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Perhaps, he thought, he should have gone to the Spacemen's Club at the spaceport itself. On the other hand, he hadn't particularly wanted to see any of the other minor officers of his own class after the near-fiasco which had damaged the Naipor. Being a Guesser set him apart, even from other Threes. He thought for a moment of asking a policeman, but he dismissed it.
Either he was doing exactly as he said ignoring his guesses and following the computer or else he was inherently incapable of controlling his guesswork and was hoping that the computer would do the work for him. If the first were true, then Kraybo was a fool; if the second, then he was a liar, and was no more capable of handling the fire control of the Naipor than the captain was.
His ice-chill voice stopped, and he simply looked at The Guesser with glacier-blue, unblinking eyes for ten long seconds. The Guesser said nothing. There was nothing he could say. Nothing that would do him any good. The Guesser disliked Grand Captain Reed and more, feared him. Reed had been captain of the Naipor for only three years, having replaced the old captain on his retirement.
How did you ever think you'd get away with it?" He paused, then barked: "Come on! Explain!" "It was the only way I could think of to get back to the Naipor, great sir," said The Guesser weakly. The captain leaned back slowly in his seat. "Well, there's one extenuating circumstance. The officers of the Trobwell reported that you were a fine source of amusement during the trip.
He was in a totally alien environment, a completely unknown situation. "I'm fine," he said at last. She nodded. "You get plenty sleep, all right. Like dead, except when you talk to yourself." Then he had spoken in delirium. "How ... how long was I out?" "Three days," she said flatly. "Almost four." She paused. "You ship leave." "Leave?" The Guesser said blankly. "The Naipor? Gone?"
The great merchantship Naipor settled her tens of thousands of tons of mass into her landing cradle on Viornis as gently as an egg being settled into an egg crate, and almost as silently. Then, as the antigravs were cut off, there was a vast, metallic sighing as the gigantic structure of the cradle itself took over the load of holding the ship in her hydraulic bath.
"Look here, Kraybo," he said after a moment, "that one single Misfit ship got close enough to do us some damage. It has endangered the life of the Naipor and the lives of her crewmen. You were on the board in that quadrant of the ship, and you let it get in too close. The records show that you mis-aimed one of your blasts.
Hitting a ship in space at ultralight velocities was something else again. Young Kraybo could play baseball blindfolded, but he wasn't yet capable of making the master guesses that would protect a merchantship like the Naipor. But what was the matter with him? He had, of course, a fire-control computer to help him swing and aim his guns, but he didn't seem to be able to depend on his guesswork.
It was as though, somewhere in the back of his mind, something kept whispering that this was all nothing but a very bad dream and that he'd wake up in his cubicle aboard the Naipor at any moment. Intellectually, he knew it wasn't true, but his emotional needs, coupled with wishful thinking, had hamstrung his intellect. However, he knew he couldn't stay here.
He had a name, of course, a regular name, like everyone else; it was down on the ship's books and in the Main Registry. But he almost never used it; he hardly ever even thought of it. For twenty of his thirty-five years of life, he had been a trained Guesser, and for fifteen of them he'd been The Guesser of Naipor.
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