Sergeant Blazynski stepped out from behind one of the tanks and saluted. I didn’t return his salute.

“What the hell is that?” In all that universe of gray, there was one spot of color.

“It’s a cat, sir.”

“Do tell.” A big one, too, and bright calico. It looked ridiculous, draped over the sergeant’s shoulder. “Let me rephrase the question: what the hell is a cat doing here?”

“It’s the maintenance squad’s mascot, sir.” The cat raised its head enough to hiss half-heartedly at me, then returned to its flaccid repose.

I looked at Charlie and he shrugged back. “It seems kind of cruel,” he said. To the sergeant: “You won’t get much use of it. After twenty-five gees, it’ll be just so much fur and guts.”

“Oh no, sir! Sirs.” He ruffed back the fur between the creature’s shoulders. It had a fluorocarbon fitting imbedded there, just like the one above my hipbone. “We bought it at a store on Stargate, already modified. Lots of ships have them now, sir. The Commodore signed the forms for us.”

Well, that was her right; maintenance was under both of us equally. And it was her ship. “You couldn’t have gotten a dog?” God, I hated cats. Always sneaking around.

“No, sir, they don’t adapt. Can’t take free fall.”

“Did you have to make any special adaptations? In the tank?” Charlie asked.

“No sir. We had an extra couch.” Great; that meant I’d be sharing a tank with the animal. “We only had to shorten the straps.

“It takes a different kind of drug for the cell-wall strengthening, but that was included in the price.”

Charlie scratched it behind an ear. It purred softly but didn’t move. “Seems kind of stupid. The animal, I mean.”

“We drugged him ahead of time.” No wonder it was so inert; the drug slows your metabolism down to a rate barely adequate to sustain life. “Makes it easier to strap him in.”

“Guess it’s all right,” I said. Maybe good for morale. “But if it starts getting in the way, I’ll personally recycle it.”

“Yes, sir!” he said, visibly relieved, thinking that I couldn’t really do anything like that to such a cute bundle of fur. Try me, buddy.

So we had seen it all. The only thing left, this side of the engines, was the huge hold where the fighters and drones waited, clamped in their massive cradles against the coming acceleration. Charlie and I went down to take a look, but there were no windows on our side of the airlock. I knew there’d be one on the inside, but the chamber was evacuated, and it wasn’t worth going through the fill-and-warm cycle merely to satisfy our curiosity.

I was starting to feel really supernumerary. Called Hilleboe and she said everything was under control. With an hour to kill, we went back to the lounge and had the computer mediate a game of Kriegspieler, which was just starting to get interesting when the ten-minute warning sounded.

The acceleration tanks had a “half-life-to-failure” of five weeks; there was a fifty-fifty chance that you could stay immersed for five weeks before some valve or tube popped and you were squashed like a bug underfoot. In practice, it had to be one hell of an emergency to justify using the tanks for more than two weeks’ acceleration. We were only going under for ten days, this first leg of our journey.

Five weeks or five hours, though, it was all the same as far as the tankee was concerned. Once the pressure got up to an operational level, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name.

So I wasn’t really surprised that no time seemed to have passed when I was suddenly dry, my body tingling with the return of sensation. The place sounded like an asthmatics’ convention in the middle of a hay field: thirty-nine people and one cat all coughing and sneezing to get rid of the last residues of fluorocarbon. While I was fumbling with my straps, the side door opened, flooding the tank with painfully bright light. The cat was the first one out, with a general scramble right behind him. For the sake of dignity, I waited until last.

Over a hundred people were milling around outside, stretching and massaging out cramps. Dignity! Surrounded by acres of young female flesh, I stared into their faces and desperately tried to solve a third-order differential equation in my head, to circumvent the gallant reflex. A temporary expedient, but it got me to the elevator.

Hilleboe was shouting orders, getting people lined up, and as the doors closed I noticed that all of one platoon had a uniform light bruise, from head to foot. Twenty pairs of black eyes. I’d have to see both Maintenance and Medical about that.

After I got dressed.

4

We stayed at one gee for three weeks, with occasional periods of free fall for navigation check, while the Masaryk II made a long, narrow loop away from the collapsar Resh-10, and back again. That period went all right, the people adjusting pretty well to ship routine. I gave them a minimum of busy-work and a maximum of training review and exercise — for their own good, though I wasn’t naive enough to think they’d see it that way.

After about a week of one gee, Private Rudkoski (the cook’s assistant) had a still, producing some eight liters a day of 95 percent ethyl alcohol. I didn’t want to stop him, life was cheerless enough; I didn’t mind as long as people showed up for duty sober — but I was damned curious both how he managed to divert the raw materials out of our sealed-tight ecology, and how the people paid for their booze. So I used the chain of command in reverse, asking Alsever to find out. She asked Jarvil, who asked Carreras, who sat down with Orban, the cook. Turned out that Sergeant Orban had set the whole thing up, letting Rudkoski do the dirty work, and was aching to brag about it to a trustworthy person.

If I had ever taken meals with the enlisted men and women, I might have figured out that something odd was going on. But the scheme didn’t extend up to officers’ country.

Through Rudkoski, Orban had jury-rigged a ship-wide economy based on alcohol. It went like this:

Each meal was prepared with one very sugary dessert-jelly, custard or plain which you were free to eat if you could stand the cloying taste. But if it was still on your tray when you presented it at the recycling window, Rudkoski would give you a ten-cent chit and scrape the sugary stuff into a fermentation vat. He had two twenty-liter vats, one “working” while the other was being filled.

The ten-cent chit was at the bottom of a system that allowed you to buy a half-liter of straight ethyl (with your choice of flavoring) for five dollars. A squad of five people who skipped all of their desserts could buy about a liter a week, enough for a party but not enough to constitute a public health problem.

When Diana brought me this information, she also brought a bottle of Rudkoski’s Worst — literally; it was a flavor that just hadn’t worked. It came up through the chain of command with only a few centimeters missing.

Its taste was a ghastly combination of strawberry and caraway seed. With a perversity not uncommon to people who rarely drink, Diana loved it. I had some ice water brought up, and she got totally blasted within an hour. For myself, I made one drink and didn’t finish it.

When she was more than halfway to oblivion, mumbling a reassuring soliloquy to her liver, she suddenly tilted her head up to stare at me with childlike directness.

“You have a real problem, Major William.”

“Not half the problem you’ll have in the morning, Lieutenant Doctor Diana.”

“Oh not really.” She waved a drunken hand in front of her face. “Some vitamins, some glu … cose, an eensy cc of adren … aline if all else fails. You … you … have … a real … problem.”