“The reason, the real reason I’d like to introduce this other unhuman type to my lovely wife is that I’d get more of a kick than you’d understand, just making him do it. Humans I can handle; this boy would be a real challenge. You can talk anybody into anything, and yourself out of anything, if you can just think of the right thing to say—and I’m the boy who can do it. Was your mother frightened by a keyboard?”
“What?” he asked, startled.
“That grin. What I’d like to know, I’d like to know how that busy boy covers so much territory. First he has to find ’em, then he has to plan how to knock ’em off, then he has to wait his chance … so many, Henry! Five already this week and here it is only Thursday!”
“Maybe there’s more than one,” Henry suggested tentatively.
“Say, I never thought of that!” I exclaimed. “I guess it’s because there’s only one of me. Gosh, what a lovely idea—squads of unhumans thinking unhumanly, doing whatever they unhumanly want all over the lot. But why should the likes of him or them take chances just to make some humans happy?”
“They don’t care if anyone gets happy,” said Henry. “Why are you whispering?”
“Must be getting pretty tight, I guess; can’t seem to do much better. Whee-ooo! Such a gorgeous load! What? What’s that you said about the unhumans, that they don’t care about making people happy? Listen, son, don’t go telling me about unhumans. Who’s the expert around here? I tell you, every time they knock somebody off, someone around stops getting mistreated. Those files there—”
“Right files, wrong conclusion. You keep worrying about what you are; we don’t. We just are.”
“We? Are you classifying yourself with me?”
“I wasn’t,” said Henry, not smiling. “Just what you are, human or not, I don’t know and I don’t care. You’re a blowhard, though.”
I snarled and heaved myself upward. But a whispered snarl doesn’t amount to much and you can heave all you like and get nowhere when your arms are deadwood and your legs are about as responsive as those old inner tubes in your neighbor’s back yard.
“What’s the matter with me?” I rasped.
“You’re about nine-tenths dead, that’s all.”
“Nine—what do you mean, Henry? What are you talking about? I’m just drunk, not—”
“Dicoumarin,” he said. “You know what that is?”
“Sure I know what it is. Capillary poison. All the smallest blood vessels rupture and you bleed to death internally before you even know you’re sick. Henry, you’ve poisoned me!”
“Well, yes.”
I tried to struggle up, but I couldn’t. “You weren’t supposed to kill me, Henry! It was Loretta! That’s why I brought you home—I guessed that the killer would be the opposite of the likes of me and you’re about as opposite as anybody could be. And you know I can’t stand her and killing her would make me happier. It’s her you’re supposed to kill, Henry!”
“No,” he answered stubbornly. “It couldn’t be her. I told you we don’t care if somebody’s made happier. It had to be you.”
“Why? Why?”
“To stop the noise.”
I looked at him, frowned foggily, shook my head.
“Self-defense,” he explained patiently. “I’m a—I suppose you’d call it a telepath, though it isn’t telepathy like you’d read about. No words, no pictures. Just a noise, I guess is the best word. There’s a certain kind of mind—human or not, who cares?—it can’t get angry, and it enjoys degrading other people and humiliating them, and when it’s enjoying these things, it sets up … that noise. We can’t stand the noise. You—you’re special. Hear you for miles. When we get rid of you, of course it makes a human happy—whoever it was you were humiliating.” Then he said again, “We can’t stand the noise.”
I whispered, “Help me, Henry. Whatever it is, I’ll stop. I promise I’ll stop.”
“You can’t stop,” he said. “Not while you’re alive … Oh, damn you, damn you, you’re even enjoying dying!” He put forearms over his head—not over his ears—and rocked back and forth, and smiled and smiled.
“You smile all the time,” I hissed. “Even now. You enjoy killing.”
“It isn’t a smile and I kill only to stop the noise.” He was breathing hard. “How can I explain to anything like you? The noise—it’s—some people can’t stand the screek of a fingernail on a blackboard, some hate the scrape of a shovel on a cement sidewalk, most can’t take the rasp of a file on metal.”
“They don’t bother me a bit,” I said.
“Here, damn you, look here!” He snatched my sewing-machine needle and plunged it under his thumbnail. His lips spread wider. “It’s pain … pain! Only, with you, it’s agony! I can’t stand your noise! It puts my teeth on edge, it hurts my head, it deafens me!”
I remembered all the times he had smiled since I brought him home. And each time like the nail on the blackboard, like the shovel, like the rasp on the file, like the needle under the nail …
I made a sort of laugh. “You’ll come with me. They’ll find the poison in me.”
“Dicoumarin? You know better than that. And there won’t be any in the whiskey glass, if that’s what you’re thinking. I gave it to you three hours ago, in Molson’s, in the drink I didn’t want and you took.”
“I’ll hang on and tell Lorrie.”
“Tell me,” he jeered, leaning toward me, his smile that wasn’t a smile as huge as a boa’s about to bite.
My tongue was thick, numb and wobbly. “Don’t!” I gasped. “Don’t … jump me … now, Henry.”
Again he clutched his head. “Get mad! If you could get mad, it would go away, that noise! Argh, you snakes, you freaks … all of you who enjoy hating! The girl, remember her, in the bar? She was making that noise until I got her angry … she’s going to get better now that you’re dead.”
I was going to say I wasn’t dead, I wasn’t yet, but my mouth wouldn’t work.
“I’ll take these,” Henry said. I watched him stack the files right under my nose. “Everything’s nice and tidy,” he told me. “You were due to drink yourself to death, anyway, and here you are just like always. Only you won’t sleep this one off … I wish I could have got you sore.”
I watched him unlock the door, saw him go, heard him talking to Lorrie briefly. Then the outer door banged.
Loretta came into the room and stopped. She sighed. “Oh, dear, we’re in a special mess tonight, aren’t we?” she said brightly.
I tried, how I tried to yell, to scream at her, but I couldn’t, and it was growing dark.
Loretta bent and pulled my arm around her neck. “You’ll have to help just a little now. Upsy-daisy!” Strong shoulders and a practiced hip hauled me upright, lolling. “You know, I do like your friend Henry. The way he smiled when he left—why, it made me feel that everything’s going to be all right.”
Bulkhead
YOU JUST DON’T LOOK through viewports very often.
It’s terrifying at first, of course—all that spangled blackness, and the sense of disorientation. Your guts never get used to sustained free fall, and you feel, when you look out, that every direction is up, which is natural, or that every direction is down, which is sheer horror. But you don’t stop looking out there because it’s terrifying. You stop because nothing ever happens out there. You’ve no sensation of speed. You’re not going anywhere. After the weeks, and the months, there’s some change, sure; but day to day you can’t see the difference, so after a while you stop looking for any.
Which, of course, eliminates the viewports as an amusement device, which is too bad. There aren’t so many things for a man to do during a Long Haul that he can afford to eliminate anything. Getting bored with the infinities outside is only a reminder that the same could happen with your writing materials, and the music, with the stereo and all the rest of it. And it’s hard to gripe, to say, “Why don’t they install a such-and-such on these barrels?” because you’ve already got wh
at a thousand space men griped about long since—many of them men with more experience, more imagination, and fewer internal resources (that is to say, more need) than you’ll ever have. Certainly more than you have now; this is your first trip, and you’re just making the transition from “inside looking out” to “inside looking on.” It’s a small world. It better be a little complicated.
A lot that has happened in worlds like these would be simple, if you knew about it. Not knowing is all right: it keeps you wondering. Some of it you can figure out, knowing as you do that a lot of men have died in these things, a lot have disappeared, ship and all, and some—but you don’t know how many—have been taken out of the ships and straight to the laughing academy. You find out fairly soon, for example, that the manual controls are automatically relayed out, and stay out of temptation until you need them to land. (Whether they’ll switch in if you need them for evasive maneuvering some time, you don’t know yet.) Who died, how many died, because they started playing with the manuals? And was it because they decided to quit and go home? Or because they convinced themselves that the autoastrogator had bugs in it? Or because they just couldn’t stand all those stationary stars?
Then there’s this: You’re alone. You crouch in this little cell in the nose of your ship, with the curving hull to your left and the flat wall of the midship bulkhead to your right. You know that in previous models that bulkhead wasn’t there. You can imagine what happened to some—how many?—ships to make it necessary, at last, to seal you away from your shipmate. Psychodynamics has come a long way, but it hasn’t begun to alter the fact that human beings are the most feral, vicious, destructive, and self-destructive creatures God ever made. You called this a world; well, reduce a world to two separate nations and see what happens. Between two confined entities there’s no mean and no median, and no real way of determining a majority. How many battered pilots have come home crazed, cooped up with the shredded bodies of their shipmates? You can’t trust two human beings together, not for long enough. If you don’t believe it look at the bulkhead; look again. It’s there because it has to be there.
You’re a peaceable guy. Scares you a little, to know how dangerous you are. Makes you a little proud, too, doesn’t it?
Be proud of this, too: that they trust you to be alone so much. Sure, there is a shipmate; but by and large you’re alone, and that’s what’s expected of you. What most people, especially earthside people, never find out is that a man who can’t be by himself is a man who knows, away down deep, that he’s not good company. You could probably make it by yourself altogether … but you must admit you’re glad you don’t have to. You have access to the other side of the bulkhead, when you need it. If you need it. It didn’t take you too long to figure out you’d use it sparingly. You have books and you have games, you have pictures and text tapes and nine different euphorics (with a watchdog dispenser, so you can never become an addict), all of which help you, when you need help, to explore yourself. But having another human mind to explore is a wonderful idea. The wonder is tempered by the knowledge—oh, how smart you were to figure it out in time!—that the other mind is a last resort; if you ever use up the potentialities it holds for you, you’ve had it, brother.
So you squeeze it out slowly; you have endurance contests with yourself to see how long you can leave it alone. You do pretty well.
You go back over your life, the things you’ve done. People have written whole novels about twenty-four hours in a man’s life. That’s the way you think it all out, slowly, piece by piece; every feature of every face, and they way they were used; what people did, and why. Especially why. It doesn’t take any time to remember what a man did, but you can spend hours thinking about why he did it.
You live it again and it’s like being a little god, knowing what’s going to happen to everyone. When you reported to Base there was a busload of guys with you. Now you know who would go all the way through the course and wind up out here; reliving it, you still know that, so you can put yourself back in the bus again and say, that stranger across the aisle is Pegg, and he isn’t going to make it. He’ll go home on furlough three months from now and he’ll try to kill himself rather than come back. The freckled nape in the seat ahead of you belongs to the redhead Walkinok, who will throw his weight around during the first week and pay expensively for it afterward. But he’ll make it. And you make friends with the shy dark guy next to you; his name is Steih and he looks like a big-brain; he’s easy to talk to and smart, the kind of fellow who always goes straight to the top. And he won’t last even until the first furlough; two weeks is all he can take, and you never see him again. But you remember his name. You remember everything, and you go back over it and remember the memories in between the memories. Did somebody on that bus have shoes that squeaked? Back you go and hunt for it; if it happened, you’ll remember it.
They say anyone can recall this way; but for you, with what the psycho-dynamicians have done to you—or is it for you?—you can do more of this than anybody. There isn’t anything that ever happened in your whole life that you can’t remember. You can start at the beginning and go all the way through. You can start at the beginning and leap years in a second, and go through an episode again … get mad again … fall in love again. And when you get tired of the events themselves, you can run them off again, to find out why. Why did Steih go through those years of study and preparation, those months of competition, when all the time he didn’t want to be in the Space Service? Why did Pegg conceal from himself that he wasn’t fit for the Space Service?
So you cast back, comb, compare and ponder, keeping busy. If you’re careful, just remembering lasts a long time, then wondering why lasts even longer; and in between times there are the books and stereos, autochess and the music … until you’re ready to cast and comb in your memories again. But sooner or later—later, if you’re especially careful—you’ll get restless, and your life as it was played out, and the reasons why it was played just that way, all that gets old. You’ve been there. You can think of no new approach to any of it, and learn nothing more from it.
That’s where the center-line bulkhead comes in handy. Its very shape is a friendly thing to you; the hull on your left is curved, as part of the ship’s side, but the bulkhead is a flat wall. Its ubiquitous presence is a reminder that it has a function, like everything else in your world; that it is by nature a partition; that the existence of a partition presupposes another compartment; and that the other compartment is the size and shape of this one, and designed for a similar purpose—to be a dwelling for someone. With no sound nor sign of occupancy, the bulkhead still attests the life behind it, just by being there. It’s a friendly flatness, a companionable feature of your world, and its company pervades all your thinking. You know it’s your last resort, but you know too that it’s a rich one. When at last you’re driven to use it, you’ll enter another kind of world, more complex and more engrossing than your own just because of the work it takes to get from place to place and the mystery of the fog between the places. It’s a mind, another human mind, sharing this prison with you when at last you need sharing more than anything in all of space.
Who is it?
You think about that. You think a whole lot about that. Back at Base, in your last year, you and the other cadets thought about that more than anything. If they’d ever given you the shadow of a hint … but wondering about it was apparently part of your training. You knew only that on your Long Haul, you would not be alone. You had a pretty good idea that the choice of a shipmate for you would be a surprise. You looked around you at mess, in class, in the dormitory; you lay awake at night dealing out their faces in a sort of solitaire game; and sometimes you thought about one and said, that’d be find, we’d get along; and sometimes you said, that stinker? Lock me up with him and that bulkhead won’t be tough enough. I’ll kill him after the third day, so help me.
After they tapped you for your first Haul, this was the only thing you were scared about. Every
thing else, you thought you could handle. You knew your job inside out and backwards, and it wouldn’t whip you. You were sharp-tuned, fine-honed, ready for anything that was under your control. You were even confident about being alone; it wouldn’t get you. Away down deep no man believes he can be driven out of his mind, just as he cannot believe—really believe—he will ever be dead. That’s the kind of thing that happens to someone else.
But this business of a shipmate wasn’t under your control. You didn’t control who it would be and you wouldn’t control the guy after blastoff. It was the only unknown, and therefore the only thing that scared you. Leave it alone and you didn’t have to so much as know you had a shipmate until you were good and ready. The only control you’d have would be the intercom button on your side of that bulkhead.
Being able to shut off a voice isn’t control, though. You don’t know what your shipmate will do. Or—be.
In those last tight days before blastoff there was one thing you became overwhelmingly aware of. Esprit de corps they call it. You and the other graduates were hammered into a mold, and hammered some more until the resiliency was gone out of you. You were alike and you did like things because you had grown to want to. You knew for certain that one of this tight, trustworthy little group would be picked for you; their training and yours, their whole lives and yours, pointed toward this ship, this Haul. Your presence on this ship summed up your training; your training culminated in your presence on the ship. Only a graduate cadet was fit to man the ship; the ship existed solely for the graduate cadet. This was something so self-evident that you never thought about it.
Not until now.
Because now, a few minutes ago, you were ready to push that button. You weren’t sure if you’d broken all records for loneliness, for duration of solitary confinement, but you’d tried. You’d looked through the viewport until it ceased to mean anything; you’d read until you didn’t care any more; you’d lived the almost-life of the stereos until you couldn’t make believe you believed them; you’d listened to music until it didn’t matter; and you’d gone over and over your life from its very beginnings until you’d completely lost perspective on it or anything or anyone in it. You’d found that you could go back to the viewport and cycle through the whole thing again, but you’d done that too, until the whole matrix of personal involvement was milked and sere and intolerable. Then the flatness of the bulkhead made itself felt. It seemed to bulge toward you, crowd you against the ship’s side, and you knew it was getting to be time you pushed that button and started involving yourself in someone else.
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