Anyway, after the pileup I quit. There was some difference of opinion on that particular point between the company and me. They claimed I was fired.
Quit or fired, however, I didn't get paid, and that led me to seek solace in the local pubs. That, in turn, led me to the city drunk-tank for the night, and that's where I ran into Bat Kendo....
Bat was Chief Tubeman on the R. S. Eagle. He was also a mutation. Not that he wasn't human or anything like that. And he certainly wasn't the much kicked around "homo superior." He merely had an extra sense. We all have it dormant. Bat had it well developed. That's why he was called Bat. People thought he could see in the dark. It wasn't that. Try closing your eyes and moving your head slowly toward an obstruction. If you are very careful and very alert, you'll be able to sense the obstruction before you touch it. Well, Bat could "see" things that way ... perfectly. He even used to pick up beer money by getting into the ring blindfolded and letting pugs throw punches at him. They hit him, but not often. And when they did connect it wasn't because he didn't sense the blows coming; it was because he was slow on his feet and generally three quarters drunk.
Bat's father, Nakano Kendo, had grown up in Nagasaki. He'd been exposed to radiation by the second atom blast there. Bat had befuddled the geneticists by showing up a mutation one generation before he was supposed to. He used to laugh about that.
His mother had been Russian. Certainly you couldn't tell his nationality by looking at him. His face held a suggestion of the Asiatic, but trying to place him anthropologically would have been as difficult as finding a pure Anglo-Saxon, whatever that is.
Bat was just the product of an insane age. A child of a man whose germ plasm had been dosed with radiation. But for all of that Bat Kendo was normal. Two arms, two legs, two eyes. Only his built-in radar marked him as different. That, and his terrific taste for booze. I never saw him sober. Yet to see him, you'd never guess he was perpetually saturated. There may have been bigger drunks in space, but I never knew one.
As a tubeman, he never had an equal. As an all around right guy, he never will have.
It was Bat that talked me into signing on the Eagle. They needed a Pilot, and where a better place to find one than in the Foy City drunk tank? I knew the Eagle, of course. Everyone in the Luna-Earth System did. She was a five hundred tonner, newly converted to atomics and fitting in the Foundation yards for a flight to Venusberg.
She was going to pick up a full cargo of weather-plant from the settlement. A hundred tons of it. And brother, that's a lot of weather-plant.
This was to be the first quantity shipment of the stuff. The "pilot-shipment." The botanists suspected a lot and had great hopes. But it was up to the Eagle to get the stuff to Earth. She was the only ship available for the trip with enough storage space for the plant, and when I listened to Bat talk about it, the flight began to take on the aspect of a mercy mission.