Short Story Monday: Space

I left him screaming in his padded room. He was the third one we’d picked up this week. The new Captain was too green; he still believed we can bring them back, he thinks they want to come back, these raft riders, Asteroid miners, and solar pirates.
They don’t. None of them are 1st generation like most of us on the Minnow.
I sat down in the mess hall. Some coffee was brought to me. It hovered gently in my cup. We’ve yet to adequately produce all of Earth’s wonders consistently on long voyages like ours. I took a sip. It was good, though you could still taste the dry shippy bitterness, even in liquids.
“That’s an unhappy face there Iris. What’s on your mind?” Kevin from security said, sitting down across the table from me. He set his stainless steel thermos on the table.
“The Asteroid boy is still at it.”
“Umm.”
“Four generations in space.”
“Jeeze. Imagine not knowing where you came from?”
I nodded in agreement and drank some more of the coffee.
“What you suppose his great great grand dad was running from?”
“It might be that he was running too something,” I countered.
“Most of ‘em were criminals though.”
“Criminality is in the eye of the beholder,” I said. His face soured at that. I tried to explain myself, “I think there was a real urge then to, you know,” I took a sip, “to fill the space. To fill space. It’s a very primitive, primeval urge. Dr. Gix Jin said, ‘Space is the womb, the fiminine, passive. Man wishes to fil it. To return from wence he came, to create anew the greatt old pattern, but now writ large upon the canvas of eternity.’ Yeah,” I said, “Dr. Gix Jin.”
I took a sip. Kevin drank from his thermos.
“Its bullshit. They were filth from the gutters of earth.”
“Even filth is motivated by something.”
“Is that why we are out here?”
I sipped the dreadful coffee, “No. Its just a job,” I finished it and left it on the table. I got up.
“See you later Iris.”
“See you Kevin,” I said, walking back to the hospital rooms.
The boy had never been to earth. He’d never felt real gravity, at least of the Earth kind. He’d likely lived on that asteroid his whole life. Yet we want him to be an earthman.
I could hear him still screaming as I neared his room.