“Spacesuit, outside. There’s a hatch in the subspace room. If their attention is diverted to the companionway door, I may be able to get in. It’s our only chance—ours, and everyone’s.”
“But the spacesuit—”
“I know,” Larry said even as he was climbing into the inflatable vacuum garment. It was Larry—and it wasn’t Larry. He felt a certain confidence, a certain sense of doing the right thing—a feeling which Larry Grange had never experienced before in his life. It was as if the boy had become a man in the final moments of his life—or, he thought all at once, it was as if Johnny Mayhem who shared his mind and his body with him was somehow transmitting some of his own skills and confidence even as he—Mayhem—had reached the decision to go outside.
“I know,” he said. “The spacesuit isn’t insulated sufficiently. I’ll have about three minutes out there. Three minutes to get inside. Otherwise, I’m finished.”
“But Larry—”
“Don’t you see, Sheila? What does it matter? Who wants the five or ten extra minutes if we’re all going to die anyway? This way, there’s a chance.”
He buckled the spacesuit and lifted the heavy fishbowl helmet, preparing to set it on his shoulders.
“Wait,” Sheila said, and stood on tiptoes to take his face in her hands and kiss him on the lips. “You—you’re different,” Sheila said. “You’re the same guy, a lot of fun, but you’re a—man, too. This is for what might have been, Larry,” she said, and kissed him again. “This is because I love you.”
Before he dropped the helmet in place, Larry said. “It isn’t for what might have been, Sheila. It’s for what will be.”
The helmet snapped shut over the shoulder ridges of the spacesuit. Moments later, he had slipped into the airlock.