Free Offworld by Robin Parrish Page B

contrary," Owen replied. "Chance favors the prepared,
and we have no idea what to expect as we travel."
    Terry was surprised to get Owen's approval, but decided to let
it go.
    "If you're near the peanut butter, grab some," Owen called out. "It doesn't go bad for a very long time. Same goes for canned soups
and crackers, if they're still sealed. Maybe some sodas."

    "Okay," Terry called back. "Might want to get some disposable
plates and utensils too." He stopped. Looked up. "Did you hear
something?"
    "Like what?" Owen shouted back.
    "Um, maybe ... a kind of creaking sound?"
    The sounds of Owen gathering materials into his own cart stopped
as he listened. Terry saw the beam of light from Owen's flashlight
on the other side of the store rotate upward until it scraped the ceiling tiles.
    "I believe," Owen said slowly, "that we should exit. Immediately."

    Chris' steps came slower as he approached the rear of the old
house, though he wasn't sure why. It seemed some part of him didn't
want to go all the way.
    He didn't take time to stop and reflect on this. He kept moving.
He had to do it. He had to know.
    At the back of the house he came across many familiar items.
The old man was a lover of routine, of everything being just where
it was supposed to be, and nearly everything was exactly as it was
the last time Chris had been here, years ago. The old shed at the far
end of the backyard, containing his father's tools and the old Chevy
he piddled with from time to time. A small gazebo stood on the
other side of the yard. It'd been started for his mother less than a year
before she died but never completed. Nearby waited a tiny garden of
homegrown vegetables-now rotten and overgrown-right next to
the back porch. A shovel, rake, and other old-fashioned tools leaned
up against the house, all in a neat row.
    But there was one item he did not recognize, and after taking a
moment to absorb the familiar, he moved to it. It was on the ground,
right inside the unfinished wooden gazebo at one corner of the lot.

    Approaching it slowly, he saw that it was a slate gray hunk of
stone, standing two feet high and about a foot wide. It could have
been a decorative rock placed in the center of the gazebo for effect.
But Chris knew differently. Hand-carved in sloppy small letters on
the bottom front corner of the stone was his father's three initials,
and both his birth date and the date of his death.
    Chris closed his eyes for a long moment, before opening them
again and reexamining the second date. It was a little over a year
ago.
    Of course they wouldn't have told him. It was NASA's policy to
withhold information of this nature while an astronaut was offworld,
as the stakes were simply too high for an astronaut to suffer a devastating emotional blow during a mission. Every man or woman who
signed on with the agency knew this going in.
    But he still couldn't quite accept what his eyes were seeing.
    He stood there beside it for a long time, his hands clasped in
front, unmoving. He refused to take his eyes off of the makeshift
tombstone, wanting to burn the image of it into his mind.
    It was illegal, of course-burying a dead body in some place
other than a graveyard. But Chris' father didn't care; he'd always
planned to be buried here, "near the Cape." One of his father's old
war buddies would have done the burial or arranged it personally,
using his dad's specific instructions. His obsession with the space
program demanded that he be laid to rest here, in the house where
he'd raised Chris alone, where he'd watched every rocket launch from
the front porch, binoculars in hand. Chris' mother had a matching
stone of her own, a few feet away, on the other side of the gazebo
where his father had placed her remains when Chris was a boy. His
father thought he was so clever with his "disguised" tombstones that
looked like decoration to anyone else.
    Now both of Chris' parents were here, dead and gone, and still