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THE OTHER DEAD MAN
Gene Wolfe
Reis surveyed the hull without hope and without despair, having worn out both. They had been hit hard.
Some port-side plates of Section Three lay peeled back like the black skin of a graphite-fiber banana;
Three, Four, and Five were holed in a dozen places. Reis marked the first on the comp slate so that
Centcomp would know, rotated the ship’s image and ran the rat around the port side of Section Three to
show that.
REPORT ALL DAMAGE, Centcomp instructed him.
He wrote quickly with the rattail: Rog .
REPORT ALL DAMAGE, flashed again and vanished. Reis shrugged philosophically, rotated the image
back, and charted another hole.
The third hole was larger than either of the first two. He jetted around to look at it more closely.
Back in the airlock, he took off his helmet and skinned out of his suit. By the time Jan opened the inner
hatch, he had the suit folded around his arm.
“Bad, huh?” Jan said.
Reis shook his head. “Not so bad. How’s Hap?”
Jan turned away.
“How’s Dawson doing with the med pod?”
“I don’t know,” Jan said, “He hasn’t told us anything.”
He followed her along the spiracle. Paula was bent over Hap, and Dawson was bent over Paula, a hand
on her shoulder. Both looked up when he and Jan came in. Dawson asked, “Anybody left downship?”
Reis shook his head.
“I didn’t think so, but you never know.”
“They’d have had to be in suits,” Reis said. “Nobody was.”
“It wouldn’t be a bad idea for us to stay suited up.”
Reis said nothing, studying Hap. Hap’s face was a pale, greenish-yellow, beaded with sweat; it reminded
Reis of an unripe banana, just washed under the tap. So this is banana day, he thought.
“Not all of the time,” Dawson said. “But most of the time.”
“Sure,” Reis told him. “Go ahead.”
“All of us.”
Hap’s breathing was so shallow that he seemed not to breathe at all.
“You won’t order it?”
 
“No,” Reis told Dawson, “I won’t order it.” After a moment he added, “And I won’t do it myself, unless
I feel like it. You can do what you want.”
Paula wiped Hap’s face with a damp washcloth. It occurred to Reis that the droplets he had taken for
perspiration might be no more than water from the cloth, that Hap might not really be breathing.
Awkwardly, he felt for Hap’s pulse.
Paula said, “You’re the senior officer now, Reis.”
He shook his head. “As long as Hap’s alive, he’s senior officer. How’d you do with the med pod, Mr.
Dawson?”
“You want a detailed report? Oxygen’s—”
“No, if I wanted details, I could get them from Centcomp. Overall.”
Dawson rolled his eyes. “Most of the physical stuff he’ll need is there; I had to fix a couple things, and
they’re fixed. The med subroutines look okay, but I don’t know. Centcomp lost a lot of core.”
Paula asked, “Can’t you run tests, Sid?”
“I’ve run them. As I said, they look all right. But it’s simple stuff.” Dawson turned back to Reis. “Do we
put him in the pod? You are the senior officer fit for duty.”
“And don’t you forget it,” Reis said. “Yes, we put him in, Mr. Dawson; it’s his only chance.”
Jan was looking at him with something indefinable in her eyes. “If we’re going to die anyway—”
“We’re not, Mr. van Joure. We should be able to patch up at least two engines, maybe three, borrowing
parts from the rest. The hit took a lot of momentum off us, and in a week or so we should be able to
shake most of what’s left. As soon as Ecomp sees that we’re still alive and kicking, it’ll authorize rescue.”
Reis hoped he had made that part sound a great deal more certain than he felt. “So our best chance is to
head back in toward the Sun and meet it part way—that should be obvious. Now let’s get Hap into that
pod before he dies. Snap to it, everybody!”
Dawson found an opportunity to take Reis aside. “You were right—if we’re going to get her going again,
we can’t spare anybody for nursing, no matter what happens. Want me to work on the long-wave?” Reis
shook his head. Engines first, long-wave afterward, if at all. There would be plenty of time to send
messages when the ship lived again. And until it did, he doubted whether any message would do much
good.
======
Lying in his sleep pod, Reis listened to the slow wheeze of air through the vent. The ship breathed again,
they’d done that much. Could it have been admiration, that look of Jan’s? He pushed the thought aside,
telling himself he had been imagining things. But still?
His mind teetered on the lip of sleep, unable to tumble over.
The ship breathed; it was only one feeble engine running at half force with a doubtful tube, and yet it was
something; they could use power tools again—the welder—and the ship breathed.
======
His foot slipped on an oil spill, and he woke with a start. That had happened years back while they were
 
refitting at Ocean West. He had fallen and cracked his head. He had believed it forgotten…
The ship breathed.
She’s our mother, Reis thought. She’s our mother; we live inside her, in her womb; and if she dies, we
die. But she died, and we’re bringing her to life again.
Someone knocked on the pod lid. Reis pushed the RETRACT lever and sat up.
Paula said, “Sir, I’m sorry but—”
“What is it? Is Jan-”
“She’s fine, sir. I relieved her an hour ago. It’s my watch.”
“Oh,” Reis said. “I didn’t realize I’d been asleep.” He sounded stupid even to himself.
“My orders were to call you, sir, if—”
He nodded. “What’s happened?”
“Hap’s dead.” Paula’s voice was flat, its only emotion this very lack of emotion betrayed.
Reis looked at her eyes. There were no tears there, and he decided it was probably a bad sign. “I’m truly
sorry,” he said. And then, “Perhaps Centcomp—”
Wordlessly, Paula pointed to the screen. The glowing green letters read: RESUSCITATION
UNDERWAY.
Reis went over to look at it. “How long has this been up?”
“Five minutes, Captain. Perhaps ten. I hoped—”
“That you wouldn’t have to wake me.
Paula nodded gratefully. “Yes, sir.”
He wrote: Resp ?
RESPIRATION 0.00. RESUSCITATION UNDERWAY.
The ship breathed, but Hap did not. That, of course, was why Paula had called him “Captain” a moment
ago. She must have tried pulse, tried everything, before knocking on his pod. He wrote: Cortex ?
ALPHA 0.00. BETA 0.00. GAMMA 0.00, Centcomp replied. RESUSCITATION UNDERWAY.
Reis wrote: Discon .
There was a noticeable pause before the alpha, beta, and gamma-wave reports vanished.
RESUSCITATION UNDERWAY, remained stubbornly on screen.
Paula said, “Centcomp won’t give up. Centcomp has faith. Funny, isn’t it?”
Reis shook his head. “It means we can’t rely on Centcomp the way we’ve been used to. Paula, I’m not
very good at telling people how I feel. Hap was my best friend.”
 
“You were his, Captain.”
Desperately Reis continued, “Then we’re both sorry, and we both know that.”
“Sir, may I tell you something?”
He nodded. “Something private? Of course.”
“We were married. You know how they still do it in some churches? We went to one. He told them we
didn’t belong, but we wanted to have the ceremony and we’d pay for it. I thought sure they’d say no, but
they did it, and he cried—Hap cried.”
Reis nodded again, “You meant a lot to him.”
“That’s all, sir. I just wanted somebody else to know. Thanks for listening.”
Reis went to his locker and got out his suit. It shone a dull silver under the cabins lights, and he recalled a
time when he had envied people who had suits like that.
“Aren’t you going back to sleep, sir?”
“No. I’ll be relieving you in less than an hour, so I’m going hullside to have another look around. When I
come back, you can turn in.”
Paula gnawed her lower lip. He was giving her something to think about besides Hap, Reis decided; that
was all to the good. “Sir, the captain doesn’t stand watch.”
“He does when there are only four of us, dog tired. Check me through the airlock, please, Mr. Phillips.”
“Of course, sir.” As the inner hatch swung shut Paula said softly, “Oh, God, I’d give anything to have him
back.”
Neptune was overhead now; they were spinning, even if the spin was too slow to be visible. With only a
single engine in service it was probably impossible to stop the spin, and there was no real reason to. The
gravitational effect was so slight he had not noticed it.
He found Jupiter and then the Sun, slightly less brilliant than Jupiter or Neptune but brighter than any
other star. The Sun! How many thousands—no, how many millions of his ancestors must have knelt and
sung and sacrificed to it. It had been Ra, Apollo, Helios, Heimdall, and a hundred more, this
medium-sized yellow star in a remote arm of the Galaxy, this old gas-burner, this space heater laboring to
warm infinite space.
If you’re a god , Reis thought, why aren’t you helping us ?
Quite suddenly he realized that the Sun was helping, was drawing them toward the circling inner planets
as powerfully as it could. He shook his head and turned his attention back to the ship.
A faint violet spark shone, died, and rekindled somewhere on Section Six, indicating that Centcomp had
at least one of its mobile units back in working order. Centcomp was self-repairing, supposedly, though
Reis had never put much faith in that; human beings were supposed to be self-repairing too, but all too
often were not.
And deep space was supposed to make you feel alone, but he had never really felt that way; sometimes,
when he was not quite so tired, he was more alive here, more vibrant, then he ever was in the polluted
atmosphere of Earth. Now Hap was dead, and Reis knew himself to be alone utterly. As he jetted over
 
to check on the mobile unit, he wished that he could weep for Hap as he had wept for his father, though
he had known his father so much less well than Hap, known him only as a large, sweet-smelling grownup
who appeared at rare intervals bringing presents.
Or if he could not cry, that Paula could.
The mobile unit looked like a tiny spider. It clung to the side of Section Three with six legs while two
more welded up one of the smaller holes. Centcomp, obviously, had decided to close the smallest holes
first, and for a moment Reis wondered whether that made sense. It did, he decided, if Centcomp was in
actual fact fixing itself; there would be more units as well as more power available later. He swerved
down toward the mobile unit until he could see it for what it was, a great jointed machine forty meters
across. Three clicks of his teeth brought ghostly numerals—hours, minutes, and seconds—to his
faceplate, which had darkened automatically against the raw ultraviolet from the mobile unit’s welding
arc. Still twenty-four minutes before he had to relieve Paula.
For a minute or two he watched the fusing of the filament patch. The patch fibers had been engineered to
form a quick, strong bond; but a bit of dwell was needed just the same. The mobile unit seemed to be
allowing enough, working slowly and methodically. In the hard vacuum of space there was no danger of
fire, and its helium valves were at OFF just as they should have been.
Reis glanced at the time again. Twenty minutes and eleven seconds, time enough yet for a quick look
inside Section Three. He circled the hull and jetted through the great, gaping tear, landing easily in a
familiar cabin that was now as airless as the skin of the ship. The hermetic hatch that sealed Section Two
from this one was tightly dogged still. He had inspected it earlier, just after the hit, and inspected it again
when he had come with Dawson, Jan, and Paula to work on the least damaged engine. He threw his
weight against each of the latches once again; you could not be too careful.
Nell Upson’s drifting corpse watched him with indifferent eyes until he pushed her away, sending her
deeper into the dark recesses of Section Three to join her fellows. In time, space would dry Nell utterly,
mummifying her; radiation would blacken her livid skin. None of that had yet taken place, and without air,
Nell’s blood could not even coagulate—she had left a thin, crimson tail of it floating in the void behind
her.
Twelve minutes. That was still plenty of time, but it was time to go. When he left the side of Section
Three, the mobile unit was at work on a second hole.
======
RESUSCITATION UNDERWAY, was still on the screen half an hour into Reis’s watch. He read it for
the hundredth time with some irritation. Was it supposed to refer to Centcomp’s self-repair functions?
Reis picked up the rat and wrote, Who’s in muse ?
CAPT. HUMAN W. HAPPLE. RESUSCITATION UNDERWAY.
So that was that. Discon .
RESUSCITATION UNDERWAY.
Clear screen, Reis scribbled.
RESUSCITATION UNDERWAY.
Reis cursed and wrote, What authority ?
 

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