“Now don’t you forget, Skampi,” you say. You find it difficult to talk; you’ve got a wide grin plastered across your face and you can’t cast it adrift. “Just as soon as they’re through with you, you come looking for me, hear? I’ll buy you a soda.”
You lean back in your G-chair and hold the bulkhead button.
“I can drink beer,” he says manfully.
“We’ll compromise. We’ll make your soda with beer. Listen, kid. I can’t promise, but I know they’re fooling with the idea of a two-man crew for starships. How’d you like to go with me—one trip, anyhow? Of course, you’ll have to be conditioned six ways from the middle, double-time, and it’ll be real rough. But—what do you say?”
And you know? He doesn’t say anything!
He laughs, though.
Now here comes Colonel Provost, the big big brass of Psychodynamics, and a young MP. That’s all the welcoming committee you’ll get. The compound’s walled and locked, and no windows look out on it. They must have unloaded some pretty sorry objects from these space cans from time to time.
They open the hatch from the outside and you immediately start coughing like hell. Your eyes say the dust has settled, but your lungs say no. By the time you have your eyes wiped, the M.P. is inside and squatting on the deck, cross-legged.
He says cheerfully, “Hi, kay-dee. This here’s a stun gun and if you so much as squint at me or the Colonel, you get flaked out like a heaving-line.”
“Don’t worry about me,” you say from behind that silly grin. “I got no quarrel with anybody and I like it here. Good morning, Colonel.”
“Look out for this one,” said the M.P. “Likes it here. He’s sick.”
“Shut up, wheelhead,” says the Colonel cheerfully. He has his gray crewcut and barrel torso shoved into the hatch and it’s real crowded in that little cabin. “Well, Cadet, how are we?”
“We’re fine,” you say. The M.P. cocks his head a little to one side and gets bright-eyed. He thinks you’re sassing the C.O., but you’re not. When you say “we,” you mean you and your shipmate.
“Anything special happen?”
The answer to that is a big fat yes, but it would take forever to tell. It’s all recorded, anyway; PD doesn’t miss a trick. But that’s from then till now, and done with. You’re concerned from now on. “Colonel, I want to talk to you right now. It’s about my shipmate.”
The Colonel leans a little further in and slaps the M.P.’s gun hand. He’s in front of the guy, so you can’t see his face. “Beat it, wheelhead.”
The M.P. clears out. You stagger up out of the G-seat and climb through the hatch. The Colonel catches your arms as you stagger. After a long time in free-fall, your knees won’t lock as you walk; you have to stiffen each one as your weight comes on it, and you have to concentrate. So you concentrate, but that doesn’t stop you from talking. You skim over the whole business, from your long solo to being reduced to meeting your shipmate, and the hassle you had with yourself over that, and then this thing that happened with the kid—weeks and weeks of it, and you’ve only just begun.
“You can pick ‘em, sir,” you pant as you lurch along. “Do you always use a little know-nothing kid? Where do you find ‘em? Does it always work out this well?”
“We get a commander out of every Long Haul,” he says.
“Say, that’s great, sir!”
“We don’t have very many ships,” he says, just as cheerfully.
“Oh,” you say.
Suddenly you stop. “Wait, sir! What about Skampi? He’s still locked in on his side of the bulkhead.”
“You first,” says the Colonel. You go on into the PD lab. “Up you go.”
You look at the big chair with its straps and electrodes and big metal hood.
“You know, they used chairs like these in the French Revolution,” you say, showing off. You’re just busting with friendliness today. You never felt like this. You sit in the big chair. “Look, sir, I want to get started on a project right away This kid, now—I tell you, he’s got a lot on the ball. He’s spaceman right to the marrow bones. He comes from right around here, that little place up the pike, Masolo. He got shook out of his bassinet by the axitugs. He spent his childhood lying on his back on the roof looking for the starships in orbit. He’s—”
“You talk all the time,” the Colonel breaks in mildly. “Sum up, will you? You made out with your shipmate. You think you could do it again in a starship. That it?”
“Think we can try it? Hey, really? Look, can I be the one to tell him, Colonel?”
“Close your mouth and sit still.”
Those are orders. You sit still. The Colonel gets you strapped in and connected up. He puts his hand on the switch.
“Where did you say you came from?”
You didn’t say, and you don’t, because the hood swings down and you’re surrounded by a sudden dissonant chord of audio at tremendous amplitude. If you had been allowed to say, though, you wouldn’t have known.
The Colonel doesn’t even give you time to be surprised at this. You sink into blackness.
It gets light again. You have no idea how much time has passed, but it must be plenty, because the sunlight from outside is a different color and slants in a different, way through the Venetian blinds. On a bench nearby is a stack of minicans with your case number painted on each one— that’d be the tape record of your Long Haul. There’s some stuff in there you’re not proud of, but you wouldn’t swap the whole story for anything.
“Hello, Colonel,” you say with your tongue thick.
“You with us again? Good.” He looks at an enlarged filmstrip and back at you. He shows you. It’s a picture of the bulkhead with the triangular score in it. “Magnetostriction vibrator, with a diamond bearing for a drill bit, hm? Not bad. You guys scare me. I’d have sworn that bulkhead couldn’t be cut and that there was nothing in the ship that could cut it. You must’ve been real eager.”
“I wanted to kill him. You know that now,” you say happily.
“You damn near did.”
“Aw, now, Colonel! I wouldn’t have gone through with it.”
“Come on,” he says, opening the buckles.
“Where, sir?”
“To your space can. Wouldn’t you like to have a look at it from the outside?”
“Cadets aren’t permitted—”
“You qualify,” says the old man shortly.
So out you go to the compound. The can still stands where it was landed.
“Where’s Skampi?” you ask worriedly.
The Colonel just passes you an odd look and walks on. You follow him up to the can. “Here, around the front.”
You walk around to the bow and look up at it. It’s just the shape it ought to be from the way it looked from inside, except that it looks a little like a picture of a whale caught winking at you.
Winking?
One-eyed!
“Do you mean to tell me you had that kid in a blind compartment, without so much as a viewport?” you rage.
The Colonel pushes you. “Sit down. Over there. On the hatch. You returning heroes and your manic moods . . . sit down!”
You sit on the edge of the open hatch.
“Sometimes they fall over when I explain,” he says gruffly. “Now what was bothering you?”
“Locking that kid up in a dark—”
“There isn’t a kid. There isn’t a dark cabin. There’s no viewport on that side of the can. It’s a hydrazine tank.”
“But I—but we—but the—”
“Where do you come from?”
“Masolo, but what’s that to—”
“What did your mother and all the kids call you when you were a space-struck teener?”