Free In Space No One Can Hear You Scream by Hank Davis Page B

most of the time, and we didn’t get confused about what to mine.
    My dad had done this for most of his life—had gone out and harvested minerals and rare earths from the asteroid belt. A month, two months, three months at a time, and come back home a little more tired, a little grayer, but with money to keep me in educational modules, and to keep Mom and me comfortable in our little house. He’d gone and come back, gone and come back, a fisherman in an endless sea, until the cold of space and the emptiness had bleached him away entirely. He’d died of one of those cancers long-time space miners get, and faded away into death like someone washed out to sea.
    He’d left almost enough money to complete my training—almost—to become an interstellar navigator, to work in those ships that went out to the new colony worlds. Almost. I needed another six months, another module and then I could apply.
    One trip out to the asteroids ought to do it, I’d thought, and I’d tried to find a ship that would take me—inexperienced and raw. There had been only Jack. Jack who’d taught Dad, Jack who’d been old when dad was an apprentice. Jack and the Gone Done It , his forever-breaking-down ship, cobbled together of salvage and will power.
    And so here I was. A month trip. All I had to do was survive a month.
    “Have you ever thought,” Jack said. He crossed the common room that was all we had outside the engine room and the storage room for our found materials, and dove into the cupboard for a piece of cheese. Hard cheese. He bit into it, leaving the mark of his teeth in the white-yellowness of the cheese. “Have you ever thought,” he said, “that the monsters were there; that they moved on? They were there when man first woke, when man first said I am , there in the darkness of the cave away from the camp fire, waiting, waiting. Any human who wandered away from the camp fire was slash, cut, gash.” He made vicious motions with the hand holding the piece of cheese. “Nothing but the remains found in the morning, half-eaten.”
    “I imagine there were tigers and bears and stuff,” I said. I’d almost said saber-tooth tigers, but then I wasn’t sure if those had lived at the same time as humans. Natural history modules were extra and not needed for a space ship navigator. “Waiting to snack on a human,” I said. “But not supernatural monsters.”
    Jack quirked an eyebrow at me. He had bushy eyebrows, very white, like the tentacles that grow over the eyes of certain dark-dwelling fish, and which give a sort of light to move by. “No?” he said. “But what if there were? And what is supernatural, exactly? Just a word people use to hide what they can’t explain. There’s always things people can’t explain. Imagine that there were those things, there, in the dark, waiting for humans to stray beyond safety and then—”
    “I won’t suppose anything of the sort,” I said. “Stop trying to scare me. Did you fix the engine?”
    He shoved the rest of the cheese in his mouth, wiped his fingers to the coveralls, leaving crumbs of cheese behind amid the oil smears. He waggled his hand at me. “Almost,” he said. “I can keep the artificial gravity on and the air purifying, but we’re still not moving. We’re marooned here. I’ll go do battle with it again.”
    The engine room swallowed him. He left the door open, though, so he could talk. I wondered why he was talking to me about monsters, and figured it was part hazing since I didn’t quite belong to his world and never would, and part to keep himself amused while he worked.
    I knew how to repair engines, too, at least in theory. I’d taken the module just before coming on this trip. But I didn’t know what had happened to the Gone Done It in the fifty years since she’d left the factory, and I doubted very much that her entrails resembled much of anything that the modules had shown me.
    Jack had changed her, at least for the last thirty years, and he