Something Beautiful

[Bob Clay]

It was pure luck and not a little irony that they found him, way out here, far from home, so far in fact that if you knew where to look in this dark black sky to find Earth’s star, the light you saw left the Sun when Alexander was conquering the known world.

The luck, if you can call it that, was that the rescue ship had picked up the orbital distress beacon, something he’d never been able to shut down despite two years of trying, and the irony was that his emergency pod room power source was nearly depleted, he’d have been dead in a week or two anyway.

So now, after two years alone, he would be going home, but of course he would never see Earth again which he accepted as he knelt down and touched the rocky floor of his pod, feeling the distant beating, like some great heart far far below in the core of this little world.

They bought him up to the rescue ship, examined him, fed him and patted him on the back, and he felt truly guilty when he eventually found his way to their drive room and pulled the control fields off the power core, in essence killing them all … himself too.

He kept them at bay with a lasgun while the reactor lost containment, he could hear them screaming in fear and confusion and tears of anguish rolled out of his eyes, but what else could he do? … there could be no question that anyone would ever come back here.

You see there was something down there, some living thing deep within the rocky ball that had been his world for two years, something that had to be protected … something beautiful.

[Mike Handley]

Sigourney Weaver woulda been proud!

[Sandra Davies]

You have an astonishing range of voices Bob ...