Well, of course I was also thirsty. I guess I had interviewed at least half the directors at the spaceport - or so I felt, anyway. But thirst was not the main reason - as it seldom was - for my stepping inside the bar.

It was a comfortable sort of place, which at the first glance would look just like any other bar in the world. But as I walked further in I saw the miniature spacecraft on the shelf above the counter, and as I sat down I noticed a spacesuit in the corner. They were all poignant reminders of this place and the bar.

The city had been born and started to flourish as space flight became more common. A great number of people had drifted there to try out their luck. Becoming a pilot was a bit like prospecting - the profits could be huge, but only a handful struck gold. This clumsy expression I had picked up in some official leaflet that the space administration had handed out to me. The population, however, had grown noticeably smaller since the early recruiting of pilots, when the romance of the work had defeated common sense for so many. The demands on the pilots were extremely strict.

"You must be a stranger here", the bartender assumed. "What can I get you?"

I studied the list hanging on the back wall next to a picture of the ancient Saturn V rocket. "I think I'll have a beer," I finally said. The list carried lots of exotic names for drinks, but usually I paid no attention to them.

The bartender snorted, but I didn't care. Even the beer I had ordered simply because it was improper to sit at the counter without having a drink. At least the bartenders seem to think so. I was not trying to get intoxicated, but I did enjoy visiting different bars getting to know people. And please, do not laugh. A journalist can also feel lonely.

It didn't seem like I had too many opportunities to get acquainted here, though. I half turned on my seat and studied the place. There were around twenty people sitting at the round tables - men mostly, but a couple of women, too. They all looked professional, there was none of that bubbly noise you hear at workers' pubs, but the conversation went on all the time.

I turned back and stared at the back wall. "Funny sort of people, pilots," I remarked offhand to the bartender, who was busy wiping the same glass for the third time. "Really difficult to get an interview out of them. My editor is getting mad at me."

He looked back at me for an instant. I tried to look as innocent as possible and showed him my press card. What else could I try - he would probably be my best source of information for the day. "They form a very coherent group, and outsiders find it very hard to get to know them. You can consider yourself lucky if someone even thinks about giving an interview. In the old days pilots were everyone's heroes, but nowadays the public thinks they are some sort of glorified bus drivers. It angers then, so they keep themselves to themselves. Funny sort, as you said."

I knew that he was right, of course. I had had no chance of getting an interview. After several hard attempts I had drifted to this bar, where the bartender at least seemed eager to talk.

"You don't really stand a chance to get that interview," he said. "Pilots stick together. They have their own unwritten but strict code, and the most important is: stand by your colleague. That's why every pilot that resigns is automatically cut off from the rest. They feel he is no longer capable of answering to this code, and after all, he has already left his colleagues in trouble, hasn't he?"

This I knew, because one of the dozen deputy directors I had interview had said the same thing. "Does that include those who had to resign because of an illness," I had asked a bit mischievously.

"It makes no difference to the pilot," he had said. "Up there the pilot is terribly lonely. He has to make decisions that, if they are wrong, can destroy the entire ship immediately. And those decisions he sometimes has to make instantly. On the ground wrong decisions don't necessarily mean such total destruction as in space, but up there one single mistake can mean your death - and the death of the passengers, too."

I kept talking to the bartender about my experiences here. "Yes, they are lonely and have a big responsibility", he confirmed.

"But the modern computers..."

"Don't talk to the pilots about computers," the bartender said with a smile. "I hear they are a great help, but unreliable. The pilot is, of course, also unreliable, but he does have feelings. A computer has no idea of what it means to kill three hundred people because you made a mistake. And computers are, after all, mere devices. They can break down. But the primary reason is that in the end it is the pilot's sole responsibility. Those days when you could blame anything on the computer are long gone. If the expansion of computers to every home towards the end of last century did nothing else, that it did. Or so they say, whenever the say anything to my kind of people," the bartender finished somewhat bitterly.

While listening to the continuous chatter I had noticed that none of them even glanced at me. I was a stranger amongst them, and if the bartender's thoughts had any validity, they did indeed wish to shut me outside.

It's a big responsibility all right, three hundred people.

The door opened. A man appeared on the doorway his dark pilot's coat wet with rain. He walked up to the counter, order a Pilot's Special, walked over to a table in the corner and sat down.

The noise died. Everything changed so abruptly that my senses cried out. Even the rain seemed to have died.

I was completely taken aback by the sudden silence. I turned and looked. Everyone was sitting bolt upright. Nobody so much as glanced at the man.

"Who is he?" I whispered to the bartender. Even a whisper was loud like a ship's departure in this silence.

The bartender was quiet for a moment. Then he reached for a small EL display with biotechnic memory, leafed through the contents and then handed it over to me.

DECISION IN SPACE DISASTER

The Space and Flight Accident Survey Board has reached a decision on the disaster last month, where 342 people were killed. The pilot Erkki Karhu, who was the sole survivor, has been found not guilty of any negligence or having left the passengers in peril.

A spokesman for Space Administration said that...

The old piece of news went on, but that was all I had to read. I had done my homework.

Erkki Karhu had been the pilot in the biggest disaster of space history, where hundreds of people had been killed. He had been claimed to have pressed the button of his own safety pod without having lifted a finger to help the passengers. Karhu had stated that the button of the pod had been placed so that he had hit it by accident when trying to change the re-entry angle of the spaceship - the ship and everyone in it had been burned to cinder in the too deep a dive to the atmosphere.

This accident in fact proved what the bartender had said about the pilots' disbelief in computers, because according to Karhu it had specifically been a computer malfunction that had changed the angle of the re-entry. And of course it was impossible to prove whether Karhu was guilty or not, as all the evidence had been burned. But as I now looked at the deadly silent room I realised that he indeed was, at least in their eyes, the one to blame.

I stood up and slowly walked over to Karhu. No one in the room looked at me, but I could feel their dislike and - strangely enough - fear. As I sat down opposite to Karhu I introduced myself, but he did not even look at me. His eyes were totally empty.

We sat for a long time saying nothing, until he lifted his eyes. He was gazing straight through me.

He started talking in strange monotone, without seeing me, as if talking to himself.

"They say it was my fault. That I panicked. That all those people are dead because of me." He was silent for a moment. "My wife died on that ship."

He fell silent. I glanced secretly at the room, but they remained as if carved on ice.

"The board found me not guilty, but that was just an illusion. You still think that I am to blame." He seemed to be talking to the room, not to me. "I lost everything," he went on in a more quiet tone, but I am sure that everyone in the room heard his words. "Everything. I lost my job, because none of you agreed to fly with me. My daughter blamed me for her mother's death and left home."

Again he fell silent for a moment. He turned to me, but his gaze still pierced me. "I lost my family. I haven't heard from my daughter in sixteen years. Sixteen years!" This he said so loudly that I startled. Nobody else seemed to hear.

"The only thing I didn't lose was my pension." He smiled bitterly, and now he for the first time looked human. "That's what the Board accomplished."

"You know what you fear!" he then cried out so that the glasses on the shelf seemed to tinkle. "You fear the same! You shut me out, because you are afraid that you too might kill hundreds of people! I am your living reminder that even a pilot can fail."

He stood up and walked straight to the door. His glass was untouched. He hadn't touched his drink.

As the door swung close behind him the conversation started again. It was as if nothing had happened.

I went back to the bartender. "What is all this?" I wondered.

"He comes in every night, sits a while without drinking and then leaves. Has been doing that for sixteen years. It's seldom that he speaks, but if he does, he says what you just heard."

"And everyone falls silent every time?"

"Yes. He has been shut outside. Just like you. And me. We do not belong. But then again, we are not responsible for hundreds of lives." He was silent for a moment. "Or at least I'm not, as long as there is no poison in the liquor."

The discussion around the tabled seemed to be going on just as before, but I could sense a new tone. For a moment I wondered what it was, and then I understood that Karhu had been right.

They were afraid. They were afraid of the very thing that had happened to him.

I rushed outside. All I could hear on the street wet with the drizzle was the silent fall of the drops from the roofs, and the pilot was nowhere to be seen.

For a moment I thought I might return and finish my beer, but then I remembered the hundreds of people that had been burned as Karhu's ship had tumbled down in a pillar of fire. And I remembered the Space Director's words: "Every day we send hundreds of people to space, but accidents almost never happen."

I gazed at the sky where water was still falling. But it did not stop me from seeing how yet another rocket rose from the port followed by a flame. I thought about the pilot, who walks into the bar every night to dying conversation, straightening backs and faces turning away. The pilot, to whom even that pain is all life and everything in it, because that is all that he has. He has lost his wife, his daughter and the company of his friends, and there is no longer any hope for him.