Morgue Ship

Morgue Ship by RAY BRADBURY - This was Burnett's last trip. Three more shelves to fill with space-slain warriors—and he would be among the living again.

He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws groping into space, and then the star-port closed.

There was another dead man aboard the Constellation.

Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him; machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet, keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.

Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship. Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor warrior's body out of the void.

He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke, who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a decent burial.

'Number ninety-eight.' Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.

'Number ninety-eight,' Burnett repeated. 'Working on ninety-five, ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight surgery.' Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.