I frowned. "Where does he get the money for his wandering around the planets?"
"He don't need no money. He's good luck. There's not a captain in the system that would refuse free passage to old Joseph." Sam shrugged his beefy shoulders. "And who am I to say otherwise? That's why I give the bums free drinks when he's around; so does every other bartender."
Two customers had entered and Sam made his way down to them, leaving me alone.
A halftripper scurried through the door and cringed up to me. He whimpered, "How about a drink, spaceman? I...."
I flipped him a coin. "Sure, buddy," I said, repressing my usual nausea at the sight of him. I got down from my stool and made my way out. It was time for me to return to the spaceport and my job.
I suppose that I forgot to tell the cabbie to take me to the administration building entrance—the first time I'd made that mistake in years. I was preoccupied with thoughts of Joseph and the story Sam had told of him. The guards at the main gate must have let us through without question when they saw my United Space Lines uniform. At any rate, when I looked up, it was too late. Not only was I on the landing field and in full view of the concrete take-off aprons, but one gigantic freighter was in the process of blasting off.
All the horror of it flowed over me with a rush. The careful training of years; the work of the doctors who had treated me; all my own self-discipline—were gone. I shook with terrified frenzy. The depths of space! The free fall! The black emptiness! The utter, uncontrollable terror!
I screamed shrilly and the cabbie turned, wide-eyed, to stare at me.
He knew the symptoms. "Space cafard! A halftripper!" he gasped, and spun the cab about to get me to a hospital. He must have realized then that my uniform didn't necessarily mean that I worked on the liners themselves, but that I could be an office employee who only on rare occasions went near the ships.
He knew too, that the very sight of a spacecraft blasting off was enough to put me in bed for a week; and that I was uncommonly lucky to have the funds for the hospitalization. Mars was strewn with the human wrecks of halftrippers who hadn't.