Oh, 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 PD boys, and never knew it. They 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, 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 board you 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 “Hah?” 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 games.”
“Gosh,” says the bulkhead, “I’m no lieutenant. I—”
You cut him off quickly. “Sergeant, then.”
“You got me all wrong,” says that damnable, shy tenor.
“Well, you’re PD, anyway,” I snap.
“I’m afraid I’m not.”
You can’t take much more of this. “Well, what the hell are you? You’re a man, aren’t 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 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!” you rasp.
The defiance disappears. “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? They?”
“At the Base...sir,” he amended quickly.
“You were on Base just how long, mister?” That “mister” could be a lead-shotted whiplash if you did 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 a lot of questions about did I want to be a space man. 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. He had green eyes.”
Provost, by God, you think. This is PD business, all right, but from where I 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—I—”
“Well? Well? Speak up, mister.”
“I heard of them, sir.”
“You heard of them sir!” you mimic. “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 star ship!” And if the voice had shuffled feet once, now its eyes shone.
“You figure to get a star ship, 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. Well, 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, 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’ That bus must’ve 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 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 star ship, not to get a commission, but just to be private tutor to a boy genius who wanted to go to space awful bad.
This wouldn’t make sense anywhere else but in this service. It barely made sense there. But look, a star-ship commander might make two trips in his whole career, and that would be all. Eighteen years each round trip, with his passengers in cold packs and a cargo of serums, refractories, machine tools, and food concentrate for the xenologists and e-t mineralogists who were crazy enough to work out there. Training the commander for such a ship was easy, as far as operating knowledge was concerned, though there was a powerful lot of it. But training him to stay conscious—-awake and aware—-and alone—for all those years was something else again. Few men like that were born; they had to be made. Most of your recluses, your hermits, all through history, were guys who had a couple of things drastically wrong with them. There couldn’t be anything wrong with a star-ship commander. He had to be captain and deck crew, and know his black hole as well (though most of the drive machinery down there was automatic), and stay alert and sane in a black, mad, weightless emptiness God never made him for. You could give him more books and pictures, games and music than even he would have time for, and still not be sure he’d stay sane unless he had some very special inner resources. These—and one other thing—were what a cadet was screened for, and what he was trained in. They packed him full of technical knowledge, psyched him to a fare-thee-well, and when they figured he was machine-finished and carrying a high gloss, they sealed him in a can and threw it out for the Long Haul. The course was preset. It might last fourteen months, and it might last three years, and after a guy got back—if he got back—he would be fit to take out a star ship or he would not. As for the shipmate—well, you’d always assumed that PD was looking for a way to shake down two guys at once so that they cou
ld be together on a star ship. Maybe someday the ships would carry eight, ten at once, and at last natural human gregariousness would have a chance to compete with the pall of black distances. So far, though, psychic disorientation had made everything mean and murderous in a man explode into action; putting more than a single human being on those boats was just asking for slaughter and shipwreck.
The other thing required of you besides technical ability and these inner resources is youth. You’re only twenty-two.
You’re twenty-two, so full of high-intensity training that, as Walkinok once said, you feel your brain convolutions are blown out smooth like a full bladder. And you’ve compacted this knowledge, coded it, used it. You’re so full of it that it’s bound to ooze out onto anyone around you. You’re twenty-two, and you’re sealed up in a can with a thirsty-headed fifteen-year-old who knows nothing but wants to go to the stars awful bad. And you can forget how stupid he seems to be, too, because you can bet your bulging cortex that the kid has an I. Q, of nine hundred and umpteen, so he can afford to act stupid. Cry.
What a dirty rotten lousy deal to put you through all this just to shave seven years off the age of a star-ship commander! Next thing you know they’ll put a diapered baby in with a work-weary sucker of a cadet, and get three star trips out of him instead of two! And what’s become of you? After you’ve done your generous stint of tutoring, they pin a discharge emblem on your tunic and say well done, Cadet, now go raise Brussels sprouts; and you stand at attention and salute the downy-cheeked squirt in all the gold braid and watch him ride the gantry to the control cabin you’ve aimed at and sweat for ever since you were weaned!
You sprawl there in that living-space, so small you can’t stand up in it, and you look at that bland belly of a bulkhead with its smooth round navel of a button, and you think, well, there’s a lot of guts back of that. You heave a deep breath (while still the detached part of your mind looks on; new it’s saying wonderingly, aren’t you the guy who was scared because nothing could get him excited anymore?) and you speak; and yours voice comes out sounding quite different from anything you’ve ever heard from anyone before. Maybe you’ve never been this mad before.
“Who told you to say that?”
You push the button and listen.
“Say...what? Uh, sir?”
“About me teaching you. Anybody at Base?”
“Why...” He seems to be thinking. “Why, no, sir. I just thought it would be a good idea.”
You don’t say anything. Just hold the button down.
He says diffidently, “Sort of...pass the time?” When you still don’t say anything, he says wistfully, “I’d try. I’d try awful hard.”
You let go the button and growl, “I just bet you would. You just thought it up all your own little self, huh?”
“Well, yes.”
“You’re a bright boy. You’re a real smart ambitious little louse!” You push the, button real quick but all you get is an astonished silence. You say, real composed, almost gentle: “That ‘louse,’ now, that’s not just a figure of speech, little boy. I mean that. I mean you’re a crummy little crawler looking to suck blood after somebody else’s done all the work. You know what you do? You just make like you’re all alone in this can. You don’t talk to me and you don’t listen to me and I’ll do you a favor, I’ll forget all about you too. I’m not going to bat your eyeballs together just yet, but don’t call me generous, little boy. It’s just that I can’t reach in there just now.”
“No!” Now, that boy can make a real piteous noise when he wants to. “No—no! Wait—please!”
“Well?”
“I don’t under—I mean, I’m sorry, Cadet. I’m honest-to-pete sorry, I never meant—”
But you cut him off. You lie back and close your eyes; you’re thrumming with fury, right down to your toenails. (This, says your internal observer, is all right. This is living.)
The weeks pass, and so do more weeks. You shoot a star and make some notes, and wait a while and shoot it again, and pretty soon you have enough data to fool around with. You get your stylus and block and the point darts around the way you want it to, and those old figures sit up and lie down and rush around just the way you want them to. You laugh when you do it; wouldn’t Junior just love to learn some of these tricks? 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 that he can hear you, so you crawl over to the bulkhead and push the button.
“Cadet,” he says. “Please, Cadet. Please.” And you know what? 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 somehow 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 air-speed indicator. You’ve spent plenty of time in a mock-up and you know you can compute your air speed 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 onto 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 magnetostriction, 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 you decide on a triangle with round corners, just big enough to shove an arm through comfortably; the three corners would make peepholes, so you can see where your arm’s going. 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 get his wrist in both hands and put your back against the bulkhead and pull till his shoulder dislocates. And maybe you could break the arm, too. All the while 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 while you’re thinking about this you’re going around and around 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 and 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, t
oo. 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 anyway, 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, 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, right out of the groove. You’re doing it, sure, but for different reasons. You’re no raving loony. You’re slow and steady, doing a job, knowing just 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 figure out. 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.
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