I grimaced. “If anyone wants to say anything—anything at all—it’ll be off the record and completely off the record. Also for the moment we’ll forget about such matters as rank and TAF regulations.” I waited. “Wang? Lamehd? How about you, Weinstein?” They stared at me quietly. Weinstein’s chair creaked back and forth.
It had me baffled. What kind of gripe could they have against me? They’d never met me before. But I knew one thing: I wasn’t going to haul a crew nursing a subsurface grudge as unanimous as this aboard a sling-shot. I wasn’t going to chop space with those eyes at my back. It would be more efficient for me to shove my head against an Irvingle lens and push the button.
“Listen,” I told them. “I meant what I said about forgetting rank and TAF regulations. I want to run a happy ship and I have to know what’s up. We’ll be living, the five of us, in the tightest, most cramped conditions the mind of man has yet been able to devise; we’ll be operating a tiny ship whose only purpose is to dodge at tremendous speed through the fire-power and screening devices of the larger enemy craft and deliver a single, crippling blast from a single oversize Irvingle. We’ve got to get along whether we like each other or not. If we don’t get along, if there’s any unspoken hostility getting in our way, the ship won’t operate at maximum efficiency. And that way, we’re through before we—”
“Commander,” Weinstein said suddenly, his chair coming down upon the floor with a solid whack, “I’d like to ask you a question.”
“Sure,” I said and let out a gust of relief that was the size of a small hurricane. “Ask me anything.”
“When you think about us, Commander, or when you talk about us, which word do you use?”
I looked at him and shook my head. “Eh?”
“When you talk about us, Commander, or when you think about us, do you call us zombies? Or do you call us blobs? That’s what I’d like to know, Commander.”
He’d spoken in such a polite, even tone that I was a long time in getting the full significance of it.
“Personally,” said Roger Grey in a voice that was just a little less polite, a little less even, “personally, I think the Commander is the kind who refers to us as canned meat. Right, Commander?”