She suddenly squeezed something under Kieran's nose, a small thing that
she had produced from her pocket without his noticing it, in his angry
preoccupation with the two men. He smelled a sweet, refreshing odor and
he struck her arm away.
"Oh, no, you're not giving me any more dopes--" Then he stopped, for
suddenly it all seemed wryly humorous to him. "A bunch of bloody
incompetents," he said, and laughed. "This is the one thing I would
never have dreamed--that a man could sleep, and wake up in a starship,
and find the starship manned by blunderers."
"Euphoric," said Paula, to the two men.
"At that," said Webber sourly, "there may be something in what he says
about us."
Vaillant turned on him and said fiercely, "If that's what you think--"
Then he controlled himself and said tightly, "Quarrelling's no good.
We're in a box but we can maybe still put it over if we get this man to
Sako. Webber, you and Paula take him in the flitter."
Kieran rose to his feet. "Fine," he said gaily. "Let us go in the
flitter, whatever that is. I am already bored with starships."
He felt good, very good. He felt a little drunk, not enough to impede
his mental processes but enough to give him a fine devil-may-care
indifference to what happened next. So it was only the spray Paula had
given him--it still made his body feel better and removed his shock and
worry and made everything seem suddenly rather amusing.
"Let us to Sako in the flitter," he said. "After all, I'm living on
velvet, I might as well see the whole show. I'm sure that Sako, wherever
it is, will be just as full of human folly as Earth was."
"He's euphoric," Paula said again, but her face was stricken.
"Of all the people in that space-cemetery, we had to pick one who
thinks like that," said Vaillant, with a sort of restrained fury.
"You said yourself that the oldest one would be the best," said Webber.
"Sako will change him."
Kieran walked down the corridor with Webber and Paula and he laughed as
he walked. They had brought him back from nothingness without his
consent, violating the privacy of death or near-death, and now something
that he had just said had bitterly disappointed them.
"Come along," he said buoyantly to the two. "Let us not lag. Once aboard
the flitter and the girl is mine."
"Oh for God's sake shut up," said Webber.
4.
It was ridiculous to be flying the stars with a bad hangover, but Kieran
had one. His head ached dully, he had an unpleasant metallic taste in
his mouth, and his former ebullience had given way to a dull depression.
He looked sourly around.
He sat in a confined little metal coop of a cabin, hardly enough in
which to stand erect. Paula Ray, in a chair a few feet away was
sleeping, her head on her breast. Webber sat forward, in what appeared
to be a pilot-chair with a number of crowded control banks in front of
it. He was not doing anything to the controls. He looked as though he
might be sleeping, too.
That was all--a tiny metal room, blank metal walls, silence. They were,
presumably, flying between the stars at incredible speeds but there was
nothing to show it. There were no screens such as the one he had seen in
the ship, to show by artful scanning devices what vista of suns and
darknesses lay outside.
"A flitter," Webber had informed him, "just doesn't have room for the
complicated apparatus that such scanners require. Seeing is a luxury you
dispense with in a flitter. We'll see when we get to Sako."