“Or,” Merola continued, “we can accept him into the crew as an informed member with helpful knowledge. We’ll then suspend the stowaway charges until we get back to Earth.”
“If we get back to Earth under the circumstances,” Forbes put in.
“Shall we vote?” Merola asked. He waited, taking the men’s silence for approval.
Ted crossed his fingers and stared up at the overhead.
“All right,” Merola said, “all those in favor of treating Baker like a member of the crew, say aye.”
Only one voice said, “Aye.” It was Merola’s own.
A significant silence hung on the air in the cabin. Ted squeezed his eyes shut tightly.
“All those in favor of placing Baker under temporary arrest as a stowaway, say aye.”
“Aye.”
“Aye.”
“Aye.”
Again the silence, punctuated only by the heavy breathing of the men.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Merola said.
Ted turned his head toward the bulkhead. The stars seemed to have gone out suddenly.
The freeze began then.
Ted could compare it to nothing he had ever experienced before. He simply ceased to exist as far as any other member of the crew was concerned. Merola spoke to him only to give instructions and orders, reluctantly abiding by the majority decision of the other men. The rest of the crew ignored him completely. If Ted came within reaching distance of any of the men, they invariably sought another part of the cabin.
During meals, they clustered together into a tight, forbidding knot, their backs to him. It was cold, a coldness generated by men who felt they were doing the right thing, a coldness more complete than that of the void outside the ship.
Ted was utterly miserable.
Coupled with the methodical ostracizing he suffered, he also had to contend with the uncomfortable conditions of space travel. Weightlessness on the short hop to the Station had been a comparative lark. It had become something more than that now.
There was a choice to be had, of course.
You could drift all over the small cabin, feeling like a gas-inflated tube, your stomach threatening to ooze out of your ears every time you moved.
Or you could wear the heavy, magnetized sandals that enabled you to establish the most synthetic of gravities in that they allowed you to walk on the deck if you so chose.
They also allowed you to walk on the bulkheads, or on the overhead, or indeed anywhere that boasted a metal surface.
The trouble was simply that the sandals were so heavy. After ten minutes of struggling around the cabin with them, having to fight free of the magnetic force every time you wanted to lift a foot and place it down again, your leg muscles were simply too tired to hold you up.
Those were the choices, and Ted pardoned his own pun as he mused that neither of them was exactly choice.
Tied in with the problem of motion was the problem of nourishment. Eating was a habit Ted had long become used to. This, and drinking, were simply a matter of form back on Earth, simple processes that could be undertaken with the eyes blindfolded and one hand tied behind the back. Not so in space.
Drinking was not too difficult at all. Naturally, open cups and bottles could not be used. When a liquid is weightless, it simply has no reason to leave a bottle, and it will not pour if the bottle it tilted. On the other hand, if the bottle were shaken, all of the contents would come rushing out in one sudden splash. All liquids were placed in closed containers made of plastic. When the sides of these containers were squeezed, the liquid squirted out.
It meant getting used to tasting milk in squirts rather than gulps, but Ted soon became adjusted to it.
Eating was another matter. When everything is weightless, a beefsteak will float about as aimlessly as will a body. A plate, unfortunately, will follow the same procedure. If a beefsteak were conceivably placed on a platter, then it would promptly float up toward the overhead at the slightest jar. And if someone inadvertently let go of a plate, it too would sail merrily off to another portion of the cabin.
As a result, the plates were made of magnetized metal, so that they clung to any metal surface upon which they were placed. Each plate was approximately two inches deep, with a plastic top covering it. The top was divided into four quarters which slid open at a touch of the finger tips.
Ted soon mastered the process of eating. No sit-down-and-stuff-yourself matter was this, he soon discovered. The food was cooked in a closed broiler. As soon as the broiler was opened, the food had to be speared with a fork immediately. Luckily, the fork utilized friction and not gravity, so there was no danger of a piece of food floating off a fork. After the food was speared, it was transferred to the plate, and the cover immediately put in place. The meal could then be begun.
Whenever a piece of food was desired, one of the quarters was slid open a fraction of an inch, and the fork thrust into that space to spear the food. The opening was then sufficiently enlarged to allow the food on the fork to pass through, and then snapped shut again. Cutting was a little more difficult in that the food had to be speared through the opening, the knife inserted into the slit, the food sliced, the knife withdrawn, the opening made wider, the food taken out, the opening closed. Nor was it possible to lay down a utensil on anything but a metal surface. Ted once put down his knife on a plastic clipboard and promptly had to chase it halfway across the cabin. He finally grasped it when its magnetism caught at the metal bulkhead.
Eating was no longer a pleasant pastime. It was, rather, a full-scale operation. This distressed Ted because he was a boy with an unusually large appetite, and weightlessness somehow took the edge off his hunger. At least, he attributed his loss of appetite to the weightless condition inside the rocket. Eating his meals alone, separate from the other men, may have had something to do with it.
At the end of their first day out from the Station, Ted was physically exhausted. And he soon discovered that sleeping was another pleasure which had been complicated by the peculiar properties of weightlessness.
It was conceivably possible to simply stretch out in mid-air and go to sleep that way. Barring any sudden jar, the body would simply hang there until it drifted off to sleep. Ted found this wasn’t the case. Every time he breathed, he found himself drifting over toward one or another of the bulkheads. When he finally settled himself close to one of the bulkheads, preventing any further drifting, he was surprised to discover he was slowly being sucked toward the intake grill of the air-conditioning system.
He gave it up as a bad try, and ended up by strapping himself into his couch, where he spent a tossless night — and, as a result, a sleepless one. He was not used to being strapped down in bed. He was a sprawling sleeper, and his inability to turn and toss at will kept him awake most of the night.
That was how he discovered the loose rivet.
He was lying on the couch, the straps across his waist and chest annoying the life out of him. He stared up at the overhead, tracing the pattern of rivets with his eyes. He decided to count the rivets, using them as substitutes for sheep. He started with the first rivet near the instrument panel, working his way aft, over his head, down the side of the bulkhead, and then across the deck. When he was back from where he’d started, he’d counted one hundred and thirteen rivets, and he then began on the rivets that ran athwartships.
He had reached one hundred and fifty-four when he saw the rivet hanging from the overhead. At first he thought his mind was just fuzzy from lack of sleep. He stared at the loose rivet, trying to decide whether its apparent looseness was simply an optical illusion, a trick being played by the shadows and the flickering lights of the instrument panel.