Know him? Yes, I know him--_knew_ him. That was twenty years ago.
Everybody knows him now. Everybody who passed him on the street knows
him. Everybody who went to the same schools, or even to different
schools in different towns, knows him now. Ask them. But I knew him. I
lived three feet away from him for a month and a half. I shipped with
him and called him by his first name.
What was he like? What was he thinking, sitting on the edge of his bunk
with his jaw in his palm and his eyes on the stars? What did he think he
was after?
Well ... Well, I think he-- You know, I think I never did know him,
after all. Not well. Not as well as some of those people who're writing
the books about him seem to.
I couldn't really describe him to you. He had a duffelbag in his hand
and a packed airsuit on his back. The skin of his face had been dried
out by ship's air, burned by ultraviolet and broiled by infra red. The
pupils of his eyes had little cloudy specks in them where the cosmic
rays had shot through them. But his eyes were steady and his body was
hard. What did he look like? He looked like a man.
* * * * *
It was after the war, and we were beaten. There used to be a school of
thought among us that deplored our combativeness; before we had ever met
any people from off Earth, even, you could hear people saying we were
toughest, cruelest life-form in the Universe, unfit to mingle with the
gentler wiser races in the stars, and a sure bet to steal their galaxy
and corrupt it forever. Where these people got their information, I
don't know.
We were beaten. We moved out beyond Centaurus, and Sirius, and then we
met the Jeks, the Nosurwey, the Lud. We tried Terrestrial know-how, we
tried Production Miracles, we tried patriotism, we tried damning the
torpedoes and full speed ahead ... and we were smashed back like
mayflies in the wind. We died in droves, and we retreated from the
guttering fires of a dozen planets, we dug in, we fought through the
last ditch, and we were dying on Earth itself before Baker mutinied,
shot Cope, and surrendered the remainder of the human race to the wiser,
gentler races in the stars. That way, we lived. That way, we were
permitted to carry on our little concerns, and mind our manners. The
Jeks and the Lud and the Nosurwey returned to their own affairs, and we
knew they would leave us alone so long as we didn't bother them.
We liked it that way. Understand me--we didn't accept it, we didn't
knuckle under with waiting murder in our hearts--we _liked_ it. We were
grateful just to be left alone again. We were happy we hadn't been wiped
out like the upstarts the rest of the Universe thought us to be. When
they let us keep our own solar system and carry on a trickle of trade
with the outside, we accepted it for the fantastically generous gift it
was. Too many of our best men were dead for us to have any remaining
claim on these things in our own right. I know how it was. I was there,
twenty years ago. I was a little, pudgy man with short breath and a
high-pitched voice. I was a typical Earthman.
* * * * *
We were out on a God-forsaken landing field on Mars, MacReidie and I,
loading cargo aboard the _Serenus_. MacReidie was First Officer. I was
Second. The stranger came walking up to us.
"Got a job?" he asked, looking at MacReidie.
Mac looked him over. He saw the same things I'd seen. He shook his head.
"Not for you. The only thing we're short on is stokers."
You wouldn't know. There's no such thing as a stoker any more, with
automatic ships. But the stranger knew what Mac meant.
_Serenus_ had what they called an electronic drive. She had to run with
an evacuated engine room. The leaking electricity would have broken any
stray air down to ozone, which eats metal and rots lungs. So the engine
room had the air pumped out of her, and the stokers who tended the dials
and set the cathode attitudes had to wear suits, smelling themselves for
twelve hours at a time and standing a good chance of cooking where they
sat when the drive arced. _Serenus_ was an ugly old tub. At that, we
were the better of the two interstellar freighters the human race had
left.
"You're bound over the border, aren't you?"