Anyway, you figure you’re just past the cusp perihelion of your parabola and you’re starting back. You know how far you’ve come and when you’ll get back. You laugh again. The sound of your voice reminds you he can hear you, so you crawl over to the bulkhead and push the button.
“Cadet,” he says. “Please, Cadet. Please.” His voice is hoarse and weak; the syllables come out as if they’re meaningless from repetition. He’s probably been lying in there for weeks bleating “Cadet—please—Cadet—please” every time you clicked the stylus against your teeth or set the quadrant on your Sun gun.
You spend a lot of time looking out the viewport, but you get sick of that and turn to the euphorics. You see a lot of stereo shows. You are always aware of the button in the bulkhead, but you ignore it. You read. You get a lot of use out of the octant; it seems you take a lot more bearings than you have to. And when at last the button starts to be intrusive, you make a real effort and leave it alone; you figure out something else to do instead.
You take a careful survey of your instruments to figure which one you need least, and finally decide on the airspeed indicator. You’ve spent plenty of time in a mockup and you know you can compute your airspeed when you return to Earth by the hull-temperature plus your ground-rise radar.
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 t
hat 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.”
“It was just that I—I’d always wanted to be in space. I thought about it in the daytime and dreamed about it at night. And all of a sudden, there it was, happening to me for real. I thought I ought to say something and I opened my mouth to do it and all of a sudden I was crying. I couldn’t help it. I guess I— Crazy, I guess.”
“I wouldn’t say so. You can hear and talk and see pictures and get yourself all ready, but there’s nothing like doing it. I know.”
“You, you’re used to it.”
* * * *
He seems to want to say something else; you hold the button down. Finally, with difficulty, he asks, “You’re big, aren’t you? I mean you’re . . . you know. Big.”
“Well, yes.”
“I wish I was. I wish I was good for... well, something.”
“Everybody push you around?”
“Mm.”
“Listen,” you say. “You take a human being and put him down next to a starship. They’re not the same size and they’re not the same shape, and one of ‘em’s pretty insignificant. But you can say that this built this, not the other way around.”
“Y-e-eah.” It is a whisper.
“Well, you’re that human being, that self-same one. Ever think of that?”
“No.”
“Neither did I, till now,” you admit rapidly. “It’s the truth, though.”
He says, “I wish I was a cadet.”
“Where do you come from, kid?”
“Masolo. It’s no place. Jerk town. I like big places with big things going on. Like the Base.”
“Awful lot of people charging around.”
“Yeah,” he says. “I don’t like crowds much, but the Base —it’s worth it.”
You sit and look at the bulkhead. It’s companionable, suddenly, and sort of changed, as if it had just grown warm, or quilted. You get a splinter of light off the bright metal where you’ve scored it. You think it’s down pretty deep. A man could stand up to it and knock that piece out with a maul, if a man could stand up, if he had a maul.
You say, very fast, as if you’re afraid something’s going to stop you, “Ever do anything you were really ashamed of? I did when I talked to you the way I did. I shouldn’t’ve done it like that... I don’t know what got into me. Yes, I do and I’ll tell you. I was afraid you were a boy genius planted on me to strip my brains and take my command. I got scared.”
It all comes out like that. You feel much better and at the same time you’re glad Walkinok or Shank aren’t around to hear you spout like that.
The kid’s very quiet for a while. Then he says, “One time my mother sent me to the market and something was a special, I forget what. But anyway I had forty cents change and I forgot about it. I found it in my pants in school next day and bought a starship magazine with it and never told her. I used to get every issue that way after that. She never missed the money. Or maybe she did and didn’t say anything. We were pretty hard up.”
You understand that the kid is trying to give you something, because you apologized to him. You don’t say anything more about that. Right here, a wonder starts to grow. You don’t know what it is, but you know that stand-off-and-watch part of your mind is working on it.
You say, “Where is this Masolo?”
“Upstate. Not far from Base. Ever since I was a baby, the axitugs were shaking the house when they took off. There’s a big tree outside the house and all the leaves shiver—with the tugs, you know. I used to climb out a limb and get on the roof and lie down on my back. Sometimes you could see the starships orbiting. Just after the Sun goes down, sometimes you can...” He swallows; you can hear it plainly. “I used to put out my hand. It was like a firefly up there.”
“Some firefly,” you say.
“Yeah. Some firefly, all right.”
Inside you, the wonder is turning to a large and luminous astonishment. It’s still inexpressible, so you leave it alone.
The kid is saying, “I was with two other fellows out by the high school one time. I was just a kid—eleven, I think. Well, some gorillas from the high school chased us. We ran and they caught up with us. The other kids started to fight them. I got over to one side and, when I had a chance, I ran. I ran all the way home. I wish I’d stayed there with those other two kids.
“They got the tar kicked out of them and I guess it hurt, but I guess it stopped hurting after some teacher came along and broke up the fight. But I hurt every time I think about running away like that. Boy, did those two give me a razzing when they saw me next day! Boy! So what I wanted to ask you, you don’t think a kid who would run away like that could be a cadet.”
He ends it like that, flat. No question.
* * * *
You think about it. You’ve been in some fine brawls as a cadet. You’re in a bar and someone cracks wise, and your blood bubbles up, and you wade in, feeling giant-size. But maybe that’s just because of the business of belonging.
You say carefully, “I think if I was in a fight, I’d rather have a guy on my side who knew what being scared felt like. Then it would be like having two guys on my side, instead of one. One of the guys wouldn’t care if he got hurt and the other guy would never want to be hurt that way again. I think a fellow like that would be a pretty good cadet.”
“Well, yeah,” says the kid, in that funny whisper.
Now the inner astonishment bursts into sight and you recognizie what it is about this kid.
At first, you were scared of him, but even when that went away, you didn’t like him. There was no question of liking him or not liking him; he was a different species that you couldn’t have anything to do with.
And the more you talked with him, the more you began to feel that you didn’t have to set yourself apart from him, that he had a whole lot you didn’t have—and that you could use it. The way he talked, honest and unabashed; you don’t know how to do that. You nearly choked to death apologizing to him.
It suddenly is very important to get along with this kid. It isn’t because the kid is important. It’s because if you can get along with somebody so weak, so wet behind the ears, and yet in his peculiar way so rich, why, you can get along with anybody, even your own lousy self.
And you realize that this thing of getting along with him has extension after extension. Somehow, if you can find more ways to get along with this kid, if you can see more things the way he sees them with no intolerance and no altitude, you’ll tap something in yourself that’s been dried up a long time now.
You find all this pretty amazing, and you settle down and talk to the kid. You don’t eke it out. You know he’ll last all the way back to Base and have plenty left over. You know, too, that by the time you get there, this kid will know a cadet can also be a louse. You can give him that much.
The way you treated him, he was hurt. But you know? He wasn’t mad. He doesn’t think he’s good enough to get mad at a cadet. He thinks a cadet rates what he does just by being a cadet.
Well, you are going to fix
that
* * * *
The time goes by and the time comes; the acceleration tug reaches out and grabs you high above Earth, so, after all that manual-control drill, you don’t have a thing to do but sit there and ride it down.
The tug hovers over the compound right near the administration building, which disappears in a cloud of yellow dust. You sink down and down in the dust cloud until you think they must be lowering you into a hole in the ground. Then, at last, there’s a slight thump and an inhuman amount of racket as the tug blasts away free.
After that, there’s only the faint whisper of the air circulator, the settling dust, and a profoundly unpleasant feeling in calves and chest as the blood gets used to circulating in a 1-G environment.
The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 1 - [Anthology] Page 12