Starburst

7

IN THE "HONEYMOON HOTEL" OF THE STARSHIP CONSTITUTION Eve Barstow lay with her husband's arms around her, staring wide-eyed at the blank wall. They were not making love. They hadn't been, and it did not seem likely they would be.

Abruptly the lights went out, and then came on again in quick flashes as the ship's circuit breakers coped with an overload. "Shef's probably transmitting again," Eve guessed.

Her husband moved slightly in the cupped-spoons position behind her. "Uh-huh," he agreed, and yawned loudly. He sounded tired, but Eve knew that in fact he was simply bored.

The flickering of the lights was terribly annoying and, although neither Eve nor any other member of the crew was prone to such things as migraines, she could feel one coming on. Back on Earth she had never had headaches. Back on Earth she had never lain in her husband's arms and felt lonely, either.

Just outside the curtain that gave them all the privacy they had, Ann Becklund and Flo Jackman were disagreeing. Not just disagreeing. Eve could tell without seeing that they were facing each other across the dropline shaft, Ann with her hands on her hips, shouting, Flo with her arms outflung, shouting, the two of them almost drowning out the drone of the plasma generator. You got very few surprises when you lived on board the Constitution. Eve knew exactly how every member of the party stood, and spoke, and shaped his face, in every state of feeling of stimulus, because she had seen each one, again and again. The Constitution was pretty big, as spaceships go, but spaceships go rather many to the barrel, and the farthest any member of the party had been from any other in all the weeks and months since they took off was fifty-three feet. No, Eve thought, not true. Will and her husband had been three or four times that far away at least once—when they were outside the hull with the power cut off, studying the externalities of the drive. But she didn't want to think about that. She shifted uncomfortably on the rather hard foam mattress. Her husband didn't even notice. Honeymoon Hotel was a kind of special place for them—not just the way it had been for all the couples, of course. They'd practically built it. The curved couches themselves, one of which they were now lying on, had been vertical stress-bearing members for the extra bursts of acceleration when they rounded the Sun, before she and Jim had unshipped them and fitted them against the inner hull wall; the thin mattress had once been part of the protective foam for that same time . . . and when they fixed them up, what ribald jokes and squeezes and goosings went on. And how little since!

The flickering stopped and the diffused bead-lights resumed their steady glow. Jim stirred uncomfortably and raised his head to peer at her. "Blow your nose, sit up," he said. He wasn't giving orders. He was just describing what she would be doing for the next few minutes, and he was quite right, and she discovered he was right about needing to blow her nose, too; good heavens, had she been weeping?

She said bitterly, "I might as well, since nothing's happening here."

Jim rolled over and yawned. That was a sort of answer, signifying that he didn't care much one way or the other. As she pulled on the wraparound that she still usually wore he absentmindedly stroked her flank. That was the rest of the answer, meaning that they could make it some other time when she was feeling more cheerful.

When she exited Honeymoon Hotel, Flo and Ann were standing exactly as she had imagined them, and they neither stopped their discussion nor looked at her as she walked past to the shaft, tugged the line to make it rise, and put her foot in a stirrup. She envied them. She wished that someone on the ship cared enough about what she did or thought to argue with her about it.