A HITCH IN SPACE

BY FRITZ LEIBER

My Space-partner was a good reliable sidekick—but his partner was something else!

Once when I was doing a hitch with the Shaulan Space Guard out Scorpio way, my partner Jeff Bogart developed just about the most harmless psychosis you could imagine: he got himself an imaginary companion.

And the imaginary companion turned out to be me.

Well, I’m a pretty nice guy and so having two of me in the ship didn’t seem a particularly bad idea. At first. In fact there’d be advantages of it, I thought. For instance, Jeff liked to talk a weary lot ... and the imaginary Joe Hansen could spell me listening to him, while I projected a book or just harkened to the wheels going around in my own head against the faint patter of starlight on the hull.

I met Jeff first at a space-rodeo, oddly enough, but now the two of us were out on a servicing check of the orbital beacons and relays and rescue depots of the five planets of the Shaulan system. A completely routine job, its only drawback that it was lengthy. Our ship was an ionic jeep that looked like a fancy fountain pen, but was very roomy for three men—one of them imaginary.

I caught on to Jeff’s little mania by overhearing him talking to me. I’d be coming back from the head or stores or linear accelerator or my bunk, and I’d hear him yakking at me. It embarrassed me the first time, how to go back into the cabin when the other me was there. But I just swam in, and without any transition-strain at all that I could observe Jeff looked around at me, smiling sort of glaze-eyed, and said warmly, “Joe. My buddy Joe. Am I glad they paired us.”

If Jeff had a major fault, as opposed to a species of nuttiness, it was that he was strictly a speak-only-good, positive-thinking guy who always deferred to me. Even idolized me, if you can imagine that. He’d give me such fulsome praise I’d be irked ten times an orbit.

Another thing that helped me catch on was that he always called the other me Joseph.

At first I thought the whole thing might be a gag, or maybe a deliberate way of letting off steam against me without violating his always-a-sweet-guy code—like happy husbands cursing in the bathroom—but then came the scrambled eggs.

  P 1/9 next