With no sound nor sign of occupancy, the bulkhead still attests the life behind it, just by being there. It’s a friendly flatness, a companionable feature of your world, and its company pervades all your thinking.
You know it’s your last resort, but you know, too, that it’s a rich one, and when at last you’re driven to use it, you’ll enter another kind of world, more complex and more engrossing than your own, just for the work it takes to get from place to place and the mystery of the fog between the places. It’s a mind, another human mind, sharing this prison with you when at last you need sharing more than anything whatever in all of space.
Who is it?
You think about that. You think a whole lot about that. Back at Base, in your last year, you and the other cadets thought about that more than anything. If they’d ever given you the shadow of a hint...but no; wondering about it was apparently part of your training. You knew only that on your Long Haul, you would not be alone. You had a pretty good idea that the choice of a shipmate for you would be a surprise.
You looked around you at mess, in class, in the dormitory; you lay awake at night dealing out their faces in a sort of solitaire game; and sometimes you thought about one and said, “That’d be fine. We’d get along.” And sometimes you said, “That stinker? Lock me up with him and that bulkhead won’t be tough enough. I’ll kill him after the third day, so help me!”
And after they tapped you for your first Haul, this was the only thing you were scared about—who’d be your shipmate. Everything else, you thought you could handle. You knew your job inside out and backward and it wouldn’t whip you. You were sharp-tuned, fine-honed, ready for anything that was under your own control. You were even confident about being alone; it wouldn’t get you. Not a chance.
Away down deep, no man believes he can be driven out of his mind, just as he cannot believe—really believe—that he will be dead. That’s the kind of thing that happens to someone else.
But this business of a shipmate—this wasn’t under your control. You didn’t control who it would be and you wouldn’t control the guy after blastoff. It was the only unknown and therefore the only thing that scared you.
Amendment: there was a certain amount of control. The intercom button was on your side of the bulkhead. Leave it alone and you didn’t have to so much as know you had a shipmate until you were good and ready.
Being able to shut off a voice isn’t control, though. You don’t know what your shipmate will do. Or be.
In those last tight days before blastoff, there was one thing you became overwhelmingly aware of. Esprit de corps, they call it. You and the other graduates were hammered into a mold—and hammered some more until the resiliency was gone out of you. You were alike and you did things alike because you had grown to want to. You knew for certain that one of this tight, trustworthy little group would be picked for you; their training and yours, their whole lives and yours, pointed toward this ship, this Haul.
Your presence on this ship summed up your training; your training culminated in your presence on the ship. Only a graduate cadet was fit to man the ship; the ship existed solely for the graduate cadet. This was something so self-evident that you never thought about it.
Not until now.
Because now, a few minutes ago, you were ready to push that button. You couldn’t know if you’d broken all records for loneliness, for duration of solitary confinement, but you’d tried. You’d looked through the viewport until it ceased to mean anything. You’d read until you didn’t care any more. You’d lived the almost-life of the stereos until you couldn’t make believe you believed them. You’d listened to music until it didn’t matter. And you’d gone over and over your life from its very beginnings until you’d completely lost perspective on it or anything and anyone in it.
You’d found that you could go back to the viewport and cycle through the whole thing again, but you’d done that, too, so often that the whole matrix of personal involvement was emptied out. Then the flatness of the bulkhead made itself felt. In a way, it seemed to bulge toward you, crowd you against the ship’s side, and you knew it was getting to be time you pushed that button and found out for sure.
Who?
Pete or Krakow or that crazy redheaded Walkinok? Or Wendover (you all called him Bendover) with all those incomprehensible shaggy-dog stories? Harris?’ Beerbelly Flacker or Gohen the Wire-haired Terror? Or Shank (what you all called him was a shame)? Or Gindes, whose inexplicable nickname was Mickey Mouse? You’d sort of hoped it would be Gindes, not because you liked him, but more because he was the one classmate you’d never known very well. He always used to look on and keep his mouth shut. He’d be much more fun to explore than, say, old Shank, who was so predictable that you could practically talk in chorus with him.
So you’ve tortured yourself, just for the sake of torture, with your thumb over the intercom button, until even the torture dried out and blew away.
You pushed.
You found out, first of all, that the intercom apparently had its own amplifier, energized when you held the button down, and that it took forever—well, three or four seconds, anyway—to warm up. First nothing, then a carrier, then the beginning of a signal; then, at last, the voice of your shipmate, rushing up to full volume, as loud and as clear as if the bulkhead did not exist. And you get off that button as if it had turned into a needle; and you’re backed against the outboard bulkhead, deep in shock, physically in silence, but with that voice going on and on and on unbelievably in your unbelieving brain.
It was crying.
It wept wearily, as though you had tuned in toward the end of a long session of wild and lonesome grief. It cried quietly, exhaustedly, without hope. And it cried in a voice that was jokingly wrong for this place—a light, high voice, nearly a contralto. It was wrong, altogether wrong.
The wild ideas come first: Stowaway?
You almost laugh. For days before blastoff, you were drugged and immersed in high-frequency fields; hypnotized, worked and reworked mentally and physically. You were passively fed and passively instructed.
You don’t know now and you may never know all they did to you. But you can be sure it was done inside six concentric rings of “security” of one kind and another, and you can be sure that your shipmate got the same. What it amounted to was concentrated attention from a mob of specialists, every sleeping and waking second from the time you beered it up at the class farewell dinner to the time the accelerator tug lifted your ship and carried it screaming up and outward. Nobody was in this ship but those who belonged in it; that you can absolutely bank on.
Mad idea, the second. For a while, you don’t even dare think it, but with that kind of voice, that crying, you have to think of something. So you do and you’re scared, scared in a way you’ve never imagined before, and to a degree you didn’t think was possible. There’s a girl in there!
You run those wordless syllables, those tired sobs, through your mind again, seeking for vocalizations as separated from the breathy, painful gasping that accompanied them. And you don’t know. You just can’t be certain.
So punch the button again. Listen some more.
Or ask.
But you can’t. The crazy idea might be true and you couldn’t stand that They couldn’t—they just couldn’t— put a girl on these ships with you and then stow her behind the bulkhead.