The Coroner found Solomon's corpse of interest. He passed his findings to Professor Adele Popper, Chief Medical Officer of the Federation.  In lancet (Outer Worlds), she wrote the article that brought her scientific fame. Her research of the man had been meticulous and detailed, like an obituary.

Solomon Archer had been born in London, England on Earth in twenty-two forty-five, as the Second World War ended.  He was just about old enough to become excited at the onset of the Space Age, although his understanding came mainly from the Science Fiction magazines and films.

The Russians sent the first man into extra-Jovian space and to the young Solomon his greatest desire became a real possibility.  Unfortunately for Solomon the Western Space Program was situated in America, so that is where Solomon decided to go.  Again, unfortunately he was both English and unsuitable as an astronaut, his hearing was not up to it.  Disappointed by this he hung around the Space Station becoming a laboratory technician, studying in his evenings.

It was the a time or massive changes accelerating rapidly in all fields, medical, social and in weaponry.  The only problem t it was all so costly and nobody likes to pay more taxes.  So over the next decades more and more or these advances were passed over to private enterprises. The Space Industry was one of such.

This made Solomon's desire and ambition able to come to fruition.  The main need now was not for passenger or tour traffic but for freight companies and they proliferated.  Starstruck Incorp was one of such but one of the less scrupulous, everything about it was cheap.  They used secondhand ships, scanty maintenance and their flight staff were older and worst paid, usually retired and dismissed men.  It was known as the last refuge of spacers that had nowhere else to go.  They offered poor pay, poor conditions and a lot or risk. They had been accused of freighting illegalities, drugs and alien species, the only people they paid well were their legal team and nothing had been proved against them.

With his lack of experience, poor hearing and, now age, they were still prepared to take Solomon on to ride of their decrepid freighters.  Freighting was a lonely job, it only took one astronaut to be in charge of older freighters and older freighters were all Starstruck Incorp owned.

On his twenty fourth voyage out the Delta Wing and Solomon ran into a heavy meteor shower and the spacecraft was holed.  This caused the control unit to seal Solomon inside, with limited air, limited food and water.  Solomon considered his situation and decided that he would wait two weeks before committing suicide.  It was all very rational, he didn't want to suffocate scrambling about fighting for life but he wanted at least two weeks to give life a chance, maybe even a rescue mission.  That depended on whether Starstruck had loaded him with a cargo that they did not mind the authorities to know about.  If it didn't matter and did not cost too much they might, just might, alert the Space Programme and they might send a rescue craft, a lot of 'might's'.

Time passed slowly, the minutes fighting their way around the clock.  He read every written work in the capsule and wrote copiously, first in a considered way, then in a frenzied, incomprehensible way.  Hunger and thirst were beginning to take their toll on him. He fought to stay awake, resenting every minute loss of conscious time.  He reviewed his past life and assessed it to be a failure.

It was on the tenth day that slivers of intense light appeared and cut a doorway in the hull.  He expected the rush as the air was expelled and he would suffocate after all.  The air did not rush out but, instead, the atmosphere improved.  Then the created doorway fell inside, Solomon saw a long corridor ahead.  The doorway had been cut out clean and he realised that the intense narrow beam of light had cut it out. He hesitated at the doorway but he heard the air being evacuated from the capsule in a controlled way.  He had no alternative, he had to go forward.  he stepped into the corridor and found it to be a moving pavement.  it carried him towards a blackness at the end and the darkness overcame him.

It was still dark but he was awake now and he did not know whether he heard what was said but he 'knew' it to be so. The 'voice' told him that his life-force had leaked away but they had boosted it and modified some of his ill designed organs and his system generally. They would locate him on the first Earth ship they came into contact with.

 It seemed only a short time before he found himself under bright light and he was looking at a surprised astronaut in a T-shirt and shorts. There wasn't any possible explanation so after a short confused conversation, they both accepted the situation. The captain of the ship was ordered by the owners to dump the stowaway at his first stop. Solomon was marooned on Phelo and Starstruck crossed his name from the staff register and forgot him.  They were happy that he would never draw a pension from them.

In the early years he had attempted to get back to Earth. He had approached every Starstruck captain either to take him back to Earth or take a message to the company but had always been unsuccessful.  He did many menial jobs to stay in area of the spaceport so that he could make these approaches.  Then he began to get casual work on tour ships to the outer planets, but only on kitchen duties, none of them would return him to Earth.

It was on such a tour that at one stopover he got drunk and awoke the next morning to find that he had missed his blast off, he was left on Szalt and tours there were few and far between.  Again he was reduced to any work that he could find.

Although this was a difficult time for Solomon he met Alice.  She was the daughter of one of the local policeman.  After a short relationship they were married, such quick marriages being the fashion on the outer planets.  His father-in-law was able to get him work in the spaceport where he could apply his skill and knowledge.  Solomon's life was content and the birth of their son, Adam, made it complete. It was only chance that made Solomon actually look at Alice as she came to meet him and it shocked him, Alice was looking old. Over the next few days he made pointed remarks and suggestions to Alice about his discovery and eventually arranged an appointment for her with a beauty consultant.

When the beauty course was finished he looked at her again, she looked old.  He said nothing. She was, he accepted, growing old and that made him look around him. He found that those that he had known for some years were growing old too. Then he looked at his adolescent son and realised that it was he that was unnatural, he had not aged at all.  It was noticeable and that frightened him.  It was then that he realised that the people around him were growing older and he was not.  First his father-in-law died and then Alice died of cancer, then his mother-in-law, of old age and Solomon had not aged at all, not from the day that he had been rescued from the wrecked Starstruck ship.

Solomon believed he had reached the bottom of the pit he had slipped down.  But when Adam died in a road crash, he hit the bitter depths and disappeared for six months, out of sight.  He appeared then pale and trembling, still looking too young to have suffered what he had suffered.

His apparent youthfulness made it necessary for him to change his employment regularly to avoid the obvious comparisons that his continued continued drinking problem, now effectively alcoholism, presented.  This created more problems in that there are a limited number of locations on an outer planet for a man to move.  Each time he found it necessary to apply for work he had to deduct a century from this true age.  He was now both tired and bored with only alcohol to give him temporary relief from them.

It did not take so many years before he had gone over the edge into full alcoholism and he was unable to find employment, the word had gone around.  Nobody sees the local drunk as other than the local drunkard.  They just picked him up and placed him against the wall.

On one occasion a sympathetic business man picked him up and took him to a medical centre.  He was examined, shot full of vitamins and on a full analysis of their investigation they found that Solomon had the body of a man of twenty five and a brain little deteriorated by age, at that he was just one hundred years older than that.  They looked for this phenomena but he had already gone.  He turned up collecting empty glasses, cleaning bars and dead drunk but people that had known him estimating his age decided that was just their imagination playing tricks on them.  He looked to them like someone they ha known in the past.

Adele Popper concluded that in his few brief interludes of sobriety Solomon felt acutely depressed, he had lived too long, too many memories that he didn't want and his greatest fear was that he was immortal.  Fate had intervened in the form of the louts and he would have been grateful for that, a hundred and fifty-five years was old enough for any man.
 
 

RICHARD REEVE lives in Norfolk now but has lived and tutored in Tangier and Spain for several years.  He has had a book published, Junk Jungle, which was also turned into Braille.  He has had several poems, short stories and articles published in various magazines.  He has also had a short story read out on Radio 4.
 

"No sane man would dance with Jasmin." - 
Edward Iregan

" Jasmin De Silva's Beauty -- the adjustment of all parts expensively so that one cannot add or subtract or change without causing a cascading collapse of the whole." --
Solar System Society Magazine
 
 
 
 
 

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