Johnny Reb

One man coughed as he rolled his third cigarette in twenty minutes, and another wasn't careful enough to avoid some noise as he set his beer mug down on the scarred wooden table. Other than that, the twenty or so patrons of the Wolverine Truck Stop and Motor Lodge's big dining room were absolutely silent, listening to the end of their host's story.

"Rhysling knew what had happened," Mick continued, "as soon as he picked himself up off the floor. It was a reactor core blow-out, caused by poor maintenance just like he'd suspected. If only the Captain had believed him instead of treating him like nothing but a blind bum - but now it was too late.

"He pushed himself up next to the bulkhead to get a little extra shielding, but he knew that he didn't have much time. In a few minutes the radiation would kill him just as dead as the engineer whose blood he could already smell. The man had been directly in front of the main shield when it blew apart. Rhysling didn't need his eyes to see what the room would look like. The pink glow of the reactor core shining through the mists of vaporized emergency shielding in a room just like this one was the last sight he had ever seen, when he had been a spaceliner engine-man twenty long years before.

Mick paused, apparently to take a sip of water. In fact, he wanted a chance to look at his audience a little more closely than he could while performing. He was glad to see that they were about as hooked as they could get. One good sign was when guys wouldn't let go of their beer mugs. That way, they wouldn't have to look down when they wanted to pick them up again. It felt good. He couldn't remember many short Heinlein stories well enough to do them, and he'd been saving up The Green Hills of Earth for a very long time. And something in the air this evening had told him that this was the night for something special.

"The Captain's voice roared out of the speakers, and he sounded scared. 'Engine room! Damage report! We're showing pegged radiation levels in there!' The young Captain knew that if it was a reactor fire in there and nobody could get to it in time, he was going to lose the ship and every soul on board. He also knew that with all the power out it would take the fire team at least half an hour to cut through the blast-doors. That would be about twenty-five minutes more than they had left.

"'Captain!,' Rhysling had to yell to be heard over the burning reactor. 'You got two engine men down in here! One's dead for sure and the other's probable. And you have a main reactor coolant failure and meltdown.'

"As he spoke, Rhysling was already pulling himself up to the control panel and fitting his hands into the remote manipulator gloves. If he'd still had the use of his eyes, he knew very well that he would have lost them in the moment he faced the core. He knew, because that was exactly how he had lost his sight twenty years before. It was an accident exactly like this that had started his career as the blind poet-bum of the spaceways, trading his bullshit poetry and songs for free rides all over the solar system. Of course, younger men like the Captain wouldn't have bothered to learn that. All they knew was that all the old-timers on the crew would let this Rhysling bum ride for free, and there was nothing that a Captain or First Mate could do about it.

"Rhysling could feel the hard radiation like it was sunlight shining through his bones. Twenty years before, an unshielded reactor core would give a man a fatal dose in ninety seconds. In the accident back then he'd gotten away with about thirty seconds to spare. Of course, ships' engines had gotten a lot bigger since then. What the hell. At least the controls hadn't changed much. His hands still knew just what to do.

"The Captain yelled at him. 'Who the hell is that? Is that Rhysling?. What the hell are you doing down there? Put somebody on! Don't touch anything until the fire team gets there! Do you hear me?'

"Rhysling yelled back. 'Captain, White is dead and the young guy is down. Copy? No time for nonsense, now!' He could already feel his throat burning from the radiation and God knows what toxins the fire would be pumping into the engine room's air. At least that garbage wasn't getting into the air in the rest of the ship. But the flood of alpha particles and fast neutrons would be going through the thin internal walls of the ship, turning it into a radioactive deathtrap in minutes. 'Your crew can't get down here in time, Captain. I am performing emergency reactor dump and core flush now.' His gloved hands flew through the emergency sequences that he would never forget."

The truckers looked like they weren't breathing. Mick knew that anyone who had traveled across the country like they did would have plenty of bad memories of the dangers of radiation. Some would have stumbled into hot zones and almost not gotten out soon enough. Others would have seen farmers trying to get rid of their deformed livestock without anybody noticing. Or worse.

"'Rhysling, you're a damned civilian! And you aren't rated for this vessel,' the Captain yelled back. But he was sounding a lot less certain than he had a few seconds ago. It made Rhysling laugh, even while he was hitting the controls.

"'Well, sir, let's just say I'm reporting for duty. And paying for all the free rides. Now shut the hell up and start recording.

"'What?,' the Captain yelled. There was a lot of racket in the room. 'Recording? Yes, I am recording.'

"For once, the Captain did what the old bum told him to do. And that's how we got the last and best bit of genuine Rhysling poetry ever. As he was finishing the first reactor-flush and starting the second, Rhysling could already feel his strength going. In the last minute or two he had probably absorbed enough radiation to kill him ten times over. He knew that his buddies would see to it that he got to the right hilltop in Tennessee. He just hoped they'd use a thick enough lead coffin, so none of them would get hurt."

"Normally, Rhysling would have wanted to sing his lyrics," Mick continued, "but his voice was too far gone for that. So he just yelled.

"'Tell the XO I finally got the end to that damned song,' he shouted. 'And it goes like this.'

"'I pray for one last landing

Mick let that sink in while he took another sip of water that he didn't actually need.

"When the rescue ship got to them a week later," he picked up again, "it was still so hot in the engine room that they waited until everybody else was off the ship before they would even open the blast-doors and send the men in rad-suits in there. Rhysling was still sitting there, just as fresh as the day he died. They could see that he'd even had time to sit down and have a couple of smokes before the end. And he looked like he knew he'd really done something. The men pulling him out assumed that he must have died happy about saving the ship and all the people on it.

"The old-timers knew him better. Rhysling was smiling because he'd finally finished that damned song. They made sure that the old man got to his hilltop, and that last stanza got onto his headstone."

Mick stopped and looked around the room, giving the little nod he always used to mark the end of a good story, glad to see how many of his tough-guy trucker customers might be getting a little misty-eyed. Then one guy started clapping, and in a few seconds everybody was going at it like they didn't have a care in the world.

It was as busy a night as Mick had seen in years, with every one of the six tables full. During the story earlier he had counted thirty guests, and he suspected that a couple more had come in since then. There was no way he could take time now to count, though; it was all he could do to keep all their mugs topped off with his home-made beer. He would just have to hope that there were beds and cots enough for all.