but for our daily briefings we had to go half way across the ship to the conference room. This was because they were still recording our meetings, and they found it easiest to do it there. Lieutenant Shue was always first in the room because he usually had a pre-meeting meeting with the Captain before he talked to me, so when I reached the corridor I was not surprised to see some-one standing in the doorway to the conference room. It was not the first time it had happened. I recognised the casual half in, half out stance, and knew the crew-member was there for me, so I paused in a doorway of my own to wait him out. He would be just ‘passing by’ and had stopped for a ‘quick word’ with Lieutenant Shue and would act surprised when I arrived, and would then hang round and chat for as long as he could. It usually ended with an offer to help me settle in or an invitation for a coffee. Frequently both.
This one was called Buddy Preston and he worked in water treatment, and was no doubt afraid others would have a head-start on befriending me unless he was proactive.
But I had wronged him. He had genuinely come to see Lieutenant Shue.
“Hi, Lieutenant. I don’t know if you’re interested. I mean, I don’t know if this is the sort of thing I should report, but Ben was talking to me in his own language yesterday,” Buddy Preston announced.
“It was Finnish.”
“No, I’m pretty certain it was alien, sir.”
“It was Finnish.”
“It really didn’t sound like any human language I’ve ever heard, sir.”
“Then he was probably speaking it with a Japanese accent.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He seems to be experimenting with accents.”
“Yeah, but I mean, why would he speak Finnish to me in the first place? I mean, I’m not Finnish.”
“He does it when he doesn’t want to talk but doesn’t want to be rude.”
“That’s just stupid.”
“That’s Ben for you.”
“And you are sure? About the Finnish?”
“I’m sure.”
“I mean, I don’t mind helping out with him, sir. You know, if he confides in me or tells me stuff or anything. I can record it for you, next time he talks to me, if that would help.”
“It was Finnish.”
“Yeah, but just in case it was really something else -”
“Thank you, Preston. I’ll bear it in mind.”
“So shall I record him, sir?”
“Not this time. We already have plenty of recordings of him speaking Finnish.”
“But maybe some other time, right?”
“Right.”
Buddy Preston sauntered off down the corridor in the opposite direction, pleased with the way the conversation had gone, and no doubt feeling he was as good as part of the team, and I walked up to the doorway.
“It was Finnish,” Lieutenant Shue said wearily.
“Hei, Luutnantii.”
He looked up from his nexus. “And you can stop that right now.”
3.11. The entertainment value of the common cold
For my first work rotation they put me in the kitchens. I pointed out this put me in close proximity to both their food supply and a large array of sharp implements.
“Do you intend to either poison us or go on a knife-rampage?” Lieutenant Shue asked.
“No.”
“Then there’s no problem.”
Once in the kitchens they put me on the dishwashers and told me I could work my way up to toast-maker if I proved any good.
“I can’t work my shift today,” I said to Lieutenant Shue at our daily briefing about ten days into the assignment. “I have a bad cold.”
Lieutenant Shue folded his hands on the table.
“A cold?”
“A common cold.”
“Can I assume people of the Fellowship are not usually prone to the common cold, and you have, in fact, given this cold to yourself?”
“You may.”
Lieutenant Shue studied me. “Why?” he asked.
“It is a common human experience. I wanted to try it for myself.”
“And are you enjoying yourself?”
“Not noticeably.”
It was the blocked sinuses and the constant stream of mucus down the nose that was particularly unpleasant. I had checked the relevant references to the common cold many times to make sure I was recreating the effects correctly because it really didn’t seem right to me.
“And do you intend to keep this up for the next four days?”
“I do.”
“Of course you do.”
When I presented myself to the sick-bay a week later, Dr Howard quietly listened to my detailed description of my symptoms, and gave me a thorough physical examination, but she was not at all happy. Instead of immediately ordering me to bed in the next-door ward, she left me on the examination couch and summoned Lieutenant Shue.
“Come down to the hospital,” she demanded. “Your alien has got pneumonia. You need to talk to him.”
She waited impatiently until Lieutenant Shue arrived. Lieutenant Shue had grown less afraid of me since my attempted murder, but Dr Howard was still wary of me and unwilling to do anything that might annoy me too much. Like tell me I wasn’t really ill.
Lieutenant Shue hurried in from whatever he had been doing, took one look at me feverish and breathing with difficulty and said: “Oh, Jesus.”
“Exactly,” Dr Howard said.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“Pneumonia.”
“Why the hell have you got pneumonia?” he asked me.
“I wanted something a little more painful than a cold this time,” I explained, as best I could. “But something still involving the respiratory system since that’s what I’ve decided to study first.”
“Being stabbed through the heart wasn’t painful enough for you?”
“It was very swift. I wanted something longer lasting. To compare.”
“I appreciate your desire to experience all aspects of the human condition,” Lieutenant Shue said. “But if you are ill, then Dr Howard has to look after you, and Dr Howard has better things to be doing. How about you have pneumonia for the rest of the day, and then get miraculously cured?”
It rather missed the point of having a prolonged illness, but Dr Howard was really not pleased with me. I could always continue with it in the privacy of my cabin.
“If I must.”
“I’m not giving him any medicine,” Dr Howard insisted. “He’s not ill.”
“Yes I am.”
“Couldn’t you pretend to treat him, give him some vitamin pills, or some saline, or something? Anything?” Lieutenant Shue asked.
After a slight pause, Dr Howard nodded.
“Sometime soon?” I asked hopefully.
“There are genuinely ill people on this ship who need treatment -” Dr Howard started. I knew from our previous deployment that the typical illnesses on board were generally colds, toothache and hypochondria, so I didn’t really feel I was putting any-one seriously at risk by occupying Dr Howard for a full ten minutes.
“Please?” Lieutenant Shue tried. “Then put him in the ward and forget about him.” He glanced at his watch, eager to get back to whatever it was he should be doing. “And you,” he added, turning to me, “you can have one day being ill, one night recovering, and tomorrow you’re fine again. And as you can’t both work and be constantly ill, how about keeping your research into the other systems on hold for the moment?”
I shrugged.
“And when I say ‘for the moment’, I mean like maybe until after you leave the ship. When you can devote a decent amount of time to them.”
“Hmm.”
“So just one day of pneumonia, OK?”
“OK.”
“And there’s not going to be any dying.”
“Never even thought about it,” I said. Almost truthfully.
3.12. An emergency is announced
Captain Southey had to keep his crew busy on t
he long voyage out to our destination at asteroid claim 2909/JR03/13C. He did this partly by holding a series of emergency exercises in the belief that as well as teaching people what to do in said emergencies they would help pull the new crew together into a single team. Most of the exercises were small ones, like some-one having a heart-attack in a part of the ship furthest away from the hospital, or a man trapped under some collapsed shelving in the hold, but some of them were ship-wide emergencies like a fire in the food store or a hull breach. There would be a P.A. warning announcing: “This is a drill”, the emergency would be pronounced, and the crew would divide up into their designated response teams.
I took part in only one of them, when failure of the life support was so total it necessitated the evacuation of the entire ship. I did not stop to pick up any belongings, I managed not to panic, I did not get lost, and I found my correct assigned escape-pod. I waited patiently in the queue to board it, sat quietly in the right seat for twenty minutes, and afterwards calmly returned to my shift in the kitchen.
It was after one of these ship-wide exercises that I went to talk to Lieutenant Shue. It was not the time for our daily briefing, but this was one of the advantages of living next door to him. It was not an advantage Lieutenant Shue appreciated to the same degree.
He was sitting at the desk while his cabin-mate, Lieutenant Harris, sat on his bed. Lieutenant Harris was telling Lieutenant Shue about what some-one had done wrong in his response team, half amused and half exasperated. After the exercises Captain Southey called the officers together to tell them what they had done wrong, and he knew he was going to have to explain away the stupidity of his team member.
“Hello, Ben,” he said, breaking off on seeing me.
“Hello, Lieutenant Harris.”
“It’s Charles, Ben. Call me Charles.”
Almost