Robert Heinlein - Time For The Stars

I called to him and he called back but we couldn't find each other. Then I was as trapped and lost and confused as he was and we groped around in the dark and the cold and the aloneness of the place where you die.

Then I felt the knife whittling at my back and I screamed.

The next thing I remember is a couple of faces floating over me. Somebody said, "I think he's coming around, Doctor." The voice did not belong to anyone; it was a long way off.

Then there was just one face and it said, "Feeling better?"

"I guess so. What happened?"

"Drink this. Here, I'll hold up your head."

When I woke up again I felt fairly wide awake and could see that I was in the ship's infirmary. Dr. Devereaux was there, looking at me. "You decided to come out of it, young fellow?"

"Out of what, Doctor? What happened?"

"I don't know precisely, but you gave a perfect clinical picture of a patient terminating in surgical shock. By the time we broke the lock on your door, you were far gone-you gave us a bad time. Can you tell me about it?"

I tried to think, then I remembered. Pat! I called him in my mind. ("Pat! Where are you, boy?")

He didn't answer. I tried again and he still didn't answer, so I knew. I sat up and managed to choke out, "My brother ... he died!"

Dr. Devereaux said, "Wups! Take it easy. Lie down. He's not dead... unless he died in the last ten minutes, which I doubt."

"But I can't reach him! How do you know? I can't reach him, I tell you!"

"Come down off the ceiling. Because I've been checking on him all morning via the m-r's on watch. He's resting easily under an eighth grain of hypnal, which is why you can't raise him. I may be stupid, son—I was stupid, not to warn you to stay out of it—but I've been tinkering with the human mind long enough to figure out approximately what happened to you, given the circumstances. My only excuse is that I have never encountered such circumstances before."

I quieted a little. It made sense that I couldn't wake Pat if they had him under drugs. Under Dr. Devereaux's questions I managed to tell him more or less what had happened—not perfectly, because you can't really tell someone else what goes on inside your head. "Uh, was the operation successful, Doctor?"

"The patient came through in good shape. We'll talk about it later. Now turn over."

"Huh?"

"Turn over. I want to take a look at your back."

He looked at it, then called two of his staff to see it. Presently he touched me. "Does that hurt?"

"Ouch! Uh, yes, it's pretty tender. What's wrong with my back, Doctor?"

"Nothing, really. But you've got two perfect stigmata, just matching the incisions for Macdougal's operation... which is the technique they used on your brother."

"Uh, what does that mean?"

"It means that the human mind is complicated and we don't know much about it. Now roll over and go to sleep. I'm going to keep you in bed a couple of days."

I didn't intend to go to sleep but I did. I was awakened by Pat calling me. "Hey, Tom! Where are you? Snap out of it."

("I'm right here. What's the matter?")

"Tom... I've got my legs back!"

I answered, ("Yeah, I know,") and went back to sleep.

Once Pat was over his paralysis I should have had the world by the tail, for I had everything I wanted. Somehow it did not work that way. Before he was hurt, I had known why I was down in the dumps: it was because he was going and I wasn't. After he was hurt, I felt guilty because I was getting what I wanted through his misfortune. It didn't seem right to be happy when he was crippled—especially when his crippled condition had got me what I wanted.

So I should have been happy once he was well again,

Were you ever at a party where you were supposed to be having fun and suddenly you realized that you weren't? No reason, just no fun and the whole world gray and tasteless?

Some of the things that were putting me off my feed I could see. First there had been Dusty, but that had been cleared up. Then there had been the matter of other people, especially the electron pushers we stood watch with, calling us freaks and other names and acting as if we were. But the Captain had tromped on that, too, and when we got better acquainted people forgot about such things. One of the relativists, Janet Meers, was a lightning calculator, which made her a freak, too, but everybody took it for granted in her and after a while they took what we did for granted.

After we got out of radio range of Earth the Captain took us out from under Commander Frick and set us up as a department of our own, with "Uncle" Alfred McNeil as head of department and Rupert Hauptman as his assistant—which meant that Rupe kept the watch list while Uncle Alf was in charge of our mess table and sort of kept us in line. We liked old Unc too well to give him much trouble and if somebody did get out of line Unc would look sad and the rest of us would slap the culprit down. It worked.

I think Dr. Devereaux recommended it to the Captain. The fact was that Commander Frick resented us. He was an electrical engineer and had spent his whole life on better and better communication equipment... then we came along and did it better and faster with no equipment at all. I don't blame him; I would have been sore, too. But we got along better with Uncle Alf.

I suppose that the Vasco da Gama was part of my trouble. The worst thing about space travel is-that absolutely nothing happens. Consequently the biggest event in our day was the morning paper. All day long each mind reader on watch (when not busy with traffic, which wasn't much) would copy news. We got the news services free and all the features and Dusty would dress it up by copying pictures sent by his twin Rusty. The communicator on the midwatch would edit it and the m-r and the communicator on the early morn ing watch would print it and have it in the mess room by breakfast.

There was no limit to the amount of copy we could have; it was just a question of how much so few people could prepare. Besides Solar System news we carried ships' news, not only of the Elsie but of the eleven others. Everybody (except myself) knew people in the other ships. Either they had met them at Zurich, or the old spacehands, like the Captain and a lot of others, had friends and acquaintances reaching back for years.

It was mostly social news, but we enjoyed it more than news from Earth and the System, because we felt closer to the ships in the fleet, even though they were billions of miles away and getting farther by the second. When Ray Gilberti and Sumire Watanabe got married in the Leif Ericsson, every ship in the fleet held a celebration. When a baby was born in the Pinta and our Captain was named godfather, it made us all proud.

We were hooked to the Vasco da Gama through Cas Warner, and Miss Gamma Furtney linked us with the Marco Polo and the Santa Maria through her triplets Miss Alpha and Miss Beta, but we got news from all the ships by pass-down-the-line. Fleet news was never cut, even if dirtside news had to be. As it was, Mama O'Toole complained that if the editions got any larger, she would either have to issue clean sheets and pillow cases only once a week or engineering would have to build her another laundry just to wash newspapers. Nevertheless, the ecology department always had clean paper ready, freshly pressed, for each edition.

We even put out an occasional extra, like the time Lucille LaVonne won "Miss Solar System" and Dusty did a pic of her so perfect you would have sworn it was a photograph. We lost some paper from that as quite a number of people kept their copies for pin-ups instead of turning them back for reclamation—I did myself. I even got Dusty to autograph it. It startled him but pleased him even though he was rude about it—an artist is entitled to credit for his work, I say, even if he is a poisonous little squirt.