She sat looking at him in the dull light. Above, cables slashed out at the couple.

Their spaceship had been going across the nightly galaxy at ease, and comfort. He even had a case of cigars to keep him company. He was, of course, Dr. Goiler of the many, fast responders to various diseases that started to pop up on various planets.

She was his wife. What more can be said?

As mentioned, she sat looking at him. He stared angrily, and started to dust himself off. He was in such a state that he felt he and she had just had an argument, a battle of gigantean proportions. His insides felt like many notes being written on by creatures whose ink leaked from their spider-like fingers. It was that feeling as if he had a wound. He looked down at himself, realizing for the first time the mass of fluid hissing out of his belly.

Perhaps that is why she stared at him, he thought.

“Listen, honey,” he tried to say, arching his back to as straight as he could get it, leaning against the spaceship wall, groping in the smoky atmosphere for something solid to hold onto. He found a coat hanger, and he used it delicately to hold him up, and he treated it as if it were a child.

The children, he thought, and knew she must have been thinking the same thing.

Or she was just terrified.

As he shakily stood on his two feet, on flooring that was covered in bubbling debris, he tried to see through the pitch of smog that started to consume the room: he was looking for her face. Finally, he could focus on it, and it reminded him so much of his mother in the springtime that it almost frightened him.

“Honey…”

He had no right words now. He could have said he was sorry to have brought her and the children. He could have said it was his fault that they crashed on some planet and were now suffering terribly inside a cheap spaceship. But all he could muster was a simple, and demeaning, “Look at me.”

As she refused the hand that tried to direct her face towards his, turning away viciously as if she were being slapped, he realized that the world wasn’t as he thought it was. And his wife wasn’t happy. Which of these things were more important to him now?

He watched her getting more distant, as if just by sitting still and ignoring him she was disappearing. Behind her rows of passenger seats were flung about, and they looked like a mass of clay by the way they were distorted and boiling by the fire that was rising below them.

Dr. Goiler sat down, defeated.

“Well, honey,” he said rather modestly, despite his constant tremble. His hand reached out and touched hers. And when she turned to him, he knew that what she feared wasn’t fear at all. It was love.

Overwhelmed with his new discovery, the doctor went to kiss his wife, but she ripped herself off of him.

“How can you act like this!” she asked him, “when you are bleeding to death!”

He slumped backward, and watched her with disinterested eyes.

“Do you really want to know?”

He had to chuckle to himself.

“As I am a doctor, I shall inform you about the scientific reasons, if it helps you to hear them, my love: As a man is dying, it is a natural occurrence for eroticism to take place. He has possibly hours left of his life, and he is unreasonably sentimental. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

She stood away, scraping her feet back farther and farther pensively.

“I’m going to check on the children.”

Dr. Goiler watched as his wife left him, but he couldn’t blame her at all. If he could move his legs as well as he liked to, he’d be with her now on the same mission…the children.

Closing his eyes, he was in a state of complete peace. The wound on his stomach also drained his feeling, which meant his body was going into shock, shutting down the functions of the nerves.

Yes, he was frightened by this. His whole life depended on facts, but if he could live by them, he could die by them. It wasn’t anything spiritual that led him to his death, it was simply evolution: let some die, others live. He’d always understood this.

A noise beside him allowed him to cast a weary gaze in that direction.

“Do you remember me?” asked this young, beautiful girl of perhaps eighteen.

Dr. Goiler laughed within himself. Of course he could remember her.

Before he had become a doctor, this girl had won his heart over and he was resolved one day to marry her. He was twenty at the time, and his parents disapproved of this marriage. Eventually, he went to study medicine and his youthful passion died out, and he forgot all about her. It was funny that she was here now.

“Why are you here?” he asked, getting up while slightly irritated.

She didn’t respond, and this only angered him more.

“Is it true?” she asked finally, “that you believe life and death is simple evolution?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Think about it: you’re born, you die, evolution?”

“Nothing more. What are you getting at?”

“Is love evolution?”

“I can explain love. It is the process of the fusion of…Why are you staring at me like that?”

“Do you love you wife?”

“Sure I do. Do you want me to deny it?”

“Will you deny that you also loved me?”
“Of course not. In fact, I often think about you.”

“Why?”

“Because…”

“Evolution?”

“Well no, it’s a memory problem I have. I can’t let go of certain things. Like you. That little dancer I had known so well and made me feel like Degas as I watched and adored you. It wasn’t lust so much as you filled me with the of life at its fullest, so to speak, in terms that everything is possible. But when you grow older, you realize it’s all a load of hog wash.”

“Deny what you just said.”

“Make me, my Little Ballerina.”

Dr. Goiler sat down and lay on his back. He looked up at the ceiling, a peeling feature to an overall ugly vessel. The spaceship was purchased for pennies on the dollar, to say quite honestly. Now with the New Depression making a muck of everything, he couldn’t deny his wants in grandeur purchasing. First it was this spaceship, then it was that earth vehicle, then it was that butler robot…all very cheap things in this growing depression.

The economies?

No, his own.

He rolled over and his eyes lit up as he saw the girl was still there.

“Tell me, did you marry after all? I swear, when I still believed in God I prayed for you quite fervently. What’s he like then, eh? A swashbuckler I hope.”

Her eyes watched him: her eyes were large, and strikingly youthful for her seemly adult form. She walked toward him as if in a step in one of her many dance routines, and her little feet easily moved her body along as if it weighed nothing at all.

“Steve.”

But he turned away.

“Why don’t you believe in God?”

“You’re too young!”

“Steeeve?” Her voice was like a symphony and it filled the spaceship with its harmonious, nearly eerie beauty.

The doctor wanted to die in peace now, and as he stumbled towards his room, he found his revolver where it always was.

“I’ll prove to you,” said Dr. Goiler quietly as he looked down, “that God doesn’t exist. I’ll show you right now that there is no hell fire, nor glistening clouds of heaven. All is made up simply to entertain us.”

The girl leaned on the wall in his room and seemed to laugh with her eyes. Behind her the smoke from the fire of the ship was intensifying, and she was slowly disappearing in grey and black curls.

“So long fiction,” said Dr. Goiler. “I’ll show you.”

The barrel of the gun was struck onto his forehead, and he laughed because it was cold at first, startling him.

Soon the cold won’t bother me anymore.

The girl was still there, getting covered in smoke. “Good-bye, Steve.”

The doctor turned to her in alarm.

“Good-bye,” he said, and pulled the trigger.

Great, he thought, looking at the wall where she had been. Another cheap purchase. He tossed the gun aside, and wasn’t half as pleased as he was earlier.

Many feet could be heard coming his way, and he saw the bright eyes of his three sons and he saw the composed look of his wife.

“Are you coming?” his wife asked him.

“Yeah, yeah,” said the doctor, holding his stomach and stumbling with his family out of the ship.