My Space-partner was a good
reliable sidekick—but _his_
partner was something else!
Once when I was doing a hitch with the Shaulan Space Guard out Scorpio
way, my partner Jeff Bogart developed just about the most harmless
psychosis you could imagine: he got himself an imaginary companion.
And the imaginary companion turned out to be me.
Well, I’m a pretty nice guy and so having two of me in the ship didn’t
seem a particularly bad idea. At first. In fact there’d be advantages of
it, I thought. For instance, Jeff liked to talk a weary lot ... and the
imaginary Joe Hansen could spell me listening to him, while I projected
a book or just harkened to the wheels going around in my own head
against the faint patter of starlight on the hull.
I met Jeff first at a space-rodeo, oddly enough, but now the two of us
were out on a servicing check of the orbital beacons and relays and
rescue depots of the five planets of the Shaulan system. A completely
routine job, its only drawback that it was lengthy. Our ship was an
ionic jeep that looked like a fancy fountain pen, but was very roomy for
three men—one of them imaginary.
I caught on to Jeff’s little mania by overhearing him talking to me. I’d
be coming back from the head or stores or linear accelerator or my bunk,
and I’d hear him yakking at me. It embarrassed me the first time, how to
go back into the cabin when the other me was there. But I just swam in,
and without any transition-strain at all that I could observe Jeff
looked around at me, smiling sort of glaze-eyed, and said warmly, “Joe.
My buddy Joe. Am I glad they paired us.”
If Jeff had a major fault, as opposed to a species of nuttiness, it was
that he was strictly a speak-only-good, positive-thinking guy who always
deferred to me. Even idolized me, if you can imagine that. He’d give me
such fulsome praise I’d be irked ten times an orbit.
Another thing that helped me catch on was that he always called the
other me Joseph.
* * * * *
At first I thought the whole thing might be a gag, or maybe a deliberate
way of letting off steam against me without violating his
always-a-sweet-guy code—like happy husbands cursing in the bathroom—but
then came the scrambled eggs.
I’d slept late and when I squinted into the cabin there was Jeff
hovering over a plate of yellow fluff and shaking his finger at my empty
seat and saying, “Dammit, Joseph, eat your scrambled eggs, I cooked ’em
’specially for you,” and when he crawfished out toward the galley a
couple seconds later he was saying, “Now you start on those eggs,
Joseph, before I get back.”