He had been standing there a long time.
He was staring at his dead wife, a heap of broken bones and blood on the floor. But he was not seeing her—at least not as she was now. He was seeing her the way his mind kept bringing her back to him: the white evenness of her teeth when she smiled, the fury of her bright blue eyes when she was angry, the way she had uncomplainingly slept on the wrinkled sheets of the bed he had made when she had been ill ten years before, and the way they had laughed about that when she reminded him of it years later. He moved to stand erect, wondering why he should have thought about that at a time like this, and then, as he looked at her again and saw what the fall had done to her, he clenched his hands in anger.
They had said it couldn't happen! But they had been wrong. Man's wisdom was not infinite after all. All the man-years of thought, all the endless whirring and clicking of the computers and calculators—all of it had not taken into account what might happen to Karen.
His hands fell open. He knew that actually, they had never been wrong. If he had found her right away, he could have put her back together. He could have utilized the synthesizer for anything really bad, like a shattered bone. The needles of the organic analyzer would have told him what else he had to do.
But Karen had been dead for hours when he found her. Too long. The damage was irreparable, permanent. She was beyond recall. He might conceivably have animated her muscles, her glands, got her blood to flowing again. But her brain would have remained a vacuous, inert thing. You had to get reconstruction going in a matter of minutes when the brain, the anatomy's most perishable component, was involved. And in some cases he had known, the memories were never fully restored.
Why couldn't it have been a tumor? A deficiency disease? A nervous breakdown? Insanity.... There was nothing the medocenter couldn't handle. Its machines were right there on the ship, ready to be used—but Karen had to fall down the ventilator shaft, opening the door and walking into it as if it were her bedroom, and falling all the way down and breaking half the bones in her body.
And he had found her too late. Hours too late.
"Too late," he said, and he nodded his head in agreement. And then he was engulfed in sudden pity and remorse and a feeling of loss, as if she had snatched a vital part of him in her going. And hadn't she? Hadn't she taken her laughter with her, the laughter that brightened his days? And the things they had shared.
He glared at her, suddenly angry that she should have done this to him, and he glared at the shaft and blew out his cheeks and clenched his hands again and roared a great cry that echoed deafeningly in the smallness of the shaft.
And then he shouted obscenities at the ship and the stars and the hundred people who lay as if dead in neat rows in the sleep locker and he pounded the walls until blood from his hands left imprints there.