Then you have an instant fantasy about that. You kneel (bumping your skull on the cover) and feel frantically around the bulkhead, where it meets deck-plates, nose compartment, overhead, after-bulkhead; and all around your fingers ride the bead of a weld. You sit back, sweating a little and half-laughing at yourself. Scratch off one fantasy; there’ll be no sliding partitions into any harems this trip.
You stop laughing and think. “They couldn’t be that cruel!” You’re on a test run, sure, and it isn’t the ship that’s being tested. You know that and you accept it. But tests, tests...must you throw a glass vase on a brick sidewalk to find out if it’s brittle? You see one of your own hands going up and out to check for a panel, a joint again. You sneer at it, at your own hand, and watch it stop in embarrassment.
Well, say they weren’t that cruel. Whom did they put in there?
Not Walkinok. Not Shank. Not Harris or Cohen or any cadet. A cadet wouldn’t lie there and cry like that, like a child, a schoolgirl—a baby.
Some stranger, then.
Now the anger comes, shouldering out all the fear. They wouldn’t! This ship is everything a cadet was born for— no, made for. That tight leash that bound you with the others, all your thinking, an easy thing you all shared and never had to think about—that was a thing that didn’t admit strangers.
Aside from that—beyond that—this wasn’t a matter of desecrated esprit; it was a matter of moral justice. Nobody but a cadet deserves a ship! What did you give your life to and what for? Why did you give up marriage, and freedom, and all the wonderful trivialities called “fun” that made most human lives worth living? Why did you hold still for Base routines and the hazing you got from the upper classmen?
Just to have some stranger, someone who wasn’t even a cadet, wander in without training, shaping, conditioning, experience...and get on your ship?
No, it has to be a cadet. It couldn’t be anything else. Even a cadet who could break down and cry—that’s a more acceptable idea than its being a woman or a stranger.
You’re still angry, but now it’s the kind of anger that goads you, not the kind that stops you. You push the button. You hear the carrier, then the beginnings of something else . . . Breathing. Difficult, broken breathing, the sound of someone too tired to cry any more, even when crying has changed nothing and there are still more tears to come.
“What the hell are you bawling about?” you yell.
The breathing goes on and on. Finally it stops for a moment and then a long, whispery, shuddery sigh.
“Hey!” you shout. “Hey—you in there!”
But there is no answer. The breathing is fainter, more regular. Whoever it is is going to sleep.
You press even harder on the button, as if that would do any good, and you yell again, this time not even “Hey!” but a blunter, angrier syllable. You can think only that your shipmate chooses—chooses, by God!—not to answer you.
You’re breathing hard now, but your shipmate isn’t. You hold your breath and listen. You hear the deep, quiet inhalations, and then a small catch, and a little sigh, the ghost of half a sob.
“Hey!”
Nothing.
You let the button go and in the sharp silence that replaces the carrier’s faint hum, the same wordless syllable builds and builds inside you until it bursts free again. You can tell from the feel of your throat and the ringing in your ears that it’s been a long, long time since you used your voice.
You’re angry and you’re hurt from these insults to yourself and to your Service. And you know what? You feel good. Some of the stereos you have are pretty nice; they take you right into battle, into the arms of beautiful women, into danger, and from time to time you could get angry at someone in them. You could—but you haven’t for a long time now. You haven’t laughed or been angry ever since...since...well, you can’t even remember when. You’d forgotten how and you’d forgotten just when it was you forgot. And now look. The heart’s going, the sweat...
This is fine.
Push the button again, take another little sip of anger. It’s been aging; it’s vintage stuff. Go ahead.
You do, and up comes the carrier.
“Please,” begs the voice. “Please, please . . . say something else.”
Your tongue is paralyzed and you choke, suddenly, when you swallow wrong. You cough violently, let go the button and pound yourself on the chest. For a moment, you’re in bad shape. Coughing makes your thinking go in spurts, and your thinking is bouncing up and down on the idea that, until now, you didn’t really believe there was anyone in there at all. You get your wind and push the button again.
The voice asks, “Are you all right? Can I do anything?”
You become certain of something else: that isn’t a voice you recognize. If you ever heard it before, you certainly don’t remember it. Then the content of it hits you. Can I do anything? You get mad again.
“Yeah,” you growl. “Hand me a glass of water.” You don’t have your thumb on the button, so you just say what pops into your mind. You shake yourself like a wet bird dog, take a deep breath, and lean on the control again.
Before you can open your mouth, you’re in a hailstorm of hysterical laughter. “Glass of water...uh-uh-uh...that’s good...you don’t know what this means,” says the voice, suddenly sober and plaintive. “I’ve waited so long. I’ve listened to your music and the sound from your stereos. You never talk, you never say anything at all. I never even heard you cough before.”
Part of your mind reacts to that: That’s unnatural, not even to cough, or laugh aloud, or hum. Must be a conditioning. But most of it explodes at this stranger, this— intruder, talking away like that without a word of explanation, of apology . . . talking as if that voice of all voices had a right to be there.
“I was beginning to think you were deaf and dumb. Or maybe even that you weren’t there at all. That was the thing that scared me the most.”
“Shut up,” you hiss, with all the fury, all the deadly warning you can command.
“I knew they wouldn’t,” the voice continues happily. “They’d never put anyone out here by himself. That would be too—” It stops abruptly as you release the button.
“My God!” you think. “The dam has boist! That character’ll chunter along like that for the duration!”
You press the button quickly, hear “—all alone out here, you get scared to look out the viewp—” and you cut off again.
That stuff like an invisible mist you see melting away is all the conjecture, those great half-formed plans of shipping out with Walkinok or the Wirehaired Terror.
You were going to review your courses, remember? Slow and easy—take a week on spatial ballistics or spectroscopy. Think it all through for a day between sentences. Or laugh over the time you and the Shank got tanked up at the canteen and pretended you were going to tie up the C.O. and jet him off with Colonel Provost, the head PD man, for a shipmate. The General would get all the psychodynamics he needed. The General was always talking psychodynamics, Provost was always doing psychodynamics.
Well, it seemed funny at the time, anyway. It wasn’t so much the beer. It was knowing the General and knowing Colonel Provost that made it funny. How funny, would it be with a stranger?
They give you someone to talk to. They give you someone you haven’t anything to talk to about! That idea of putting a girl behind the bulkhead, now, that was a horrible idea. It was torture. Well, so’s this. Maybe worse.