Explore "Death Wish" by Robert Sheckley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The space freighter "Queen Dierdre" was a great, squat, pockmarked vessel of the Earth-Mars run and she never gave anyone a bit of trouble. That should have been sufficient warning to Mr. Watkins, her engineer. Watkins was fond of saying that there are two kinds of equipment -- the kind that fails bit by bit, and the kind that fails all at once.
Watkins was short and red-faced, magnificently mustached, and always a little out of breath. With a cigar in his hand, over a glass of beer, he talked most cynically about his ship, in the immemorial fashion of engineers. But in reality, Watkins was foolishly infatuated with "Dierdre", idealized her, humanized her, and couldn't conceive of anything serious ever happening.