"Sir, what in heaven's name do you expect from me?" Bailey pleaded.
"Only good food," Winkelmann mumbled through his mouthful of disguised algae. He tapped his head with a finger. "This—the brain that guides the ship—cannot be coaxed to work on hog-slop. You understand me, Belly-Robber?"
Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban Hausfrau with the vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums or weeping. Only—can you understand this, so simple?—food that will keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard. You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor, that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw," Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment, to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."