The rain marched across the umbrellas with incessantly scurrying feet. The space below them was heavy with cigarette smoke, like a small, poorly-ventilated room, and with the muted sound of many voices, keyed low—anxious but objective. Allerton could almost see the scores of pencils, ready to pounce upon the blank pages of the ruled pads and scribble his name across the hemisphere, the world.
"What are you telling me?" demanded Allerton. He had heard. Even now the words were etching themselves in his brain, stirring old memories, conjuring impossible visions. This was the sort of thing you saw on the video-casts and tch-tch'd about, then went upstairs with your wife and took her in your arms and thought, are the people that happens to real?
"Mrs. Allerton was married again ten months ago. In an interview this morning she said she was glad you were alive but loved her husband, her new husband I mean, that is, the man she married because she thought you were dead." It was the girl-reporter again, the brittle, pencil-point quality gone from her voice.
Allerton subdued a wild impulse to say something flippant. Suddenly, it was as if he had indeed died out there in space and now he was a ghost, coming home to haunt people who wanted only to forget. The reporters expected him to say something, though. Tell them that he had spent three years in space, hating every minute of it, to find security for his family? Tell them he had risked his life to repair the ship on Io because if he failed the government insurance would provide for his family? Tell them he was now dead, really dead as Nancy had thought, and they were wasting their time interviewing a ghost?
"Have you any plans, Mr. Allerton?"
"I'm sorry, I didn't hear you." The rain had slackened. He heard his own heart, hammering in his throat and ears.
"What are your plans for the future, Mr. Allerton? Are you going to contest the marriage legally? Will you see your wife at all?"
"I don't know," said Allerton mechanically. "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." He pushed his way through the crowd of reporters, a tall but stooped figure, averting his eyes from the umbrella ribs. He had been married to Nancy only six months before shipping out, had received word about the birth of their son at the last mail-station on Ceres. If she sought the same security he wanted, he could not find it in his heart to condemn her. He was dead. He had been waiting to live all his life, but now he was dead.
"All right, spacer. On your feet. We're closing."