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It was about a month after the gravity transition that Natalia had realized that we actually had an option to opt out of the game of war that the captain was conducting.
"Why should we react to him at all?" she asked. "We don't have to play any game. We can let him play this game of war by himself. We don't need his sanction, in fact we don't need anything from him that he insists he must give us, but can't."
"What more could he do?" I asked, and smiled, knowing that he could do nothing more than he had already done. He could stagger our shifts so that our work periods would never overlap. That was already happening. The inconvenience was minor. Nobody had more than four hours of work each day. There wasn't that much work to do on those 'normal' days. If the ship had a jail, perhaps I might have been condemned to rot in it, but as it was, this personal vendetta the captain was fighting was harder on him than on us. He had built a jail for himself. We simply stopped worrying about his war, and let him rage on as he wished.
Of course him sending me into the pit, instead of a better man, or even a whole metallurgical team, could have spelled disaster for me and us all if I had failed. It could have endangered the entire mission. It might have even cost the life of everyone on board. I was amazed by how far he was prepared to push his vendetta. When the job was done, he could barely bring himself to acknowledge that I succeeded. In fact, I could barely believe myself that I succeeded. What he had asked me to do seemed totally impossible. At least it seemed so at first. I was sure that not even Natalia could fully understand what had happened. Maybe I succeeded because her life too, was hanging in the balance. Perhaps that, all by itself, had caused me to pull out all the stops, digging deep into my inner resources as I had never done in all my life. Now however, as it was past, the whole episode seemed as bewildering as a fading dream that drifts away with the sunrise. And yes, out of it came an amazing sunrise that was quite unexpected.
The part that the captain played in this sequence, that forced me to dig deeper, soon became unimportant. Whatever he had done or was still scheming was his responsibility, not ours. Even the prospect that the issue between us could spill over and divide the crew wasn't really our responsibility either. We didn't feel responsible for meeting their challenges too. Nevertheless Natalia and I took the greatest care to stay out of Johnny's way, as much as it was possible to do so. It was a bit inconvenient at times, but nothing more than that. Since his office was on the way to the 'planetarium,' this meant that I had to take the long way around to get there. The long way meant going down to the third level, coming back up through the end of the living quarters, and this every time I wanted some quiet time of contemplation, looking at the stars, or to meet Natalia there during our shift-breaks. Still, the detour, as long as it was, seemed easier than walking past the captain's open door.
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Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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