Sixty years ago I enjoyed reading and writing science fiction short stories. I never had any of them published but, all these years later, I have the frst page of one of my stories on my PC. The name of the story is/was "Procyon". I am posting that page below:
A thousand miles from the planet Earth a starship blinked into
existence, bringing with it a smaller ship. In the smaller ship a man
named Rymer turned his face toward the round viewport beside him and
watched the starship dwindle as the engine of his ship placed
distance between the two vessels. As he gazed upon it the starship
snapped back into nothingness, like a burst soap bubble, and he was
alone.
In
the warm darkness of his cramped cabin Rymer continued to stare at
the space where the starship had been, while his mind braced against
the isolation that was already beginning to wash over him. If he
could remain alive for the next seventy-two hours he would again see
that starship and would move toward it, watching it loom larger and
closer until the thin metal shell that was his ship gingerly touched
the other silvery hull; then the stars would disappear and he would
be on his way home.
He
extended a gloved hand toward a switch and the stars began to rain
past the viewport. He let the ship roll slowly until he saw the
burning spark called Procyon, and then his mind flashed toward a
world spinning about that distant sun. His friends were there, as was
his life - not here, he thought, on this strange muddy ball called
Earth. The starship would reach that distant world in a few days,
but his vessel was not a starship and could never make the journey.
He was stranded here until the starship returned and nudged against
his tiny craft and gripped it in the field of its generators and tore
it out of space to hurtle back with it toward that star eleven light
years away.
He
touched another switch and Earth rose in the viewport, then stopped
huge and motionless to fill all space outside the aperture. Rymer
stared with cold dislike at the bright planet, for it had caused him
to be here and to chance losing his life in hostile space far from
his native world. He stared and frowned, while the bright planet
gleamed its warm radiance into his face and onto the cabin wall
beyond, and at last he rolled the ship away so that he could no
longer see the golden world outside.
His eyes skipped among the dials and gauges glowing reassuringly around
him before resting upon a screen that held an image of the world
outside. As the ship's flight computer executed maneuvers necessary
to wrestle the ship into an earth orbit, Rymer adjusted a grid over
the image and turned on his reconnaissance equipment. He consulted
charts and aimed his instruments at selected points on the planet
below, while a machine tabulated radio emission spectra, infrared
sources, atmospheric spectrograms, and a dozen other factors. At the
completion of his survey Rymer noted with considerable surprise that
he had discovered a radio beacon on the planet's surface. Further
investigation was required, and as he programmed a computer landing,
Rymer wondered if he was about to step into a trap.
A rocket flared silent flame and the ship banked into the first thin
stratum of Earth's atmosphere, slowly steepening its angle of descent
until the craft began pushing before it a thundering shock wave that
streamed back and away from the ship, carrying off the searing heat
generated by ramming through miles of atmosphere. Rymer sat inside
his small metal world and looked without thinking at the fiery death
beyond the viewport.
