So he had the numbers to memorize, the instructions and locations in navigation as well as the figures on their laded mass and moment in exit, and by the very nature of his assignment memorizing them the old-fashioned way, the way they’d done before the Old Man had given in and admitted that tape-study wasn’t going to turn the crew and particularly the juniors into Unionized automatons.
God, they’d even gotten hypermath through Vince’s head since that blessed change in the Rules.
And they couldn’t short Jeremy his education the entire pass around their course, not even a significant number of jumps. Jeremy was going to go on study again in a couple of jumps or spend some of his rec evenings later this year locked in a room with Fletcher and both of them doing deep-study.
He hadn’t broken that small piece of news to the boys yet. Jeremy was still delighted with his new roommate, with an almost-brother who was large, inept with the routines, and mentally—
—different. Say that much for dealing with a stationer.
Much as he didn’t like it.
He stowed the boots in his locker and tugged on the light-soled jumpboots that would protect his feet if he had to move and still wouldn’t cramp up during a quasi-sleep that, in his body’s time, would amount to about two weeks.
You didn’t want tight clothing during that time, because your body wouldn’t do much of anything while the drug stayed in your body—you wouldn’t move, but you were just marginally aware. Your mind could process things, like dream-state, and you could learn things of a factual sort, and if you were vastly disturbed, at the edge of the state, as you were coming out, sometimes you could get up off your bunk and do things marginally under the control of your conscious mind.
That was the spooky part—and never having known anyone who’d not been through the experience of a hyperspace jump from way before birth, when pregnant women had to get off mild thymedine and onto hyprazine, a drug which would intentionally get to the fetal bloodstream, he had extreme last-minute regrets about leaving Fletcher to Jeremy. Jeremy had a generally calming effect on Fletcher—unless Fletcher hyped instead of tranked down, and thought he’d met the devil in hyperspace.
Maybe he should pull Fletcher into his quarters. The rest of the crew wouldn’t take it as exalting Fletcher, but Jeremy would take it as a slap in the face.
Jeremy had a beeper; Jeremy was unfazed by jump and had been known to be up on his feet during the dump-downs which the young smart-ass still illicitly did, he was all but certain. Nobody among the juniors, including himself or Bucklin, would be faster to have their wits about them if Fletcher did spook; he was sure of that. Jeremy also had two extra doses of trank and knew what to do with them, right through the plastic envelope on any available surface of his roommate if he had to.
You didn’t track a kid toward Helm if he didn’t have the killer reflexes. And Jeremy had them, better than anybody in years.
It remained to prove what they’d make out of Fletcher.
Chapter 9
Fletcher sat on his bunk putting on the lighter boots and the light sweater Jeremy advised, a lot calmer than he thought he’d possibly be now that the event was on him. Jeremy’s juvenile cheerfulness was reassuring. “It gets kind of cold,” Jeremy said matter-of-factly. “And you can’t get up to get anything. You might want to, but you’d lose your balance, even if you can think that far. They really advise against it.”
He’d thought people slept through it, numb to anything that happened to them. But his mother had been aware enough, walking around. She’d talked to him when she was on it. He didn’t know how high a dose she’d been taking.
Too much, the last time… that was for damned certain. But it wasn’t poison. It was just a drug. A drug that thousands of people took regularly with no ill effects.
The takehold sounded. He scrambled to get belted in, to get a pillow under his head. And to get the book set up, which Jeremy had lent him. It fed out into a game visor, for when he wanted it. It was an adventure story, something called War of the Worlds. He wouldn’t spend the hours with nothing to do but think about his situation.
“Usually we take tape,” Jeremy said, “usually it’s math—or biology,” A wrinkle of Jeremy’s nose. “But they want to kind of, you know, make sure you’re all right with this before they let you take tape during it. So I’m staying off tape for the while, so I can help you if you, you know, need something.”
“What’s dangerous about it?” Stupid question. He knew the answers there were.
“Just, you know, if you didn’t get set right and needed something.”
“I thought you couldn’t move.”
“You shouldn’t move. I mean, you can scratch your nose or something. You try not to think about it, but your nose always itches. If you can find it and not hit yourself in the eye. Best is just to relax. Watch the pretty lights. There’s usually lights.”
“Usually?”
“If you’re not doing tape. Or you think about stuff. Think about happy stuff. Think about the happiest stuff you can think of. That’s the best.”
He damn sure didn’t want nightmares. A solid month of nightmares. He didn’t want to think about it. “How many of these have you been through?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe… maybe fifty, sixty. And Tripoint. Tripoint’s a cinch now. You come out with shooting going on, alarms going off—that’s where you just lie there wondering…”
“Where’s that?”
“Oh, Tripoint once. At Earth.”
Somehow, on this ship, he didn’t think the kid was lying. “On it?”
“Not on it. They were shooting, you could see it on the scopes. They were shooting, just all hell going on.” Jeremy was winding tighter, the way he’d been with the vid games, muscles tight, hands balled into fists, beating a short, small rhythm as if there were music Jeremy could hear. “Like, if you get hulled,—we did, once—there’s this sound—there’s this sound goes through everything. You don’t hear it. And the lights going off. Everything’s red when you wake up, those emergency lights—”
“That happened?” He didn’t think that was a lie, either. He’d hit a nerve of some kind, touched off something, and the kid was scared—of what, he didn’t know—staring at sights he didn’t see,
“Yeah, it happened.” Breath came through Jeremy’s teeth and he seemed clenched tight, every muscle. “But we got ’em back. We got ’em back at Bryant’s.” The beat of hands continued, a drumbeat against his drawn-up legs, rapid, tight movements. And the engines cut in. “We’re going. We’re going. Here we go.”
The kid was spooked. He’d expected he’d be crawling the walls in panic, but Jeremy was wired, wound, caught up in memory Jeremy had just advised him not to access: think of happy things. Jeremy wasn’t thinking of happy memories.
“We don’t take the drug now?” he asked Jeremy, any question, to gain some doorway into Jeremy’s private terror. The bunks were tilting, making their whole cabin one double-deck bunk the way they did when the ship was accelerating. He couldn’t think of anything else to say but to question what he was trying, in his own fear, to remember to do. “We wait for the announcement. Right?”
“Yeah,” Jeremy’s voice came to him. “Yeah, wait. Just wait. They’ll say when.”