Break a Leg, Jim Harmon [rooftoppers .txt] 📗

I smiled. "Sort of gives you a feeling of confidence and security, doesn't it? It would be unfortunate for anyone who had a great many accidents to be denied the supplies in that Kit, I should think. Of course, it is available only to those filling the position of Accident Prone and doing the work faithfully and according to orders."

"Yes, sir," Charlie mumbled.

"Selby is your personal physician, you realize," I drove on. "He takes care of the rest of us only if he has time left over from you. Why, when I was having my two weeks in the summer as an Ensign, I had to lie for half an hour with a crushed foot while the doctor sprayed our Prone's throat to guard against infection. Let me tell you, I was in quite a bit of pain."

Charlie's pale eyes narrowed as if he had just made a sudden discovery, perhaps about the relationship between us. "You don't make as much money as I do, do you, sir? You don't have a valet? And your bed folds into the bulkhead?"

I thought he was at last beginning to get it. "Yes," I said.

He stood sharply to attention. "Request transfer to position of Assistant Pile Driver, j.g., sir."

I barely halted a groan. He thought I resented him and was deliberately holding him down into the miserable overpaid, overfed job that was beneath him and the talents that so fitted him for the job.

"Request granted."

He would learn.

He had better.

I started to sweat in a gush. He had really better.

I took him into the rear of the ship and showed him where he would sleep. In the oily gloom, he regarded the pad from an old acceleration couch fitted to two scratched and nicked aluminum pipes jury-rigged between two squat tanks containing water for the atomic pile used close to planets where the gravitational field interfered with the star-drive.

"Over here's what you have to keep an eye on, Baxter," I told him.

We walked past the dimly lighted rows of towering fuel lines and cables. Charlie tripped over the hump of a deck-level cable housing. His knee banged against the deck plates and he stood with an effort.

"Careful," I said. "Now that you have limited medical attention, don't break a leg."

Baxter rubbed his leg thoughtfully. "Funny. My grandfather used to be in show business. He told me that telling somebody to break a leg was wishing them good luck."

I cleared my throat. "It would seem in dubious taste, addressed to an accident prone. However, you have my best wishes. You realize that your salary as Prone of 11,000 credits a month and your pay of 23 credits a month as an APD, j.g., are suspended until the Admiralty rules on your case."

"Yes, sir. I realize that, sir."

I stopped him in front of the soiled red box that was the tension gauge. "If the electrical control of the drive somehow becomes broken, the interrupted circuit will show on the gauge. It is then the duty of the APD, j.g., to go through the small airlock and maintain manual control of the pile while at least one of the control circuits is repaired. The job rarely has to be done, but when it is, it is very often fatal."

Baxter only nodded. "I understand."

I doubted that he did.

After leaving Baxter on his first watch, I went to the messhall and waited for him to show up. The men knew what to do when he came.

It was rather pleasant to sit there savoring the odors. At times, they still seem more like those of a chemical laboratory than a kitchen, but I have become so used to associating burning starch products, centrifuged tannic acid, and melting dextrose with food that I am almost immune to the aroma of Prone food like juicy, sizzling steak. Almost.

Charlie Baxter finally came through the hatch. He paused and seemed to shake off what he must have thought was some olfactory hallucination and started to sit down at the table with the rest of the men. He looked rather pleased. He had probably decided being Accident Prone had deprived him of much of the company he had every right to enjoy with his shipmates.

"Get out of here!" Frank Peirmonte yelled, jumping up from the other end of the oblong table.

"Why?" Baxter asked in astonishment.

"Baxter," I put in, "I'm afraid the men think they may catch radiation fever from a pile driver like you."

"Catch radiation fever?" he repeated. "Men have been exposed to atomics for hundreds of years. Surely you men must know any poisoning in one individual can't be transmitted to another like germs. I couldn't absorb enough radiation to be dangerous to you in simple proximity and still be alive. Don't you see that?"

At once, all of my crew at the table covered their faces with their arms.

"Don't look at us!" Bronoski screamed, his voice knifing toward the higher octaves.

Baxter gaped in a daze from one of us to the other. "What do you mean? Why shouldn't I look at you?"

"You've got The Eye! All pile drivers get it."

"But I have to eat," he objected. "I'm hungry. Really I am."

I swung around and exchanged a few words with Tan Eck, the cook, at the rear hatch. I took a steaming tray and went across the compartment, averting my face.

"You will have to forgive these superstitious spacemen," I apologized to Baxter. "You go right ahead and eat just outside the door. I won't mind a bit."

"Thanks," Baxter said, accepting the plate. He looked down at the white paste, black gum and cup of yellowish liquid fitted in the proper holes and slots, then up at me. "What is this stuff?"

"You don't have to look right at me!" I snapped. "It is standard spaceman's fare—re-reconstituted carbohydrates, protein and hot ground roasted soya. This is stuff we had left over on our plates from lunch, all set to go into the converter, but Tan Eck reprocessed it for you. It's what regulations specify for an APD, j.g."

Baxter opened his mouth and closed it hard. "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

He turned smartly to leave and I halted him with a palm up. "Baxter."

He turned. "Yes, sir?"

"We are moving to the other side of the continent to continue with the re-survey. I want to make it clear to you that you are absolutely forbidden to leave the ship. We can't spare the guards for your liabilities, now that you have thrown away your value."

"Yes, sir."

Even at the time, I was gratified by the sudden thoughtful narrowing of his eyes.

I wasn't surprised the next day when Bronoski reported that Charlie Baxter had taken a bacpac—food, soap, blankets and so forth—and left the Hilliard. He was determined to prove that he wasn't merely Accident Prone and could get things done on his own.

"Charterson and Von Elderman are following him?" I asked.

Bronoski nodded his bullet-shaped head. "Like a hawk."

"The Bird can follow him like a hawk. I want them to follow him like men."

"They are as good at the job as I am," Bronoski reassured me.

"I think," I said quickly, "that I had better go down to Communications and follow Baxter myself."

The Bird was an electronic device. It looked like a local life-form that was actually a flying mammal. Inside the thing was was a sensitive video camera and a self-propulsion unit.

The Bird homed in on Baxter's electroencephalograph waves.

The view on the screen in front of the lounging chairs was clear but monotonous.

Charlie made his way across the landscape, woods on this side of the continent, not jungle, without incident. He did fall down like a wet laundry bag every so often, but that, as you'd figure, amounted to traveling across country without incident. He'd have done the same on a smooth pavement.

I had a cigarette in my mouth, futilely pounding my pockets for the lighter I didn't have, when Charlie met the alien.

There was only one native this time, the same thin form, but more lightly clothed here. I shifted uneasily and hoped the two guards were close. There was only one this time, but it was useless to suppose Charlie could handle him himself.

"Greetings," Charlie said. "I am Big Brother of a new Family."

There was no sound equipment in the Bird, but the translator circuits in the control board read Baxter's lips and produced their sound patterns for us. They would also translate the native's language, but just then he wasn't saying anything.

He walked around the Prone leisurely, as if considering buying him.

Charlie shifted the straps of his pack. He hadn't been convinced of his own abilities enough to take along a gun or any other kind of weapon. He would be almost sure to kill himself with it.

Or would he?

I suddenly wondered if Charlie doubted himself enough to commit outright suicide. He had had plenty of close calls, yet he had always survived. If his goal was self-destruction, he surely would have reached it after this many opportunities.

I watched the screen intently.

Charlie thought he was alone there with a possibly hostile native. All he had to do was make one