“Tape, mostly. Lots of tape. Same thing. They’ve come round to thinking it’s all right. I brought some with me,—All right, I lied. I’ve got tapes. Some of the environmental stuff. My biochem.” Just the pretty ones, those first of all. The ones with pictures of home. His home. He didn’t think he could take them right now. It still hurt too much. “You can try one if you want.” Turning Jeremy into somebody he could really talk to about Downbelow was a bonus he hadn’t expected when he’d packed the tapes. But that seemed possible, and his spirits were higher than they had been since he’d boarded.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “Sure! Wild! Can I borrow one tonight?”
He opened the drawer, took out his tape case, took out a pretty one.
And hesitated. “It could be scary for you. I don’t know. It’s a planet. You feel the weather. Thunder and all. It’s a pretty good effect.”
“Oh, hell,” Jeremy said. “Can’t be that bad.” Jeremy took the tape and opened the wall panel at the side of his bunk, looking for pills.
“Take a quarter-dose, no more. This is stationer tape. Planetary tape. Lightning and reverse-curve horizons. If you climb the walls tonight it won’t be my fault.”
Jeremy grinned at him and shook out a pill. He split it. Offered the other half to him.
He opted for the biochem tape for his own reader. It wasn’t jump they faced, just a night’s sleep, and a night of no dreams but the ones the tape provided—a Downbelow tour for Jeremy and a night of life process chemistry for him.
He didn’t care that he was into Chad for a room cleaning. He settled down with the headset and the tape going and with the drug that flattened out your objections to information coursing through his bloodstream.
It was the first time he’d taken tape aboard. It was the first time he’d trusted the people he was with enough to take that drug that made you so helpless, so compliant, so ready to believe what you were told. You didn’t learn around strangers. You didn’t, in his own experience, do it anywhere but locked in your own private room, safe from outside suggestion, but he felt safe to try, finally, in Jeremy’s presence.
It meant a good night’s sleep, a night in which he was back in things he knew and terms he understood. You forgot little details if you didn’t use what you learned; tape could sharpen up what was getting hazy in your mind, and if he talked to Jake in engineering as Jeremy suggested, about getting into something that offered a little more headwork, he wanted to be sharp enough to impress Jake and not sound a fool if Jake asked him questions. This time through the old familiar tape he set his subconscious to wonder about things that a closed system like a ship’s lifesupport might find problematic, and he wondered what tapes the ship’s technical library might have that would let him brush up on specifics of the systems. The ship had a library. They might let him have tapes to study. If they trusted him , which had become an unexpected hurdle.
Talk to JR? Not damned likely.
Chapter 13
There’s a problem,” Bucklin put it, warning JR what was coming, and after that there was a junior staff meeting, a quiet and serial staff meeting, pursued down corridors, anywhere JR could find them. JR found Vince and Linda, among the first, in A deck main corridor, and made them late reporting to breakfast.
“What’s this with a Welcome-in?” he asked “I said, did I not, let him alone?”
There were frowns. There were no effective answers.
He found Connor topside, B deck, and said, “It’s off. No hazing. My orders.”
He found Sue and Nike in A deck lifesupport, and asked, “Whose damn idea was it in the first place?”
He didn’t get a satisfactory answer. What he got was, “He’s a problem. He’s a problem in everything, isn’t he?”
He found Chad, and said, “If he cleans your room, Chad, he just cleans it. You keep your hands off him or you and I are going to go a round.”
Chad wasn’t happy.
He went the whole route. Lyra and Wayne, Toby, and Ashley, all glum faces and unhappy attitudes.
And after he thought that he’d made the issue crystal clear, at mid-second shift he had a delegation approach him in the sim room, next to the bullet-car that reeked of the cold of the after holds. He was going in, not out, but he was still mentally hyped for the pilot-sims his career-track mandated—sims that didn’t have anything to do with Pell’s vid-game amusements. It was high-voltage activity that maintained his ability to track on high V emergencies, just as Helm had had to do when it met the Union carrier, and his state of mind at the moment was not optimal for intricate interpersonal politics. Bucklin had to know that.
It was Wayne and Connor, Toby, Chad and Ashley who pulled the ambush, and they’d done it in the cramped privacy of the core-access airlock, a small sealed room with a pressure door between it and the main A-deck corridor. It was only them, they could talk without senior crew in the middle of it, and Bucklin , damn him, had unexpectedly chosen to become their spokesman. JR found himself ready to blow, given just a little encouragement.
“The question is,” Bucklin said as JR stood with his hand on the call-button that would give him the sim-car and take him away from their bedeviling. “The question is, this is what we’ve always done. Omitting it says something.”
He dropped his hand from the button. Clearly he wasn’t going to solve this in two seconds. Clearly, like dealing with Union carriers, sometimes the situation tested not one’s speed in handling a matter, but one’s self-control.
“Always isn’t this time,” he said to the group. “The guy is not one of us, he didn’t grow up in our traditions, he doesn’t know what we’re up to, and we don’t communicate all that well with that stationer-trained brain of his.”
“It seems to me,” said Ashley, “that those are exactly the reasons for having a Welcome-in.”
“No,” he said, and drew a calm breath. “The answer is no . It’s an order.”
“We did it for Jeremy,” Wayne pointed out. Wayne, next to Bucklin and Lyra, was their levelest head. “It was important then. It made lot of difference.”
“And I’m telling you we can’t do it for Fletcher. For one thing, the Old Man would have the proverbial cat. For another, he’s a stationer .”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it, up and down the list?” Chad said. “He’s a stationer. He doesn’t give a damn about this ship. He walks up, does as he pleases in front of everybody at the bar and thumbs his nose at you, and all of us—and nobody ever called him on it.”
“I called him on it. Immediately.”
“Yes, and he walked off. He roughs up Vince, he doesn’t stay for gatherings… say hello to him and you get stared at.”
“Did you hear the word order , Chad? I order you to let this drop.”
“Yessir, we hear, but—”
“We don’t think a Welcome-in is as important as it used to be,” Toby said, all earnestness, “or what? Is this part of the Old Rules? I thought it was the Old Rules. I thought that was what we were always hanging on to. I thought it was important to do the traditions. We’re going to have babies on this ship. are we not going to welcome them in when they come up, or what?”