United States or Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Bunch was a sort of family. Members of families may love each other, but it doesn't have to happen. For a second it was as if Ramos had Tiflin spitted on some barb of his taunting smile aimed at Tiflin's most vulnerable point. Ramos clicked his tongue. What he was certainly going to remark was that people who couldn't pass the emotional stability tests, just couldn't get a space-fitness card.
This seemed his one skill, his pride, his proof of manhood. And he wanted to get into space like nobody else around, except maybe Gimp Hines. It wasn't hard to sense how his head worked the whole Bunch knew. Tiflin's face seemed to writhe, now, with self-doubt and truculence; his eyes were on the photos of the heroes, beginning way back; Goddard. Von Braun.
"You're tiresome, Jig," Reynolds said without heat. "Somebody's going to poke you sometime..." Next morning, before going to classes at Tech, Frank Nelsen, with the possibility of bitter disappointment looming in his own mind, spotted Glen Tiflin, the switch blade tosser, standing on the corner, not quite opposite the First National Bank. Tiflin's mouth was tight and his eyes were narrowed.
He wasn't even around, anymore, when you beauties got caught. They come and they go." "But you were around, Tiflin!" "Maybe not. Maybe I was twenty million miles off." "Like hell!" Nelsen gritted his teeth, grabbed Tiflin's shoulder, and swung his gloved fist as hard as he could against the thin layer of rubber and wire over Tiflin's stomach. He struck three times. "Damn you!" Nelsen snarled.
"That might be an answer," he said. They plopped where they were, and tried to rest until the orbiting cluster of rings emerged from Earth's shadow into blazing sunshine, again. Then Mitch and Frank returned to their own bubbs to check on the acceleration. It was soon plain that Joe Kuzak's bubb, towing Tiflin's drum, would lag. "Hell!" Art Kuzak snapped.
Maybe he had the brains to be a great investigator of the past, in the Belt or on Mars, if his mind didn't crack first, which seemed sure to happen if he left Earth at all. But it was Glen Tiflin's reactions that were the strangest. He had his switch blade out, and was tossing it expertly against a wall two-by-four, in which it stuck quivering each time.
Can you go in there, be polite, say you're a Bunch member, make a promise, and above all avoid blowing your top? Boy if you queer this...!" Tiflin's mouth was open. "You kidding?" "No!" Tiflin gulped, and actually looked subdued. "Okay, Frank. Be cavalier. Hell, I'd croak before I'd mess this up...!" By evening, everybody had visited J. John Reynolds, including Charlie Reynolds and Jig Hollins.
"I promised myself I'd get you good, Tiflin! Now tell us what else you and your friends are cooking for us, or by the Big Silence, you'll be a drifting, explosively decompressed mummy!" Frank Nelsen didn't know till now, after exerting himself, how weak privations had made him. He felt dizzy. Tiflin's eyes had glazed slightly, as he and Frank did a slow roll, together. He gasped.
Tiflin snaked a cigarette out from inside the collar of his Archer. "Hey!" Reynolds said mildly. "Oxygen, remember? Shouldn't you ask our host, first?" Ramos had eased up on ribbing Tiflin months ago. "It's okay," he said. "The air-restorers are new." But Tiflin's explosive nerves, under strain for a long time, didn't take it. He threw down the unlighted fag.
Word Of The Day