Then you remembered the sixty zillion measurements you’d taken off a synchro-cosmotron so big that it took you four minutes at a fast walk to get from one end to the other.
You remember the mock-ups, 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. Even exhausted, you did it right. Even doped up.
You remember the trips into town with Harris and Blaustein 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 star ship, and what such ships are for.
You sit up in your bunk, with that mixed-up, wide-awake 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 suddenly you see what it is. That kid in there, he could have an I. Q. of nine goddam thousand and never learn how to put down a rocket 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 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 his being a menace to you. And 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! God, did you hear him cry, that time?
You feel twenty pounds lighter (which is odd since you’re still in free fall), and as if you’d just washed your face. “Hey, Krampi!”
You go push the button and wait. The carrier comes. Then you hear a sharp, short inhalation. A sniff...no, you won’t call it that. “Skampi, sir,” he corrects you timidly.
“Okay, whatever you say. And knock off the ‘sir.’”
“Yessir. Yes.”
“What were you crying about?”
“When, s—”
“Okay,” you say gently. “You don’t have to talk about it.”
“Oh, nonono. 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 blast-off.”
“Scared?”
“No...yes, I was, but that wasn’t why. I just...”
“Take your time.”
“Th-thanks. 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 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 says, “You...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 know those star ships. You take a single human being and put him down next to a star ship. They’re not the same size and they’re not the same shape, and one of ‘em’s pretty insignificant. But you can say this built this.”
“Y-e-eah.” It is a whisper.
“Well, you’re that human being, that self-same one. Ever think of that?”
“No.”
“Well, neither did I till now,” you say 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 stuff 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 were suddenly warm, or quilted. You get a splinter of light off the bright metal where you’ve scored it. 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, suddenly and 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 and 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 star ship magazine with it, and never told her about it. I used to get every issue that way after that. She never missed it. Or maybe she did but 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 the Base. Ever since I was a baby the axi-tugs 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 star ships 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.”
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 kids out by the high school one time. I was just a kid, eleven I think. Well, some gorillas from the high school, they 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 get hurt every time I think about it, 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 fine. But maybe that’s just because of the corps, 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 cowardice felt like. I think 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, all right,” says the kid, in that funny whisper.
Suddenly the inner astonishment bursts into sight and you recognize 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 of being 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.
Suddenly it’s 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. 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 the Base and have plenty left over. You know too, that by the time you get there this kid will know a cadet can be a louse too. 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 cadet. Well, we’re going to fix that.
The time goes by and the time comes; the acceleration tug reaches out and grabs you high up, 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 buttocks as the blood gets used to circulating in a I-G environment.
“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 ever 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 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 star ships. How’d you like to go with me, one trip anyhow? Course, you’ll have to be conditioned six ways from the middle, double-time, and it’ll be real tough. But—what do you say?”
And you know, he doesn’t say anything?
He laughs, though.
Now here comes Provost, the big brass of Psychodynamics, and a young M.P. 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 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, crossed-legged. He says cheerfully, “Hi-kay dee. This here’s a stun gun and if you so much as look wall-eyed 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.”
“Shat 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 colonel, 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. I’m concerned with from now on. “Colonel, sir, 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 I 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 biceps 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 the shipmate, and the fight you had with yourself over that, and then this thing that happened with the kid—weeks of it, and here you feel you’ve only just begun. “You can pick ’em, sir,” you pant as you hobble 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 on every ship,” he says.
“Hey, 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 his side.”
“You first,” says the colonel. We go on into the PD lab.
“Up you go,” he says, waving. 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 cheerfulness 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 space man right to the marrowbones. He comes from right around here, that little place up the pike, Masolo. You know. He got shook out of his bassinet by the axi-tugs; he spent his childhood lying on his back on the roof looking for the star ships in orbit. He’s—”
“You talk all the time,” says the colonel mildly. “Sum up, will you? You made out with your shipmate. You think you could do it again in a star ship. That it?”
“Think we can try it? Hey, really? Look, can I be the one to tell him, Colonel?”
“Shut 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 a good deal, because the sunlight from outside is a different color and slants
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’s 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 with us again? Good.” He looks at an enlarged film strip and back at me. He shows me. 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. You really do. 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?”
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 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. He does it again. “Sit. Over there. On the hatch. You returning heroes and your manic moods...siddown!”
You sit on the edge of the open hatch. “Sometimes they fall down when I tell ’em,” 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 because it’s a hydrazine tank.”
A Way Home Page 22