"_--so there we were at a million per, and the air was gettin' thick.
The Skipper says 'Cheer up, brave boys, we'll--'_"
He was singing. He had a terrible voice, but he could carry a tune, and
he was hammering it out at the top of his lungs.
"_Twas the last cruise of the_ Venus, _by God you should of seen us! The
pipes were full of whisky, and just to make things risky, the jets were
..._"
The crew were chuckling into their own chest phones. I could hear
Daniels trying to cut him off. But he kept going. I started laughing
myself. No one's supposed to jam an intercom, but it made the crew feel
good. When the crew feels good, the ship runs right, and it had been a
long time since they'd been happy.
He went on for another twenty minutes. Then his voice thinned out, and I
heard him cough a little. "Daniels," he said, "get a relief down here
for me. _Jump to it!_" He said the last part in a Master's voice.
Daniels didn't ask questions. He sent a man on his way down.
He'd been singing, the stoker had. He'd been singing while he worked
with one arm dead, one sleeve ripped open and badly patched because the
fabric was slippery with blood. There'd been a flashover in the drivers.
By the time his relief got down there, he had the insulation back on,
and the drive was purring along the way it should have been. It hadn't
even missed a beat.
He went down to sick bay, got the arm wrapped, and would have gone back
on shift if Daniels'd let him.
Those of us who were going off shift found him toying with the theremin
in the mess compartment. He didn't know how to play it, and it sounded
like a dog howling.
"Sing, will you!" somebody yelled. He grinned and went back to the "Good
Ship _Venus_." It wasn't good, but it was loud. From that, we went to
"Starways, Farways, and Barways," and "The Freefall Song." Somebody
started "I Left Her Behind For You," and that got us off into
sentimental things, the way these sessions would sometimes wind up when
spacemen were far from home. But not since the war, we all seemed to
realize together. We stopped, and looked at each other, and we all began
drifting out of the mess compartment.
And maybe it got to him, too. It may explain something. He and I were
the last to leave. We went to the bunkroom, and he stopped in the middle
of taking off his shirt. He stood there, looking out the porthole, and
forgot I was there. I heard him reciting something, softly, under his
breath, and I stepped a little closer. This is what it was:
"_The rockets rise against the skies,
Slowly; in sunlight gleaming
With silver hue upon the blue.
And the universe waits, dreaming._
"_For men must go where the flame-winds blow,
The gas clouds softly plaiting;
Where stars are spun and worlds begun,
And men will find them waiting._
"_The song that roars where the rocket soars
Is the song of the stellar flame;
The dreams of Man and galactic span
Are equal and much the same._"
What was he thinking of? Make your own choice. I think I came close to
knowing him, at that moment, but until human beings turn telepath, no
man can be sure of another.
He shook himself like a dog out of cold water, and got into his bunk. I
got into mine, and after a while I fell asleep.
* * * * *
I don't know what MacReidie may have told the skipper about the stoker,
or if he tried to tell him anything. The captain was the senior ticket
holder in the Merchant Service, and a good man, in his day. He kept
mostly to his cabin. And there was nothing MacReidie could do on his own
authority--nothing simple, that is. And the stoker had saved the ship,
and ...
I think what kept anything from happening between MacReidie and the
stoker, or anyone else and the stoker, was that it would have meant
trouble in the ship. Trouble, confined to our little percentage of the
ship's volume, could seem like something much more important than the
fate of the human race. It may not seem that way to you. But as long as
no one began anything, we could all get along. We could have a good
trip.
MacReidie worried, I'm sure. I worried, sometimes. But nothing happened.
When we reached Alpha Centaurus, and set down at the trading field on
the second planet, it was the same as the other trips we'd made, and the
same kind of landfall. The Lud factor came out of his post after we'd
waited for a while, and gave us our permit to disembark. There was a Jek
ship at the other end of the field, loaded with the cargo we would get
in exchange for our holdful of goods. We had the usual things; wine,
music tapes, furs, and the like. The Jeks had been giving us light
machinery lately--probably we'd get two or three more loads, and then
they'd begin giving us something else.
But I found that this trip wasn't quite the same. I found myself looking
at the factor's post, and I realized for the first time that the Lud
hadn't built it. It was a leftover from the old colonial human
government. And the city on the horizon--men had built it; the touch of
our architecture was on every building. I wondered why it had never
occurred to me that this was so. It made the landfall different from all
the others, somehow. It gave a new face to the entire planet.
* * * * *
Mac and I and some of the other crewmen went down on the field to handle
the unloading. Jeks on self-propelled cargo lifts jockeyed among us,
scooping up the loads as we unhooked the slings, bringing cases of
machinery from their own ship. They sat atop their vehicles, lean and
aloof, dashing in, whirling, shooting across the field to their ship
and back like wild horsemen on the plains of Earth, paying us no notice.