You dismount the instrument and take it apart and get the diamond bearing. You go through the games locker and the equipment chest until you put together a nickel rod and a coil, and you hook on to your short-range radio where the oscillations suit you. You cement the diamond to the tip of the rod, shove the rod through the long axis of the coil. You turn on the juice and feel (rather than hear) the rod humming softly.
“The phenomenon, dear pupil,” you say, but silently, “is magneto-striction, whereby the nickel rod contracts slightly in the magnetic field. And since the field is in oscillation, that diamond on the tip is vibrating like crazy.”
You get your stylus and, after careful consideration, decide on a triangle with round corners, just big enough to shove an arm through comfortably; the three corners would make peepholes.
All the while, you have quick fantasies about it. You’ll knock the triangular piece out of the bulkhead and stick your face in the hole and say “Surprise!” and he’ll be cowering there, wondering what goes on. And you’ll say, “Shake and let bygones be.” And he’ll jump over, all eager, and you’ll take his hand and drag it through the hole and put your back against the bulkhead and pull till his shoulder dislocates.
He’s gasping, “Cadet, please,” until you get tired of amusing yourself and haul the wrist around and sink your teeth in it. Then he starts to bleed, and you just hold him there while “Cadet-please” gets fainter and fainter, and you explain to him all about differential equations and mass-ratios.
And as you’re thinking about this, you’re going round and round the blunted triangle with your vibrating diamond. The bulkhead is thick as hell and tough—it’s hull-metal; imagine that, for an inboard bulkhead!—but that’s all right. You’ve got plenty of time. And bit by bit, your scored line goes deeper.
Every once in a while, you take a breather. It occurs to you to wonder what you’ll say when you’re grappled in and the Colonel sees that hole in the bulkhead. You try not to wonder about this, but you do all the same, a whole lot. You run it over in your mind and sometimes the Colonel says, “Good, Cadet. That’s real resourcefulness, the kind I like to see.” But other times it doesn’t quite come out that way, especially with the kid dead on one side of the bulkhead and his blood all over the place on the other side.
So maybe you won’t kill him. You’ll just scare him. Have fun with him.
Maybe he’ll talk, too. Maybe this entire Long Haul was set up by PD just to find out if you’d cooperate with your shipmate, try to teach him what you know, at any cost. And you know, if you thought more of the Service than you do about your own dirty career in it, that’s just what you’d do. Maybe if you did that, they’d give you a star-ship, you and the kid both.
So, anyway, this cutting job is long and slow and suits you fine; no matter what you think, you go on with it, just because you started. When it’s finished you’ll know what to do.
Funny that the result of this trip was going to be the same as some of those you’d heard whispered about, where a ship came in with one guy dead and the other . . .
But that was the difference. To do a thing like that, those guys must have been space-happy. You’re doing it, sure, but for different reasons. You’re no raving looney. You’re slow-and-steady, doing a job, knowing exactly why.
Or you will, when the time comes.
You’re real happy this whole time.
Then all that changes.
Just why, you can’t know. You turned in and you slept, and all of a sudden you’re wide awake. You’re thinking about some lab work you did. It was a demonstration of eddy-current effects.
There was a copper disk as thick as your arm and a meter in diameter, swinging from a rope in the center of the gymnasium. You hauled it up to the high ceiling at the far end and turned it loose. There was a big electromagnet set up in the middle of the place, and as the disk reached the bottom of its long swing, it passed between the poles of the magnet, going like hell. You threw the switch and the disk stopped dead right where it was and rang like a big gong, though nothing had touched it.
Then you remember the sixty zillion measurements you’d taken off a synchro-cosmotron so huge that it took you four minutes at a fast walk to get from one end to the other.
You remember the mockups, the hours and hours of hi-G, no-G; one instrument out, another, all of ‘em, some of ‘em; simulated meteorites on collision orbit; manual landing techniques—until your brains were in your hands and the seat of your pants, and you did the right things with them without thinking. Exhausted, you still did it right. Even doped up.
You remember the trips into town with Harris and Flacker and the others. Something happened to you every time you so much as walked down a street with those guys. It was a thing you’d never told anyone. Part of it was something that happened between the townspeople and your group. Part of it was between your group and yourself. It all added up to being a little different and a little better... but not in a cocky way. In a way that made you grateful to the long, heavy bulk of a starship and what such ships are for.
You sit up in your bunk, with that mixed-up, wideawake feeling, reaching for something you can’t quite understand, some one simple thing that would sum up the huge equipment, the thousands of measurements, the hours of cramming and the suspense of examinations; the seat-of-the-pants skills and the pride in town . . .
And now you see what it is.
That kid in there, he could have an I.Q. of nine goddam hundred and never learn how to put down a ship with all his instruments out and the gyros on manual. Not by somebody telling him over an intercom when he’s never even sat in a G-seat. He might memorize twelve thousand slightly varying measurements off a linear accelerator, but he wouldn’t gain that certain important thing you get when you make those measurements yourself. You could describe the way the copper disk rang when the eddy current stopped it, but he would have to see it happen before it did to him all the things it did to you.
You still don’t know who that kid is or why he’s here, but you can bet on one thing—he isn’t here to pick your brains and take your job. You don’t have to like him and you can be mad he’s aboard instead of Harris or Walky; but get that junk out of your head right now about him being a menace to you. Goddlemighty Godfrey, where did that poisonous little crumb in your brain come from? Since when are you subject to fear and jealousy and insecurity? Since when do you have to guard yourself against your own imagination?
Come the hell off it, Cadet. You’re not that good a teacher; he’s not that much of a monster.
Monster! Did you hear him cry that time?
You feel twenty pounds lighter (which is odd, seeing that you’re still in free-fall) and as if you’d just washed your face. “Hey, Krampil”
You go push the button and wait. Then you hear a sharp inhalation through nostrils. A sniff...no, you won’t call it that.
“Skampi, sir,” he corrects you timidly.
“Okay, whatever you say. And knock off that ‘sir.’ “
“Yes, sir. I mean yes.”
“What were you crying about?”
“When, s-?”
“Okay,” you break in gently. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“No. I wasn’t trying to deny it. I . . . cried twice. I’m sorry you heard me. You must think . . .”
“I don’t think,” you say sincerely. “Not enough.”
He thinks that over and apparently drops it. “I cried right after blastoff.”
“Scared?”
“No . . . yes, I was, but that wasn’t why. I just. . .”
“Take your time telling me. Time is what we got nothing else but of.”