“It’s all been continuous, interrupted only by ordinary nightly dreamstate and whatever psych counseling he’s had.” Fletcher shot Charlie a hard, burning look, which Charlie didn’t look to see. “Our spacer, now, has seen twenty years of history; he was born during the War; he’s seen combat for all his years. Our stationer’s seen three less years and his station’s been at peace, whatever internal events it’s suffered. Our spacer’s nineteenth and twentieth years were spent in a sixteen-year-old body in the last stages of puberty, and he’s not expected to finish that process until he’s at least twenty-one or twenty-two depending on our travel schedule; he won’t be posted to adult crew until he’s at least twenty-six or twenty-seven and won’t enter apprenticeship until he gets at least another physical year’s growth. Meanwhile our stationer’s already past the growth spurt, the rapid changes in jaw, hair, primary and secondary sexual development. Body and hormones reach truce. He’s pretty well started on his adult life, as stationers tend to be at his age.—On the other hand, when Chad reaches his ship-time twenties, advantage pitches in the other direction. Our spacer won’t suffer the stress disease a stationer has: he has that monthly emotional purge, granted he’s not one of the rare poor sods that comes out of jump depressed, and our Chad is not depressed. He’ll be sixty station-years before he needs to think about rejuv, and look forty, with the historical experience of sixty, when our stationer who stayed on station-time for his first seventeen years is just a little sooner on rejuv. If he doesn’t want to ache in the mornings,” Charlie patted Fletcher’s bare shoulder. “You survived. Congratulations. But let’s put a better bandage on the elbow.”
“It’s fine.”
“Shut up, Fletcher,” JR said. “Just sit still.”
Fletcher sat, and gazed fixedly at the wall, endured the neoplasm Charlie shot on for a patch, and the bandaging.
“You can shower with that.”
“Thanks.”
“Go and thrive. You’re released. Done. Unless JR wants you.”
Fletcher slid down from the table and began to pull his clothing to rights, determinedly not looking at any of them, as Charlie moved on to Chad and the mouth.
It was hard to judge Fletcher’s limits and capabilities. Add everything Charlie had said, plus bone-ignorant of safety procedures and any useful trade.
Try again, JR thought. “Difficult call, Fletcher. Difficult to judge where you are.”
“Where I don’t want to be, is the plain fact.”
“You were right at the start of everything, were you?” He’d known intellectually that Fletcher was called up out of a study program. How adult it was, how much career it might be, was all guesswork to him. “Now a career restart.”
“I’m not interested in a restart,” Fletcher said.
And, frankly, Fletcher was late to be starting anything. At any given jump, the senior captain or third Helm or Scan or Com 1 might not wake up, and the senior-juniors would be moving up, into real posts. It could make bad, bad blood on that point if he couldn’t finesse what Fletcher was, or might be. But he’d made his initial determination, a junior personnel decision, and it was his decision.
“Behind my unit and ahead of Chad’s,” he said, “there’s no personnel from those years. No one survived. That’s the problem. There’s no one to assign you with, you’re too far behind my set, and you and Chad, who’d be somebody to put you with, have just pounded hell out of each other. That makes things somewhat hard for me trying to put you somewhere constructive.”
“How about back on Pell?” Fletcher asked, in hard, insubordinate challenge.
“Not my option. Not yours. I said you were in. I’ve got the job of finding you a spot. You want some senior privileges—” It was the damned drink incident at the bar that had touched off the mess, that and his failure to lay the law down absolutely on one side or the other. He was aware Chad was listening, and Chad would report exactly what the disposition was. So would he, faster than that. A memo would hit the individual mail-boxes within the hour. And this time he didn’t count on their lifelong connections to straighten out the details: he knew where he’d assumed it would happen with Fletcher. It hadn’t worked itself out; and decision, any decision, was better than no decision. “I’m creating a class of one. Solo. You want your unique privileges, you’ve got bar rights at family gatherings, but I’m insisting you stay in the approved junior-juniors’ sleepovers and not overnight elsewhere during liberty. More than that—I’m giving you a duty. You take care of Jeremy, Vince, and Linda. It takes them off my hands and gives me and my team a break from junior-juniors.”
Fletcher gave him a straight-on look, as if trying to decide where the stinger was.
“I don’t know the regulations.”
“They do. Jeremy won’t con you, Vince will almost assuredly try.” He made a shift of his eyes to Chad, who was getting off the table. And back to Fletcher. “You don’t have to make apologies to each other. A love fest isn’t required. I do expect civil behavior. And a concentrated effort to settle your differences.”
Fletcher absorbed that observation in long silence. He looked across the gap at Chad, on whom Charlie had interrupted his examination.
“Chad,” JR said, and Chad got down, jump suit bunched around his waist.
“Yessir.”
“Chad, this is your cousin Fletcher.”
“Yessir.” It was a mumble, still. Chad drew a deep breath and offered his hand.
Fletcher took it, not smiling.
“Pretty good punch,” Chad said magnanimously.
Fletcher didn’t say a thing. Just recovered his hand.
“Go on,” JR said, and Fletcher left.
“Damn station prig,” Chad said when he’d gone. “But he sure learnt to fight somewhere.”
“Evidently he did,” JR said dryly, and Chad got back on the table and endured being poked and prodded.
“Ow,” Chad said.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it tied things down. Charlie had put a finger on one significant matter. Tempers on what had been a burning issue almost always settled a little after jump: hyperspace straightened out perspectives, lowered emotional charges, made things seem trivial against the wider universe—acted, in most instances, like a mood elevator. Some quarrels just dissipated, grown too tenuous to maintain, and others fizzled after a few half-hearted spats the other side of where they’d been.
Unfortunately they weren’t approaching a jump where things would cool down. They were on the inbound leg of the Mariner run, coming into port, where he had to turn junior-junior crew loose on a dockside that had notoriously little sense of humor with rule-breakers—a dockside made doubly hazardous because it was a border zone between Alliance and Union and a minefield of political sensitivities and touchy cops.
Finity on a trade run as an ordinary merchanter was going to be damned conspicuous. He’d caught discussion among the senior crew, how various eyes were going to be watching her and her crew for signs that she wasn’t really engaged in commerce, signs, he could fill in for himself, such as the absence of underage crew on the docks, when all other ships let their youngsters go to the game parlors and the approved kid haunts.