Bright Segment (41 page)

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 you parabola and you’re starting 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 you 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 lines 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, 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 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 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 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 down 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 blastoff.”

“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 selfsame 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 the 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.”