"Poor little beggar," said the guard. "Star-crazy, like all the rest of them. Well, he'll get over it."
"I suppose so," said Trehearne, and was glad that he would not see Torin again.
He found the doctor and had himself patched up, and after that he was busy checking lading. He was dead for sleep, and it seemed an eternity until, toward midnight, the cargo was all aboard and the hatches locked. The Saarga lifted into the star-shot sky, and the acceleration built and built to the thrust of the humming generators.
Trehearne told Rohan and Perri that he was too played out to talk about what had happened, and tumbled into his bunk. He was almost instantly asleep—and almost as instantly awake again.
There was a screaming in the ship....
They found Torin lying beside the well that led up from the hold. He had made it that far. His skin was already darkened with the subcutaneous hemorrhage, his body twisted and writhing, his face almost unrecognizable. And he screamed and would not stop.
Trehearne held him and watched him die.
It seemed to take a long, long time. It was not a clean death. It was dissolution. Trehearne remembered his own torment and there was nothing he could do. The others watched also with sick white faces. In the end it was the guard who went to fetch a cloth to wrap the body in, and there were tears on his cheeks.
Trehearne laid Torin on the sheet. His flesh was not hard any more. He was no longer straight and well made. He was not even a dead boy. He was a rag, a shapelessness, an obscenity. It crossed Trehearne's mind how nearly he had come to dying that same death.
He got up. He returned to his cabin, stripped and scrubbed himself in a kind of frenzy. He kicked his sodden garments into the corridor for someone else to deal with. He could not touch them again. And all the time he heard Torin's voice crying, "Surely I am strong enough to go out and see the stars!"