Hollister spun alone for a long while. He watched Earth grow from a marble to a melon to a world. The air in his suit tasted of iron and autumn. He thought of his own front porch. The rake leaning against the elm tree. The smell of rain on hot concrete.
They fell, of course. Not down—but out . The hull had kissed the meteor swarm with a lover’s violence, and now the rocket was a bright bouquet of scrap, and the men were seeds scattered across an ink-black garden. kaleidoscope ray bradbury
Stone. The navigator. The man who had once charted Earth’s constellations from a planetarium dome, drunk on wonder. Now he was a smudge of glass and bone inside his own helmet, his visor webbed with fractures. Through the cracks, his face looked like a broken mosaic. Hollister spun alone for a long while
But Hollister looked.
One by one, they winked out. The radio became a jigsaw of static and goodbye. Until only Stone remained. He thought of his own front porch
He laughed.
“Listen to me, Hollister. When you hit atmosphere—and you will, your trajectory says so—you’ll burn. But for one second, one forever , you’ll be a shooting star. A child in Iowa will see you. Or a farmer in Ukraine. Or a girl on a rooftop in Tokyo, counting wishes.”