“Think we can handle it in twenty minutes?”
“I don’ know. It seem like a short time to do a real good job of it, but maybe if we don’t waste any on preliminary fisticuffin’…”
“Hell, they didn’t waste any ceremony on Relke.”
“Less go, then!” He grinned at Relke and held out his fist. “Spit on it?”
Relke shook his head. Henderson laughed. “Wanted to see if you’d go ptooey in your helmet.”
“Come on, Lije. The rest of you guys find cover.”
Relke watched the two of them lope off toward the rolling barracks. “Hey, Joe,” he called after a few seconds.
The lopers stopped to look back. “Relke?”
“Yeah. Don’t lose.”
“What?”
“They’ll say I sicced you. Don’t lose.”
“Don’t worry.” They loped again. The longer Relke watched them, the less he liked the idea. If they didn’t do a pretty thorough job on Kunz and Larkin, things would be worse for Relke than if they did nothing at all. Then there was the movement to think about; he didn’t know to what extent they looked out for their own.
Relke walked out of the danger zone and hiked across the hill where he could get a clear view of the rocket. He stopped for a while on the slope and watched four distant figures moving around on the ground beneath the towering ship. For a moment, he thought they were women, but then he saw that one of them was coiling mooring cable, and he knew they were ship’s crew. What sort of men had the d’Annecy women been able to hire for such a job? he wondered.
He saw that they were getting ready to lift ship. Lift ship!
Relke was suddenly running toward them without knowing why. Whenever he topped a rise of ground and could see them, he tried calling them, but they were not using the project’s suit frequency. Finally he found their voices on the seldom used private charter band, but they were speaking French.
One of the men looped a coil of cable over his shoulder and started up the ladder toward the lock. Relke stopped atop an outcropping. He was still two or three miles from the ship. The “isobar” valve system for the left knee of his suit had jammed, and it refused to take up the increased pressure caused by flexure. It was like trying to bend a fully inflated rubber tire, and he hobbled about for a moment with one leg stiff as a crutch.
“Listen!” he called on the p.c. frequency. “You guys at the ship. Can you hear me?” He was panting, and he felt a little panicky. The man on the ladder stopped climbing and looked around.
There was a staccato exchange in French.
“No, no! Over here. On the rock.” He waved at them and jumped a few times. “Look toward the camp. On the rock.”
They conversed heatedly among themselves for a time. “Don’t any of you speak English?” he begged.
They were silent for a moment. “Whoevair ees?” one of them ventured. “You conversation with wrong radio, M’sieur. Switch a button.”
“No, no. I’m trying to call you…”
A carrier drowned him out.
“We close for business,” the man said. “We go now.” He started climbing again.
“Listen!” Relke yelled. “Ten thousand dollars. Everything.”
“You crazy man.”
“Look, it won’t get you in any trouble. I’ve got plenty in the bank. I’ll pay—”
The carrier cut him off again.
“You crazy. Get off the air. We do not go to Earth now.”
“Wait! Listen! Tell Giselle… No, let me talk to her. Get her to use the radio. It’s important.”
“I tell you, we close for business now.” The man climbed in the airlock. The others climbed up behind. They were, jeering at him. This time it sounded like Arabic. He watched until they were all inside.
White fury lanced the ground and spread in a white sheet beneath the ship and roiled up in a tumult of dust and expanding gasses. It climbed on a white fan, gathering velocity. Relke could still make it out as a ship when its course began arcing away from the vertical. It was beginning a trajectory in the direction of Copernicus. When it was out of sight, he began trudging back toward the work site. He was nearly an hour overdue.
“Where you been?” Novotny asked him quietly after watching him hobble the last quarter of a mile in stony silence. He was squinting at the lineman with that faintly puzzled look that Relke recognized as a most ominous omen. The squint was lopsided because of a cut under one eye, and it looked like a chip was missing from a tooth.
Relke showed his stiff leg and bounced the heel against the ground a couple of times. “I walked too far, and the c.p. valves got jammed. Sorry, Joe.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. Let’s see.”
The pusher satisfied himself that the suit was malfunctioning. He waved the lineman toward the barrack train. “Go to supply and get it fixed. Get back on the double. You’ve slowed us down.”
Relke paused. “You sore, Joe?”
“We’re on duty. I don’t get sore on duty. I save it up. Now—haul ass!”
Relke hobbled off. “What about… what you went for, Joe?” he called back. “What happened?”
“I told you to keep your nose out of politics!” the pusher snapped. “Never mind what happened.”
Joe, Relke decided, was plenty sore. About something. Maybe about a beating that backfired. Maybe about Relke taking an hour awol. Either way, he was in trouble. He thought it over and decided that paying a bootleg ship ten thousand to take him back to Earth with them hadn’t been such a hysterical whim after all.
But then he met Larkin in the supply wagon. Larkin was stretched out flat on his back, and a medic kept saying, “Who did it to you? Who did it to you?” and Larkin kept telling him to go to hell out of a mouth that looked like a piece of singed stew meat. Kunz was curled up on a blanket and looked even worse. He spat in his sleep and a bit of tooth rattled across the deck.
“Meanest bunch of bastards I ever saw,” the clerk told Relke while he checked in the suit. “They don’t even give you a chance. Here were these two guys sleeping in their bunks and not bothering anybody, and what do you think?”
“I quit thinking. What?”
“Somebody starts working them over. Wham. Don’t even wake them up first. Just wham. You ever see anything like it? Mean, John, just mean. You can’t even get a shift’s sleep anymore. You better go to bed with a knife in your boot, John.”
“It’s Bill.”
“Oh. What do you suppose makes a guy that mean anyway?”
“I don’t know. Everybody’s jumpy, I guess.”
The clerk looked at him wisely. “There you have put your finger on it, John. Looney nerves. The jitters. Everybody’s suit-happy.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “You know how I tell when the camp’s getting jittery?”
“Listen, check me out a suit. I’ve got to get back to the line.”
“Now wait, this’ll surprise you. I can tell better than the psych checkers when everybody’s going on a slow panic. It’s the sleeping bag liners.”
“What?”
“The bed wetters, John. You’d be surprised how many grown men turn bed wetters about the middle of a hitch. At first, nobody. Then somebody gets killed on the line. The bag liners start coming in for cleaning. By the end of the hitch, the wash tank smells like a public lavatory, John. Not just the men, either. Some of the engineers. You know what I’m doing?”
“Look, Mack, the suit…”
“Not Mack. Frank. Look, I’ll show you the chart.” He got out a sheet of paper with a crudely drawn graph on it. “See how it goes? The peak? I’ve done ten of them.”
“Why?”
The clerk looked at him blankly. “For the idea box, John. Didn’t you know about the prizes? Doctor Esterhall ought to be glad to get information like this.”