was out of sight, he began trudging back toward the work site. He was nearly an hour overdue.
“Where you been?” Novotny asked him quietly after watching him hobble the last quarter of a mile in stony silence. He was squinting at the lineman with that faintly puzzled look that Relke recognized as a most ominous omen. The squint was lopsided because of a cut under one eye, and it looked like a chip was missing from a tooth.
Relke showed his stiff leg and bounced the heel against the ground a couple of times. “I walked too far, and the c.p. valves got jammed. Sorry, Joe.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. Let’s see.”
The pusher satisfied himself that the suit was malfunctioning. He waved the lineman toward the barrack train. “Go to supply and get it fixed. Get back on the double. You’ve slowed us down.”
Relke paused. “You sore, Joe?”
“We’re on duty. I don’t get sore on duty. I save it up. Now—haul ass!”
Relke hobbled off. “What about… what you went for, Joe?” he called back. “What happened?”
“I told you to keep your nose out of politics!” the pusher snapped. “Never mind what happened.”
Joe, Relke decided, was plenty sore. About something. Maybe about a beating that backfired. Maybe about Relke taking an hour awol. Either way, he was in trouble. He thought it over and decided that paying a bootleg ship ten thousand to take him back to Earth with them hadn’t been such a hysterical whim after all.
But then he met Larkin in the supply wagon. Larkin was stretched out flat on his back, and a medic kept saying, “Who did it to you? Who did it to you?” and Larkin kept telling him to go to hell out of a mouth that looked like a piece of singed stew meat. Kunz was curled up on a blanket and looked even worse. He spat in his sleep and a bit of tooth rattled across the deck.
“Meanest bunch of bastards I ever saw,” the clerk told Relke while he checked in the suit. “They don’t even give you a chance. Here were these two guys sleeping in their bunks and not bothering anybody, and what do you think?”
“I quit thinking. What?”
“Somebody starts working them over. Wham. Don’t even wake them up first. Just wham. You ever see anything like it? Mean, John, just mean. You can’t even get a shift’s sleep anymore. You better go to bed with a knife in your boot, John.”
“It’s Bill.”
“Oh. What do you suppose makes a guy that mean anyway?”
“I don’t know. Everybody’s jumpy, I guess.”
The clerk looked at him wisely. “There you have put your finger on it, John. Looney nerves. The jitters. Everybody’s suit-happy.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “You know how I tell when the camp’s getting jittery?”
“Listen, check me out a suit. I’ve got to get back to the line.”
“Now wait, this’ll surprise you. I can tell better than the psych checkers when everybody’s going on a slow panic. It’s the sleeping bag liners.”
“What?”
“The bed wetters, John. You’d be surprised how many grown men turn bed wetters about the middle of a hitch. At first, nobody. Then somebody gets killed on the line. The bag liners start coming in for cleaning. By the end of the hitch, the wash tank smells like a public lavatory, John. Not just the men, either. Some of the engineers. You know what I’m doing?”
“Look, Mack, the suit…”
“Not Mack. Frank. Look, I’ll show you the chart.” He got out a sheet of paper with a crudely drawn graph on it. “See how it goes? The peak? I’ve done ten of them.”
“Why?”
The clerk looked at him blankly. “For the idea box, John. Didn’t you know about the prizes? Doctor Esterhall ought to be glad to get information like this.”
“Christ, they’ll give you a medal, Charley. Now give me my damn suit before I get it myself. I’m due on the line.”
“OK, OK. You got the jitters yourself, haven’t you?” He went to get the suit. “I just happened to think,” he called back. “If you’ve been turning in liners yourself, don’t worry about me. I don’t keep names, and I don’t remember faces.”
“You blab plenty, though,” Relke grumbled to himself. The clerk heard him. “No call to get sore, John.”
“I’m not sore, I’m just in a hurry. If you want to beg for a stomping, it’s nothing to me.”
The clerk came back bristling. “Who’s going to stomp?”
“The bed wetters, I guess.” He started getting into the suit.
“Why? It’s for science, isn’t it?”
“Nobody likes to be watched.”
“There you put your finger on it, John. It’s the watching part that’s worst. If they’d only quit watching us, or come out where we could see them! You know what I think? I think there’s some of them among us. In disguise.” The clerk smirked mysteriously at what-he-knew-but-wouldn’t-tell.
Relke paused with a zipper halfway up. “Who do you mean—watching? Checkers?”
The clerk snorted and resumed what he had been doing when Relke entered: he was carefully taping his share of stock in Mme. d’Annecy’s venture up on the wall among a display of pin-ups. “You know who I mean,” he muttered.
“No, I don’t.”
“The ones that dug that mine, that’s who.”
“Aliens? Oh, bullspit.”
“Yeah? You’ll see. They’re keeping an eye on us, all right. There’s a guy on the African team that even talked to some of them.”
“Nuts. He’s not the first guy that ever talked to spooks. Or demons. Or saucer pilots. You don’t have to be a Looney to be a lunatic.”
That made the clerk sore, and he stomped off to his sanctum to brood. Relke finished getting into the suit and stepped into the airlock. Some guys had to personify their fear. If there was danger, somebody must be responsible. They had to have an Enemy. Maybe it helped, believing in gremlins from beyond Pluto. It gave you something to hate when your luck was bad.
He met Joe just outside the lock. The pusher was waiting to get in.
“Hey, Pappy, I own up. I was goofing off awhile ago. If you want to be sore—” Relke stopped. Something was wrong. Joe was breathing hard, and he looked sick.
“Christ, I’m not sore!
“What’s wrong, Joe?”
The pusher paused in the hatchway. “Run on back to the line. Keep an eye on Braxton. I’m getting a jeep. Back in a minute.” He went on inside and closed the hatch.
Relke trotted toward the last tower. After a while he could hear Braxton talking in spasms on the frequency. It sounded like sobbing. He decided it
“Theah just isn’t any God,” Bama was moaning. “Theah just couldn’t be a God and be so mean. He was the bes’ frien’ a man evah had, and he nevah did nothin’ to de-serve it. Oh, God, oh, God, why did it have to be
There was a man lying on the ground beside the tower. Relke could see Benet bending over him. Benet was clutching a fistful of the man’s suit. He crossed himself slowly and stood up. A safety team runabout skidded to a halt beside the tower, and three men piled out. Benet spread his hands at them in a wide shrug and turned his back.
“What happened?” Relke asked as he loped up to Beasley.
“Kama was welding. Lije walked over to ask him for a wrench or something. Bama turned around to get it, and Lije sat down on the strut with the hot weld.”
“Blow out?”
“He wasn’t that lucky. Call it a fast slowout.”
