The Stoker and the Stars | Page 3

MacReidie who first found out what he'd done during the war.
I've got to explain about MacReidie. He takes his opinions fast and strong. He's a good man--is, or was; I haven't seen him for a long while--but he liked things simple.
MacReidie said the duffelbag broke loose and floated into the middle of the bunkroom during acceleration. He opened it to see whose it was. When he found out, he closed it up and strapped it back in its place at the foot of the stoker's bunk.
MacReidie was my relief on the bridge. When he came up, he didn't relieve me right away. He stood next to my chair and looked out through the ports.
"Captain leave any special instructions in the Order Book?" he asked.
"Just the usual. Keep a tight watch and proceed cautiously."
"That new stoker," Mac said.
"Yeah?"
"I knew there was something wrong with him. He's got an old Marine uniform in his duffel."
I didn't say anything. Mac glanced over at me. "Well?"
"I don't know." I didn't.
I couldn't say I was surprised. It had to be something like that, about the stoker. The mark was on him, as I've said.
It was the Marines that did Earth's best dying. It had to be. They were trained to be the best we had, and they believed in their training. They were the ones who slashed back the deepest when the other side hit us. They were the ones who sallied out into the doomed spaces between the stars and took the war to the other side as well as any human force could ever hope to. They were always the last to leave an abandoned position. If Earth had been giving medals to members of her forces in the war, every man in the Corps would have had the Medal of Honor two and three times over. Posthumously. I don't believe there were ten of them left alive when Cope was shot. Cope was one of them. They were a kind of human being neither MacReidie nor I could hope to understand.
"You don't know," Mac said. "It's there. In his duffel. Damn it, we're going out to trade with his sworn enemies! Why do you suppose he wanted to sign on? Why do you suppose he's so eager to go!"
"You think he's going to try to start something?"
"Think! That's exactly what he's going for. One last big alley fight. One last brawl. When they cut him down--do you suppose they'll stop with him? They'll kill us, and then they'll go in and stamp Earth flat! You know it as well as I do."
"I don't know, Mac," I said. "Go easy." I could feel the knots in my stomach. I didn't want any trouble. Not from the stoker, not from Mac. None of us wanted trouble--not even Mac, but he'd cause it to get rid of it, if you follow what I mean about his kind of man.
Mac hit the viewport with his fist. "Easy! Easy--nothing's easy. I hate this life," he said in a murderous voice. "I don't know why I keep signing on. Mars to Centaurus and back, back and forth, in an old rust tub that's going to blow herself up one of these--"
* * * * *
Daniels called me on the phone from Communications. "Turn up your Intercom volume," he said. "The stoker's jamming the circuit."
I kicked the selector switch over, and this is what I got:
"--so there we were at a million per, and the air was gettin' thick. The Skipper says 'Cheer up, brave boys, we'll--'"
He was singing. He had a terrible voice, but he could carry a tune, and he was hammering it out at the top of his lungs.
"Twas the last cruise of the Venus, by God you should of seen us! The pipes were full of whisky, and just to make things risky, the jets were ..."
The crew were chuckling into their own chest phones. I could hear Daniels trying to cut him off. But he kept going. I started laughing myself. No one's supposed to jam an intercom, but it made the crew feel good. When the crew feels good, the ship runs right, and it had been a long time since they'd been happy.
He went on for another twenty minutes. Then his voice thinned out, and I heard him cough a little. "Daniels," he said, "get a relief down here for me. Jump to it!" He said the last part in a Master's voice. Daniels didn't ask questions. He sent a man on his way down.
He'd been singing, the stoker had. He'd been singing while he worked with one arm dead, one sleeve ripped open and badly patched because the fabric was slippery with blood. There'd been a flashover in the drivers. By the time his relief got down there, he had the