get loaded up and out of there before something happened.
And now something had happened. No one had come down to sit with me. There'd not been a dozen words spoken at the supper table. Everything felt deadly wrong.
Pancake and Hutch had rigged up the chart room for the previewing chore and I busted into it and slammed the door and stood with my back against it. Not only Hutch was there, but Pancake and Frost as well and, in the machine's bucket seat, a man I recognized as one of the engine gang. I stood for a moment without saying anything, and the three of them stared back at me. The man with the helmet on his head didn't notice?he wasn't even there.
'All right, Hutch,' I said, 'come clean. What is this all about? Why is that man previewing? I thought just you and…'
'Captain,' said Frost, 'we were about to tell you.'
'You shut up! I am asking Hutch.'
'Frost is right,' said Hutch. 'We were all set to tell you. But you were so busy and it came a little hard…'
'What's hard about it?'
'Well, you had your heart all set to make yourself a fortune. We were trying to find a way to break it to you gentle.'
I left the door and walked over to him. 'I don't know what you're talking about,' I said, 'but we still make ourselves a killing. There never was a time of day or night, Hutch, that I couldn't beat your head in and if you don't want me to start, you better talk real fast.'
'We'll make no killing, Captain,' Frost said quietly. 'We're taking this stuff back and we'll turn it over to the authorities.'
'All of you are nuts!' I roared. 'For years, we've slaved and sweated, hunting for the jackpot. And now that we have it in our mitts, now that we can walk barefooted through a pile of thousand-dollar bills, you're going chicken on me. What's…'
'It's not right for us to do it, sir,' said Pancake.
And that 'sir' scared me more than anything that had happened so far. Pancake had never called me that before. I looked from one to the other of them and what I saw in their faces chilled me to the bone. Every single one of them thought just the same as Pancake. 'That orientation course!' I shouted.
Hutch nodded. 'It explained about honesty and honour.'
'What do you scamps know about honesty and honour?' I raged. 'There ain't a one of you that ever drew an honest breath.'
'We never knew about it before,' said Pancake, 'but we know about it now.'
'It's just propaganda! It's just a dirty trick the professors played on us!'
And it was a dirty trick. Although you have to admit the professors knew their onions. I don't know if they figured us humans for a race of heels or if the orientation course was just normal routine. But no wonder they hadn't questioned me. No wonder they'd made no investigation before handing us their knowledge. They had us stopped before we could even make a move.
'We felt that since we had learned about honesty,' said Frost, 'it was only right the rest of the crew should know. It's an awful kind of life we've been living, Captain.'
'So', said Hutch, 'we been bringing in the men, one by one, and orienting them. We figured it was the least that we could do. This man is about the last of them.'
'A missionary,' I said to Hutch. 'So that is what you are. Remember what you told me one night? You said you wouldn't be a missionary no matter what they paid you.'
'There's no need of that,' Frost replied coldly. 'You can't shame us and you can't bully us. We know we are right.'
'But the money! What about the corporation? We had it all planned out!'
Frost said: 'You might as well forget it, Captain. When you take the course.'
'I'm not taking any course.' My voice must have been as deadly as I felt, for not a one of them made a move toward me. 'If any of you mealy-mouthed missionaries feel an urge to make me, you can start trying right now.'
They still didn't move. I had them bluffed. But there was no point in arguing with them. There was nothing I could do against that stone wall of honesty and honour. I turned my back on them and walked to the door. At the door, I stopped. I said to Frost: 'You better turn Doc loose and give him the cure. Tell him it's all right with me. He has it coming to him. It will serve him right.'
Then I shut the door behind me and went up the catwalk to my cabin. I locked the door, a thing I'd never done before. I sat down on the edge of the bunk and stared at the wall and thought.
There was just one thing they had forgotten. This was my ship, not theirs. They were just the crew and their papers had run out long ago and never been renewed.
I got down on my hands and knees and hauled out the tin box I kept the papers in. I went through it systematically and sorted out the papers that I needed?the title to the ship and the registry and the last papers they had signed.
I laid the papers on the bunk and shoved the box out of the way and sat down again. I picked up the papers and shuffled them from one hand to the other. I could throw them off the ship any time I wished. I could take off without them and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, they could do about it. And what was more, I could get away with it. It was legal, of course, but it was a rotten thing to do. Now that they were honest men and honourable, though, they'd bow to the legality and let me get away with it. And in such a case, they had no one but themselves to thank.
I sat there for a long time thinking, but my thoughts went round and round and mostly had to do with things out of the past?how Pancake had gotten tangled up in the nettle patch out in the Coonskin System and how Doc had fallen in love with (of all things) a tri-sexual being that time we touched at Siro and how Hutch had cornered the liquor supply at Munko, then lost it in a game that was akin to craps except the dice were queer little living entities that you had no control of, which made it tough on Hutch.
A rap came at the door. It was Doc. 'You all full of honesty?' I asked him.
He shuddered. 'Not me. I turned down the offer.'
'It's the same kind of swill you were preaching at me just a couple of days ago.'
'Can't you see,' asked Doc, 'what it would do to the human race?'
'Sure. It'll make them honourable and honest. No one will ever cheat or steal again and it will be cozy…'
'They'll die of complicated boredom,' said Doc. 'Life will become a sort of cross between a Boy Scout jamboree and a ladies' sewing circle. There'll be no loud and unseemly argument and they'll be polite and proper to the point of stupefaction.'
'So you have changed your mind.'
'Not really, Captain. But this is the wrong way to go about it. Whatever progress the race has ever made has been achieved by the due process of social evolution. In any human advance, the villains and the rascals are as important as the forward-looking idealist. They are man's consciences and man can't get along without them.'
'If I were you, Doc,' I said, 'I wouldn't worry so much about the human race. It's a pretty big thing and it can take a lot of bumps. Even an overdose of honesty won't hurt it permanently.' Actually, I didn't give a damn. I had other things on my mind right then.
Doc crossed the room and sat down on the bunk beside me. He leaned over and tapped the papers I still held in my hand. 'You got it all doped out,' he said.
I nodded bleakly. 'Yeah.'
'I thought you would.'
I shot a quick glance at him. 'You were way ahead of me. That's why you switched over.'
Doc shook his head emphatically. 'No. Please believe me, Captain, I feel as bad as you do.'
'It won't work either way.' I shuffled the papers. 'They acted in good faith. They didn't sign aboard, sure. But there was no reason that they should have. It was all understood. Share and share alike. And that's the way it's been for too long to repudiate it now. And we can't keep on. Even if we agreed to dump the stuff right here and blast off and never think of it again, we'd not get rid of it. It would always be there. The past is dead, Doc. It's spoiled. It's smashed and it can't be put back together.' I felt like bawling. It had been a long time since I had felt that full of grief.
