The Best of Frederik Pohl

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I took three of them. I don't like to start them before midnight, but anyway I stopped shaking.

I closed my eyes, and then I was on the ship again. The noise in the bar became the noise of the rockets and the air washers and the sludge sluicers. I began to sweat, although this place was air-conditioned too. I could hear Wally whistling to himself the way he did, the sound muffled by his oxygen mask and drowned in the rocket noise, only still perfectly audible. The tune was Sophisticated Lady. Sometimes it was Easy to Love and sometimes Chasing Shadows, but mostly Sophisticated Lady. He was from Juiliard. Somebody sneezed, and it sounded just like Chowderhead sneezing. You know how everybody sneezes according to his own individual style? Chowderhead had a ladylike little sneeze-it went hutta, real quick, all through the mouth, no nose involved. The captain went Hrasssh! Wally was Ashoo, ashoo, ashoo. Gilvey was Hutch-uh. Sam didn't sneeze much, but he sort of coughed and sprayed, and that was worse. Sometimes I used to think about killing Sam by tying him down and having Wally and the captain sneeze him to death. But that was a kind of a joke, naturally, when I was feeling good. Or pretty good. Usually I thought about a knife for Sam. For Chowderhead it was a gun, right in the belly, one shot. For Wally it was a tommy-gun - just stitching him up and down, you know, back and forth. The captain was putting him in a cage with hungry lions, and Gilvey was strangling with my bare hands. That was probably because of the cough, I guess.

She was back. "Please tell me about it," she begged. "I'm so curious."

I opened my eyes.

"You want me to tell you about it?"

"Oh, please!"

"About what it's like to fly to Mars on a rocket?"

"Yes!"

"All right," I said. It's wonderful what three little white pills will do. I wasn't even shaking. "There's six men, see? In a space the size of a Buick, and that's all the room there is. Two of us in the bunks all the time, four of us on watch. Maybe you want to stay in the sack an extra ten minutes-because it's the only place on the ship where you can stretch out, you know, the only place where you can rest without somebody's elbow in your side. But you can't. Because by then it's the next man's turn. And maybe you don't have elbows in your side while it's your turn off watch, but in the starboard bunk there's the air regenerator master valve-I bet I could still show you the business, right around my kidneys-and in the port bunk there's the emergency escape hatch handle. That gets you right in the temple, if you turn your head too fast. And you can't really sleep-I mean not soundly-because of the noise. That is, when the rockets are going. When they aren't going, then you're in free-fall, and that's bad too, because you dream about falling. But when they're going, I don't know, I think it's worse. It's pretty loud. And even if it weren't for the noise, if you sleep too soundly you might roll over on your oxygen line. Then you dream about drowning. Ever do that? You're struggling and choking and you can't get any air? It isn't dangerous, I guess. Anyway, it always woke me up in time. Though I heard about a fellow in a flight six years ago - "Well. So you've always got this oxygen mask on, all the time, except if you take it off for a second to talk to somebody. You don't do that very often, because what is there to say? Oh, maybe the first couple of weeks, sure-everybody's friends then. You don't even need the mask, for that matter. Or not very much. Everybody's still pretty clean. The place smells-oh, let's see-about like the locker room in a gym. You know? You can stand it. That's if nobody's got space sickness, of course. We were lucky that way. I heard about a flight where two of the crew got space sickness on the first course correction, and chucked up all over the place the second day out. Man! But that's about the way it's going to get anyway, you know. Outside the masks it's soup. It isn't that you smell it so much. You kind of taste it, in the back of your mouth, and your eyes sting. That's after the first two or three months. Later on it gets worse. And with the mask on, of course, the oxygen mixture is coming in under pressure. That's funny if you're not used to it. Your lungs have to work a little bit harder to get rid of it, especially after you're asleep, so after a while the muscles get sore. And then they get sorer. And then- "Well.