I even found myself contrasting Klara with Sheri, who was at least two sizes smaller. (Not usually. Usually Klara was just right.) And Dred Frauenglass, who came with Sam’s set, was a gentle, thin young man who didn’t talk much and seemed to take up less room than anyone else.
I was the virgin in the group, and everybody took turns showing me how to do what little we had to do. You have to make the routine photographic and spectrometer readings. Keep a tape of readouts from the Heechee control panel, where there are constant minute variations in hue and intensity from the colored lights. (They still keep studying them, hoping to understand what they mean.) Snap and analyze the spectra of the tau-space stars in the viewscreen. And all that put together takes, oh, maybe, two manhours a day. The household tasks of preparing meals and cleaning up take about another two.
So you have used up some four man-hours out of each day for the five of you, in which you have collectively something like eighty man-hours to use up.
I’m lying. That’s not really what you do with your time. What you do with your time is wait for turnaround.
Three days, four days, a week; and I became conscious that there was a building tension that I didn’t share. Two weeks, and I knew what it was, because I was feeling it, too. We were all waiting for it to happen. When we went to sleep our last look was at the golden spiral to see if miraculously it had flickered alight. When we woke up our first thought was whether the ceiling had become the floor. By the third week we were all definitely edgy. Ham showed it the most, plump, golden-skinned Ham with the jolly genie’s face:
“Let’s play some poker, Rob.”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on, Rob. We need a fourth.” (In Chinese poker you deal out the whole deck, thirteen cards to each player. You can’t play it any other way.)
“I don’t want to.”
And suddenly furious: “Piss on you! You’re not worth a snake’s fart as crew, now you won’t even play cards!”
And then he would sit cutting the cards moodily for half an hour at a time, as though it were a skill he needed to perfect for his life’s sake. And, come right down to it, it almost was. Because figure it out for yourself. Suppose you’re in a Five and you pass seventy-five days without turnaround. Right away you know that you’re in trouble: the rations won’t support five people for more than three hundred days.
But they might support four.
Or three. Or two. Or one.
At that point it has become clear that at least one person is not going to come back from the trip alive, and what most crews do is start cutting the cards. Loser politely cuts his throat. If loser is not polite, the other four give him etiquette lessons.
A lot of ships that went out as Fives have come back as Threes. A few come back as Ones.
So we made the time pass, not easily and certainly not fast.
Sex was a sovereign anodyne for a while, and Klara and I spent hours on end wrapped in each other’s arms, drowsing off for a while and waking to wake the other to sex again. I suppose the boys did much the same; it was not long before the lander began to smell like the locker room in a boys’ gym. Then we began seeking solitude, all five of us. Well, there wasn’t enough solitude on the ship to split five ways, but we did what we could; by common consent we began letting one of us have the lander to himself (or herself) for an hour or two at a time. While I was there Klara was tolerated in the capsule. While Klara was there I usually played cards with the boys. While one of them was there the other two kept us company. I have no idea what the others did with their solo time; what I did with mine was mostly stare into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the lander ports at absolute blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was better than seeing what I had grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the ship.
Then, after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my tapes, Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard and played electronic music into earplugs (even so, some of it leaked out if you listened hard, and I got terribly, terribly sick of Bach, Palestrina and Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us into classes, and we spent a lot of time humoring him, discussing the nature of neutron stars, black holes and Seyfert galaxies, when we were not reviewing test procedures before landing on a new world. The good thing about that was that we managed not to hate each other for half an hour at a time. The rest of the time—well, yes, usually we hated each other. I could not stand Ham Tayeh’s constant shuffling of the cards. Dred developed an unreasoning hostility toward my occasional cigarette. Sam’s armpits were a horror, even in the festering reek of the inside of the capsule, against which the worst of Gateway’s air would have seemed a rose garden. And Klara—well, Klara had this bad habit. She liked asparagus. She had brought four kilos of dehydrated foods with her, just for variety and for something to do; and although she shared them with me, and sometimes with the others, she insisted on eating asparagus now and then all by herself. Asparagus makes your urine smell funny. It is not a romantic thing to know when your darling has been eating asparagus by the change in air quality in the common toilet.
And yet—she was my darling, all right, she really was. We had not just been screwing in those endless hours in the lander; we had been talking. I have never known the inside of anyone’s head a fraction as well as I came to know Klara’s. I had to love her. I could not help it, and I could not stop. Ever.
On the twenty-third day I was playing with Ham’s electronic piano when I suddenly felt seasick. The fluctuating gray force, that I had come hardly to notice, was abruptly intensifying.
I looked up and met Klara’s eyes. She was timorously, almost weepily smiling. She pointed, and all up through the sinuous curves of the spiral of glass, golden sparks were chasing themselves like bright minnows in a stream.
We grabbed each other and held on, laughing, as space swooped around us and bottom became top. We had reached turnaround. And we had margin to spare.
15
Sigfrid’s office is of course under the Bubble, like anybody else’s. It can’t be too hot or too cold. But sometimes it feels that way. I say to him, “Christ, it’s hot in here. Your air conditioner is malfunctioning.”
“I don’t have an air conditioner, Robbie,” he says patiently. “Getting back to your mother—”
“Screw my mother,” I say. “Screw yours, too.”
There is a pause. I know what his circuits are thinking, and I feel I will regret that impetuous remark. So I add quickly, “I mean, I’m really uncomfortable, Sigfrid. It’s hot in here.”
“You are hot in here,” he corrects me.
“What?”
“My sensors indicate that your temperature goes up almost a degree whenever we talk about certain subjects: your mother, the woman Gelle-Klara Moynlin, your first trip, your third trip, Dane Metchnikov and excretion.”
“Well, that’s great,” I yell, suddenly angry. “You’re telling me you spy on me?”
“You know that I monitor your external signs, Robbie,” he says reprovingly. “There is no harm in that. It is no more significant than a friend observing that you blush or stammer, or drum your fingers.”
“So you say.”
“I do say that, Rob. I tell you this because I think you should know that these subjects are charged with some emotional overload for you. Would you like to talk about why that might be?”
“No! What I’d like to talk about is you, Sigfrid! What other little secrets are you holding out on me? Do you count my erections? Bug my bed? Tap my phone?”
“No, Rob. I don’t do any of those things.”
“I certainly hope that’s the truth, Sigfrid. I have my ways of knowing when you lie.”
Pause. “I don’t think I understand what you are saying, Rob.”
“You don’t have to,” I sneer. “You’re just a machine.” It’s enough that I understand. It is very important to me to have that little secret from Sigfrid. In my pocket is the slip of paper that S. Ya. Lavorovna gave me one night, full of pot, wine, and great sex. One day soon I will take it out of my pocket, and then we will see which of us is the boss. I really enjoy this contest with Sigfrid. It gets me angry. When I am angry I forget that very large place where I hurt, and go on hurting, and don’t know how to stop.