"I coudn't hear you, sir," Peter said. Though he was sweating in the heavy flight clothes in the warm room, he was shivering and he felt a painful urge to urinate. "I just can't seem to hear through those tubes."
"There's nothing wrong with the tubes! I could hear you all right! And there's nothing wrong with your ears! You had a medical checkup only two weeks ago, didn't you? All you pissy-assed cadets are examined when you transfer here! Aren't you?"
Peter nodded and said, "Yes sir, just like you were."
The lieutenant, his face red, eyes bugging, said, "What do you mean by that? Are you saying I was a pissy-assed cadet?"
"No, sir," Peter said, feeling the sweat pour out from his arrjipits. "I would never say 'pissy-assed' in reference to you, sir."
"What would you say?" the lieutenant said, almost screaming.
Peter looked from the corners of his eyes at the other cadets and instructors. Most of them were paying no attention or pretending not to. Some were grinning.
"I would never mention you," Peter said.
"What? Because I'm not worth mentioning, is that it? Frigate, you try me! I don't like your attitude on the ground or in the air. But to get back to the subject despite all your efforts to avoid it! Why in hell can't you hear me when I can hear you? Is it because you don't want to hear me?
"Well, that's dangerous, Frigate! It's frightening, too. You scare the hell out of me! Do you know how many of those stubby-winged BT-12's spin in every week? Those sons of bitches have got a builtin spin, cadet. Even when an instructor tells his ape-brained student to spin it deliberately, and he's got his hand on the stick, ready to take over, the sons of bitches sometimes still keep on spinning!
"So I sure as hell don't want to tell you to turn right and have you think I'm telling you to spin her and catch me off guard. You could have us twenty feet deep in the ground before I could take to the chute! Okay, what is the matter with your ears?"
"I don't know," Peter said miserably. "Maybe it's wax. Wax builds up in my ears. It's a family trait, sir. I have to have the wax blown out every six months."
"I'll blow out more than wax out of another place than your ears, mister! Didn't the doctor check out your ears? Sure he did! So don't tell me it's wax! You just don't want to hear me! And why? God knows why! Or maybe you hate me so much you don't care if you die just so you take me with you? Is that it?"
Peter would not have been surprised to see the lieutenant foaming at the mouth.
"No, sir."
"No, sir, what?"
"No, sir, to any of that."
"You mean you're denying everything? You did turn left when I said turn right, didn't you? Don't tell me I'm a liar!"
"No, sir."
The lieutenant paused, then said, "Why are you smiling, Frigate?"
"I didn't know I was," Peter said. That was true. He was really in mental and physical distress. So why had he smiled?
"You're crazy, Frigate!" the lieutenant shouted. A captain, standing behind him, frowned. But he made no move to interfere.
"I don't want to see you again, Frigate, until you have a written testimonial from a doctor that your ears are okay. Do you hear that?"
Peter nodded. "
"Yes, sir, I hear you."
"You're grounded until I get that report. But I want it at flight time, tomorrow, when I take you up again, God help me!"
"Yes, sir," Peter said and almost saluted. That would have been another excuse for the instructor to ream him out. Saluting was not done in the flight room.
He looked back as he checked in his parachute. The captain and the lieutenant were talking earnestly. What were they saying about him? That he ought to be washed out?
Maybe he should be. He really couldn't hear his instructor. Only half of the lieutenant's frenzied gabble came through intelligibly on the tubes. It wasn't because of wax. Or the high altitude. Or anything physically wrong with his hearing.
It would be years later before he knew that he just did not want to hear the lieutenant.
"He was right," Peter said.
"Who was right?" Eve said. She was sitting up in bed, leaning on one arm, looking down at him. Her body was covered with thick varicolored towels tabbed together, and the hood still shrouded her face.
Peter sat up and stretched. The inside of the hut was dark; the drums and bugles along the bank sounded faintly. Nearby, a neighbor was banging on his fish-skin-and-bamboo drum as if he were trying to wake up the whole world. "Nothing."
"You were groaning and mumbling." "Earth is always with us," he said, and he left her to figure that out for herself. With him he took the thunder mug to the neighborhood deposit hut which was about a hundred paces away. There he greeted a score of men and women, all on the same task. They dumped the contents of the pots into a large bamboo wagon. After breakfast, this would be hauled out of the building by a team of men into the foothills to the base of a mountain. There the excrement would be treated to make potassium for black gunpowder. Frigate worked two days a month there and four days on the sentinel towers. A grailstone was just on the other side of the hill on which their hut stood. Usually, he and Eve took their grails to it. This morning, however, he wanted to talk to the crew of the boat that had arrived during the night. Eve would not object if he went by himself, since she had to finish stringing necklaces of hornfish vertebrae, varicolored helical bones in demand as ornaments. She and Frigate traded them for tobacco and liquor and flints. Frigate also made boomerangs and, occasionally, dugouts and canoes.
Frigate carried his grail with his left hand and his yew-wood flint-tipped spear in the other. A fish-skin belt around his waist held a sheath containing a chert axe. A quiver of arrows, flint tipped and fletched with thin, carved bones, was slung over one shoulder. A bow of yew, wrapped in bamboo paper, was strapped to the quiver to protect it from the early-morning moisture.
The little state of which he was a citizen, Ruritania, was not at war or under threat of war. The law requiring that all have their weapons handy was a hangover from the old days of turbulence. Obsolete laws had almost as hard a time dying here as on Earth.
Social inertia was everywhere, though its resistance to change varied from state to state.
Frigate walked among the huts spread out over the plain. Hundreds, covered like him from foot to head against the chill, joined him. About a half-hour after the sun rose, they began to shed their cloths. While eating breakfast, Frigate looked for new faces. There were fifteen, all from the newly arrived schooner, the Razzle Dazzle. They sat in a group, eating and talking to those interested in the newcomers. Peter sat down by them to watch and listen.
The captain, Martin Fairington, also known as the Frisco Kid, was a muscular man of medium height. His handsome face looked Irish. His hair was reddish-bronze and curly; his eyes, large and deep blue; his chin, strong. He talked energetically, smiling often, cracking jokes. His Esperanto was fluent but not perfect, and it was evident that he preferred English.
The first mate, Tom Rider, also known as Tex, stood about 5.08 centimeters or 2 inches shorter than Frigate's 1.8 meter or 6 feet.
He was what the pulp magazine writers of Frigate's youth called "ruggedly handsome." Not as muscular as the captain, he moved quickly though gracefully with a confidence that Frigate envied. His dark hair was straight and if his tanned skin had been two shades browner, he could have passed for an Onondaga Indian. His Esperanto was perfect, but, like Farrington, he was pleased to find some English-speakers in the crowd. His voice was a pleasant baritone which combined a Southwestern drawl with a Midwestern pronunciation.
Frigate learned much about the crew just by listening to their uninhibited account of themselves. They were the usual motley collection met on the larger boats that wandered up and down The River. The captain's woman was a nineteenth-century South American Caucasian; the first mate's, a citizen of the Roman city of Aphrodita of the second century a.d. Frigate remembered that its ruins had been discovered by archaeologists in Turkey sometime around the 1970's.