Slowly his face screwed up tight, the leathery skin wrinkling like a withered apple. Eyes closed, he hammered a raw fist on the bar till blood spurted. He was like a hurt child trying to hurt himself more to get even with fate.
"I had friends on the Venture IV," he cried wildly. "A lot of good friends. What happened to them? Where are they?..."
Calming down, he started talking. His voice was oddly detached, and so low you could hardly hear him.
"I was the ninth man," he said. "The rest were all techs, of one kind or another. I was the only spacetramp aboard. I've often wondered why they picked me, but somebody must have had a good reason. Maybe I was the catalyst. Each of the others could do one job extremely well. I could take over and do anything in an emergency—not as well, but a scratch job to keep the show on the road. And when the 'ologies' developed friction, I was the lubricant—the guy with no axe to grind who kept the other's axes sharpened and tempered."
Braun stopped and flung himself at the drink. He seemed to need it. But he was under control again, almost too much under control.
"We were way out—somewhere," he continued. "About as far as the others ever got. You can't express it in miles or in time, because neither of them have the right meaning. Not out there."
He stopped again. His eyes seemed to be staring beyond the outer limits of darkness, beyond the mystical barrier of the speed of light itself....
"The ship came out of warp automatically. Robot machinery was set for that, to bring us out at intervals—though nobody could be sure just how it would function. Ordinary time-intervals do not exist, and time itself is a random factor—out there. They tell me we were gone more than five years, here. For us, it was weeks. Most of the time we were in suspended animation, of course, with automatic controls to handle the ship and rouse one or more of us at intervals. Usually the ship was out of the warp and stopped when we were awakened. Twice, both in the early stages, it was not like that.
"Those times we were awake and in motion together. It was weird. Space was like black, transparent cellophane, wrinkled and bunched together with the ship leaping from one wrinkle to another. We could not see it, but that was the way we imagined it. We could see, though.