When the red hand touched fifteen Bill Harrigan was already in his cushions with a sleep mask over his craggy face. I envied him, but it was my turn to ride the chair out. Mike was in the other set of pneumatic cushions, but he hadn't gassed out. He grinned at me.
Then the red hand came straight up. I gritted my teeth and tripped the master throttle of the multiplex. The seven big Wilsons hit with a soundless shock and the Banshee went out.
The first few shifts were routine. Nasty, of course. The only pleasant part of spaceflight before the Halstead-Jenkins Mass Diminutors replaced Wilson drivers two years ago were the off-shifts when you could crawl into the cushions and turn on the sleep gas. Every sane and normal spacehand gassed out as much of the time as possible. It was safest.
For the Wilsons radiated supersonics with a frequency somewhere in the neighborhood of a fingernail scratching down a blackboard. Only amplified a million, billion, jillion stinking times.
That's why space wasn't crowded in those days, and why some of the earlier ships didn't come back. Wilsons did something to a man's nerves and emotions. A crew might be good friends on the ground, but that constant barrage of driver supersonics made them hate each other as long as they were in transit. Occasionally some poor guy would crack wide open, go space-batty, and when that happened the victim almost always wanted to kill his crewmates and wreck the controls. Earplugs were useless, for you don't hear supersonics. They sneak in through your pores and get under your toenails and even come down through the hairs of your head. They get in everywhere.
Whenever the auto-timer cut the gas on me and I had to go on watch I always felt as though all the fiends of hell were digging at my nerves with red-hot power tools. I itched inside and couldn't get at the itches to scratch. But I was used to that.
Then, on one of my watches, the meters showed a heavy drain on the secondaries. I wrote a note asking Mike to limit his test calls with the Hustic, and then rewrote it six different times to keep it from sounding too nasty. That's how you get with Wilsons running.
On my next time up I found a sketch of myself wet-nursing the power packs fastened to the bulkhead, and an alleged poem that was mostly putrid puns. Mike's idea of humor.