I needn't have worried. Captain Hannah didn't want her back. He just wanted to relax and talk to someone. I bought him a drink, but I refused one myself, remembering what had happened to me the times before, when I had listened to Captain Hannah with a glass in my hand.
Captain Hannah ran a leathery hand over his leathery face. He looked haggard. "I came here because I've got to talk to somebody," he said, "and you make a good listener.
"Do you remember after I completed my contract with you for the delivery of the gasha root, and after you had talked me into leaving Beulah with you for the sake of the little one, how we had a few drinks together to celebrate our mutual success, before I headed out?"
Well, my memory about who had talked whom into what about Beulah didn't agree with his, but I told him I remembered our last get-together, and he went on.
"Anyone who tries to set up an interstellar Jump with a hangover should be permanently barred from the spaceways," he said with some feeling. "I guess that the only reason they aren't, is that the ones who make a mistake are never heard from again." He paused and sipped. "Except me."
"When I left you that last time, and pushed Delta Crucis up into parking orbit, I was full of rhial and a grim determination to deliver a whale to the Prinkip. I must have made some mistake or other in setting up the Jump coordinates, because when I popped out of Limbo, alarm bells went off in all directions. The main computer told me it didn't have the faintest idea where we had arrived, and the auxiliary computer agreed noisily. I turned off the alarms and uncovered the viewports to check for myself, without much hope.
"The view from the ones on the starboard side didn't show me anything I recognized, so I pushed myself across the room and slid off the covers on the port side.
"The stars there were unfamiliar, too, but I'm afraid that I didn't notice for awhile. The foreground was taking up all of my attention. There were two towheaded kids—about eight or nine years old, I should judge—floating in empty space, with their noses flattened against the viewport glass. They were as brown as berries, and as naked as jaybirds, and as cute as chipmunks, and as alike as two peas, and as improbable as virtue.
"The one on the left—my left, that is—backed off enough so that his nose straightened out, smiled angelically and asked politely whether he and his twin brother might come in. That is, his lips moved and I heard the words, and they made sense. Only they didn't. Nothing made sense when somebody talking in a vacuum could be heard as if he were right beside you. Anyway, I nodded that they could come in.