And now I wasn’t going to see any more of it. It made me feel pretty solemn.
I looked up; there was a boy standing in front of me. He said, “What’s the trouble, William, my boy? Dropsick?”
It was that twerp Jones. You could have knocked me out with a feather. If I had known he was going to emigrate, I would have thought twice about it.
I asked him where in the world he had come from.
“The same place you did, naturally. I asked you a question.”
I informed him that I was not dropsick and asked him whatever gave him that silly notion. He reached out and grabbed my arm and turned it so that the red spot the injection had made showed. He laughed and I jerked my arm away.
He laughed again and showed me his arm; it had a red spot on it, too. “Happens to the best of us,” he said. “Don’t be shy about it.”
Then he said, “Come on. Let’s look around the joint before they make us strap down again.”
I went along. He wasn’t what I would pick for a buddy but he was a familiar face. We worked our way over to the hatch to the next deck. I started to go through but Jones stopped me. “Let’s go into the control room,” he suggested.
“Huh? Oh, they wouldn’t let us!”
“Is it a crime to try? Come on.” We went back the other way and through a short passage. It ended in a door that was marked: CONTROL ROOM-STAY OUT! Somebody had written under it: This means you!!! and somebody else had added: Who? Me?
Jones tried it; it was locked. There was a button beside it; he pushed it.
It opened and we found ourselves staring into the face of a man with two stripes on his collar. Behind him was an older man with four stripes on his; he called out, “Who is it, Sam? Tell ’em we’re not in the market.”
The first man said, “What do you kids want?”
Jones said, “Please, sir, we’re interested in astrogation. Could we have permission to visit the control room?”
I could see he was going to chuck us out and I had started to turn away when the older man called out, “Oh, shucks, Sam, bring ’em in!”
The younger fellow shrugged and said, “As you say, Skipper.”
We went in and the Captain said, “Grab on to something; don’t float around. And don’t touch anything, or I’ll cut your ears off. Now who are you?”
We told him; he said, “Glad to know you, Hank–same to you, Bill. Welcome aboard.” Then he reached out and touched the sleeve of my uniform—it had come loose again. “Son, your underwear is showing.”
I blushed and told him how I happened to be wearing it. He laughed and said, “So you swindled us into lifting it anyway. That’s rich—eh, Sam? Have a cup of coffee.”
They were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee— not from cups, of course, but from little plastic bags like they use for babies. The bags even had nipples on them. I said no, thanks. While the shot Miss Andrews gave me had made me feel better, it hadn’t made me feel that much better. Hank Jones turned it down, too.
The control room didn’t have a port in it of any sort. There was a big television screen forward on the bulkhead leading to the nose, but it wasn’t turned on. I wondered what Mrs. Tarbutton would think if she knew that the Captain couldn’t see where we were going and didn’t seem to care.
I asked him about the ports. He said ports were strictly for tourists. “What would you do with a port if you had one?” he asked. “Stick your head out the window and look for road signs? We can see anything we need to see. Sam, heat up the video and show the kids.”
“Aye aye, Skipper.” The other chap swam over to his couch and started turning switches. He left his sandwich hanging in the air while he did so.
I looked around. The control room was circular and the end we came in was bigger than the other end; it was practically up in the nose of the ship and the sides sloped in. There were two couches, one for the pilot and one for the co-pilot, flat against the wall that separated the control room from the passenger compartments. Most of the space between the couches was taken up by the computer.