He was breathing hard. “I’ve had just about enough of you,” he said slowly. And the next thing I knew I had a mouthful of knuckles and I was down.
I got up cautiously, trying to surprise him. But it was no good; he knocked me down again. I tried to kick him while I was down, but he danced out of my way.
The third time he hit me I stayed down. When I quit seeing stars he was gone—and I hadn’t managed to lay a finger on him. I never was any good in a fight; I’m still talking when I ought to be slugging.
I went to a scuttlebutt and bathed my face. Hank ran across me there and asked me what in the world I had been doing. I told him I had run into a door. I told Dad the same thing.
Noisy didn’t bother me any more and we never had anything to say to each other again. I lay awake a long time that night, trying to figure it out. I didn’t get it. The chap who thought up that malarkey about “my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure” certainly had never met Noisy Edwards. For my taste Noisy was a no good so-and-so and I wished I had been able to use his face to stuff the hole the meteor made. I thought about a number of ways to fix him, but none of them was any good. As Dad says, sometimes there just isn’t any cure for a situation.
9. The Moons of Jupiter
Nothing much happened until it was time to make our approach to Jupiter, except that a four-year-old kid turned up missing. The kid’s parents searched all around and they passed the word from the control room for everybody to keep an eye open but they still couldn’t find him.
So we had a chance to try out the Scouts’ emergency organization. The ship’s officers couldn’t search the ship, since there was just the Captain and two watch officers and Mr. Ortega and his assistant chief. Captain Harkness supplied plans to each of the Scoutmasters and we went through that ship like a kid searching his clothes for a half credit. We turned the kid up, all right, in about twenty minutes. Seems the little devil had snuck into the hydroponics room while it was being serviced and had got himself locked in.
While he was in there he had got thirsty and had tried to drink the solutions they raise the plants in–had drunk some, in fact. The result was just about what you would expect. It didn’t do him any real harm but, boy, was that place a mess!
I was talking to Dad about it that night over a game. Peggy had a Girl Scout meeting and Molly was off somewhere; we were alone for once. The baby’s mother had raised particular Ned, just as if there had really been something wrong—I mean, what can happen in a space ship? The kid couldn’t fall overboard.
Dad said her reaction was perfectly natural.
I said, “See, here, George, does it seem to you that some of the emigrants don’t have what it takes to be colonists?”
“Mmmm .. . possibly.”
I was thinking of Noisy but the ones I mentioned were Mrs. Tarbutton, who gave up and didn’t even come along, and that female—Mrs. Grigsby—who got in trouble and had to wash dishes. And another fellow named Saunders who was continually in trouble with the council for trying to live his own life, wild and free, no matter what it did to the rest of us. “George, how did those characters get past the psycho tests?”
George stopped to peg fifteen-four, then said, “Bill, haven’t you ever heard of political influence?”
All I said was, “Huh?”
“It’s a shocking thought I know, but you are old enough to get used to the world as it is, instead of the way it ought to be. Take a hypothetical case: I don’t suppose that a niece of a state councilor would be very likely to fail the psycho tests. Oh, she might fail the first tests, but a review board might find differently–if the councilor really wanted her to pass.”