For the past three days I had been aware of Van Lyle hanging around me. I became a lot more aware of him when two arms suddenly went around me from behind, and two hands clasped my breasts.
“Hey, Jeanie,” Lyle’s voice whispered in my ear. “You’ve got lovely tits. It’s going to be nice and quiet for a while. Want to get friendly?”
I jerked forward along the bunk, untangling my legs and trying to pull myself free. He was hanging on tight. That hurt.
“Get your damned hands off me.” I wanted to say something a lot worse, but I knew we were going to be cooped up in the same space for another few weeks, no matter what. I had been trained to avoid onboard confrontations, and I wanted to stay cool and end this politely.
I swung around to face him and pushed myself away.
“Oh, don’t be like that.” He was grinning, a big, smarmy God’s-gift-to-women grin. “Come on. Lighten up. We could have some real fun.”
He reached out towards my breast again, and I pushed his hand away. “Quit that, Lyle! I tell you, I’m not having any.”
“You haven’t tried it. Lots of women could tell you, you won’t be disappointed. Want to have a look at my testimonials?” And then, as I pushed his groping hand away again, this time when it reached towards my crotch, “Hey, Jeanie, you’re strong. I just love strong women.”
“You do, do you?” I’d had it. “This strong enough for you?”
I swung with all my body behind it as his face came forward, and got him with my fist right on the bridge of his nose.
It hurt like hell — hurt me, I mean. I didn’t care how much it hurt him. But I don’t think he enjoyed it, because as the blood spurted out of his flattened nose and splashed all over my bunk, he let out a terrible howl that brought McAndrew running.
Just as well, because by that time I was upright, off my bunk, and all set to kick Lyle in the balls at least ten times as hard as I’d punched his nose. McAndrew got in the way before I could do it. He leaned close to Van Lyle, a rag in his hand to mop up blood.
“What happened?”
Lyle produced only a horrible snorting noise.
“Tripped as he was coming in here,” I said, “and banged his face on the edge of the bunk. Get the medical kit.”
McAndrew glanced at the bunk as Stefan Parmikan finally appeared. I knew that Mac was doing an instant height and angle match, and rejecting it. But he never said a thing. Nor did Lyle, unless you count the groans when Parmikan was moving his broken nose around in an attempt to achieve a reasonably straight result.
We fixed the nose, more or less, and sedated Lyle. Parmikan went back to bed. During the sleep period, McAndrew leaned over the edge of my bunk and whispered to me. “Jeanie? I know you’re awake. Are you all right?”
“I’m just fine.” I didn’t want him as furious as I was.
“He didn’t bang himself on the bunk, did he? He made advances to you, and you hit him.”
“What makes you think that?” Mac’s insights were supposed to be into Nature, but not human nature.
“He was talking about you two days ago, when you weren’t present. He said he wanted to take you to bed. Get a piece, he said.”
“And you were there? Why for God’s sake didn’t you stop him? Tell him that you and I are lovers, have been for years.”
There was a long, worried pause. “It wouldn’t have been right, talking about you like that. And Jeanie, I don’t own you, you know.”
McAndrew, McAndrew. If I weren’t so fond of you, I’d wring your scrupulous Puritan neck.
“But you know what?” he went on, “I’m afraid that it’s going to make for a more difficult working atmosphere during the experiments.”
It’s a good thing it was dark, so I couldn’t take a shot at his nose, too.
The first twenty-three days of the trip out had seemed pretty bad. I learned the next morning that the remaining five were going to be a lot worse — and then after that we had the period of McAndrew’s experiments to look forward to, followed by a four-week return journey to the Institute.
The pattern was established on the twenty-fourth day. Van Lyle was back on his feet early. The bruise from his broken nose had mysteriously spread, to give him two purple-black eyes. With a white, rigid plaster across the middle of his face, he resembled a vengeful owl as he staggered out of his bunk. He glared around him.
“The inside of this capsule is dirty. It must be cleaned.”
“It’s not bad,” I said. “It’s just the way you’d expect the ship to look after three weeks.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.” Lyle picked up a dish of soggy cereal, inverted it, and deliberately dropped it to the floor. “Get to work. This cabin first, then my quarters. I’ll be back to inspect your progress this afternoon.”
I held myself in — just. When Stefan Parmikan appeared ten minutes later, I had all the cleaning equipment out of the ceiling racks and ready for use.
He looked, not at me but past me. “What do you think you are doing?”
“Getting ready to clean the cabin. Following Officer Lyle’s instruction.”
“Very well. You can do that later. I need you to explain the procedure for ship automatic course tracking to me.”
Unbelievable. Could it be that Stefan Parmikan was at last taking an interest in the way that the Hoatzin worked? I rose to follow him, but he turned and pointed to the cleaning equipment.
“Put those away first, back in the ceiling racks. I’m not going to spend the whole day falling over your stuff. And I’m not going to waste time arguing. You can get everything out again later.”
It didn’t help to recognize that Parmikan was quoting my own words, about the luggage of his that I had refused to allow aboard.
I began to put away the cleaning equipment, and thought favorably of Fletcher Christian.
No one on the Hoatzin seemed happy for the next five days. Parmikan and Lyle constantly tried to push me over the edge, and were constantly disappointed. They came close, but I certainly wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of knowing how close.
And McAndrew, who should have been as happy as a pig because the time of his experiments had arrived, had become intense and introverted. The Hoatzin had homed in close to his strongest anomalous signal, but it did not seem to have resolved his problem.
“Look at this, Jeanie,” he said, during one of my rare breaks from slavery. I had just checked that the ship had achieved its final location and velocity, and confirmed that we were at rest again relative to Sol. “These are real-time signals, happening right this minute. I’ve got instruments focused on a region only two light-seconds from here. You can see the visual display of it on the left half of the screen.”
I looked. Other than a triangle of three bright reference stars, the visible wavelength display was blank.
“Nothing there,” I said.
“Quite right. And now, the input from the mass detectors. They’re set up to scan the same field, and I’ve got them in imaging mode focused for two light-seconds away.” McAndrew popped the mass detector result on the right, as a split-screen display.
I stared. I expected to see nothing on the right side of the screen, either, and that’s exactly what I saw. The region two light-seconds from us, where McAndrew’s mass detection instruments were focused, was empty of matter — more empty, in fact, than any other known region.
“Well,” I began to say. And then something impossible happened. The left-hand screen at visible wavelengths continued to show nothing but distant reference stars; but the screen displaying the mass imaging system inputs showed an object floating steadily across it, from top to bottom. The blob was clean-edged and irregular in shape, its outline like a fat, curved and pimpled cigar. It took maybe ten seconds from the first appearance on the top of the screen to its leisurely disappearance from the lower boundary. It must be moving at just a few miles a second relative to the Hoatzin.