His head jerked upright, and he stared at me a few seconds. Then he
stood up and went out to the small galley.
A stinking fullback trying to play the political game with Slide Rule
Sam. How these athletes loved to over-rate themselves.
He brought my food, and then went into the galley to eat his.
When he came out, he said, "I'd like to nap, if you're going to be
awake, Chief."
"I'll be awake for two hours. You'd better sleep fast."
"You're the boss," he said, which was his admission.
I gave him a bad time the rest of the trip and got not a single
complaint out of him. And at Mars, we put on our suits and went ashore,
and I entered my complaints with the subsidiary board at the company
headquarters there.
They got us transportation to Earth next morning, and both Van and
Horse were held for trial the following week.
That gave me time, and I pulled every string I knew in the four days
before the trial. Horse was almost irreplaceable; Van could be replaced
in five minutes.
But there was no need to worry about Collins. He didn't fight. He
pulled no strings I knew of, and when he went up in front of the board,
he pleaded space insanity.
He'd seen a mirage, he'd insisted on my checking it, he'd called me
names and he took the full responsibility for the robot breakdown.
Trying to save Van, I suppose, with that last.
Horse had a company lawyer, and he tried to establish the line that
perhaps there had been life on the asteroid and that a discovery of
that importance over-shadowed the charges of insubordination and
temporary space insanity.
I got on the stand and swore there had been no sign of life and not
even an asteroid where Horse had fixed the scanner. I was safe enough,
I knew. There were only a few ships on the run, and no other with a
scanner of our power.
I hadn't wasted the four days. For three years, I'd been studying
navigation in my spare time. I wasn't really qualified for the
Mars-Jupiter run, but I had men high in the company who thought I was.
I'd get by until I learned.