The other ovals were her eyes. He lunged forwards violently, only to hit his head against the plastic with a dull thump. He didn't actually see stars then, but his vision blurred behind a roseate glow as if he had just seen a nuclear blast. The two ovals behind the fingertips clearly resolved into her eyes as she pressed closer. His hands reached for hers, pressing against the plastic, searched the smooth curve of the transparent coffin that separated them. Her lips were moving, silently. Examining the way the red blinking lights on his left shone through the plastic, he realised that there were two layers of plastic between them, possibly separated by vacuum. He tried to move his feet, to roll over. There wasn't room. Suddenly, figures in radiation suits appeared behind her, grabbing her around the waist, dragging her back. Her mouth opened in a silent scream, hair flying as she struggled. They bundled her out of a doorway just out of his view as two of them approached, faces anonymous behind tinted faceplates. A third figure slapped a sticker on the outside of the plastic casing. It was the familiar horned trefoil that meant 'biohazard'. The two manoeuvred the case which was apparently resting on some sort of trolley, pushing it like a luggage rack down a darkened corridor. He glimpsed bodies lying on the floor with rusty stains around their mouths. They stopped. One of them opened a hatch set at waist-height in the wall. They shoved him into it head-first, the heavy door slamming shut without a sound. It was now pitch black, and he was upside-down, his forehead pressed against the base of the coffin. He knew it was a coffin, even if he wasn't dead. Yet. Suddenly, he was falling, the coffin rattling as it bumped against the sides of the shaft. Then he was out of the shaft, falling from the side of the asteroid-station, falling head-first into open space. The only object in sight was the asteroid he had just left, a dark shape over a backdrop of stars. He couldn't even see the sun. He wondered how much air he had left. November 1990 |
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