Easy now, thought the captain. Easy now.
Mark Annuncio entered the captain’s cabin and licked his lips in a futile attempt to get rid of the bitter taste in his mouth. He felt lightheaded and heavy-hearted.
At the moment he would have given up his Service status to be back on Earth.
He thought wishfully of his own familiar quarters; small but private; alone with his own kind. It was just a bed, desk, chair, and closet, but he had all of Central Library on free call. Here there was nothing. He had thought there would be a lot to learn on board ship. He had never been on board ship before. But he hadn’t expected days and days of spacesickness.
He was so homesick he could cry, and he hated himself because he knew that his eyes were red and moist and that the captain would see it. He hated himself because he wasn’t large and wide; because he looked like a mouse.
In a word, that was it. He had mouse-brown hair with nothing but silken straightness to it; a narrow, receding chin, a small mouth and a pointed nose. All he needed were five or six delicate vibrissae on each side of the nose to make the illusion complete. And he was below average in height.
And then he saw the star-field in the captain’s observation port and the breath went out of him.
Stars!
Stars as he had never seen them.
Mark had never left the planet Earth before. (Dr. Sheffield told him that was why he was spacesick. Mark didn’t believe him. He had read in fifty different books that spacesickness was psychogenic. Even Dr. Sheffield tried to fool him sometimes.)