The Wreck of The Ship John B.

I Spotted The Corpse the 1356th time period out. It was floating alone in the indifferent blackness of space ten billion miles from nowhere, the small jets attached to its space suit empty of fuel and the oxygen tank a depleted, echoing canister of aluminum. There was nothing else within immediate range, which meant that the body had drifted in the silent dark for thousands of time periods, the air in its suit gradually seeping out through a hundred microscopic pinholes and the cold seeping in, turning the man inside into a frozen, desiccated mummy.

It was sheer accident that I had picked it up at all. I had given up running the radar on automatic sweep hundreds of time periods before; but this particular period, for reasons I couldn't put a finger on, I had gotten tired of staring through my compartment ports, dreaming of home or trying to figure out what seemed so strange about the ship lately, and decided to run the gear through a routine check. It picked up the suit on the fourth sweep, right after I had fired it up. The sweep line in the viewing globe staggered to a halt, hunted for a moment, then narrowed to a bright thread of scarlet. The panic button flashed red and a split second later the "All Stations" alarm echoed throughout the Cassiopeia like the brassy trumpet call of doom which, I suppose, it really was.

I must have stared at the globe for a full minute, idly scratching my tattooed captain's bars and wondering what the hell it could be, before I began working the magnifier to bring the hologram closer. When I could make out what it was, the sweat popped out between my shoulder blades and a chill grew in my stomach. I waited until the control console indicated all stations were mannedsome 2.3 minutes behind optimum schedule, though I had really ceased to worry about optimum schedules long ago then hollered into the squawk box for Coleman, our metalsmith, to suit up and drift out and get it.

Once the body was inside the air lock, other crew members acted as honorary pallbearers and bore it quietly into the communications compartment and laid it gently on the deck, using light magnetic clamps to secure it to the metal flooring. It was quite an occasion and I guess we were all aware of it, or so I thought at the timethe first martyr to be recovered from space. A few minutes later, the rest of the crew had kicked silently into the compartment to cling to the brake rings and cold light tubes until the tiny cabin looked like a human aviary with ten nude and fatherless birds clustered in it.

It must have been at least 500 time periods since we had all been in one compartment together and probably only slightly less than that since I had spoken to another member of the crew. During the long voyage, the humanity in you slowly evaporates, like a puddle of water in a hot sun, and you grow apart. It was probably different on military ships, but the Cassiopeia was a freighter and I was an elected captain and we weren't really a crew, we were future colonistswhich meant young, brainy and noncooperative. The ship was completely automatic, of course, which made us strictly a group of passengers, like those in a crowded transit shuttle back on Earth. We had make-work, but eventually we grew bored and sick and tired of one another and then silent and hostile. The Colonization Board had expected that and made sure we had shadow screens and no weapons of any kind. For our part, we wore Privacy like an invisible suit of armor, and the day inevitably came when we didn't speak to one another at all.

Nobody said a word now, all stared expressionless at the thing on the deck. They were waiting for the captain to speak—and I didn't know what to say. I didn't look like a captain—I was short and skinny and cursed with a baby face and pale hair the color of ashes—and right then I didn't feel like a captain, either. I coughed, the noise sounding gross and vulgar in the humid cabin, and wondered how to begin, then realized I couldn't see the death mask behind the cracked faceplate of the space suit. The warm moisture in the cabin had condensed into an army of fine white crystals intent on burying the thing where it lay.

I kicked over to the suit, grabbed a floor ring to brake myself and hunkered down by the frosted metal. I brushed away the crystals from the plate, wiped my hands on my naked thighs and rocked back and forth on my heels, momentarily absorbed by the fragile face behind the plate. Then it was time to say something and I was suddenly acutely conscious of the soft whine of the central computer, the murmur of the ventilation machinery that never quite removed all the moisture and human stink from the air, and the shallow breathing of the naked crew in the cramped cabin. I could feel the temperature start to creep up even as I knelt there, and then the smell got to me and I almost gagged. We had no ship's laundry, no separate living quarters and no showers—cargo was too valuable, so space and weight were at a premium—which meant that living on board the Cassiopeia was like living in a crowded locker room just after the winning game, when you can taste the sweat in the steamy air.

I frowned, glanced up at Potter, the pimply-faced kid who was our life-systems man, and clicked my thumbnail against the faceplate with a great show of deliberation. "Not ... pretty," I croaked. My voice sounded oddly loud and choked with rust.

Potter licked his lips, picked nervously at his scraggly beard, looked like he was going to say something, then merely nodded. Hulsman, our man in microcircuitry, the boyish blond type that fat old ladies love to mother, opened his mouth, noticed that nobody else was about to speak, closed it again and instead made fluttering motions with his hands. Reynolds, a pudgy medical tech, expert at splinters, boils, blisters, hives and shipboard circumcisions, fingered his nose and looked wise. Ball, the astronomer, tall, thin and professionally British, the man I had always thought should have been captain, was suddenly preoccupied with his loincloth. Skinny little Jimenez, our physicist, whom we had earlier dubbed Keeper of the Pile, hid behind his thick glasses and bushy red beard and tried to appear inscrutable, while Adams, Kentworthy and Herschel merely stared at the thing on the deck with varying degrees of distaste and—to my surprise—disinterest.

I made the mental note crew all present and accounted for and swore that this time period I would actually enter it in the log, then turned my attention back to the suit. The shrunken face and the dried eyeballs and the marble mouth. I shivered. If the suit's radio had been working, you could probably have heard him scream for hours. Then something caught my eye and I leaned closer, my own breath fogging the faceplate. The radio switch was off. But that isn't done, I thought. Nobody leaves a ship with his radio off.

I nodded to Coleman, now out of his suit, and asked: "Know age?"

He hooked a foot under a brake ring and squatted down, his badge of office, the screwdriver, tucked into his greasy loincloth, ringing slightly against the deck. He was a tiny, bandy-legged man with curly black body hair and heavy eyebrows and a broad nose that made his lace look faintly anthropoidal. He wiped at the suit and grunted, "Old model, maybe two-three hundred years. Dark Ages stuff."

Which didn't tell me much, so I said, "Let's open him up."

We fumbled with the frozen fastenings, then dumped the body out of the suit like dice out of a cup; frost immediately silvered it with a thin rime. Potter and I inspected the body carefully while Coleman went over the suit. The corpse felt light and dry—papier-mâché. "Nothing," I finally muttered, baffled more by thoughts of what I ought to be looking for than by what I had found. "No wounds, he didn't bleed." I studied the faint expression, a human watermark barely discernible on the dried and frozen flesh. "Doesn't look unhappy, looks more ... annoyed? Alive when he put the suit on, alive when he left the ship alone."

Alone?

I dove back to the viewing globe just as the alarm bell thundered throughout the ship once again.

• • •

I wrapped my legs around the control console, signaled the crew to remain in the cabin and let my fingers dance over the banked control boards. The ranges dwindled and the stars in the viewing globe exploded outward, touched the globe's surface and vanished in brief sparkles of light. A moment later, the globe held another hologram of a suit cartwheeling through space.

Same model, I thought. Another man from the same ship, another drifter dancing his solitary waltz. I ran my hands swiftly over the console again and the ranges grew, the stars shrinking in toward the center. The sweep line sprouted a dozen thin, red branches and a thick trunk—a dozen drifting men and the ship they came from.

"Want me to get them all?" Coleman asked, looking apprehensive. "There's time ... fuel mass." He pointed to the corpse on the deck. "One isn't enough?"

I shook my head. "I want their ship," I said quietly.

I heard movement among the crew members behind me and Jimenez drifted around the console and grabbed a brake ring. He had that thin Latin skin and I could see the little veins pulsing at his temples. "Why?" It came out as a furious, muffled croak. "No business of ours—can't do anything anyway. Ship's dead, crew's dead, can't bring them back to life. Not our business!" He was a scrawny little man and, with his dirty glasses and the cords standing out in his neck, he looked 30 years older than he really was; I had to remind myself that he and I both had an Earth year to go before we reached our majority.

I glanced at the others. They were looking at the viewing globe as if it held something that smelled bad. I was pushing it, I thought. But then, the derelict had been—what? Gutted by a meteorite, boarded by—something?

I shook my head and made slight corrections for the viewing globe. "Whatever happened to them could happen to us," I said logically. "Maybe we can find out what it was."

Jimenez hunched over the globe, the exploding stars disappearing into the reddish thatch that covered his thin chest. I was physically closer to him right then than I had been to anybody in hundreds of time periods, and the proximity made me nervous. His voice was carefully slow, the voice you use with an adolescent when you're underlining a warning. "It's not our business, Martin! And if there's danger, we have no weapons to protect ourselves or our ship. And since that crew is dead and floating Outside, there's obviously danger —and nothing we can use against it!"

"What's it?" I asked casually.

He got red in the face, glared at me for a moment longer, then shrugged his pipe-rack shoulders and said, "Have it your way." He let go of the brake ring and drifted a few feet over to the side of the cabin with the others. I concentrated on watching the suits float past in the silence of space, the close-ups spinning through the globe. One, two, three ... A dozen men, lifeless and frozen, drifting in the spotted silence, forming a funnel-shaped path back to the ship for which they had once crewed. Then the suits were gone and there was only a glittering beach of stars with a small red smear in the center that grew steadily larger. When it came within the smallest hologram range, I spun the controls and it leaped to full view. I motioned to Coleman, who slanted over to the console and inspected the image in the globe as if it were a tissue slice under a microscope.

"Freighter class, Model A-18, two hundred years old—closer to two-thirty. Tell by the flare to the tubes."

"You're too sure," I said.

"Made models when I was a kid," he grunted. "Won a lot of prizes."

I stared at the ship in the globe. It was old, all right—the ancient dumbbell shape, with small circular ports and awkward radar antennae projecting out beyond the hull. And then I saw it—an exit hatch gaping open as if some celestial dentist had asked it to say "Ah." I got the same feeling I used to get on Earth looking at the people on the moving sidewalks from 200 stories up: a lurching sensation in my stomach and a loose feeling around my anus.

We drifted into a tight orbit around the derelict and waited. I started to sweat—a thin film of slime that oozed out all over my body—and I knew that I stank; algae-based meals have something in them that's worse than garlic. We kept inspecting the freighter in the viewing globe, hoping to get some clue, but there was nothing to be seen from a distance—only the ship itself silhouetted against the stars, one hatch open to space. There was no sign of any physical activity and no sudden burst of chatter from our radio receiver, which was running up and down the frequency spectrum like a squirrel on a tree, hoping to lock onto a signal. There was no sign of life on the infrared detectors and only residual pile activity showed on the Geigers.

"You going to board her?" Coleman asked hesitantly. I could sense the attention of the crew suddenly switch from the viewing globe to me.

"How many long-voyage ships fail to reach their destination?" I mused. "Thirty percent? Forty?"

Reluctantly. "About that."

"Anybody know why?" I asked quietly. "No. Anybody ever found a freighter that didn't make it? No again—in the deeps of space, there isn't even any sense looking. But somebody just found one. We did. And somebody can now hold an autopsy. Us."

Coleman's face was all lines and angles, his brows two greasy black thumb-prints over his small brown eyes. "Look —we're freighter class, long-voyage freighter class. The only weapons on board are knives less than three inches in length."

"You think aliens are a possibility?" None had ever been found.

"Not likely."

"Then what's bothering you?"

"I—don't know." His usual growl faded to a mumble and he wouldn't meet my eyes; I was forcing him into a corner and I knew he hated me for it. "I don't think we ought to bother. It doesn't really concern us."

I stared at him for a moment and his face grew red. Then I glanced back at the viewing globe, at the lonely ship framed against the glitter of the galaxy, and made up my mind. I turned to the crew and said curtly, "Any volunteers for a boarding party?"

Nobody looked at me and nobody raised a hand. I let the silence grow and finally Jimenez said in his hoarse croak, "This isn't a military cruiser and you're not a real captain, Martin. You're elected—and we can elect another if we want."

I shrugged to myself. I had half expected it and it really didn't matter. If they wanted a new captain, that was jake with me. And then I thought about it a moment longer, about maybe Jimenez running the ship, and decided— much to my surprise—that it wasn't jake at all. Not really.

"Fine," I lied. "I didn't ask for the job. Anybody who wants the responsibility and the work that goes with it"—there wasn't much, but you'd have to be captain to know that—"can have it. Anybody want to nominate himself? Huls-man?" He looked alarmed and shook his head. "Ball?" He declined, too, which surprised me—I figured if anybody would have grabbed it. Ball would have. "Jimenez?" He hesitated. "Come on, Jimenez," I said, "the involvement will be good for you."

It worked, of course. He shook his head and rasped, "No thanks."

"Anybody else?" There were no takers. "Thank you all for the honor, gentlemen. Jimenez, Coleman, suit up." I turned to the others. "Ball is acting captain. If we fail to return within three time periods, resume voyage. Do not try rescue."

I unwrapped my legs from the console, motioned Ball over to it, then floated to the space-suit locker. We suited up in silence and all the while I felt vaguely unhappy. Nobody had wanted to get involved with my excursion over to the derelict, but nobody had really put up a fight against it, either; and for some reason, that bothered me.

• • •

It was while drifting across to the derelict that I had my first really bad time of it. In space, you tend to react one of two ways. For some, the environment has no meaning—Outside is a room of black velvet with small lights for stars embedded in the black, and you, your shipmates and your ship comprise the immediate horizons. The psychological Gestalt is not one of vastness but one of an odd miniaturization. For others, particularly if they lose their referent points, reality floods their sensory apparatus and they panic. It was something that hadn't been foreseen by the early astronauts, who could position themselves in space by the huge bulk of the Earth nearby and their own space capsules. In deep space, a man can't conceive of the vast-nesses, the immense stretches in any direction, the feeling of no horizon, no end to the uncharted silent reaches.

It hit me when I was halfway across. I had twisted slightly to get at my laser flashlight and for a split second I lost sight of the Cassiopeia, the derelict, and Coleman and Jimenez. I could suddenly feel the immensities, the intense quiet, the frozen loneliness, the indifference. It was like being cast adrift on a huge ocean at night, an ocean in which there was no spark of life in the black waters below and no familiar beating of wings in the dark skies above and the nearest land was so far away you could not even imagine the distance.

My muscles spasmed and my suddenly clenched hand automatically turned on the laser flash. My eyes followed the beam outward until it was lost in space—a beam of light that penciled out and vanished in the immensities, but which in my mind's eye kept running on and on and on. And then the sense of my own insignificance crushed me and there was only blackness and I closed my eyes and knew I was falling but there was no floor that I would ever hit.

It sounded at first like a baby crying and then I realized it was myself. I jerked my eyes open wide, started to cartwheel, then caught a glimpse of Coleman and Jimenez on my left, silently watching. Their size immediately told me their distance from myself and suddenly the whole scene collapsed and inverted itself, like a curious optical illusion. The vastness was actually a room with dimension, the Cassiopeia and the derelict marking the positions of the (continued on page 92)The Ship John B.(continued from page 84) walls of black velvet studded with the tiny lights that looked like stars.

I caught my breath, swallowed, pushed the panic from my mind and set my suit rockets so I slowly circled the derelict. At the far end I spotted the name, almost pitted into illegibility: The John B.—I couldn't tell what the last name was. Then the hatch was yawning open below me and Jimenez and Coleman had already disappeared inside. I clung to the lip for a moment before ducking through and stared back at the black depths behind me, at the sandy sifting of stars and the Cassiopeia riding in silhouette half a mile away. The words came automatically: ghostly galleons. Nor did the feeling vanish once inside. The shadow screens, shutting out sight and sound, were on, apparently still operated by the residual activity of the pile, cutting the ship into cubicles and compartments and a main corridor. The cold light tubes were also on, bathing the empty corridor in brilliance after—how many time periods? I knew without looking further that the ship was deserted and I could imagine echoing footsteps and pale ghosts.

Oh pilot, 'tis a fearful night! There's danger on the deep.

Jimenez and Coleman drifted up to me, looking like oddly articulated fish in their suits. "We won't split up until we can turn off the shadow screens," I said, trying very much to sound like a ship's captain. "Crew's quarters first, then communications, then the pile room." Even to myself, I sounded officious.

Jimenez' voice was an irritating squeak in my headphones. "What are we looking for?"

"Don't you think you'll know when you see it?" I asked. And then it occurred to me that he wasn't being sarcastic after all.

We hit the crew's quarters first—the one long compartment with individual ports, elasto-hammocks, and individual viewing screens hooked up to the central computer, the standard source of information and entertainment, the electronic tit on which we all suckle as soon as we're on board. There were switches for the read-out screens, plus additional switches so you could partition off your section with a shadow screen for Privacy. And that struck me as odd—all the screens were on, which was highly unlikely, though I had noted their increasing use aboard the Cassiopeia.

I ignored my own dictum about staying in sight and pushed through into one of the screened-off compartments. It was empty, of course, but there were telltale signs of human occupancy, like a fading whiff of perfume in the air. The archaeologist entering the burial tomb, I thought. And from an ax handle and a shard of pottery, I'll resurrect the man who lived here. But there was damn little in this tomb. A chessboard had been set up—it was forbidden to bring anything personal aboard, but Coleman had smuggled one aboard the Cassiopeia and I had no doubt but what it was a standard bit of contraband—and dates of games played and who had won and who had lost marked with a soft pen on the bulkhead. I knelt down and looked at the dates. At first a game had been played every time period, then it was every other, then every tenth time period, and finally—the 1267th time period out—two members of the crew had played their last game. The pieces were still on the board and by the looks of it, the game had only just begun. Then there had been an interruption and the players had left and the game had never been resumed.

I shoved through to the next screened compartment and just then Coleman located the central switch and all the shadow screens dissolved and we were in one large compartment. At the far end was the pile room and at the near one, the control console and communications. Crew's quarters were in between, spiraling like a gigantic helix around what had been the main corridor. I started to drift over to join Coleman, then suddenly hung back. A thin magnetic food tray was on the deck by one of the elasto-hammocks. I bent and ran a metal finger across the residue on the tray. The meal had been half eaten, the remains now effectively freeze-dried. Somebody had obviously set the tray down, magnetic fork carefully placed back in the indentation provided, and walked away. The tray hadn't been dumped in panic, the food particles in the standard gummy sauce that adhered to the metal tray hadn't been scattered—what looked like artificial rice, steak and peas were still within their shallow compartments.

There was a sound in my headphones and I looked up to see Jimenez waving at me from the power pile. I floated over. The dials and rheostats indicated that the pile was at neutral—a high enough level of activity to supply power for the cold light tubes and the shadow screens and perhaps a few other facilities, but hardly enough to provide any thrust.

Jimenez had the engineer's log open and I glanced down to where his finger was pointing. Shut pile down, time period 1436. Signed, Dickinson, Physicist. So it had happened 169 time periods after the last chess game had been started, I thought. If I guessed correctly, that was the time period the ship had been deserted. From then on, the John B. had drifted.

"Coleman ..."

He floated over, the beard behind his faceplate making him look like a monkey in a glass cage.

"Granted the pattern in which we found them, do you have any idea within how much time of each other the crew members would had to have left the ship?"

His voice sounded metallic and puzzled. "Not the faintest, not over a drift pattern of two hundred years. The computer could figure it." He paused. "Probably within a few time periods of each other, maybe a few hours."

"Could they have all left together?"

"No, we would have found them all clumped together then. No, I think they left within hours of each other."

I shivered. So one by one they had suited up and walked out, I thought. Walked out to a certain death, indifferent to the ship, indifferent to their mission, indifferent to life itself. And no indication as to why. No struggle, no hurriedly scrawled notes, no indication of force.

We ended our search at the far end of the compartment, by the control console and the central computer. I had a sudden hunch and sat down at the console. There was enough pile activity to energize the computer. I tapped out a request for a Biblical passage as a test. There was a soft whine and clicking and then the passage appeared on the readout screen, the lines moving slowly up from the bottom to the top.

Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.

I hesitated a moment, guessed at a date, ran my fingers over the keys and requested a list of read-outs for the 437th time period. Soft clicking. Biologist Scheer had requested information on chess, mathematician Bailey had requested current light fiction, Captain Shea had wanted a history of the Renaissance. I jumped to the 989th time period. No requests. I tried a few periods later. Still none. There were no further requests for another 31 time periods, then psychologist Hendrix had suddenly wanted to read everything about the problems of cities in the late 20th, early 21st Centuries. There were no requests after that until the 1436th time period, when physicist Dickinson had wanted technical information on the pile. From there on, the request files were completely blank.

I suddenly felt a hammering through the metal soles of my boots and looked up from the read-out screen to see Coleman tearing at a bulkhead safe with a spanner wrench. The safe abruptly gave (continued on page 208)The Ship John B.(continued from page 92) way and Coleman did a slow flip, grabbing a brake ring to stop himself. He fumbled around in the safe, then drifted over to me with a half dozen log tapes. The inscription on one of the small cans read: Log of the John B. McClellan. The name jogged my memory and I recalled it in a footnote in a textbook, one of the names in a long listing of lost ships.

I told Coleman to take them back with him, then turned to Jimenez: "We miss anything?"

He dutifully glanced around at the cabin behind him, but I got the feeling that he really wasn't seeing it. "You can't think of anything, I sure as hell can't."

I started for the hatch, then drifted back to the central computer and took the big reel of tape with its listing of read-out requests. Who knew ...

On the way out, what had been in the back of my mind finally hit me. I hadn't found anything wrong. No signs of being boarded, no signs of violence—nothing wrong with the ship itself. Which left—what? The crew?

And then I didn't think of it anymore, because we had left the cave of the John B. behind and I was in the emptiness of space again, frantically trying to locate the Cassiopeia and get a bearing before the illusion reversed itself and I was once more an insignificant speck suspended in a black void without end.

• • •

We committed the unknown crewman to space once more with appropriate ceremony, made the necessary course corrections and resumed the long voyage. The John B. dwindled in the distance behind us and then was nothing more than a memory and a half dozen computer tapes.

I spent the next three or four time periods listening to the contents of the John B.'s log, almost all of which consisted of routine, technical entries. Those entries that weren't—most of these were at the beginning—mentioned winners in the daily chess tournament and what could be classified as mild gossip items about members of the crew. Toward the end, there were stretches of missing entries where the captain had failed to file his daily report.

The last entry was for the last time period. Am going Outside.

There was no explanation given, no reason, no mention of any threat. I could imagine the captain putting down his speakalong, suiting up and walking out. But I had no clue as to why.

I stored the log tapes in the computer locker, made a mental note to give them a more thorough run-through in the near future and spent the next few time periods speculating about them while stretched out in my compartment, the shadow screens on, staring quietly out the port at the sowing of stars in the unfathomable distance. The tapes gradually slipped from my mind and I started thinking about Earth and New Chicago and the green fields of the Midwest and the 500 time periods we had to go before we made planet-fall. And then one period I was lying there thinking of those 500 segments of time and wondering what it would be like to run down a sidewalk again or dive into a pool of water, when I suddenly reflected that there was a certain unreality to my thinking. Planet-fall, another world, blue skies ... But there was no conviction to my thinking, no real belief that that kind of future was going to happen.

I really came awake then, and it was like waking up in a house in the middle of the night, when you catch yourself listening, and you're sweating and shaking and just lying there waiting. And then I had my finger on it and the thought didn't shift fast enough to get away. I really didn't believe we were going to make planet-fall. What I did believe, way down deep, was that one day we were going to suit up and casually walk out of the Cassiopeia.

I sat up on the edge of my hammock and cocked an ear and let my shadow screen fade and just listened to the ship for a moment. The silence was smothering, and yet I could remember laughter and curses and games in the corridor and times when you could see the whole undivided compartment for time period after time period.

My mind started to race and fall all over itself. The John B. hadn't been hulled by a meteorite or boarded by alien life forms. Mechanical failure? But long-voyage freighters had triple safeguards; it was impossible for something to go wrong with the pile or the computer or the electrical setup. The life-systems setup—something could go wrong there, but chances were vanishingly slim. Which left ...

The crew, of course.

But there had been no signs of violence, no signs of mutiny. A saboteur on board? But there had to be an opposing political or military setup and there was none. Mass insanity? Hardly—not in the accepted sense.

I thought about what the Cassiopeia had been like right after blast-off and what it was like now, and shivered. It had been like watching a clock run down. The life had gradually seeped out of the crew while the shadow screens had grown like ivy. When was the last time Coleman had played a chess game? And when was the last time I had filed a log report?

I had to do something about it, I thought, lying back down on the elasto-hammock—the very next time period. And then I realized what I was doing and turned pale. Not the next time period, now! I tumbled off the hammock and shoved over to Jimenez' compartment and pushed through the shadow screen, not waiting to palm for permission.

He was sacked out on his hammock, his eyes closed, his heavy reddish body hair covering him like a soft auburn fuzz. When he had first come on board, he had been alert, alive, almost obnoxiously eager—constantly checking the pile, filling his calculating slate with row after row of figures, delighted that the central computer contained enough information on his specialty to keep him busy for three solid years.

He suddenly sensed I was there and opened his eyes to stare quietly at me, without expression. I said, "Hello, Specs."

"Privacy, Martin."

"I wanted to ask you what you thought about the John B.," I said.

He turned his back, his spine looking like a long, reddish caterpillar. "I don't think about it, Martin."

"Why not?"

"If you're playing twenty questions, I'm not interested."

"It's serious," I said.

"Sure." He was quiet for a moment and I began to think he had actually drifted off to sleep, when he suddenly said, "I don't think about it because there's nothing we can do about it and it's none of our business."

"I think——" I started.

"I don't give a damn what you think! I want Privacy—now get the hell out, will you?"

"What would you do," I said slowly, "if I told you that the pile was redlining?"

He sat up on one elbow and glared. "I'd call you a goddamned liar! Nothing's wrong with that pile—nothing ever has been and nothing ever will be! It doesn't need the attention of men, Martin! This ship doesn't need a physicist or a metalsmith or an astronomer—or a captain, for that matter. Something could happen to any one of us and it wouldn't matter a damn—we're passengers, Martin, passengers!" He sagged back down and stared quietly at the screened overhead. His voice was barely audible. "Get out of here, will you?"

I backed out and drifted over to Hulsman's compartment. The shadow screens were on there, too—all of the ship's screens were on, I noted—and I hesitated a moment before floating through. Hulsman was the youngest on board, our mascot when we had left Earth. He was the likable type—blond hair, freckles, a smile that was catching. You wanted to rub your knuckles on the back of his head and send him to the outfield to shag flies.

I pushed through and found him watching me. It was an older face now—much older—framed by long, dirty blond hair, and the bright-blue eyes were a dull and dirty slate.

"Hello, Martin." The voice was list less.

"I was thinking about the John B.," I said casually. "I was wondering what you thought."

A tired look flooded his face, as if talking and thinking were too much effort. "I guess I haven't thought much about it, Martin. I guess I don't much care."

"Don't you think the same thing could happen to us?"

A flicker of concern wandered uncertainly over his face and then fled. "That was a long time ago, wasn't it?"

"You're not curious?"

"I guess I ought to be, but I'm not." He lay there quietly for a moment, then suddenly closed his eyes and turned his back to me. "Look, Martin, would you—you know—leave me alone? I guess I can't help much."

I stood there and looked at him, helpless. "That's OK, I understand, Hully."

I had started to drift out when he suddenly said in a low voice, "I got this funny feeling, Martin, this feeling that I ought to be doing something—only somehow I can't get started. I ought to be able to do something on board, Martin." Then he turned slightly and jammed his face into the hammock. "It scares me," he whimpered in a muffled voice. "It scares the hell out of me."

• • •

The first real crisis came 20 time periods later, when life on board the Cassiopeia had unwound even further and we were all nonthinking slow-motion ghosts. I was in the life-systems compartment, along with Hulsman, Ball and Coleman, lining up for the "evening meal," though most of the crew now preferred to draw their meals when nobody else was around and they didn't run the risk of having to talk to anybody. I was at one of the food dispensers working the selectors above my tray when Potter pushed in to take a tray from the rack and shove over to the next food slot a few feet away. When he shoved away from the rack, his tray caught in the food slot and he slid on past it.

It happened quickly enough. The thin tray, worn sharp from hundreds of insertions into the metal mouth of the food dispenser, caught in the slot, and when Potter slid past it, the sharp edge of the tray slashed deep into his forearm.

None of us said a word, we just stared. Potter had grabbed a brake ring and now floated in the middle of the com partment, a big frightened kid staring wide-eyed at his left arm where the blood spurted, balled, then flattened slowly toward the deck.

It seemed like a full minute went by and still nobody moved. I stood glued by the side of the food dispenser, my mind split. One part of it—a large part—wasn't reacting at all. It was simply

watching Potter, watching him bleed, watching the blood pool on the deck, wondering curiously what Potter was going to do next. It was like watching a fascinating stereocast. The hologram that was Potter was going to die, right before my eyes, from a slashed main ar tery. It was something I had never seen before.

And then it made connection. Maybe none of us were vital to the ship, but Potter was the life-systems man and he was vital to the crew. And Potter was going to die!

I dropped my tray and dove over to him. He stood there in semishock, trem bling and staring stupidly at his arm. I tore at my loincloth and bound the rag tightly around his arm, then whirled to Hulsman, watching blank-faced.

"Get Reynolds, on the double!"

He didn't move; his eyes were glazed.

I tightened the bandage, knotted it, then grabbed a handful of food off my tray that had settled to the deck nearby and threw it at Hulsman. The mess hit along the side of his neck and slid slowly off toward his shoulder.

"Move, you sonofabitch, or I'll push you face first into the nearest dispenser and let you drown in that slop! Snap it!"

"Privacy ..." Hulsman started to chatter.

"Move, Damnit!"

He shot from his bench into the cold light corridor, frantically grabbing at brake rings to guide his progress. I could hear him bawling for Reynolds even as he disappeared from view.

Pain and shock were now washing through Potter. He clutched his arm and started to moan, then looked up at me, his face horror-stricken. "I could have died," he blubbered. "They would have let me die."

• • •

A dozen time periods after Potter had slashed his arm, the rest of the crew had faded even further into long-voyage apathy, remote to one another, remote even to themselves. The ship was now a jungle of shadow screens preserving Privacy. Crew members went out of their way to avoid one another, and when they did meet, it was with hostile noncuriosity.

I made friends with Potter because he saved my life.

There had come a time period when, psychologically speaking, I caved in and started to avoid the others. I spent more and more of my time floating in my compartment, staring out the port and thinking of home or maybe of absolutely nothing at all. I had been the only one to worry about the ship and the crew—all right, now, to hell with them. And shortly after that, when Potter shoved through my shadow screen without palming for permission, I caught myself saying automatically, "Privacy, Potter."

"You've got trouble, Captain."

I came out of it like a man waking up

in the morning. "Whadd'ya mean?"

"Ball's suiting up to go Outside. You've got maybe three minutes to catch him."

I rolled off my hammock, shoved against a brake ring and shot up the corridor, grabbing rings as I passed to give myself a little additional thrust each time. I clipped through one shadow-screened compartment, taking a chance of colliding with its occupant, then rounded a corner and bore down on the space-suited figure quietly working the controls of the inner air lock. I sailed in between the figure and the lock, grabbing a ring and braking to a halt with a speed that almost tore my arms out of their sockets.

"Going someplace, Ball?"

He stared at me, then reached up and unclamped his helmet and took it off. He shook his head, sending his black beard and long hair flying, and smiled woodenly. He looked like one of the prophets out of the Old Testament, wild eyes and all.

"I'm going Outside, Captain," he said gravely.

"You never checked with me," I said.

"Sorry about that, I really meant to."

"Do your duties take you Outside?" I asked, stalling.

The wooden smile again. "Clear view of the stars. Unimpeded view and all that. Natural observations. It's provided for ..." His voice changed slightly, losing its formal tone. He took a ragged breath. "Regs state that the captain is not to interfere with technicians in the normal pursuit of their duties."

"Regs also state that no man leaves the ship without a tether line, unless it's ship-to-ship transfer. Where's your line, Ball?"

He stared stupidly down at his equipment belt. "Did I forget that?"

"And what about your tanks? You've got one of those we used to go over to the John B. with. There's no more than twenty minutes in it, if that."

His eyes became shifty. "I hadn't left yet. I was going to change tanks."

I forced a nervous smile. "Look, Ball, we need you. And you'll be needed at destination planet."

Ball licked his lips. His face had a hunted look. "This ship doesn't need me," he mumbled. "Neither does anybody in it. And planet-fall's ..." His voice trickled away. He cocked his head to one side and smiled faintly. "You're not going to let me out, are you, Martin?"

I saw it coming that vital fraction of a second before it actually happened. A slight hardening around the eyes, then all expression abruptly vanished, like fingerprints on a freshly baked cake, and Ball hit me like a docking tug, howling, "I'm going Outside, damnit, I'm going ..."

He was thin but with the deceptive hardness that thin mechanics sometimes have. He yanked me away from the air-lock hatch, then shoved me, hard, own the corridor.

I flew backward about 20 feet, the breath momentarily knocked out of me, then scrambled upright and shot back from a brake ring. Ball whirled, his suit small handicap in the near-weightless ship.

"You can't keep me cooped up with bloody strangers!"

I tried to brake and hit him all at the same time, but I overshot and Ball grabbed me around the waist as I shot by. I doubled up and tried to get my knees between me and his suit, but his metal-clad right arm shot out and caught my head between his forearm and biceps and he squeezed, gripping his wrist with his other hand. I kicked out with my feet, found no purchase and flailed wildly at the empty air. The pressure abruptly increased and I started to black out.

"Going Outside, goddamnit, going Outside."

"Grab him, Martin, grab him!"

The pressure suddenly let up and I squirmed free. I shook my head to clear it, then whirled to see what had happened. Potter was clinging to the collar of Ball's space suit with one hand, his slashed arm hanging uselessly at his side.

It couldn't last but a second longer, I thought, dazed. I dug my feet into a brake ring, crouched, then shot up at Ball. The timing was just right. I hit Ball at chest level and wrapped my legs around him as he toppled backward. Then I clasped both hands together and clubbed, once. His eyes dulled and I could feel him go limp.

I let go, brushed the sweat off my face and caught my breath in racking sobs. Then everything caught up with me and I bent double, suddenly afraid I was going to lose my dinner all over the corridor. Potter caught my arm and I mumbled "Thanks" and forced myself to swallow the bile. I felt dizzy and sick, and to cover. I said, "What made you help, Potter?"

"It was the logic of it," he said with an intense seriousness. "If I didn't care what happened to Ball, then I couldn't very well be sore at the guys who hadn't cared what happened to me when I was bleeding, could I? So I figured I had to care."

I didn't answer, still trying to control my stomach.

"Do you think the rest of the crew would have followed him out?"

I nodded. "Yeah—one by one, until this can of worms was empty—and we probably would have been among them." I stared down the empty corridor and shivered. There were people behind the shadow screens, but the Cassiopeia seemed deserted already.

Ball started to moan and I bent over and slapped him lightly in the face. His eyelids fluttered a little and then he was staring up at me, blank-faced.

"Get out of the suit," I growled. "Hang it up and go to your compartment. I'll be by later."

We watched him drift off down the corridor and Potter said, "What are you going to do when he tries to leave again?"

"Stop him, what else?"

"And the time after that?"

I shrugged and started to float back to my compartment, then suddenly turned. "Look, we've got the tapes of read-out requests from the John B. If you want to help, we can take turns running them through the computer and briefing the material requested. Maybe we can come up with something."

Potter gave me a strange look. "You're the captain, Martin—you want me to do something, you just tell me to do something."

• • •

We fed the punched request tapes from the John B. into the Cassiopeia's own memory tanks and took turns scanning the material requested. We were hardly thorough—you couldn't read five years of read-out requests in ten or twenty time periods—and the requests themselves were something of an enigma, the third derivative of the personalities on board, their likes, their dislikes, their passing fancies. Was it significant, for example, that mathematician Bailey had gradually changed from a diet of light fiction to heavy treatises on mathematics during a thousand time periods? There was no way of knowing.

It was Potter who suggested a solution. "Look, we're not being objective, we're too close to the trees to see the forest."

"How so?"

"I think we ought to be working by analogy. We're assuming that we're the only ones worried about the future of the Cassiopeia and what has gone wrong— and we're right. But why? Why are you concerned, for example? Why did you stay on duty when the rest of the crew were crapping out? And why am I concerned?"

I felt that he had overstated it; myself, I knew that I had gradually been giving up; but I thought about it a long moment, then said, "A matter of responsibility—to the crew. Being designated captain, the mere act of designation, gave me a feeling of responsibility. The same, I guess, for you. Both of us have a responsibility to the crew as a whole; the others don't."

He looked at me quizzically. "Wouldn't somebody on board the John B. have been in a similar position?"

"OK," I said slowly, "I see your point. Obviously, the captain. And they had a psychologist on board. I think that would have been about it."

"I think I ought to take the captain's requests, and you, the psychologist's," he said thoughtfully. "It'll probably make for greater objectivity."

It was good logical reasoning and it's what I should've done, but I guess if a parent can learn from his child, a captain can learn from his crew—even if it's only a crew of one.

Two time periods later, I had a fairly good picture of Peter Hendrix, the psychologist on board the John B. A young man—maybe 25—and something of an athlete, at least enough of one to be vain about his physique and worry about getting out of shape (requested read-out on Koptra's Isometric Exercises the 29th time period out). Probably hadn't actually practiced in his profession (Five Years of Case Histories: Horney), was a pipe collector (Vanderhof's Briars and Meerschaums) and something of a dog fancier (Reisman: Man's Animal Friend, Fifth Edition, Rev.). About the 800th time period out, the requests started to fade. It was obvious that Hendrix was reading less and less, that he had gotten to the point where he stayed within his compartment, shadow screens on, floating in the dark and avoiding other crew members. Then, suddenly, the 1020th time period, he had requested Vandercook's Problems of the Cities and Walter's Man by Himself, two studies of the megapolis of the 20th Century. There was a flurry after that of similar volumes and then these requests, too, began to taper. From the 1045th time period on, Hendrix had made no more requests.

I pondered the list for a moment, then shrugged and started checking to see which ones were in the Cassiopeia's central computer. Both the Vandercook and the Walter were still available; some of the others had been deleted. I made myself comfortable at the read-out console, set the controls for Slow Scan and started to read.

I didn't get it all at once—parts of it didn't fall into place until I thought about it for a while—but after about three hours, I began to see the connections. A few time periods later, I was a sweaty mess, pretty sure of what the problem was but much less sure of a solution. I was surprised that any of the long-voyage freighters had made it at all. Part of the problem was built into the nature of the long voyage, part of it undoubtedly depended on the random selection of crew. All of it gave me the chills. I slept on it for a period, then shoved over to Potter's compartment and violated Privacy with no regrets at all.

He was asleep, curled up in a fetal position on his hammock. I grabbed him by the shoulder. "Wake up, Potter—c'mon, snap it!"

"Wha ... what ..."

"What did you find out about the captain?"

He swung his hairless legs over the side of the hammock, yawned and scratched his naked belly. "Is that what you woke me up for? Jesus Aitch Christ. Look. I didn't find out a goddamned thing. He liked Italian cooking and he was fond of horses—I guess they weren't extinct then, he owned one or something." And then he snapped wide awake. "What's the story on Hendrix?"

I told him, talking for almost a full hour. When I had finished, he looked round-eyed and whistled. "So what happens now, "sir? As a theory, it sounds good to me, but what do we do about it? It's one thing to know, another to——"

"I'm not sure what I'll do," I said slowly. "I guess I'll try talking. If that doesn't work, then I'll just have to think of something else."

• • •

I tried Coleman first. We had been friends once and I thought my chances of reaching him were better than any of the others.

I palmed permission to enter his compartment, got no response and shoved through the screen anyway. Coleman's arms were folded behind his head, his eyes closed.

"Joe."

No response. I drifted closer and slapped him lightly in the face. His eyes slowly opened; there was no sign of anger.

"Privacy, Martin." His eyelids started to sag shut again.

I slapped him once more, a little harder. His eyes stayed open this time. I drifted over to the port and turned my back. I was sweating now, beginning to stink with nervousness.

"You know, Joe, I was thinking about the other time period, when Potter got his arm slashed. I started thinking to myself—what would happen it Potter had died and then the algae tanks went out? And that kind of shook me up for a moment, because it occurred to me that even if we're not important to the ship, Joe, we're important to one another. And I hadn't really thought about that before."

I stole a quick glance at Coleman. Nothing.

"See, without Potter, Joe, we don't eat, we don't breathe. If I hadn't gotten a tourniquet on him, he would've bled to death and all the rest of us would have died if anything happened to the tanks. It was lucky I realized that, wasn't it, Joe?"

No response.

"It's pretty cold Outside, Joe, pretty dead. No life for millions and millions of miles. The only living things are right here inside the Cassiopeia. You and I and Potter and Jimenez and the rest of them. Ten little pulsing blobs of jelly against all that nothingness out there. We need one another, Joe, we can't shut one another out anymore. If we do, then some time period somebody's going to walk Outside and the rest of us are going to pick up our marbles and follow. And none of us will have sense enough to realize it's suicide."

I was both sweating and cold by the time I had finished. So far as I could tell, Coleman didn't even know I was there.

Something snapped inside my head then and I started yelling and swearing at him and calling him every name I could think of. After a few minutes of that, my stream of curses turned to a trickle and then I dried up completely. It was like railing at a corpse. I turned to leave and then I spotted Coleman's chess set against the bulkhead, the little Dresden china figurines standing guard over their tiny land of red and black squares. They were lovely pieces, delicate, with soft, glowing colors.

I picked up a queen, regal and aloof in her glazed, rose-colored dress and little slippers of spidery fired china. Then I took Coleman's big magnetic screwdriver from the bulkhead where it had stuck, hefted it by the blade and whacked the handle down on the queen in my other hand. It was like cracking ice. The figurine shattered and fine china dust powdered out through my fingers. I opened my hand and the crushed pink-and-blue queen started to disperse through space.

"It was against regs to bring these on board," I said icily. I picked up a bishop in fine china miter and cloak and a second later he, too, was powder. I lifted up a rook next and glanced up at Coleman. There was something in his eyes now, something that, on other occasions, would have sent shivers down my spine.

"You shouldn't have violated regs," I said. The rook was dust. I bent to pick up a knight. Whatever was in Coleman's eyes had to be coaxed out, even if it were murder. I casually smashed the knight.

"You bastard!"

And Coleman was on me. He staggered me for a moment, but I had expected it and managed to step partly aside. He grabbed my leg, then twisted and dove for my throat. I dodged and clutched an arm as he shot by and got his head with my other hand. The speed was already there and all it needed was for me to guide him a little. He slammed into the glassteel port and there was a soft splurt and the cubicle was shot through with a fine spray of blood. I grimaced—a shade too hard; Coleman had probably broken several teeth. I still had hold of his arm and suddenly whipped it back and wrapped my legs around him and squeezed. He bucked, arched for a second, then all his strength flowed out and he went limp. I hung on for a moment, wary, then let him go except for a hand on his arm to steady him.

He surprised me, then. He turned, buried his head in my shoulder and started to sob.

• • •

We held the council of war in Potter's compartment, with all the shadow screens on and our voices low, though the chances of being interrupted were just about zero.

"We can't go around to each member of the crew and try to convince him of anything by sweet reasonableness," Potter said thoughtfully.

"I wasn't going to," I said. "The only thing I think will work is shock—we'll have to force them to become involved."

"I don't know ..." Potter began.

"It worked on me," Coleman said, faintly unfriendly. "But I don't know if it will work on anybody else."

I idly scratched the matted hair under my arm, squashing something that had so far evaded the ultraviolet tubes overhead, then turned to Potter. "Any ideas?"

He shook his head. "I'm no psychologist."

"Fake it." I said bluntly. "I'm no captain, either. So what would you do if you were a psychologist?"

Potter's smile was toothy. "You want me to think like a shrink—OK, I'd play on their strongest emotions, love and hate and fear, try to shake them up. But the catch is, we don't know what they love and hate and fear. If this had been a military ship—you know, ankles to elbows all the time—there would have been constant involvement and we'd know one another a lot better." He shrugged. "As it is——"

"What about the personnel tapes in the computer," Coleman interrupted. "Wouldn't they help?"

The personnel tapes were a thought. They contained our psychological profiles, medical histories and short rèsumès about our home life—our guts and souls reduced to minor alignments of iron oxide on tissue-thin tape to aid the placement service at destination planet.

"Those tapes are under sealed circuits," I said dubiously. "There's no way we can get a read-out on them."

Coleman snorted, the sudden creases in his monkey face cracking open his beard so the hairs stuck out like the bristles on a brush. "Any idiot could break those seals."

"Could you?" I asked.

He shrugged. "I might blow the whole computer, but I doubt it."

"And then we go to work on the crew, that it?" Potter asked.

"That's right," I said. "Frighten them, irritate them, make them angry."

"You can adapt to irritation," Potter said, suddenly doubtful.

"It all depends," I said thoughtfully, "on the irritation."

• • •

We started with Jimenez, because he had an easy weakness we could play on and because we needed his strength, if we could arouse it. He was now a quiet, almost completely passive Jimenez who had given up any pretense whatsoever at routine. He either slept or stared out the ports, padding to the food dispenser at regular intervals, eating silently, not talking, not really aware of anybody else at all, except from time to time he seemed apprehensive when somebody else was around. He was a native of Tijuana, Mexico, the festival center of the North American continent, and according to the personnel tapes, he hated the area and not without reason—it was alive with rattlers and Jimenez had a phobia about snakes.

It took skill to turn a twisted piece of cloth into what we wanted. Skill, some coloring and some hardened grease to make ridges and scales. Then 'we waited until Jimenez was asleep. I was elected to creep cautiously through the shadow screen and drop the "snake" in the reddish fuzz that covered Jimenez' chest. Then I lightly dragged the tips of my fingers through his chest hair and made a rattling sound with my tongue against my teeth, and quickly ducked out of the compartment.

There was a moment's tense wait and then Jimenez bolted through the screen, his red beard flying and his eyes wild. I could imagine the scream he must have let out. He saw me, hung in space for a moment while he figured it out. his eyes rolling, then grabbed a brake ring and plunged feet first at me. Coleman and Potter grabbed his arms and hauled him back.

I said, "I'd like to talk to you, Jimenez."

He spat in my face and turned his back—but I talked to him anyway.

I think I could have figured out Hulsman without reading through his profile. We had to splice some of the medical "techniques and responses" tapes and cut back and forth with a "home movie" tape of Hulsman's family; and when we were through, I was pretty disgusted with myself. I let a time period go by and then dropped by Hulsman's compartment and told him the computer was out of whack and there might be involuntary screenings of some of the memory banks but there was no way of doing anything about it. I don't think he even heard me. I told him again and left and a few hours later we programed his compartment and opened the circuits and waited.

He was part way out five seconds after the circuits were opened, his face ashen and showing signs of extreme shock. Then he hesitated and slipped back in. I followed a few minutes later. He was staring at the screen, fists balled, the muscles in his face little flat areas of concrete. I waited a moment until I was sure he knew I was there, then loudly cleared my throat.

"Your mother, Hulsman," I said acidly, "did she ever work on stage?"

He blacked an eye and almost broke my nose before Potter and Coleman could restrain him.

We kept it up for a dozen time periods. Various indignities broke Reynolds, who had a personal sense of cleanliness that bordered on the pathological. First I smashed the ultraviolet sanitary tubes in his compartment. He was only vaguely aware of it, a slight irritation that slowly started to feed on him. Then I made sure he kept finding little bits of dried food on his dispenser tray whenever he went to eat. And, of course, I laughed and joked about his tray whenever he was in earshot, and one period in the life-systems compartment I casually let slip that I was the one who kept fouling his food tray and what a great joke it was.

He came within an ace of decapitating me by skimming the sharp-edged tray across the compartment at me. I ducked and it hit the bulkhead with enough force to bend the lip of the tray back about an inch.

Ball's weakness was his physical vanity. He was a big man and his code, of course, included not hitting any man smaller than himself—to have done so would have been to lose face. He didn't know what to do when Coleman kept stumbling into him and snarling that it was all Ball's fault. Coleman managed it cleverly enough—a push off a brake ring with only a slight miscalculation and Ball would be on the receiving end of an unexpected jostle or jab. After a while, Ball became very apprehensive about it—a transit-shuttle passenger not knowing what the abusive drunk across the aisle is going to do next. With growing awareness came a conscious effort to ignore Coleman, except that Coleman wouldn't be ignored. He spared neither Ball's family nor his personal proclivities nor his courage—which he implied was obvious more by its absence than its presence. Ball's frustration was like an itch and one time period he finally scratched it and bloodied Coleman's nose, more to his amazement than Coleman's. He stood there, vaguely upset and angry, and I promptly said the appropriate thing about their relative sizes and something to the effect that Ball should pick on a man his own size.

I had forgotten how much closer I came to being a match for him than Coleman was. "You bloody bastard!" he screamed, and almost four years of fear and frustration came pounding at me. This time it took four of us to calm him down—and he was really calm only after I hit him along the side of the head with a half dozen trays. Kentworthy, Adams and Herschel were next.

But all the time I was breaking the crew, I knew it really wasn't going to work. I hadn't changed the basic situation nor the basic surroundings. I could supply more irritation, but Potter was right—eventually I would become the small boy crying wolf and then I would lose them for good. What I had to do was manufacture an emergency, a genuine emergency in which there would be an honest element of chance that we might not make it, an emergency that could be coped with—but just barely.

I wanted to confide in Potter and Coleman but knew I couldn't take the risk, so I researched it myself with the aid of the computer. It was the cargo manifest that finally gave me the idea. There were dangers in it—there had to be—and in the end it would all depend on the ingenuity of the crew. And if I had guessed wrong—well, it would be no worse than bleeding their lives away staring out the ports, to finally get so fed up with themselves that they would walk out forever and spend the rest of eternity cartwheeling through the lonely reaches of space.

I waited until a time period when most of the shadow screens were on, found a crowbar and crept back to the life-systems compartment. Behind the food-dispenser fronts was a small compartment containing the automated algae tanks, the small farms of living organisms that were our life's blood. I wedged the bar into the lip of the dispenser and slowly bent it down, hooking my feet under a brake ring to gain leverage. The front gradually yielded and finally there was an opening wide enough for me to wiggle through. I squeezed past the driers and the formers and the flavorers and then started swinging the crowbar. Tanks erupted and the contents splattered against the bulkheads—streams of green slime geysering through the compartment, filling the air with a thick green mist and coating the bar with a viscous slime. I was so frightened I wanted to vomit, but I kept swinging. I had to be right.

I finally squeezed out, heaving and gagging and dripping slime, and made my way to the control console. I located the central bank of shadow-screen controls, opened the panel beneath and rammed the crowbar into the wiring at the same time I pressed the general alarm.

The brassy clangor of the alarm beat through the ship like heavy surf, and simultaneously the control board for the shadow screens arced and sputtered and one by one the screens went off, until I was looking at a single long compartment with nine alarmed and almost nude crew members scrambling off their elasto-hammocks.

A second later somebody hollered, men started to stumble into one another and then somebody spotted me standing by the console, covered with slime and still clutching the crowbar. And all the time the alarm was screaming throughout the ship like a hysterical air-raid siren.

They swarmed up to the console.

"Hey, what gives?"

"What the hell?"

"Hey, Potter, the food dispenser!"

"What happened to the screens?"

"What the bloody hell is going on?"

"The food dispenser."

A shriek. "The Food Dispenser!"

They swept to the other end of the compartment like a tide, then one by one they fluttered back to form a silent, watchful ring around me.

"You stupid bastard," Jimenez said in a freezing voice, "you've signed a death warrant for everybody here. For yourself, too."

I shook my head. "No, we can get through. There's grain in the cargo compartments and we can build hydroponics tubs. I think we can do it."

Everybody looked at Potter. Jimenez said, "Can we?"

Potter was squatting on the deck, holding his head in his hands and shaking and mumbling, "Holy Mother of Jesus, Martin, you shouldn't have done it, you should've warned me, you should've warned me." Jimenez' toe caught him in the ribs and he looked up, still pasty-faced and trembling. "I don't know, I don't know. It's a big maybe. We'll have to break into the cargo compartment and we'll have to——"

Reynolds squeaked, "We'll have to build a whole new ecology, that's what we'll have to do, a whole new ecology! You just don't make tubs, where'll we get the fertilizer?"

"I didn't think you'd ask anything so obvious," I interrupted. He turned green. Coleman had turned his back to me when Jimenez asked him about the cargo compartments. "Yeah, maybe we can get through. It'll take a lot of work. We'll have to burn our way through and I don't even know if we have enough oxy-acetylene to do it. One thing for sure, we'll be damned hungry by the time we get there."

It was Ball who said coldly, "Why'd you do it, Martin?"

They all stopped talking then and I could see the almost imperceptible movement to line up behind Ball. This was the big one, I thought, this was the final challenge. And I had no friends among them. "Because I had to, Ball," I said slowly. "Because that was the only way I could guarantee that we would get there at all."

He thought about it a minute, then said logically, "You may have guaranteed just the opposite."

I nodded. "I might have, but I don't think so. Be honest, Ball—would you bet that we would have made it anyway?" I turned to the rest. "Would any of you bet? Did any of you really give a good goddamn before right now? Oh, sure, you care now all right—you have to!"

Ball and I stared at each other, fencing, and after the longest moment in my life, he said quietly, "Maybe you're right. We'll see."

I glanced at the rest of them. Coleman was nodding slightly to himself, Reynolds looked a little uncertain. I even thought I detected a slight glimmer of approval in Jimenez' small myopic eyes. Well, I had done it, I thought with absolutely no feeling of elation. They were valuable to one another now, they were involved now—they had to be, their lives depended on it.

Then Hulsman stepped out of the crowd clutching a spanner wrench and shaking his head slightly to clear away the dirty blond hair from in front of his blazing eyes. He was all tiger now, I thought; he would try something foolish if ticked just right. I had the feeling he was still furious about the other.

"I ought to kill you, Martin!"

I sized him up and said contemptuously, "No, you won't, Hulsman. Neither you nor anybody else would dream of it right now."

He showed his teeth and waved the wrench and said, "Why not? What makes you so sure?"

I was pretty tired and I was starting to shake with reaction. I wished to God that I could go to sleep and forget about it all, but I realized I couldn't do that now any more than they could.

"Because you need a captain," I said. "And I'm the only one who's qualified, I'm the only one who really wants it. Everybody else had his chance and nobody took it, nobody wanted the responsibility. So I'm it, Hulsman, don't bother looking any further." I shoved forward slightly and grabbed the wrench away from him. "Now get the torches and get to work—all of you. Snap it!"

• • •

The tenth day after touchdown, I sat in the portmaster's office going over the manifest receipt. I was uncomfortable— it would be a long time before I got used to shoes and shirts and trousers again, and taking a shower struck me as something that really wasn't necessary more than once or twice a month—but a good part of the discomfort was simply the fact that we were coming to the end of the manifest and there were certain items that were missing and unaccounted for.

Callahan, the portmaster, was a comfortable sort—genial and ruddy, with 20 extra pounds that somehow seemed to translate into an air of authority rather than merely coat his bones with fat. He was an important man on Xerxes—the portmaster on a colony planet always was—and I had no doubt his relaxed attitude would vanish in a hurry when we came to the subject of the missing items.

Much to my astonishment, he really didn't seem to notice and had started to write his name at the bottom when I interrupted him.

"I'm very sorry, sir," I said formally, "but there are some missing items."

He put down his pen, leaned back in his wicker chair and raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"The seed grains," I said stiffly. "I think there's something less than one tenth the allotment tonnage present. And certain flat metal items are not present— in the form listed.

" He lit his pipe, puffed for a moment, then looked up at me with alert brown eyes that seemed a little out of place in his fleshy face. "You're referring to the flat metal sheets you converted into hydroponics tubs?"

"I didn't know——" I started, surprised.

He waved a hand. "Of course I know, I'm no idiot, Martin. I've been portmaster here for almost ten years, handling an average of an Earth ship a month. The first thing we do—after unloading, delousing the crew and fumigating the pigpen that the crew's quarters have been turned into—is to check the manifest against what actually arrives here. And then we check the ship's log. You missed a lot of entries, but you were still pretty explicit as to what happened."

I reddened. "I didn't mean——"

"As to missing items," he continued, "it doesn't matter. The virtue of bureaucracy is that it constantly seeks to minimize risk. Three out of the five ships carrying identical cargoes as yours made it on the long voyage. That's not to say the seed grains won't be missed—but they weren't really vital."

"You're trying to tell me that the ship and its cargo weren't very important," I said bitterly.

"I mean nothing of the sort," he said kindly. "Look, Martin, you did what you had to do for the good of the ship and the crew. On a larger scale, Earth does what it has to do for the good of the colony planets. And as important as the cargo is, don't forget that the crew is even more important—we need their technical skills badly. You got them all here safely; for that, you're to be congratulated." He suddenly looked grim. "You ought to see how some ships come in— murders, insanity, crews in mutiny, sometimes half the new dead. You did pretty well, Martin, better than you realize."

I stared out the window behind him, not listening. Port tugs were hauling the Cassiopeia away, to be smelted down for scrap. There were few exports as yet from Xerxes and the extra incoming ships were melted down for badly needed metals. My mind started to drift, remembering the loneliness on board and the stink of the crew's quarters and Potter's slashed arm and what we had done to Hulsman and——

"I think I was right about what I wrote in the log," I said suddenly.

Callahan gave me a long look, then rolled a cigar at me across his desktop. "If you want to talk about it, I want to hear about it."

It was flattering and I lit the cigar and felt expansive. "You said that the triumph of bureaucracy was that it sought to minimize risk. I'll buy that— but that, and necessity, made the ship what it was. The reason why freighters are spartan is obvious. And since the crew is going to be green, a crew that makes only one trip, the ship has to be pretty much automatic. Which means there's nothing for the crew to really do —in one sense, it isn't needed. And it knows it."

"Is that necessarily bad?" Callahan asked, surprised.

"Any environment that doesn't require a man to do something is a hostile environment," I said slowly. "And the less it requires him to do, the more hostile it is."

Callahan looked blank. "I don't get it."

I frowned. "I didn't either. Not until I had read the same material that Hendrix, the psychologist on board the John B., had read about the problems of cities in the 20th Century. Those early cities were a mess—they were overcrowded and they suffered from air pollution and traffic strangulation and crime and all of that, but there was another problem, a more serious one." I concentrated on the cigar for a minute. "Man's gregarious, he tends to clot in groups—first in hamlets, then villages, then towns, and finally in large cities. But nobody ever figured there would be a law of diminishing returns. The larger the city, the larger the population cluster, the less important the individual man within it. He's a smaller and smaller cog in a larger and larger machine and finally hereally doesn't matter at all. And those early cities were machines, tremendous machines made up of traffic flows and power grids and communication networks and huge water systems and disposal plants. Eventually, a man became aware of his own insignificance, and when he did, he started to withdraw. They had a word for it. They called it alienation—anomie."

Callahan didn't say anything, just puffed on his pipe and watched me with those alert brown eyes that could see two inches below the surface of my skin.

"There was something else," I continued. "The closer you had to live with your neighbors, the less close you felt to them. You didn't want to know the people who lived next door, or down the hall, or across the street. They were just part of the faceless mass. Besides, you knew they didn't give a crap about you, so why should you give a crap about them?" I shivered. "A man could be murdered in a transit shuttle and nobody would come to his defense. Nobody wanted to be involved. A woman could scream for help in the streets and people would plug their ears and close their windows. They accepted horror—and weren't even aware of it."

"Apathetic?" Callahan asked.

I nodded. "That's right. Not only toward one another, but toward themselves as well. Once, during a power black-out, people stranded in the transit shuttles didn't panic, didn't riot, didn't try to get out. They just sat there. The marvelous machine had stopped working and all the little cogs couldn't function on their own. They had forgotten how."

I fell silent, watching the activity of the port outside the window and remembering. "What's the connection?" Callahan prodded gently. "You're talking about a city with millions of people—there were only ten of you aboard the Cassiopeia."

I wondered for a moment if the man were stupid, then realized he only wanted me to confirm what he already thought. "It was a spacegoing slum," I said. "There were only ten of us, but on a numbers-per-square-foot basis, it would make the most overpopulated city look like a prairie. And like the people in those early cities, we had no control over our environment. We were helpless. We had routine jobs to perform—make-work —but none of them really mattered. We didn't matter. We had no say-so in what was happening to us. And there was the filial factor." I could feel my armpits start to bleed sweat. "We didn't need one another—and the horrible thing was that it had all been planned that way. The Colonization Board was afraid we might kill one another during the long voyage, so they provided shadow screens, taught us to respect Privacy above all, and arranged routine so we could avoid one another. And no weapons, of course, of any kind. Which made us even more helpless in the face of the unknown. And like the city dwellers, the final result was loss of identity. We became remote from one another, from ourselves, from our own feelings. Like the people in the transit shuttles, we could watch Potter bleed to death and feel nothing. We weren't involved."

Callahan said, "Why did the crew of the John B. walk out?"

"The environment," I said slowly. "The horrifying, indifferent environment, and the loneliness. When you're alone in a crowd, you're really alone. And then you become afraid. Finally, all you want to do is get away from that crowd."

"But walking Outside was suicide."

I shrugged. "They didn't know it. They had lost touch with reality by then. As for Outside, it's not always world without end—sometimes it's more like a little black room with lights studding the walls. It's as real one way as the other." I sat there quietly for a moment, my cigar slowly turning to ash in the tray, unnoticed. "I can understand why the crew of the John B. walked out. The poor bastards wanted to get away from the ship, away from one another." I could feel myself start to break then. "The opposite of love isn't hate," I said slowly. "It's indifference. Ask any kid."

Callahan stood up and said, "I'll make recommendations and send them back to the Board. Probably urge that they make the ships less foolproof. They may lose some ships that way; but in the long run, I think it will be better." He stood up and handed me the manifest receipt. "We need leaders here, you know. That's one category we're always short of."

"It's a difficult one to train for and ship," I said.

"We've never asked them to ship us any," Callahan said quietly. "They sort of develop along the way." I had my hand on the doorknob when he suddenly said, "We need a good man at the port here. After you've looked around a bit, come on back."

I saluted and turned and walked out into the bright sunlight. Three blocks from the spaceport, the Rod and Pile nestled beneath some of Xerxes' tall, palmlike trees, set well back from the boulevard.

They had rounded up a dozen girls and everybody cheered when I walked in. Jimenez was the first to buy me a drink; his glasses were clean and his beard was trimmed and he had clothes on and I damn near didn't recognize him. He called me a dirty gringo, smiled when he said it, then bought another drink, downed it and did a magnificent fall off his stool. Hulsman was next, the all-American-boy grin having suffered a sea change into a happy, drunken smile, and then Ball was buying and slapping me on the back and even Reynolds, scrubbed and pink in a spotless uniform, broke down and bought a round. We drank and sang and made passes at the girls and dates for later and roared with laughter at anecdotes that had been anything but funny at the time. We made arrangements to have a reunion every year and I wondered to myself what lies we would be telling one another after we had spread across the continents of Xerxes and had wives and kids and the Cassiopeia was almost forgotten and the stars only something to look at at night and feel romantic about.

Then I found myself alone at a table with Coleman. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small package I had treasured all afternoon and set it gently on the table in front of him. He stared at it, puzzled.

"Go ahead," I said. "Open it." He fumbled at the wrappings and then spread the contents out on the table. A bishop, a queen, a knight and a rook. They were lovely, delicate figures, almost exact duplicates of the ones I had smashed.

"When it comes to porcelain," I said, "Xerxes has the best craftsmen this side of Earth." I stretched out in the chair and watched Coleman play delightedly with his chess pieces and listened to the overhead fan and stared at the pool of sunlight by the open door. Then I ordered a drink, relaxed and let myself remember just a little bit of what it had been like on board the Cassiopeia.