The wave broke just as the boat swung and a thunderous torrent of solid water smashed on deck, ripping at the forward cabin, crashing with torrential force around their legs, heeling the boat further, further, till the lee-gunwale foamed white water and the boat wallowed drunkenly. Seconds later the wave was past, but they were broadside on and a second breaker towered over them, rushing them to doom. With a yell, the man grabbed at a rail and clung fiercely. The boy was knocked flat and crushed against the bulwarks as tons of water thundered over. The boat backed in the surge, her stern rising high, higher yet, till the hatch cover broke open and the dead arm again flailed out.
Big Norman saw, and screamed, and let go his hold, frenziedly fighting his way back to that madly flapping arm. The boy saw him fall on the hatch, seeming to struggle with the dead flesh, shrieking, the body rising from the dark locker in a fierce embrace.
And then a final, giant wave bore them off, the man howling sobs into the sea and the corpse dancing beside him in the roaring waters.
The boy clung on, gibbering.
He was still there when they found him, and towed the boat to port.
“Suicide then?” said the inspector.
“Yes sir, several witnesses saw her jump, but the skipper had no chance. Propeller caught her.”
“Well at least it was quick. Took the head clean off.”
“That’s right. The shock must have thrust the body down because it couldn’t be found. They searched for a bit but of course in the — er — circumstances there was no question of her still being alive.”
The inspector nodded abruptly. He had not much liked his inspection of that head in the mortuary. Her eyes had been open, her lips drawn back in a final, desperate agony. And he had to see it again, today.
“Well we’ve got the rest now. Funny coincidence her husband fishing her out. No wonder he lost control. He must have dropped overboard getting her in and then the tide brought them to shore together. Rather touching really.”
The sergeant pursed his lips. He was a local man.
“Maybe, sir, though I gather they weren’t exactly well suited. He knocked her about. She’d gone off a bit ago, pregnant. She probably did it because of him.”
The inspector shrugged, getting his papers together and then reaching for his hat.
“Well, if there had been anybody aboard but that retarded lad we might have got a clearer tale.”
Then he rose, collected big Norman’s cousin from the waiting room and went down again to the mortuary to identify formally the two bodies. The man was worst, after being smashed on the reef. He was bloated horribly, his coarse bulging face blue. The vicious rocks had ripped his flesh in awful, jagged rents, splitting his chest wide open and almost severing one arm. His belly was shattered.
But the woman looked much better. She was thin and pale, but her body, though bruised, was miraculously whole and unharmed. The mortuary attendants had done a good job. They had stitched the head back in place. Her staring eyes had been squeezed nearly shut.
And it was surely only in the inspector’s imagination that those ghastly, dead slit eyes were looking up at him and that those pallid lips were twisting slowly into a faint and satisfied smile.
BRIDES FOR MARS, by Eric C. Williams
3D photographs and talking medical certificates tell you next to nothing about the person with whom you have contracted marriage.
Miriam Chokewater, aged nineteen, burdened with an ugly name but moderately pretty to the eye, thin, just emerging from boneyness and pressing towards svelte; blonde, blue eyes, good teeth, in-growing toenail on left foot, vaccinated against Martian pelagia, bubonic and Styx pollen, blood group Al, twisted the photograph of Franco Parzetti, aged twenty-three, Martian pioneer farmer, etc. etc. She watched him take his two 3D paces for the hundredth time and wondered what he was really like, you know, deep in his soul. Was he gentle? Would he love her?
Franco had her colored image pinned to the curtain of his sleeping dome where the light wind caused Miriam to twist her torso first this way and then that, and he imagined for the hundredth time what it would be like to hold her under the thermosheet, and what they would talk about after (and in his less heated moments, whether she could cook Martian cactus).
The photograph told him fifty percent of what he wanted to know — she looked even-tempered, placid, but not particularly strong (though very often these thin girls were resilient). She looked as if she had a good pair of lungs which she would find a help in Mars’ still thin air — the terra-forming process begun in the previous century was still in its early stages and ongoing. She had a kissable mouth. What he couldn’t tell was whether she knew much about farming in sand; how she would stand up to being sealed in a dome for two or three weeks when the storms came; whether she scratched herself (he couldn’t stand people who scratched); whether she had BO (God! he hoped not); whether she could cook Italian-style; oh, and whether she would love him.
These two mortals were, at the moment, separated by a gulf of 63 million miles, but this gap was being reduced at the rate of ten miles per second. They were due to unite in contracted marriage in about 140 days if the voyage to Mars went well and if traveling conditions on Marr allowed passage to the great depression of Hellas when Miriam arrived.
Miriam, still in torment as to whether she had done the right thing in pledging herself to a photograph of someone sixty-three million miles away, sat on her bunk in the SS (Settler Ship) Mayburg along with 499 other Martian brides and spoke to her cabin mate Laura Krankovsky about the anguished reaction when her mother had learned of her loved daughter’s registration in the Pioneer Brigade.
“She cried for days. I felt awful. I’ve never hurt my mother in all my life and I thought she would be glad to see me married off, me being nineteen, but no! She said I’d done it just to get away from her and she cried and cried ’til I thought my heart would break.”
Laura Krakovski stared at Miriam without much sympathy or understanding. Her English was the rudimentary sort taught in the outlying districts of New Russia and she was due to be wedded to Ivan Zarkow, a Russian-speaking farmer in Coprates.
“Cry? Why cry?” she asked, her heavy brow beetling in puzzlement.
Miriam did not note the lack of comprehension. She sighed and went on with a voice quivering on the edge of tears.
“We loved one another so much; we never had secrets from each other. Ever since I was a little girl I used to tell her everything, and even after that when I grew up. And she used to tell me all her thoughts, just like a sister, really. We’d talk for hours together and laugh. Of course, I never knew my father, so we only had each other, you know, and that’s why she cried. She’d got nobody else. She said she’d die. I tried to get out of the Brigade — I pleaded with them but they wouldn’t let me.” Tears at last ran down her cheeks.