Mark looked at the captain’s wide back and his overdeveloped posterior. He looked at the gray stubble that covered the captain’s head, at the two large hands with thick fingers that clasped one another in the small of the captain’s back and flapped rhythmically against the shiny plastex of his jacket.
Mark thought: What does he care about the stars? Does he care about their size and brightness and spectral classes?
His lower lip trembled. The captain was just one of the noncompos. Everyone on ship was a noncompos. That’s what they called them back in the Service. Noncompos. All of them. Couldn’t cube fifteen without a computer.
Mark felt very lonely.
He let it go—no use trying to explain—and said, “The stars get so thick here. Like pea soup.”
“All appearance, Mr. Annuncio.” (The captain pronounced the “c” in Mark’s name like an “s” rather than a “is” and the sound grated on Mark’s ear.) “Average distance between stars in the thickest cluster is over a light-year. Plenty of room, eh? Looks thick, though. Grant you that. If the lights were out, they’d shine like a trillion Chisholm points in an oscillating force-field.”
But he didn’t offer to put the lights out and Mark wasn’t going to ask him to.
The captain said, “Sit down, Mr. Annuncio. No use standing, eh? You smoke? Mind if I do? Sorry you couldn’t be here this mornins. Had an excellent view of Lagrange I and II at six space-hours. Red and green. Like traffic lights, eh? Missed you all trip. Space-legs need strengthening, eh?”
He barked out his “eh’s” in a high-pitched voice that Mark found devilishly irritating.
Mark said in a low voice, “I’m all right now.”