“Well I’ll be damned … ” the laundry officer said, then snapped his gaping mouth closed and screamed, “Get this thing offa my hand-it’s biting me to death!”
The two MPs still swayed back and forth, handcuffed effectively to the immobile figure of the former Eager Beager. Beager just stared, smiling around the grip he had on the officer’s hand, and it wasn’t until Bill got his atomic rifle and put the barrel into Eager’s mouth and levered the jaw open that the hand could be withdrawn. While he did this Bill saw that the top of Eager’s head had split open just above his ears and was held at the back by a shiny brass hinge. Inside the gaping skull, instead of brains and bones and things, was a model control room with a tiny chair, minuscule controls, TV screens, and a water cooler. Eager was just a robot worked by the little creature that had escaped in the spaceship. It looked like a Chinger-but it was only seven inches tall.
“Hey!” Bill said, “Eager is just a robot worked by the little creature that escaped in the spaceship! It looked like a Chinger-but it was only seven inches tall …”
“Seven inches, seven feet-what difference does it make!” the laundry officer mumbled petulantly as he wrapped a handkerchief around his wounded hand. “You don’t expect us to tell the recruits how small the enemy really are, or to explain how they come from a 10G planet. We gotta keep the morale up.”
V
Now that Eager Beager had turned out to be a Chinger spy, Bill felt very much alone. Bowb Brown, who never talked anyway, now talked even less, which meant never, so there was no one that Bill could bitch to. Bowb was the only other fuseman in the compartment who had been in Bill’s squad at Camp Leon Trotsky, and all of the new men were very clannish and given to sitting close together and mumbling and throwing suspicious looks over their shoulders if he should come too close. Their only recreation was welding and every off watch they would break out the welders and weld things to the floor and the next watch cut them loose again, which is about as dim a way of wasting time as there is; but they seemed to enjoy it. So Bill was very much out of things and tried bitching to Eager Beager.
“Look at the trouble you got me into!” he whined.
Beager just smiled back, unmoved by the complaint.
“At least close your head when I’m talking to you,” Bill snarled, and reached over to slam the top of Eager’s head shut. But it didn’t do any good. Eager couldn’t do anything any more except smile. He had polished his last boot. He just stood there now; he was really very heavy and besides was magnetized to the floor, and the fuse tenders hung their dirty shirts and arc welders on him. He stayed there for three watches before someone figured out what to do with him, until finally a squad of MPs came with crowbars and tilted him into a handcar and rolled him away.
“So long,” Bill called out, waving after him, then went back to polishing his boots. “He was a good buddy, even if he was a Chinger spy.”
Bowb didn’t answer him, and welders wouldn’t talk to him, and he spent a lot of the time avoiding Reverend Tembo. The grand old lady of the fleet, Christine Keeler, was still in orbit while her engines were being installed. There was very little to do, because, in spite of what First Class Spleen had said, they had mastered all the intricacies of fuse tending in a little less than the prescribed year; in fact it took them something like maybe fifteen minutes. In his free time Bill wandered around the ship, going as far as the MPs who guarded the hatchways would allow him, and even considered going back to see the chaplain so he could have someone to bitch to. But if he timed it wrong he might meet the laundry officer again, and that was more than he could face. So he walked through the ship, very much alone, and looked in through the door of a compartment and saw a boot on a bed.