I sat down on an old wooden settle, carved all over like a bench on the Public Docks. At one end a ruminating tar was still further adorning it with his jack-knife, stooping over and diligently working away at the space between his legs. He was trying his hand at a spaceship under full void-sail, but he didn’t make much headway, I thought.
At last some four or five of us were summoned to our meal in an adjoining room. It was dank as moorlands—no driers at all—the landlord said he couldn’t afford it. Nothing but two dismal actinic candles, each in a winding shade. We were fain to sidle up our filter plugs, and hold to our lips cups of fragrant tea with the most careful of inhales. But the fare was of the most substantial kind—not only recom and potatoes, but dumplings; good heavens! dumplings for supper! One young fellow in a green box coat, addressed himself to these dumplings in a most direful manner.
“My boy,” said the landlord, “you’ll have the nightmare to a dead sartainty.”
“Landlord,” I whispered, “that aint the missileer is it?”
“Oh, no,” said he, looking a sort of diabolically funny, “the missileer is a dark complexioned chap. He never eats dumplings, he don’t—he eats nothing but recom-steaks, and he likes ’em rare.”
“The devil he does,” says I. “Where is that missileer? Is he here?”
“He’ll be here afore long,” was the answer.
I could not help it, but I began to feel suspicious of this “dark complexioned” missileer. At any rate, I made up my mind that if it so turned out that we should sleep together, he must undress and strap into the bunk before I did.
Supper over, the company went back to the bar-room, when, knowing not what else to do with myself, I resolved to spend the rest of the evening as a looker on.
Presently a rioting noise was heard without. Starting up, the landlord cried, “That’s the Grampus’s crew. I seed her reported in the offing this morning; a three years’ voyage, and a full ship. Hurrah, boys; now we’ll have the latest news from the Feegees.”
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A tramping of magboots was heard in the entry; the bulkhead was flung open, and in rolled a wild set of spacers enough. Enveloped in their patched undersuits, and with their heads muffled in recircs and noseplugs, all bedarned and ragged, and their beards brittle with ill-provender, they seemed an eruption of spectres from Labrador. They had just docked from their shuttle, and this was the first hab they entered. No wonder, then, that they made a straight wake for the spacewhale’s mouth—the bar—when the wrinkled little old Joan, there officiating, soon poured them out brimmers all round. One complained of a bad cold in his head, upon which Joan mixed him a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses, which she swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the rings of Labrador, or on the darkside of an extrasolar planetoid.
The liquor soon mounted into their heads, as it generally does even with the arrantest topers newly debarked from space, and they began capering about most obstreperously.
I observed, however, that one of them held somewhat aloof, and though he seemed desirous not to spoil the hilarity of his shipmates by his own sober face, yet upon the whole he refrained from making as much noise as the rest. This man interested me at once; and since the sea-gods had ordained that he should soon become my shipmate (though but a sleeping-partner one, so far as this narrative is concerned), I will here venture upon a little description of him. He stood full six feet in height, with noble shoulders, and a chest like a coffer-dam. I have seldom seen such brawn in a man. His face was deeply brown and burnt, making his white teeth dazzling by the contrast; while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy. His voice at once announced that he was an Outrunner, and from his fine stature, I thought he must be one of those tall plate-wrestlers from the Alleghanian Expanse in Sagittarius. When the revelry of his companions had mounted to its height, this man slipped away unobserved, and I saw no more of him till he became my comrade in the void. In a few minutes, however, he was missed by his shipmates, and being, it seems, for some reason a huge favourite with them, they raised a cry of “Bulkington! Bulkington! where’s Bulkington?” and darted out of the hab in pursuit of him.
It was now about nine o’clock, and the room seeming almost supernaturally quiet after these orgies, I began to congratulate myself upon a little plan that had occurred to me just previous to the entrance of the spacemen.
No man prefers to sleep two in a bed. In fact, you would a good deal rather not sleep with your own brother. I don’t know how it is, but people like to be private when they are sleeping. And when it comes to sleeping with an unknown stranger, in a strange inn, in a strange station, and that stranger a missileer, then your objections indefinitely multiply. Nor was there any earthly reason why I as a spacer should sleep two in a bed, more than anybody else; for spacers no more sleep two in a bed in space, than bachelor Kings do ashore. To be sure they all sleep together in one apartment, but you have your own hammock, and cover yourself with your own blanket, and sleep in your own skin.
The more I pondered over this missileer , the more I abominated the thought of sleeping with him. It was fair to presume that being a missileer, his linen or woollen, as the case might be, would not be of the tidiest, certainly none of the finest. I began to twitch all over. Besides, it was getting late, and my decent missileer ought to be home and going bunkwards. Suppose now, he should tumble in upon me at midnight—how could I tell from what vile hole he had been coming?