Five weeks or five hours, though, it was all the same as far as the tankee was concerned. Once the pressure got up to an operational level, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name.
So I wasn’t really surprised that no time seemed to have passed when I was suddenly dry, my body tingling with the return of sensation. The place sounded like an asthmatics’ convention in the middle of a hay field: thirty-nine people and one cat all coughing and sneezing to get rid of the last residues of fluorocarbon. While I was fumbling with my straps, the side door opened, flooding the tank with painfully bright light. The cat was the first one out, with a general scramble right behind him. For the sake of dignity, I waited until last.
Over a hundred people were milling around outside, stretching and massaging out cramps. Dignity! Surrounded by acres of young female flesh, I stared into their faces and desperately tried to solve a third-order differential equation in my head, to circumvent the gallant reflex. A temporary expedient, but it got me to the elevator.
Hilleboe was shouting orders, getting people lined up, and as the doors closed I noticed that all of one platoon had a uniform light bruise, from head to foot. Twenty pairs of black eyes. I’d have to see both Maintenance and Medical about that.
After I got dressed.
4
We stayed at one gee for three weeks, with occasional pariods of free fall for navigation check, while the Masaiyk 11 made a long, narrow loop away from the collapsar Resh10, and back again. That period went all right, the people adjusting pretty well to ship routine. I gave them a minimum of busy-work and a maximum of training review and exercise-for their own good, though I wasn’t naive enough to think they’d see it that way.
After about a week of one gee, Private Rudkoski (the cook’s assistant) had a still, producing some eight liters a day of 95 percent ethyl alcohol. I didn’t want to stop him- life was cheerless enough; I didn’t mind as long as people showed up for duty sober-but I was damned curious both how he managed to divert the raw materials out of our sealed-tight ecology, and how the people paid for their booze. So I used the chain of command in reverse, asking Alsever to find out. She asked Jarvil, who asked Carreras, who sat down with Orban, the cook. Turned out that Sergeant Orban had set the whole thing up, letting Rudkoski do the dirty work, and was aching to brag about it to a trustworthy person.
If I had ever taken meals with the enlisted men and women, I might have figured out that something odd was going on. But the scheme didn’t extend up to officers’ country.
Through Rudkoski, Orban had juryrigged a ship-wide economy based on alcohol. It went like this:
Each meal was prepared with one very sugary dessert- jelly, custard or flan-which you were free to eat if you could stand the cloying taste. But if it was still on your tray when you presented it at the recycling window, Rudkoski would give you a Len-cent chit and scrape the sugary stuff into a fermentation vat. He had two twenty-liter vats, one “working” while the other was being filled.
The ten-cent chit was at the bottom of a system that allowed you to buy a half-liter of straight ethyl (with your choice of flavoring) for five dollars. A squad of five people who skipped all of their desserts could buy about a liter a week, enough for a party but not enough to constitute a public health problem.
When Diana brought me this information, she also brought a bottle of Rudkoski’s Worst-literally; it was a flavor that just hadn’t worked. It came up through the chain of command with only a few centimeters missing.
Its taste was a ghastly combination of strawberry and caraway seed. With a perversity not uncommon to people who rarely drink, Diana loved it. I had some ice water brought up, and she got totally blasted within an hour. For myself, I made one drink and didn’t finish it.