THE LADY WAS A TRAMP
     SHE HAD been lovely once, sleek-lined and proud, with shining flanks; and men had come to her
with hungry hearts and star-filled eyes, and high pulse of adventure in their blood.
     Now she was old. Her hide was scarred with use, her luster dulled; though there was beauty in her
still it was hidden deep. A man had to know where to look—and he had to care.

     The young man left the conditioned coolness of the Administration Building and paused outside the
door to orient. Then he strode briskly forward, ignoring the heat that wilted his uniform collar and damply
curled the edges of the freshly stamped papers in his breast pocket. He passed the inner tier of docks,
refusing to look to left or right at the twin proud heights of gleaming Navy vessels.
     Beyond them, alone in the outmost ring, the Lady Jane sat on her base in the concrete hole, waiting.
In the white-light glare of the shadowless Dome, each smallest pit and pockmark of twenty years' usage
stood out in cruel relief against the weathered darkness of her hull. Potbellied, dumpy, unbeautiful, she
squatted without impatience inside the steel framework of supports, while her tanks were flushed and her
tubes reamed clean. When the dock gang was done, and the ravages of the last voyage repaired insofar
as could be, she would set forth once more on her rounds of the ports in space. Meantime, she rested.
     The young man paused. It was his first good look at the Lady Jane. He half-turned back; but it was
too late now. Fury, or training, or despair, or some of all of them, moved him on.
     "That's him all right," Anita smiled, and turned a knob on the Lady Jane's viewpoint screen; the figure
leaped toward them with focussed clarity, and the IBMan insignia showed up on the jacket sleeve.
     "Mad dogs and eye-bee-men," Chan quoted softly, and leaned forward to study the young man with
mock amazement. On the tenth "day" of Lunar sunlight it was still possible to keep moderately cool inside
an unsealed ship, and the central Administration Building was kept at a steady seventy, day or night. But
out in the atmosphere dome, it was hot. Yet the young man walking briskly toward the ship wore formal
greens, and his shirt was bound at his neck with a knotted tie. Chandra leaned back, picked up a tall cold
glass and shook his head.
     "Look at him, Chan! He's a kid. . . ."
     Chan shrugged. "You knew that before. You got the papers. . . ."
     Impatiently, she shook her head. "I know. But look at him. . . ."
     "I wasn't any older—" Chandra began.
     "Yes you were! I don't know what your papers said, but—look at him. And you weren't an IBMan.
And we were all younger then. And—darling, you were a man!"
     He laughed and stood up, rumpling her hair as he passed. "Well, if that's all that's eating on you,
babe—hell, four of us kept you happy half-way home."
     He ducked through the bunk-room door as she started to rise. "Don't shoot," he called back.
     "It ain't so funny, honey." She stood watching the screen. "What's bothering me is, who's going to
keep him happy?"

    Terence Hugh Carnahan, Lieutenant, U.N.N. Reserves, was twenty-four years old and newly
commissioned. He was stuffed to the gills with eight full years of Academy training, precision, and
knowledge. The shiny new stripes on his sleeve and the dampening papers inside his breast pocket were
the prizes he'd worked for and dreamed of as long as it mattered. The fruits were sour now, and the
dream was curdled. A man might approach the Lady incited by lust to a venture of greed; but the sight of
her was enough to wipe out the last visions of glory.
    The Lieutenant moved on, more slowly. He stopped as a three-wheeled red-and-white-striped
baggage truck swung out in a wide crazy curve from behind the Navy ship to the left and careened to a
stop at the Lady's side.
    A tall thin man in rumpled full-dress whites leaped out of the bucket, swinging a canvas suitcase in his
hand. He climbed aboard the ship's waiting elevator and it started up.
     Terry walked on and waited beside the truck for the cage to come down. When it did, he produced
his ID card, got inside, and rode up in silence.
     In the open lock, the man in the dirty whites was waiting for him. He held out his hand, and for the
first time Terry saw the pilot's jets on his lapels; and the boards on his shoulders spelled Commander.
     "You the new IBMan?" the pilot asked. "Where's your gear?"
     "I sent it on this morning." They shook, and the pilot's slim fingers were unexpectedly cool and dry.
     "Welcome to our happy home," he said. "Glad to have you aboard. And all that sort of thing. Manuel
Ramon Decardez, at your service. They call me Deke."
     "I'm Terry Carnahan."
     "Come on in. I guess they're all waiting." Deke led the way through the open inner valve.
     In the suit room, the pilot turned back. "Just take it easy, kid," he said. "It ain't like the Navy in here."

     It wasn't.
     The Lieutenant had been on merchant ships before. It was part of his training to know the layout and
standard equipment of every jump-ship ever made. He had been on inspection tours; and a Lady class
ship was still in Academy use for cadet instruction trips. But that one was Navy-maintained and
Navy-staffed.
     This Lady had left the service thirteen years back. The crew quarters had been torn out to make an
extra hold, and the rule book had gone by the wayside along with the hammocks.
     "Up here," Deke said, and Terry followed him up the ladder to Officers' Country. Then he stood in
the wardroom doorway and stared at the crazy carnival scene.
     To start with, the overheads were off. The only light was diffused U-V out of the algy tanks that cut
two-foot swaths along opposite bulkheads. In the yellow-green dimness, the, scattered lounging chairs
and coffee cups and a tray with a bottle and glasses on the table, gave a ridiculous cocktail-bar effect to
the whole place. And the first thing he saw was a hippy blonde, in tight black slacks and a loosely tied
white shirt, who detached herself from the arm of a chair—and from the encircling arm of what looked
like a naked brown-skinned man inside the chair. She ran across the room to fling herself on Deke, who
picked her up bodily, kissed her with gusto.
     "Where did you sneak in from?" she demanded. "We were waiting for—"
     "Whoa, babe," Deke started. "If you mean—" He started to turn, began to move forward, to let
Terry in, but from a shadowy corner a wiry little man in coveralls, with grease-stains on his hands and his
hair and his face, broke in.
     "What the hell! These two give me a pile of pitch about haulin' myself up here to give the new kid a
big hello, and all I find is this old s.o.b. instead!" These two appeared to be the blonde and the naked
man. Deke was the s.o.b.
     "You bitchin' again, Mike?" The voice was a bull-roar; it came from the only member of the Lady's
crew Terry had met before. The Captain came down the ladder from Control, sneakers and rolled-cuff
workpants first, and then the tremendous bulk of chest and arms, bristled with wiry curling red-gold hair.
The room had looked crowded before. With Karl Hillstrom's two-hundred-twenty pounds added, it was
jammed. "Relax," he said. "Have a drink and relax. Nita said she saw the kid comin' . . ."
     Deke had given up trying to interrupt. He turned back to Terry and shrugged. "I told you—" he
started, and just then the blonde saw him.
     "Oh, my God!" she said, and broke into helpless laughter; so did Deke. She took a step forward
toward Terry, trying to talk. He ignored it.
     "Captain Hillstrom?" he said formally, as loud as possible. He felt like a school-kid in a lousy play,
doing a bad job of acting the part of the butler at a masquerade.
     The big man turned. "Oh, there you are!" He held out a burly hand. "You met Deke already? Anita,
this is our new IBMan, Terry Carnahan. Anita Filmord, our Medic. And Mike Gorevitch, our Chief—"
that was the grease-stained one—"and Chan—Chandra Lal, our Biotech."
     Terry fished in his pocket for the orders the Captain had failed to request, and noted with relief
meantime that the Biotech, Chan, now unfolding himself from his chair, wasn't entirely naked after all.
    It wasn't till then that he fully realized the hippy blonde was nobody's visiting daughter or friend, but a
member of the crew and an officer in the Naval Reserve.
    The blonde officer put a drink in his hand, and his last clear thought that night was that Deke was
quite right: it wasn't like the Navy. Not at all.

     When they gave him his commission, at the Examiner's Board, they had also delivered elaborate and
resounding exhortations about the Great Trust being placed this day in his hands: how the work of an
IBMan on a merchant ship was both more difficult and more important by far than anything done by an
officer of equivalent rank on a Navy ship.
     He knew all that. The ranking IBMan officer, on any ship, was fully responsible for the operation and
maintenance of all material connected in any way with either solar navigation or space-warp jumps. On a
tramp, there was likely to be just one IBMan to do it all, Navy Transports carried a full complement of
four officers and five enlisted men. Fresh Academy graduates came on board with j.g. status only, and
worked in charge of an enlisted maintenance crew on the "jump-along"—that abstract mechanical brain
whose function it was to set up the obscure mathematic-symbolic relationships which made it possible for
matter to be transmitted through the "holes" in space-time, enabling a ship to travel an infinite distance in
an infinitesimal time.
     On a Navy transport, a full Lieutenant IBMan would be in charge of SolNav only, with two petty
officers under him, both qualified to handle maintenance, and one at least with a Navy rating, capable of
relieving him on duty at the control board during the five or twelve or twenty hours it might take to
navigate a jump-ship in or out of the obstacle course of clutter and junk and planets and orbits of any
given System.
     Even the senior officer, on a Navy Transport, would never have to jump "blind," except in the rare
and nearly unheard-of instance of an analog failure; only tramps and Navy Scouts ever jumped willingly
on anything but a 'log-computed course. The stellar analog computers were the Navy's Topmost Secret;
when you used one, nothing was required except to make sure the jump-along itself was in perfect
condition, and then to pull the switch. The 'log did the rest.
     Merchant ships carried 'logs for their chartered ports of call—the Lady had two—but the charter
ports were the smallest part of a merchant trip. The number of destinations for which Navy analogs were
available was hardly a hatfull out of the galaxies. Without a 'log to point the way for him, it was up to the
IBMan to plot coordinates for where a hole ought to be. With luck and skill he could bring the ship out
into normal space again somewhere within SolNav reach of the destination. With the tiniest error in
computation, a ship might be lost forever in some distant universe with no stars to steer her home.
     Terry Carnahan had been hoping desperately for a Navy transport job—but only because it was the
route to the Scouts: the Navy's glory-boys, the two-bunk blind-jump ships that went out alone to map
the edges of man's universe. It was the Scout job he'd worked for those long eight years—and dreamed
about five years before, while he sweated for credits to get into Academy.
     He didn't argue with his tramp assignment; nobody argued with the Board. He knew that most of the
men who drew Navy assignments would envy him; the money was in the Reserves. And most of the rest,
the ones who drew Transport and liked it, were there because they couldn't jump blind, and they knew
it.
     He knew all that. But when his orders came, and they told him he drew a tramp because he was
tenth in his class—that's what they said: tramp work was the toughest —he also knew how close he had
come to the dream, because he also knew that the top five men had been sent to Scout training.
     Eight years of the most he could give it just wasn't enough. The answer was NO! For good.
     But you didn't throw out eight years of training for a good job either. Terry went for his psychs and
medics, and met Captain (U.N.N. Reserve) Karl Hillstrom; he took his two weeks' leave and reported
for duty.
     That first night, he fell asleep with the bunkroom spinning around him, and an obvious simple solution
to the whole mess spinning with it, just out of his reach, no matter how fast he turned. When he stopped
whirling, the dreams began, the dreams about naked crewmen, one of whom might have been him, and a
terrible wonderful blonde in a sea of stars, winkin' and blinkin' and nod in a herring tramp to the smiling
moon-faced girl who asked him in. . . .
     In the morning, Captain Karl Hillstrom showed him around Control. It was ship-shape and shiny up
here, and the IBMan plunged gratefully into routine, checking and testing his board, and running off
sample comps. He allowed himself only the briefest inspection of the jump-along and the keyboard and
calckers attached. His first job would be solar navigation. Once they were clear of the System, there'd be
three weeks on solar drive before they jumped—plenty of time to double-check the other equipment.
Right now, the standard computers and solar 'log were what counted.
     He worked steadily till he became aware of the Captain at his side.
     "How does it look?"
     "Fine so far, sir." Terry leaned back.
     "Anything messed up there, you can blame it on me. I worked that board coming in. "
     Terry remembered now—they had lost their IBMan on Betelgeuse IV, last trip, and come back
short-handed, and with half the trade load still in the holds. Since no one but an IBMan could jump blind,
they'd had to come back to pick up a new man—Terry.
     "I haven't found anything wrong, sir," Terry said.
     "You can drop the 'sir.' We go mostly by first names here." There was an edge of irritation in the
Captain's voice. "It's chow time now. You want to knock off?"
     Terry hesitated. This wasn't the Navy; it was a lousy tramp. If the pilot was drunk half the time, and
the Chief had a dirty neck, and the Captain looked like a pirate or stevedore (the first of which he was,
and the second had been), the IBMan was certainly free to work or eat when he chose.
     "I'd just as lief stick with it for a while," Terry said cautiously.
     "Sure. Suit yourself. Galley's open. Take what you want when you want it. . . ."
     He disappeared. For a blessed two hours, alone with machines he knew and trusted, Terry ran off
the standard tests and comps, noting with trained precision each tiniest deviation from perfect
performance. The computer had never been built that could navigate without error. Maybe only in the
tenth decimal, but that was enough for disaster. You had to know your 'log and your board and
machines, and make your adjustments as automatically as a man makes allowance for the Sights on a rifle
he's known and shot for years.
     It took Terry four hours to learn this board, and he had started his first dry-run when the sandwich
appeared on his arm-rest. A tall plastic glass with a straw in the top and a tempting froth came next.
     "Well, thanks," he said, "but you didn't have to—" "It's chocolate," she told him. "I ordered
strawberry when your papers came in, but they haven't sent it yet." "Chocolate is fine," he said weakly,
and let himself look.

    The loose-tied shirt and tight-fitting slacks of the evening had been replaced by standard-issue
summer-weight fatigues. The blouse was zipped up, and she seemed to be wearing a bra underneath.
Her shorts displayed no more than a reasonable length of shapely leg. She wore no makeup, and her face
looked scrubbed and clean. You could hardly get mad at a woman for being good-looking. The
sandwich looked toasted and crisp, and he found he was very hungry.
    "Well, thanks," he said again, and took a bite, and picked up the pencil with his other hand.
    "Karl had to go down to Ad," she said. He took his eyes off his paper, and figured that out.
Administration office, she'd mean.
    "They called him to bring down the Beetle 'log papers," she said. "He asked me to let you know—it'll
be back in the morning."
    He nodded, trying to match her casual air. The Betelgeuse analog was coming back from the shop
tomorrow. And IBMan Carnahan would be due for his first installation—the first on his own command.
    ". . . we could finish your med-check in time for dinner," she was talking still. "You want to knock off
up here pretty soon?"
    He nodded again, and glanced over his board. The run he'd started would take most of an hour.
Then some time for adjustments. . . . "Sixteen hours all right?" he asked.
     "Fine. Dinner's at nineteen."
     He sat there and stared at his sandwich and thought it all over, including the staggering fact of the
Commander's silver leaves on the woman's faded green shirt collar.
     The milkshake turned out to be good; the sandwich delicious. The run on the board got fouled up,
and after a half an hour of grief, he had to admit his mind wasn't on it. There was a Manual on the
wardroom shelf below, that would tell him the things he wanted to know. He switched off the board, and
went down.
     Page 532, Section six, was explicit. The Medical Officer for a six-man crew had to have junior
psych, as well as a senior pharmacist's or nurse's rating—besides being qualified sub for the Biotech.
With Commander's rank, it meant she likely had more actual years of training than he did. And: "The
Medical Officer shall be supplied with dossiers . . . psych ratings and personality profiles ... responsible
for well-being of personnel. . . ."
     It explained some things: the milk shake and strawberry order, for instance; and why she should
bother with either one. It did nothing to change the first impression of last night; or to make him forget his
dreams; or —certainly—to make him feel any more at ease with Commander Anita Filmord. There were
some things a woman shouldn't know about a man . . . or at least some women. . . .
     There was very little Anita Filmord didn't know about Terry Carnahan three hours later. For the first
half-hour she took smears and samples and scrapings with deft impersonal proficiency. Each labeled slide
or tube went into its own slot or niche or clamp; then she threw a switch, and sat down to confront him
with a questionnaire. To the familiar humming background of the diagnostics, she asked him all the
questions he had answered twice a year for the past eight years.
     "They put me through all this when I got my orders,' he said at the end. "How come . . ."
     "We do it every time you come on board. I'll have to run samples on Karl this evening too." The
machine had run itself down. She pulled out the tape, tossed it onto her desk for reading later. "I don't
know what you've been doing the past two weeks," she pointed out, and he felt himself flush at the
certainty of what she meant. "And we've got a good long time to be shut up on this ship together." She
stood there looking at him. Her smile faded. "The prospect isn't too appealing, is it?"
     "You are!" he might have said. This wasn't the Navy. The way she was dressed last night, the way
she acted ...
     Last night—was it one of those dreams? He couldn't be sure, but the memory came clearly. . . . He
had heard a door close, and the murmur of voices, one high and one low. Before he fell asleep again—or
in his dream?—a tall figure had entered the bunkroom and flopped in the last empty sack.
     Five men and one woman ...
     "You're goddam right it's not!" he wanted to say, but he shifted his gaze four inches, and the leaves
on the collar of her short-sleeved shirt were still a Commander's.
     He threw out all putative answers, and retreated to subordination.
     "Yes, ma'am," he said blank-faced. "It surely is, ma'am." Five men and one woman . . . and Deke
had it all tied up! . . .
     "I'm glad to hear you say so, Lieutenant," she answered deadpan. "But if anything should turn
up—any problems or questions or troubles of any kind—remember, that's why I'm here." Her smile was
just a bit mechanical this time. Good!
     "Just come if you need me," she said. "Any time . . ."

      Five men and one woman . . . and come, she said, any time . . . maybe it wasn't just Deke. Maybe
...
    He went to the spray room and stripped and turned on the shower full blast to shut out Chandra Lal's
cheerful talk. When he was finished, Chan was still in a cloud of steam, the effects of a day cleaning algy
tanks now removed. While Terry rubbed himself harshly dry, Chan resumed conversation.
    "How do you like the old bitch?" he asked idly.
    "I'm not an expert," Carnahan said, and rubbed faster.
     "Who is? I've been here six years now, and I still get surprises. She may not look like much, but she's
a hell of a mess of boat for five men to run ...
     Five men and one woman . . . What the hell? Come off that track, boy. Chan was talking about the
ship—not the Medic.
     "You're right about that," Terry said, and escaped to his locker.
     He wore his clean uniform like armor into the wardroom, accepted a cocktail, and sipped at it
slowly. Deke, the pilot, and Captain Hillstrom were both drunk already, loudly replaying the ball game
they'd just seen on the vid.
     Hillstrom had shed his uniform as soon as he got back in the ship; he was bare-chested and
rolled-cuffed again.
     Deke at least dressed for dinner. So did Anita. Tonight, the tight-ass slacks were red, and she did
wear a bra—also bright red—under her clear plastic shirt.
     Mike wasn't dressed and he wasn't drunk. He came up just in time to sit down and eat with the rest,
his face and coveralls both, if possible, one layer greasier than the day before. Chandra did not dress
either: he emerged from the spray room, glowing, immaculate in the virtually non-existent trunks he'd
worn the night before. Anita poured him a drink.
     Obviously, she wouldn't care how—or if—Chan was dressed.
     And if she didn't, who should?
     Not Karl Hillstrom, that was clear; or perhaps he was too drunk to notice. .. .
     Sleep didn't come easy that night. When all the crew's bunks but Deke's were filled, Terry gave up,
and went out to the wardroom. He found Deke there, alone, watching a film. He tried to watch, too, but
next to the screen, a red light on the Medic's door flashed, DON'T DISTURB! and his eyes kept seeing,
instead of the picture, the curve of a thigh limned in the fiery red of her slacks, or perhaps of the bulb. . .
.
     He got up and prowled the room.
     DON'T DISTURB: ". . . any time . . ."
     The door opened. Karl Hillstrom came out. It closed behind him, and the light flicked off. She was
alone now. She could be disturbed.
     "Hi . . . late-late show?" Karl poured himself a drink and held up the bottle. "How about you?" "I had
it," Deke said.
     "Terry?"
     "Thanks. I will . . . later." He poured his own, a big one, and took it back to his bunk.
     . . . any time . . . Deke didn't have it tied up, not at all. .

     At two in the morning, he remembered vaguely some provision in the Manual for refusal to serve in
ships with a crew of less than ten, on grounds of personality stress. That meant a psych Board of
course—and it had to go through the Medic . . . well, she might have reasons to make it easy for him.
This wasn't the Navy, but it was still under Navy charter. Lousy tramp! He grinned, and promised himself
to look it up, and went to sleep.
     At three, he woke briefly, remembering she had said the Captain would have to have a new set of
samples run that evening for his med records. Well, that could explain the DON'T DISTURB . . . At
eight, they woke him to tell him the Beetle 'log was coming on board.
     Mike Gorevitch drifted up from his engines to lend a hand, and the hand was a steady one, Terry
found. By noon they were finished with a job that would have taken Terry more than a day by himself.
His first installation was finished. Over a shared plate of cold meat in the galley, the IBMan found himself
inexplicably pleased at the Chief's terse invitation to have a look below.
     "Nothin' you didn't see before better on a Navy boat," Mike said, "But some of the stuff is rigged up
my own way. You ever get stuck with a duty shift down there, you'll want to know . . ."
     Like every jump-ship, the Lady was Navy built, equipped, and staffed. Even Hillstrom, who had
made his stake in the Solar Fleet, had to get his Reserve Commission before they'd sell him his ship and
lease him a stellar analog to hook onto the jump-along.
     By now he had traded in that first cheap Sirius 'log for a prized Aldebaran, and had acquired a
Betelgeuse besides. It was on Betelgeuse IV that Bailey, the IBMan who'd been with the Lady for nine
of her thirteen years tramping, had lost his nerve. It was something that happened. The best jump-man
reached the point where he'd figured he'd had it—the one more blind trip wouldn't work. Bailey quit
cold, and declined even passage back.
     This trip, the Lady carried a consignment of precision instruments for the new colony on Aldebaran
III. But nobody ever got rich on consignment freight. It paid for the trip; that was all. The profit-shares
came out of the other hold: the seeds and whisky and iron pigs and glassware and quick-freeze livestock
embryos; the anything-and-whatsit barter goods that someone at some unchartered planet off the Analog
routes would pay for in some way. That was the lure that kept the crews on merchant ships: you never
knew when you'd come back with the barter-hold full of uranium, or cast-gold native artifacts, or
robin-egg diamonds.
     And if you also never knew for sure when you'd come back, or where from, or whether . . . well,
that was the reason why IBMen went upstairs fast. For a man who could handle the job, there was pay
and promotion, and almost anything else he might want.
     What Carnahan wanted, the Lady didn't have.

    For Mike Gorevitch, that was not the case.
    The Lady was a tramp. She was scratched and dented and tarnished with age. She'd lost her polish,
arid her shape was out of date. She'd been around, and it showed.
    But she had beauty in her still, if you knew where to look, and you cared.
    "There's a dance in the old girl yet," Mike said approvingly, when he saw the IBMan's hand linger
with pleasure on the smooth perfect surface of the shaft he'd ground the night before. "You read Archy?"
he asked.
    Terry shook his head. "What's that?"
    "You might not like it," Mike said doubtfully. He opened a locker and pulled out a battered
grease-stained book. "Here. You can take it up with you if you want."

     That night, Terry slept. He took the Manual and Mike's book both to the bunk with him right after
dinner, and found what he wanted in one, then returned to the other. Both of them helped, and so did
exhaustion.
     But somewhere in the night he woke long enough to note that it was Deke who came in last again,
and to identify the pattern of repeated sounds from two nights back. It had not been a dream.
     Five men and one woman . . . He wondered why Bailey had quit. Nine years, and then . . . If you
took it that long . . . Well, he had the same way out if he wanted it . . . any time ...
     Next day, again, he worked at his board through the morning. This time it was Chandra who
happened to be in the galley when Terry went down for his lunch. The pattern began to come clear:
informal, haphazard, and unsystematic, but they were taking him over the ship, little by little.
     The two of them sat on a white-painted bench in the Bio lab, and discoursed of algae and alien
life-forms and also Anita. "Listen," Chan said abruptly, "has the blonde bombshell got you mixed up?"
     "No," Terry said bitterly. "I wouldn't say that."
     "It ain't like the Navy, is it kid?" Chan smiled, and it didn't matter if you knew the man had been
trained for years to create just this feeling of empathy and understanding; he created it all the same. If he
couldn't, they'd be in a hell of a spot on an alien planet. . . .
     "Don't get me wrong," Terry said cautiously. "I like girls. If you think everyone sleeps in his own bed
on a Navy ship . . ."
     "I came out of Academy too," Chan reminded him.
     "All right, then, you know what I mean. But this kind of deal—one dame, and the five of us, and—I
just can't see it. If I go to a whore, I don't want her around me all day. And if I have a girl, I damn sure
don't want every guy she sees to get into . . . you know what I mean!"
     "Yeah." He was silent a moment. "I know what you mean, but I don't know if I can explain . . .
Look, it's a small ship, and the payload counts. A girl friend for every guy would be nice, but . . . well,
hell, kid, you'll see for yourself once we get going. All I wanted to say to begin
     with was if you got the idea it was all for one guy, you were wrong. Deke's always kind of hopped
up before we go, and he's the guy we have to count on to get us out safe. She just naturally . . . anyhow,
don't let him monopolize anything—not if you want it, that is."
     "I don't," Terry said, and they went back to algae and aliens. And at least one thing emerged: Mike
wasn't the only man on board who cared. Just what it was that mattered so much to him or to Chan,
Terry wasn't quite sure: their work, or the Lady herself, or the dead dream she stood for. Whatever
exactly it was, the feeling was something that Terry could understand—and that Deke and Hillstrom
never could ...
     Hillstrom didn't have to. He owned the Lady. He wasn't obliged to understand her: only to pay the
bills, and let the hired hands do their work for him. For her . . . ?
     The hired help worked, all right. At least, Mike and Chan did, and Terry Carnahan. Even Deke put
in a full morning up in Control, checking his board, and testing a dry run with Terry.
     Even Deke? What the hell? Deke had been holding down the driver's seat on the Lady for four years
now. He had to be good. And he was; the half-hour's test was enough to show his class.
     In his bunk that night, Terry improved his acquaintance with Archy the poet-cockroach, and
Mehitabel the cat. Archy's opinions amused him; but in the determined dignity of the lady-cat's earthy
enthusiasms, he found a philosophy sadly appropriate for the life of a Lady ship: and it was difficult to
continue to feel entirely sad about the fit of the shoe while Mehitabel danced her wild free whirling dance,
defiant and tourjoursgai . wotthehell…wotthehell ...
     Mehitabel, Mike, and Chandra all helped. But backing them all up was the Manual.
     P. 549, at the bottom: "An IBMan specialist may exercise his privilege of declaring the psychological
conditions on board a ship of the specified classes unfit for blind jump at any time before plotting
navigation data to the jump-off point in question. In such cases, the ship will return by analog to Lunar
Base; or if unequipped to do so, will remain in its current port, pending a hearing by the Commandant."
     They wouldn't jump till after the Aldebaran hop. Six weeks out, two weeks in port: there was time to
wait and find out whether one lousy tramp could ruin the work and the dreams of thirteen years.
     As he fell asleep, the IBMan thought with surprise that grease and nudity were perhaps as fitting
uniforms in their ways for engine maintenance and bio work as kniteedge trouser creases were for
precision computing. . . .

    The thirty-foot-wide metal collar that encircled the lower third of the Lady Jane, in drydock, rose
slowly out of the concrete pit. When the Lady had been lifted some twenty feet, the trucks moved in and
extended supporting yard-wide jacks up into smaller collars, set in the underside of the wide, upper
flange.
    The outer lock, 'midships, swung open, and the elevator cage started down. Five figures in full-gear
pressure suits emerged and took their places on the flange. They fastened the chains and winches
securing the jacks in their sockets and belted themselves in position to keep a watch on the winches
during the overland voyage.
    One by one their voices cleared over the suit-to-suit. "All secure here . . . Okay . . . Check . . .
Secure ... That's it!" Hillstrom's was the last.
    "All clear?" He waited five seconds, then waved the red flag at his side. The enormous pit jack sank
downward; and the trucks started lifting alone. At fifty feet, the jet tubes were clear of the ramp. The
trucks swivelled into alignment, and sixty-five earth-tons of wheelchair began to move the Lady away
from drydock in lumbering state.
    From his seat on the flange, Terence Hugh Carnahan surveyed man's moon, and found it good. Six
hours away, the black knife-edge of lunar night sliced off the horizon. Ten minutes ahead, the mile-long
launching tube yawned empty and waiting.
    The suit-to-suit crackled with small talk and still-smaller humor. Terry almost gave in to the urge to
turn it off. He'd been through the launching routine a hundred times, in mockups and dry runs, but this
was his first time to ride a live ship over the face of the moon from the dock to the tube. If the schoolboy
dreams of glory were dead forever . . . if the battered old hulk of the Lady was all he could have . . .
even she had her dubious virtues, and among them the brightest was this . . . this moment, now, the
fulfillment of, not a child's dream, but the Big Dream of a man, of mankind, for the stars.
      It was sacrilege, nothing less, to be approaching the launch-site with a series of schoolboy double
entendres supplying the background music.
      He had actually reached for the switch, when a new voice floated in. "Still with us, Lieutenant?"
      "Yes, ma'am!" He let his hand drop. The regulations made sense. Secured as they were in their seats,
and spread round the bulge of the Lady, the audio was all the proof they had that each of them was still
on post, alive and conscious. Even the Medic inside the sealed ship, watching the screens, couldn't be
sure from what she could actually see, whether a man immobile inside a suit was effectively operative.
      They came up to the tube, and the great cranes reached out steel fingers, stripping and lifting the
Lady out of her wheelchair wrappings, pushing and nudging and sliding her into place on the runway. Six
moon-suited figures slid down the jacks into the trucks, and were toted back up to the airlock by the
tube elevator.
      There was no time for small talk now. Five hours to see for the last time that the ship was secure;
once the word, ready, went down, it was too late to look any more.
      Terry covered his section with swift methodical care. Satisfied, he went to his chair, and strapped
himself in; he did a last double check on his board; then he fastened his helmet back on, and began the
slow conscious relaxing of muscles and breathing that ended the ritual.
      When the count-down began, he was off in a floating dream of sunshine and sparkling water. Zero
minus nine, and he sat up erect. Minus eight, and he forced himself back into limpness before they hit
seven. Breathe in . . . out . . . hold . . . in . . . six . . . out . . . hold . . . in . . . hold . . . five . . . out . . . four
. . . in . . . three . . . out . . . two . . . innnnnone-annnnou—out!
      Off and out ... down and out . . . blackness and whirlpools and terror and kick back, up, out!
      His finger punched the wake-up button before he was fully aware of consciousness again. The light
ahead of him flashed green, and there was an instant's prideful notice that his was the second green on.
Then he forgot to be proud, and forgot to be Terry Carnahan. Green lights flashed and steadied, then
yellow and blue and red. The board was a Christmas-tree crossword constellation, each light a word or
a number or place, their shifting patterns spelling out death and life.
      Pressure eased; and the voices began—voices of engines and scanners and stresses and temps.
Some he heard in the helmet and some the board told him with signals and lights. A voice in the helmet
allowed him to take it off: the voice of the Bio board. A key on the pilot's board, at the chair up ahead,
was depressed by a finger; the think-board, in this chair, flashed questioning lights. The think-board
replied, and new figures lit up ahead, for the hands to use—the hands and direction and eyes of the Lady,
up there at the pilot's board, steering her free of the multitude of menacing mites and pieces and bits of
matter and mass in the populous planet-plied system.
      The dance of escape begat rhythm to suit itself, and the old girl whirled on her axis, and pushed her
way out to the stars, with a dance in her yet, wotthehell and the think-board was metal-and-plastic but
flesh-and-blood too; part of her, of the streaming single mote which alone in this mote-filled single
cell-of-Sol was bound to break out of bounds and escape to the endless entropic emptiness of Universe.

     "Take a break, kid. We got a clear stretch here. Karl can take over."
     He looked at the chrono, and didn't believe what he saw, and looked again. Five hours, and
seventeen minutes past zero. Now aching muscles returned to sensation, and ego to Terry Carnahan.
     Anita was standing beside him, one hand on a chair strap, the other held out to help.
     "Whore!" he said. "Get away, bitch!"
     She went away; Terry stayed where he was. What Deke could take, he could take too.
     He took it for six hours more, through the last of the dust and debris of the System. He drank from
the flask when it nuzzled his lips, and swallowed the pills she put in his mouth, and gave back what she
needed: the readings and scannings and comps and corrections that went to the driver's seat, to the pilot's
board, to Deke with the strength of ten and a tramp in his heart.
     He stayed there and took it until there was no more to do. Then he reached for the straps, and her
hands were already there, unfastening him.
     Bitch! he thought. Tramp! You don't want me!
     He let her lead him out of the room, down the ladder, through dim yellow-green, to the door where
the light would be flashing red outside.
     And there he stopped. There was something important to ask her, when he found out what it was, he
started to smile. Which one do you want?
     Which one? How could she possibly tell?
     As well ask, Which one needs her?
     He laughed and stepped forward ... and the tramp was his.