Bright Segment

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Who? Pete or Krakow or that crazy redhead Walkinok? Or Wendover—you all called him Bendover—with all those incomprehensible shaggy-dog stories? Harris? Flacker? Beerbelly Blaustein or Cohen the Wire-haired Terror? Or Shank—what you all called him was a shame? Or Grindes, whose inexplicable nickname was Mickey Mouse. You’d rather hoped it would be Grindes, not because you liked him but because he was the one classmate you’d never known very well. He always looked on and kept his mouth shut. He’d be much more fun to explore than say, old Shank, who was so predictable you could practically talk in chorus with him.

  So you tortured yourself, just for the sake of torture, with your thumb over the intercom button, until even the torture dried out and blew away.

  You pushed.

  You found out first of all that the intercom apparently had its own amplifier, energized when you held the button down, and that it took forever—well, three or four seconds—to warm up. First nothing, then a carrier, then the beginnings of a signal; then at last the voice of your shipmate, rushing up to full volume, as loud and as clear as if the bulkhead did not exist. And you get off that button as if it were suddenly white-hot, as if it had turned into a needle; and you’re cowering against the outboard bulkhead, deep in shock, physically in silence but with that voice going on and on and on, unbelievably in your unbelieving brain.

  It was crying.

  It wept wearily, as if you had tuned in toward the end of a long session of wild and lonesome grief. It cried quietly, exhaustedly, and as if there was in all the universe no hope. And it cried in a voice which was joltingly wrong for this place. It was a light, full voice, a tenor near to contralto in timbre. Its overtones were childlike—not childish; childlike—and it was wrong. Altogether wrong.

  The wild ideas come first: Stowaway?

  You almost laugh. For days before blastoff you were doped and drugged and immersed in high-frequency fields; hypnotized, worked and reworked mentally and physically. You were passively fed and passively instructed; you don’t know now and you may never know all they did to you. But you can be sure it was done inside six concentric rings of “security” of one kind and another, and you can be sure that your shipmate got the same. What it amounted to was concentrated attention from a mob of specialists, every sleeping and waking second from the time you beered it up at the class farewell dinner to the time the accelerator tug lifted your ship and carried it screaming up and outward. Nobody is in this ship but those who belong in it; that you can absolutely bank on.

  Mad idea the second: (Oh no; no! for a while you don’t even dare think it. But with that kind of voice, that crying, you have to think of something. So you do, and you’re scared, scared in a way you’ve never imagined before, and to a degree you didn’t think was possible.) There’s a girl in there!

  You run those wordless syllables, those tired sobs, through your mind again, seeking for vocalizations as separated from the breathy, painful gasping that accompanied them. And you don’t know. You just can’t be sure.

  So punch the button again. Listen some more. Or—ask. But you can’t, you can’t; the crazy idea might be true, and you couldn’t stand that. They couldn’t, they just couldn’t put a girl on these ships with you—and then put her behind the bulkhead.

  Then you have an instant fantasy about all that; you kneel suddenly, bumping your skull on the overhead, and flap your hands around the bulkhead, where it meets deck plates, nose compartment, overhead, after bulkhead; and all around, your fingers ride the bead of a weld. You sit back, sweating a little and half laughing at yourself. Scratch one fantasy; there’ll be no sliding partitions into no harems, this trip.

  You stop laughing and think, they couldn’t be that cruel! You’re on a test run, sure, and it isn’t the ship that’s being tested. You know that and you accept it. But tests, tests … must you throw a glass vase on a brick sidewalk to find out if it’s brittle? You see one of your own hands going up and out to check for a panel, a join again. You sneer at it, and watch it stop in embarrassment and slink home guiltily to the deck beside you.

  Well, say they weren’t that cruel. Who did they put in there?

  Not Walkinok. Not Shank. Not Harris or Cohen, or any cadet. A cadet wouldn’t lie there and cry like that, like a child, a schoolgirl, a baby.

  Some stranger, then. And now the anger comes, shouldering out all the fear. They wouldn’t! This ship is everything a cadet was born for—made for. That tight chain that bound you with the others, an easy thing you all shared and never had to think about, that was a thing that didn’t admit strangers. Aside from that, beyond that: this isn’t a matter of desecrated esprit: it’s a matter of moral justice. Nobody but a cadet deserves a ship! What did you give your life to, and what for? Why did you fluff off marriage, and freedom, and all the wonderful, unpredictable trivialities called “fun” that make most human lives worth living? Why did you hold still for Base routines, for the hazing you got from the upper classmen? Just to have some stranger, someone who wasn’t even a cadet, wander in without training, shaping, conditioning, experience, and get on your ship?

  Oh, it has to be a cadet. It couldn’t be anyone else. Even a cadet that could break down and cry—that’s a more acceptable idea than its being a woman, or a stranger.

  You’re still angry, but now it’s not the kind of anger that stops you. You push the button. You hear the carrier; then the beginnings of something else … ah. Breathing. Difficult, broken breathing, the sound of someone too tired to cry any more, even when crying has changed nothing and there are more tears to come.

  “What the hell are you bawling about?” you yell.

  The breathing goes on, and goes on. Finally it stops for a moment, and then a long, whispery, shuddery sigh. “Hey!” you yell. “Hey—you in there!”

  But there is no answer. The breathing is fainter, more regular. Whoever it is, is going to sleep.

  You press even harder on the button, as if that would do any good, and you yell again, this time not even “Hey!” but a simpler, angrier syllable. You can think only that your shipmate chooses—chooses, by God—not to answer you.

  You’re breathing hard now, but your shipmate isn’t. You hold your breath and listen. You hear the deep, quiet inhalations, and then a small catch, and a little sigh, the ghost of half a sob. “Hey!”

  Nothing.

  You let the button go, and in the sharp silence that replaces the carrier’s faint hum, that wordless syllable builds and builds inside you until it bursts free again. You can tell from the feel of your throat and the ringing in your ears that it’s been a time, a long, long time since you used your voice.

  You’re angry and you’re hurt from these insults to yourself and to your service, and you know what? You feel good. Some of the stereos you have are pretty good; they take you right into battle, into the arms of beautiful women, into danger, and from time to time you could get angry at someone in them. You could, but you haven’t for a long time now. You haven’t laughed or been angry since … since … well, you can’t even remember when. You forgot how and you’ve forgotten just when it was you forgot. And now look. The heart’s going, the sweat … this is fine.

  Push the button again, take another little sip of anger. It’s been aging; it’s vintage stuff. Go ahead. You do, and up comes the carrier.

  “Please,” says the voice. “Please, please … say something else.”

  Your tongue is paralyzed and you choke, suddenly, on a drop of your own saliva. You cough violently, let go the button, and pound yourself on the chest. For a moment you’re in bad shape. Coughing makes your thinking go in spurts, and your thinking is bouncing up and down on the idea that until now you didn’t really believe there was anyone in there at all. You get your wind and push the button again. The voice says, “Are you all right? Can I do anything?”

  You become certain of something else: that isn’t a voice you recognize. If you ever heard it before you sure don’t remember it. Then the content of it hits you. “Can I do
anything?”

  You get mad again. “Yeah,” you growl, “hand me a glass of water.” You don’t have your thumb on the button so you just say what pops into your mind. You shake yourself like a wet bird dog, take a deep breath, and lean on the control again.

  Before you can open your mouth you’re in a hailstorm of hysterical laughter. “Glass of water … uh-uh-uh … that’s good. You don’t know what this means,” says the voice, suddenly sober and plaintive, “I’ve waited so long, I’ve listened to your music and the sound from your stereos … You never talk, you never say anything at all; I never even heard you cough before.”

  Part of your mind reacts to that: That’s unnatural, not even to cough, or laugh aloud or hum. Must be a conditioning. But most of it explodes at this stranger, this intruder, talking away like that without a word of explanation, of apology, talking as if that voice had a right to be here. “Shaddap!”

  “I was beginning to think you were deaf ’n’ dumb. Or maybe even that you weren’t there at all. That was the thing that scared me the most.”

  “Shhut up,” you hiss, with all the fury, all the deadly warning you can command.

  “I knew they wouldn’t,” says the voice happily. “They’d never put a man out here by himself. That would be too—” It stops abruptly as you release the button.

  My God, you think. The dam has boist. That charachter’ll chunter along like that for the duration. You press the button quickly, hear “—all alone out here, you get scared to look out the viewp—” and you cut him off again.

  That stuff like an invisible mist you see melting away is all that conjecture, those wonderful half-formed plans of shipping out with Walkinok or the Wire-haired Terror. You were going to review your courses, remember? Slow and easy—take a week on spatial ballistics or spectroscopy. Think it all over for a day between sentences. Or laugh over the time you and the Shank got beered up at the canteen and pretended you were going to tie up the C.O. and jet him off with Provost, the head PD man, for a shipmate. The general would get all the psychodynamics he needed. The general was always talking psychodynamics, Colonel Provost was always doing psychodynamics. Ah, it seemed funny at the time, anyway. It wasn’t so much the beer. It was knowing the general, knowing Provost, that made it funny. How funny would it be with a stranger?

  They give you someone to talk to. They give you someone you haven’t anything to talk to about! The idea of shipping a girl behind the bulkhead, now, that was a real horrible idea. That was torture. Well, so’s this. Only much more refined.

  A thought keeps knocking, and you finally back off and let it in. Something to do with the button. You push it and you can hear your shipmate. You release it and … shut off the intercom? No, by the Lord you don’t. When you were coughing, you were off that button. “Can I do anything?”

  Now what the hell kind of business is this? (That detached part of your mind reaches hungrily for the pulses of fury: ah, it feels good!) Do you mean to sit there and tell me, you rage silently at the PD men who designed this ship, that unless I push that button my shipmate can hear everything that goes on with me? The intercom’s open on the other side all the time, open on this side only when I push the button, is that it?

  You turn and glare out the viewport, staring down the cold distant eye of infinity, and Where the hell, you rage silently, where the hell’s my privacy?

  This won’t do. This won’t do at all. You figured right from the start that you and your shipmate would be pretty equal, sure, but on a ship, even a little two-passenger can like this, someone’s got to be in command. Given that the other compartment has the same stereos, the same dispensers, the same food and water and everything else, and the only difference between these living quarters is that button—who’s privileged? Me, because I get to push the button? Or my shipmate, who gets to listen in on me when I so much as belch?

  Oh, I know, you think suddenly. That’s a PD operative in there, a psychodynamics specialist assigned to observe me! You almost laugh out loud; relief washes over you. PD work is naturally hush-hush. You’ll never know how many hours during your course you were under hypnosis. It was even rumored around that some guys had cerebral surgery done by PD boys, and never knew it. They had to work in secret for the same reason you don’t stir your coffee with an ink stick. PD is one field where the tools must leave no mark.

  Well, fine, fine. At last this shipmate makes some sense, you’ve got an answer you can accept. This ship, this trip, is of and for a cadet, but it’s PD business. The only non-cadet who’d conceivably board you would have to be a PD tech.

  So you grin and reach for the button—then, remembering the way it works, that the intercom’s open from your side when you’re off the button, you draw your hand back, face the bulkhead, and say easily, “Okay, PD, I’m on to you. How’m I doing?” You wonder how many cadets tumble to the trick this soon. You push the button and wait for the answer.

  The answer is “Hah?” in a mixture of shyness and mystification.

  You let go the button and laugh. “No sense stringing it out, Lieutenant.” (This is clever. Most PD techs are looeys; one or two are master sergeants. Right or not, you haven’t hurt his feelings.) “I know you’re a PD man.”

  There’s a silence from the other side, then, “What’s a PD man?”

  You get a little sore. “Now see here, Lieutenant, you don’t have to play any more games.”

  “Gosh,” says the bulkhead, “I’m no lieutenant. I—”

  You cut him off quickly. “Sergeant, then.”

  “You got me all wrong,” says that damnable, shy tenor.

  “Well, you’re PD anyway,” I snap.

  “I’m afraid I’m not.”

  You can’t take much more of this. “Well, what the hell are you? You’re a man, aren’t you?”

  A silence. And as it beats by, that anger and that fear of torture begin to mount, hand in hand. “Well!” you roar.

  “Well,” says the voice, and you can practically see it shuffle its feet. “I’m fifteen years old …”

  You drag out your senior-class snap; there’s a way of talking to fourth and third classmen that makes ’em jump. “Mister, you give an account of yourself, but now. What’s your name?”

  “Skampi.”

  “Skampi? What the hell kind of name is that?”

  “It’s what they call me.”

  Did you detect a whisper of defiance there? “Sir!” you rasp.

  The defiance disappears. “It’s what they call me … sir.”

  “And what are you doing on my ship, mister?”

  A frightened gulp. “I—I’m sorry, uh, sir. They put me on.”

  “They? They?”

  “At the Base … sir,” he amended quickly.

  “You were on Base just how long, mister?” That “mister” could be a lead-shotted whiplash if you did it right. It was sure being done right.

  “I don’t know, sir.” You have the feeling the punk’s going to burst into tears again. “They took me to a big laboratory and there were a lot of sort of booths with machines in them. They asked me a lot of questions about did I want to be a space man. Well, I did, I always did ever since I was a kid. So after a while they put me on a table and gave me a shot and when I woke up I was here.”

  “Who gave you a shot? What was his name?”

  “I never … I didn’t find out, sir.” A pause. “A big man. Old. He had gray hair, very short. He had green eyes.”

  Provost, by God, you think. This is PD business, all right, but from where I sit, it’s monkey business. “You know any spatial ballistics?”

  “No, sir. Some day I—”

  “Astrogation?”

  “Only what I picked up myself. But I’ll—”

  “Gravity mechanics? Differentials? Strength of materials? Light-metal fission? Relativity?”

  “I—I—”

  “Well? Well? Speak up, mister.”

  “I heard of them, sir.”

  “You heard of them
sir!” you mimic. “Do you know what this ship is for?”

  “Oh, yes, sir! Everybody knows that. This is the Long Haul. When you come back from this, you get your commission and they give you a star ship!” And if the voice had shuffled feet once, now its eyes shone.

  “You figure to get a star ship, mister?”

  “Well, I—I—”

  “You think they give commands to Boy Scouts just because the Boy Scout wants to go to space awful bad?”

  No answer.

  You jeer, “Have you got the slightest idea how much training a cadet has to go through, how much he has to learn?”

  “Well, no, but I guess I will.”

  “Sir!”

  “Sir. Well, they put me aboard, all those officers who asked me the questions and everything. It must be all right. Hey!” he says excitedly, all the crushed timidity disappearing, replaced by a bubbling enthusiasm. “I know! We have all this time … maybe you’re supposed to teach me astrogation and relativity, and all that.”

  Your jaw drops at the sheer childishness of it. And then something really ugly drifts up and smothers everything else.

  For some reason your mind flashes back to the bus, the day you got to Base. You can remember back easily to all the faces you worked with, those who made it and those who didn’t. But your class had thirty-eight cadets in it. That bus must’ve held fifty. What happened to the rest? You’d always assumed they went into other sections—ground crew, computer men, maintenance. Suppose they’d been sorted out, examined for some special trait or talent that only the PD men knew about. Suppose they were loaded right aboard ships, each with a graduate cadet?