A thought keeps knocking and you finally back off and let it in. Something to do with the button. You push it and you can hear your shipmate. You release it and...shut off the intercom?
No, by the Lord, you don’t! When you were coughing, you were off that button. Can I do anything?
Now what the hell kind of business is this? (And that detached part of your mind reaches hungrily for the pulses of fury: ah, it feels good!) Do you mean to sit there and tell me (you rage silently at the PD men who designed this ship) that even if I don’t push that button, my shipmate can hear everything that goes on with me? The intercom’s open on the other side all the time, open on this side only when I push the button—is that it?
You turn and glare out the viewport, staring down the cold, distant eye of infinity, and Where the hell, you storm silently, is my privacy?
This won’t do. It won’t do at all. You figured right from the start that you and your shipmate would be pretty equal, but on a ship, even a little two-passenger can like this, someone’s got to be in command. Given that the other compartment has the same stereos, the same dispensers, the same food and water and everything else, and the only difference between these living quarters is that button— who’s privileged? Me, because I get to push the button? Or my shipmate, who gets to listen in on me when I so much as cough?
“I know!” you think suddenly. “That’s a PD operative in there! A psychodynamics specialist assigned to observe me!”
You almost laugh out loud; relief washes over you. PD work is naturally hush-hush. You’ll never know how many hours during your course you were under hypnosis. It was even rumored around that some guys had cerebral surgery done by the PD boys and never knew it. The boys had to work in secret for the same reason you don’t stir your coffee with an ink-stick—PD is one field where the tools must leave no mark.
Well, fine, fine. At last this shipmate makes some sense: at last you’ve got an answer you can accept. This ship, this trip, is of and for a cadet—but it’s PD business. The only non-cadet who’d conceivably be aboard would have to be a PD tech.
So you grin and reach for the button. Then, remembering the way it works, that the intercom’s open from your side when you’re off the button, you draw your hand back, face the bulkhead, and say easily, “Okay, PD, I’m on to you. How’m I doing?” You wonder how many cadets tumble to the trick this soon. You push the button and wait for the answer.
The answer is “Huh?” in a mixture of shyness and mystification.
You let go the button and laugh. “No sense stringing it out, Lieutenant.” (This is clever. Most PD techs are looeys; one or two are master sergeants. Right or not, you haven’t hurt his feelings.) “I know you’re a PD man.”
There’s a silence from the other side. Then: “What’s a PD man?”
You get a little sore. “Now see here, Lieutenant, you don’t have to play any more of these psych games.”
“Gosh, I’m no lieutenant. I—”
You cut him off quickly. “Sergeant, then.”
“You got me all wrong,” says that damnable high voice.
“Well, you’re PD, anyway.”
“I’m afraid I’m not.”
You can’t take much more of this. “Then what the hell are you?”
A silence. And as it beats by, that anger and that fear of torture begin to mount, hand in hand.
“Well?” you roar.
“Well,” says the voice, and you can practically see it shuffle its feet. “I’m not anything. I’m fifteen years old ...”
You drag out your senior-class snap; there’s a way of talking to fourth and third classmen that makes ‘em jump. “Mister, you give an account of yourself, but now. What’s your name?”
“Skampi.”
“Skampi? What the hell kind of a name is that?”
“It’s what they call me.”
Did you detect a whisper of defiance there? “Sir!”
The defiance disappears instantly. “It’s what they call me . . . sir.”
“And what are you doing on my ship, mister?”
A frightened gulp. “I—I’m sorry—uh—sir. They put me on.”
“They?”
“At the Base . . . sir,” he amended quickly.
“You were on the Base just how long, mister?” That “mister” can be a lead-shot whiplash if you do it right. It was sure being done right.
“I don’t know, sir.” You have the feeling the punk’s going to burst into tears again. “They took me to a big laboratory and there were a lot of sort of booths with machines in them. They asked me all kinds of questions about did I want to be a spaceman. Well, I did. I always did, ever since I was a kid. So, after a while, they put me on a table and gave me a shot and when I woke up, I was here.”
“Who gave you a shot? What was his name?”
“I never ... I didn’t find out, sir.” A pause. “A big man. Old. He had gray hair, very short, and green eyes.”
Provost, by God. This is PD business, all right, but from where you sit, it’s monkey business.
“You know any spatial ballistics?”
“No, sir. Some day, I—”
“Astrogation?”
“Only what I picked up myself. But I’ll—”
“Gravity mechanics? Differentials? Strength of materials? Light-metal fission? Relativity?”
“I—“
“Well? Well? Speak up, mister!”
“I heard of them, sir.”
“ ‘I heard of them, sir!’ “ you mimic savagely. “Do you know what this ship is for?”
“Oh, yes, sir! Everybody knows that. This is the Long Haul. When you come back from this, you get your commission and they give you a starship!” And if the voice had shuffled its feet once, now its eyes shone.
“You figure to get a starship, mister?”
“Well, I—I—”
“You think they give commands to Boy Scouts just because the Boy Scout wants to go to space awful bad?”
No answer.
You jeer, “Have you got the slightest idea how much training a cadet has to go through, how much he has to learn?”
“Well, no, but I guess I will.”
“Sir!”
“Sir. They put me aboard, all those officers who asked me the questions and everything. It must be all right. Hey!” he says excitedly, all the crushed timidity disappearing, to be replaced by a bubbling enthusiasm. “I know! We have all this time...maybe you’re supposed to teach me astrogation and relativity and all that.”
Your jaw drops at the sheer childishness of it. And then something really ugly drifts up and smothers everything else.
For some reason, your mind flashes back to the bus, the day you got to Base. You can remember back easily to all the faces you worked with, those who made it and those who didn’t. But your class had thirty-eight cadets in it and that bus must have held fifty. What happened to the rest? You’d always assumed they went into other sections-ground crew, computer men, maintenance. Suppose they’d been sorted out, examined for some special trait or talent that only the PD men knew about? Suppose they were loaded right aboard ships, each with a graduate cadet?
And why?
Suppose these punks, greenhorns, Boy. Scouts, children —suppose they were the ones slated for a commission? Suppose guys like you, thinking all this while you were the cream of the crop, and the top cream off that—suppose all along you’d tested out as second-grade material. Suppose you were the one who did the sweating and cramming and took the hazing and the demerits and the lousy mess-hall food, not to command a starship, not to get a commission, but just to be a private tutor to a boy genius who wanted to go to space awful bad?