He wasn’t sure. It was all human judgment. The hisa had watched the sky for as long as hisa remembered, from before humans left Earth. Waiting for something to happen from their clouded, starless sky. Was it a cultural dead end they’d reached?

“You know a lot of stuff,” Jeremy said.

“I’m two years short of a degree in Planetary Science. You know? It’s my life . It’s what’s important to me. And somebody aboard asked me why study planets.”

“Because you want to know!” Jeremy said, which did a lot to patch that young woman’s careless dismissal. “Because you want to know stuff. I do, anyway.”

“I don’t think what I know is real useful here.”

“You know science, don’t you?”

“A lot of life science.”

“Well, tell JR. I’ll bet he’d be interested. Life science is what keeps us breathing, case of what’s important, here. You probably ought to talk to Jake. He’s the bioneer.”

“Probably I should,” he said, “talk to Parton, that is.” Dealing with JR, he preferred to keep to a minimum. “Maybe I could do something besides laundry. ”

“Oh, everybody does laundry sooner or later,” Jeremy said. “Just the chief engineer sends all the junior engineers to do it, right along with maintenance, and the chief doesn’t unless he loses a bet. But you ’prentice to Jake, is what you do. Me, I’m off studies for the last couple of jumps because I’m watching you so you don’t turn green and die. Usually I’m on study tape. That’s where Vince goes after shift, That’s where Linda goes. You just do sims until there’s a rush on, and then they call you in, like me, I do beginner pilot sims and scan sims, because if I don’t make the cut when I’m big enough, you know, for the real test stuff, there’s got to be something for me to do. God, I really don’t want to do scan. I really hate it.” Jeremy was slapping his fist against his leg, that nervousness he got from vid-games; now Fletcher knew where it came from. “But even if I make Helm, I’ll have to sit Scan in a crisis. Same as Linda. She likes it, though. She thinks it’s great.”

“What’s Vince?” He had to know. The set wasn’t complete.

“Vince, he’s Legal. That’s what he wants to do, can you believe it? That and archive and files and library. It’s about the same. Records.”

Vince at a desk, doing painstaking work. A lawyer. A librarian. Their hothead wanted to keep books? The mind didn’t easily form that image. Plead in court? The judge would throw Vince in jail.

“I think you ought to talk to Jake, though,” Jeremy said.

“I’m sure they’ve got my records.” They don’t care, was in his mind. But also there was the glimmer of a use for himself. Not the use he wanted, but it was using something he knew and having contact with the systems on a ship that did technically interest him. A foam-steel planet, in those respects, recycling its atmosphere and doing so in systems he wanted to see.

“You want me to talk to Jake?” Jeremy asked.

“I’ll talk to him, sooner or later.” He tucked the stick back into the drawer, and shut it “Right now I guess it’s enough I don’t turn green and die.”

“Medical said let you go through maybe four, five jumps before you do anything like tape. The captains used to not let any of us do it. Used to make us learn with books. But the information just comes too fast, that’s what Paul said. Helm said if pilots could do tape-sims to keep their skills up then the rest of us weren’t going to go azi-fied on a calculus tape. I’m glad. Dead-on I’d be an azi if I had to learn calculus out of a book. You’d just see the blank behind the eyes…” Jeremy gave his rendition of an automaten. “Did you learn from books on Pell?”

“Tape, mostly. Lots of tape. Same thing. They’ve come round to thinking it’s all right. I brought some with me,—All right, I lied. I’ve got tapes. Some of the environmental stuff. My biochem.” Just the pretty ones, those first of all. The ones with pictures of home. His home. He didn’t think he could take them right now. It still hurt too much. “You can try one if you want.” Turning Jeremy into somebody he could really talk to about Downbelow was a bonus he hadn’t expected when he’d packed the tapes. But that seemed possible, and his spirits were higher than they had been since he’d boarded.

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “Sure! Wild! Can I borrow one tonight?”

He opened the drawer, took out his tape case, took out a pretty one.

And hesitated. “It could be scary for you. I don’t know. It’s a planet. You feel the weather. Thunder and all. It’s a pretty good effect.”

“Oh, hell,” Jeremy said. “Can’t be that bad.” Jeremy took the tape and opened the wall panel at the side of his bunk, looking for pills.

“Take a quarter-dose, no more. This is stationer tape. Planetary tape. Lightning and reverse-curve horizons. If you climb the walls tonight it won’t be my fault.”

Jeremy grinned at him and shook out a pill. He split it. Offered the other half to him.

He opted for the biochem tape for his own reader. It wasn’t jump they faced, just a night’s sleep, and a night of no dreams but the ones the tape provided—a Downbelow tour for Jeremy and a night of life process chemistry for him.

He didn’t care that he was into Chad for a room cleaning. He settled down with the headset and the tape going and with the drug that flattened out your objections to information coursing through his bloodstream.

It was the first time he’d taken tape aboard. It was the first time he’d trusted the people he was with enough to take that drug that made you so helpless, so compliant, so ready to believe what you were told. You didn’t learn around strangers. You didn’t, in his own experience, do it anywhere but locked in your own private room, safe from outside suggestion, but he felt safe to try, finally, in Jeremy’s presence.

It meant a good night’s sleep, a night in which he was back in things he knew and terms he understood. You forgot little details if you didn’t use what you learned; tape could sharpen up what was getting hazy in your mind, and if he talked to Jake in engineering as Jeremy suggested, about getting into something that offered a little more headwork, he wanted to be sharp enough to impress Jake and not sound a fool if Jake asked him questions. This time through the old familiar tape he set his subconscious to wonder about things that a closed system like a ship’s lifesupport might find problematic, and he wondered what tapes the ship’s technical library might have that would let him brush up on specifics of the systems. The ship had a library. They might let him have tapes to study. If they trusted him , which had become an unexpected hurdle.

Talk to JR? Not damned likely.

Chapter 13

There’s a problem,” Bucklin put it, warning JR what was coming, and after that there was a junior staff meeting, a quiet and serial staff meeting, pursued down corridors, anywhere JR could find them. JR found Vince and Linda, among the first, in A deck main corridor, and made them late reporting to breakfast.

“What’s this with a Welcome-in?” he asked “I said, did I not, let him alone?”

There were frowns. There were no effective answers.

He found Connor topside, B deck, and said, “It’s off. No hazing. My orders.”

He found Sue and Nike in A deck lifesupport, and asked, “Whose damn idea was it in the first place?”

He didn’t get a satisfactory answer. What he got was, “He’s a problem. He’s a problem in everything, isn’t he?”

He found Chad, and said, “If he cleans your room, Chad, he just cleans it. You keep your hands off him or you and I are going to go a round.”

Chad wasn’t happy.

He went the whole route. Lyra and Wayne, Toby, and Ashley, all glum faces and unhappy attitudes.