“I got a taste of your jokes.”
“I understand so. There were some pretty light-weight kids involved in what went way out of parameters. You and Chad are a fair match. You kept it to that. I respect that. They know they took it too far. I frankly tried to dissuade them from the idea, but they wanted to welcome you in, in the serious sense. That’s the tradition.”
“Welcome, is it?”
“It’s what they meant. Know us. Fall into the order of things. Find a place. With the crew. In the crew.”
“It’s a stupid tradition.”
“It may be, but I’m asking you to take it the way it should have gone. No grudges. They’ve done what they insisted on doing. It’s over. You’re in.”
“I don’t want to be in.”
“That’s another problem, but they’ve no right now to treat you as an outsider. You understand that? There is a difference. And they made that difference, so they have to accept you in with whatever privilege I grant.”
“Damn if I care. Sir.”
“Calm down, I say. You’ve got a right to be mad, but if you exercise it you’ll do yourself damage.”
“More than they’d like to do? I don’t think so. Welcome in, hell! I’m not welcome here! That’s real clear!”
“It was a bad start. Best I could do. I wasn’t going to leave you alone for your first jump; and me taking you in—that would put you in with the senior-juniors where you don’t fit. That was my thinking. Jeremy’s a good kid. He reacts fast. He’d keep you out of trouble. Do you want to be moved ?”
“Jeremy’s fine.” Fletcher seemed calmer, and stayed fixed on him without evidence of skittering off into temper. “No problems with him.”
“You’re sure. Even after what happened.”
“He’s a kid.”
“He is a kid. On the other hand… you’re not. And you are. Coming off a station where you don’t cope with ship-time… you don’t fit the ship’s profile, that’s what we say. You’re not in our profile. It’s hard to figure where to put you.”
“That’s too bad.”
Fletcher had a way of trying to get under his skin. Or he outright didn’t understand. And Charlie had shown up. Charlie—whose job was spacer bodies in all their diverse problems.
“Fletcher, I want you, first of all, to get checked out. Go right over there and sit down. Chad’s been in getting his mouth fixed. No lasting damage.—Then, Charlie, if you’d check out Chad. We’re looking for dents.”
It meant both Fletcher and Chad sitting on two adjacent tables in the surgery, a traffic management pricklier than two rimrunners at a jump-point, and the same possibilities of shots fired. “I’m not going to ask for any handshaking,” JR said, while Chad sat still and Fletcher stripped to the waist and got up on the other table, jaw set.
“Hurt?” Charlie had provoked a wince, pressing on ribs, then bent an arm, bringing a deeply gashed and bandaged forearm to view. “Lovely. So what did we have here?”
“We had a small discussion,” JR answered for both participants. “Charlie, we have here one stationer, aged seventeen, one spacer, Chad, aged twenty. How old are we?”
“Which one?” Charlie asked, having a close look mean-while into Fletcher’s right eye, preoccupied with inventory. “Our spacer is, what, a little short of seventeen?”
“Sixteen,” Chad muttered, “sir.”
“So how old are we?” JR asked “For our stationer’s benefit,—how old are we?”
Charlie backed off from the inspection of the other eye and gave Fletcher a slow scrutiny, the same, then, to Chad. “The stationer is a mature seventeen, probably having most of his height, not his ideal adult weight by about fifteen kilos. The spacer is a mature and very tall sixteen-year-old physique, grew, what was it? An inch since Bryant’s?”
“Yessir,” Chad said.
“And putting on a couple of kilos off Jeff’s fancy desserts,” Charlie said Chad blushed. He was putting it on around the middle. “But the stationer,” Charlie said, “our stationer lad is a different maturity, been through puberty, long bones are stopping growth, secondary sexual traits normal at my last examination…” Fletcher’s mouth was a thin line, he was staring at the edge of the table, possibly with a flush on Fletcher’s face, but Charlie didn’t proceed to the comparative clinical details. “Emotionally, however,” Charlie said, “the equation is more different between them now than it will ever be in later life. Fletcher, at seventeen, has lived every day of his seventeen years. He’s not grown up having the purge of emotional stress Chad’s undergone every month or so in hyperspace: his experience hasn’t been subject to that deboot.
“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.