But no one heard. There was no one to hear. Only the sleepers who lived their days with his years.
"Why?" he shouted, while his tears fell. And he thought: I haven't cried since I was a kid. Then, saying her name again and again, he knelt by her side to feel the silkiness of her jet black hair.
There had been no death aboard a Star Transit ship since the very beginning. From the first day of the Great Emigration more than a hundred years before, when the first captain and his wife stepped aboard to pilot the precious cargo of sleeping humans ten or more years across the vast stellar reaches to colonies on planets in a half dozen far-distant star systems, there had been no recorded death.
But now there would always be Karen.
He should have told them she walked in her sleep. But the Medical Examiners would have shrugged as they had with everything else he had told them. The medocenters would take care of it. You couldn't cure sleepwalking with the devices in the medocenter, but they would have taken care of anything that happened as a result—if he had reached her in time. It was unforeseen, this business of her walking into the shaft. No one was to blame. No one, that is, except himself.
Clifton looked up from beside his wife to the circle of light at the top of the shaft. "All right," he called out, "I'm to blame, do you hear? I did it. She could be alive except for me."
There was no answer to his self-indictment.
"And where does it leave me?" he shouted bitterly. "I'm the one who has to live and I've got nine years to go. Nine years to Ostarpa and the small colony there. What am I supposed to do?"
He never remembered later how long he stood in the shaft shouting until he was hoarse, only recalling that at one point the walls seemed to close in on him and the ship seemed filled with an oppressive strangeness, and he was clawing his way up the ladder to the top. And there were blurred images of walls and rooms as he ran about the ship, and he remembered his jerking open the liquor cabinet and the stupor that followed.