Willie’s Planet

Willie's Planet by Mike Ellis - The most fitting place for a man to die is where he dies for man. Yet Willie chose a sterile, alien world that wouldn't even see a man for millions of years...

Tom stood in front of the filtered porthole of the tiny cabin and soaked up the sunlight that came through. It felt good after ten months of deep space blackness.

'By golly, Willie, this is luck,' he said to the little man standing at the cabin's instruments, 'our hundredth and last star, and it's an Earth type sun. How much difference is there from our sun?'

Willie held the color chart up beside the spectrum screen. 'Almost on. Couple of degrees difference.' He tossed the chart on the desk and came to stand at Tom's side, the top of his head even with Tom's erect shoulder. His thin face was tense and worried.

'Tom,' he said, 'I have a hunch about this star.' He stared at the screen morosely.

'I don't receive a thing,' Tom chuckled, stretching his flat muscled arms to the low ceiling, his body making a triangle from his narrow hips to his wide shoulders. 'What's the hunch?'

'Ever have the feeling you'd been some place before when you'd actually never been there? I feel that about this star.' Willie glanced at Tom with his bright blue eyes, then looked quickly away, a bit of a red flush high on his cheeks.

'It's just because it's like our sun, that's all,' Tom said.

'No, it's not that, Tom. It's something else. I feel like we ought to get out of here. Maybe it's the planet.'

'Planet?' Tom said.

'Yes,' Willie said quietly, 'an Earth type planet.'

'Earth type!' Tom shouted. 'Ten thousand credits bonus! Get it on the screen, Willie. Let's see that spending money baby.'

Willie turned on the viewer. Dark and shadowy on one side, bright with blue-green color on the other, the planet floated on the screen.

'The blue must be water and the green continents Damn, it's beautiful.'