"You think he's going to try to start something?"
"Think! That's exactly what he's going for. One last big alley fight. One last brawl. When they cut him down—do you suppose they'll stop with him? They'll kill us, and then they'll go in and stamp Earth flat! You know it as well as I do."
"I don't know, Mac," I said. "Go easy." I could feel the knots in my stomach. I didn't want any trouble. Not from the stoker, not from Mac. None of us wanted trouble—not even Mac, but he'd cause it to get rid of it, if you follow what I mean about his kind of man.
Mac hit the viewport with his fist. "Easy! Easy—nothing's easy. I hate this life," he said in a murderous voice. "I don't know why I keep signing on. Mars to Centaurus and back, back and forth, in an old rust tub that's going to blow herself up one of these—"
Daniels called me on the phone from Communications. "Turn up your Intercom volume," he said. "The stoker's jamming the circuit."
I kicked the selector switch over, and this is what I got:
"—so there we were at a million per, and the air was gettin' thick. The Skipper says 'Cheer up, brave boys, we'll—'"
He was singing. He had a terrible voice, but he could carry a tune, and he was hammering it out at the top of his lungs.
"Twas the last cruise of the Venus, by God you should of seen us! The pipes were full of whisky, and just to make things risky, the jets were ..."