"Oh, please!"
"About what it's like to fly to Mars on a rocket?"
"Yes!"
"All right," I said.
It's wonderful what three little white pills will do. I wasn't even
shaking.
"There's six men, see? In a space the size of a Buick, and that's all
the room there is. Two of us in the bunks all the time, four of us on
watch. Maybe you want to stay in the sack an extra ten minutes--because
it's the only place on the ship where you can stretch out, you know, the
only place where you can rest without somebody's elbow in your side. But
you can't. Because by then it's the next man's turn.
"And maybe you don't have elbows in your side while it's your turn off
watch, but in the starboard bunk there's the air-regenerator master
valve--I bet I could still show you the bruises right around my
kidneys--and in the port bunk there's the emergency-escape-hatch handle.
That gets you right in the temple, if you turn your head too fast.
"And you can't really sleep, I mean not soundly, because of the noise.
That is, when the rockets are going. When they aren't going, then you're
in free-fall, and that's bad, too, because you dream about falling. But
when they're going, I don't know, I think it's worse. It's pretty loud.
"And even if it weren't for the noise, if you sleep too soundly you
might roll over on your oxygen line. Then you dream about drowning. Ever
do that? You're strangling and choking and you can't get any air? It
isn't dangerous, I guess. Anyway, it always woke me up in time. Though I
heard about a fellow in a flight six years ago--
"Well. So you've always got this oxygen mask on, all the time, except if
you take it off for a second to talk to somebody. You don't do that very
often, because what is there to say? Oh, maybe the first couple of
weeks, sure--everybody's friends then. You don't even need the mask, for
that matter. Or not very much. Everybody's still pretty clean. The place
smells--oh, let's see--about like the locker room in a gym. You know?
You can stand it. That's if nobody's got space sickness, of course. We
were lucky that way.
"But that's about how it's going to get anyway, you know. Outside the
masks, it's soup. It isn't that you smell it so much. You kind of
_taste_ it, in the back of your mouth, and your eyes sting. That's after
the first two or three months. Later on, it gets worse.
"And with the mask on, of course, the oxygen mixture is coming in under
pressure. That's funny if you're not used to it. Your lungs have to work
a little bit harder to get rid of it, especially when you're asleep, so
after a while the muscles get sore. And then they get sorer. And then--
"Well.
"Before we take off, the psych people give us a long doo-da that keeps
us from killing each other. But they can't stop us from thinking about
it. And afterward, after we're back on Earth--this is what you won't
read about in the articles--they keep us apart. You know how they work
it? We get a pension, naturally. I mean there's got to be a pension,
otherwise there isn't enough money in the world to make anybody go. But
in the contract, it says to get the pension we have to stay in our own
area.
[Illustration]
"The whole country's marked off. Six sections. Each has at least one big
city in it. I was lucky, I got a lot of them. They try to keep it so
every man's home town is in his own section, but--well, like with us,
Chowderhead and the captain both happened to come from Santa Monica. I
think it was Chowderhead that got California, Nevada, all that Southwest
area. It was the luck of the draw. God knows what the captain got.
"Maybe New Jersey," I said, and took another white pill.
* * * * *
We went on to another place and she said suddenly, "I figured something
out. The way you keep looking around."
"What did you figure out?"
"Well, part of it was what you said about the other fellow getting New
Jersey. This is New Jersey. You don't belong in this section, right?"
"Right," I said after a minute.
"So why are you here? I know why. You're here because you're looking for
somebody."
"That's right."
She said triumphantly, "You want to find that other fellow from your
crew! You want to fight him!"
I couldn't help shaking, white pills or no white pills. But I had to
correct her.
"No. I want to kill him."
"How do you know he's here? He's got a lot of states to roam around in,
too, doesn't he?"
"Six. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland--all the way down to
Washington."
"Then how do you know--"
"He'll be here." I didn't have to tell her how I knew. But I knew.
I wasn't the only one who spent his time at the border of his assigned
area, looking across the river or staring across a state line, knowing
that somebody was on the other side. I knew. You fight a war and you
don't have to guess that the enemy might have his troops a thousand
miles away from the battle line. You know where his troops will be. You
know he wants to fight, too.
_Hutta. Hutta._