Free Anywhen by James Blish

hazards—one of the more usual ones—of interstellar pioneering; and though I've heard that things have gotten a little softer in recent years, I can't say that I've seen any signs of it. Even aboard the Chisholm, I was sometimes accused of making a god of my stomach, even by Captain Motlow; which was plainly unfair, considering the quantities of steamed-shoes-in-muslin which I'd gnawed at without complaint during the first few months of the trip.
    All the same, I did my best to stay on my dignity, as is expected of every officer and gentleman commissioned by act of the General Assembly.
    "An army marches on its stomach," I pointed out, "and I'm supposed to be a fighting man. I don't mind servicing my own arms, or that my batman doesn't seem to know how to press a uniform, or even having to baby-tend Dr. Roche. All that's part of the normal grab bag you get in the field. But—"
    "Yah-huh," Captain Motlow said. He was a tall, narrow man, and except for his battleship prow of a chin, looked as though he were leather himself. "You're also supposed to an astrogator, Hans. Get your mind off sauerbraten and onto the problem at hand, will you?"
    I looked at the planet on the screens and made a slight correction for the third moon—a tiny, jagged mass of dense rock with a retrograde movement and high eccentricity, very hard to allow for without longer observation time than we'd had up to now. Inevitably, it reminded me of something.
    "I've got the problem in hand," I said stiffly, pointing to the tab board showing my figures in glowing characters. He swivelled around in his chair to look up at them. "And don't think it was easy. How long is the Chisholm going to last with an astrogator who hasn't had any B vitamins since he left Earth, except what I wangled out of Doc Bixby's stores? Astrogation demands steady nerves —and that hunk of rock we had last night for dinner was no more a sauerbraten than I am."
    "Don't tempt me, Lieutenant Pfeiffer," Captain Motlow said. "We may hit cannibalism enough down below. If you're damn sure we can put the Chisholm into this orbit, we'll go have our meeting with Dr. Roche. Between meals, we've got work to do."
    "Certainly, I'm sure," I said. Motlow nodded and turned back to push the "do-so" button. The figures vanished from the tab board into the banks, and for a while the Chisholm groaned and heaved as she was pushed into the orbit around our goal. That's one thing I can say for Motlow: When I told him the figures were right, he trusted me. He never had any reason to be sorry for it, and neither has any other captain.
    All the same, he's also far from the only captain to give me the impression that field-commissioned officers like boiled shoes.
    Dr. Armand Roche was another of my crosses aboard the Chisholm, but also so ordinary a feature of any U.N.R.R.A. crash-rescue mission in deep space that I could hardly complain about him. Crash rescue, after all, is a general cross mankind bears—and may have to bear for some centuries yet—in payment for the poor forethought the first interstellar explorers exercised in the practice of a science called gnotobiosis.
    Maybe they couldn't be blamed for that, since they had never heard of the term. It is the science of living a totally germ-free life; in other words, the most extreme form of sanitation and public health imaginable. In the first days of space travel, nobody suspected that it would eventually have to come to that. The builders of the first unmanned rockets did think to sterilize their missiles as best they could, and in fact the proposition that it would be unwise ( and scientifically confusing) to contaminate other planets with Earthly life was embodied in several international agreements. But nobody thought of man himself as a contaminant until far too late.
    "There were a few harbingers," Dr. Roche was telling the quiet group in the officers' mess. He was a smallish, bland-faced, rumpled man, but he spoke with considerable passion