Fritz Leiber

“ I told him solemnly, feeling pretty foolish.
“But you’re my buddy I always can trust,” he protested, squirming a bit. “I wish you wouldn’t talk this way.”
“Jeff, you can’t trust anybody too far,” I said. “Even good guys can do bad things. When I was a boy there was a kid named Harry I practically worshipped. We lived on a pioneer world of Fomalhaut that had good snow, and we’d hitch rides with our sleds off little airscrew planes taking off. We’d each have a long white line on his sled and loop it beforehand around the plane’s tail-gear and back to the sled. ”

“ Now I was losing space to the ship faster and faster. Yet all I could do was reel in the me-end of the line as fast as I could. Suddenly the whole line straightened and gave me a bigger jerk than I’d intended. I could see Trompled Love crumple a little. And I was swinging just a bit, like a pendulum.
I used a glove-friction to spread the rest of the jerk, but still I was at the end of my line and Trompled Love had crumpled a bit more before I was coasting along with the ship again. ”

“ I’d switched my suit radio off for a bit, because, working in space, Jeff had taken to just gabbling to me nervously all the time—maybe because he figured there couldn’t be room for Joseph with him in his suit.
I finished up and paused for a last look at the ship. She was sweetly slim from her conical living quarters to the taper-tail of her ionic jet, but she had more junk on her than an amateur asteroid prospector hangs on his suit the first time out. Every duty orbit, fifty scientists come with permission from the Commandant to hang some automatic research gadget on the hull. ”

“ Next I reattached the antenna to my suit—which turned out to be a lot more troublesome job than unshipping it—and tongued on the radio with the idea of listening in on Jeff.
Right away I heard him say, “Wake up, Joseph! I’m going to tell you your faults again. I got a new way of cataloguing them—chronologically. Begin with childhood. You hitched sled-rides on airplanes. That was bad, Joseph, that was against the law. If the man had caught you doing it, if he’d seen you whizzing along there back of him, he’d have had every right to shoot you down in cold blood. ”

“ Joseph had swum into the cabin right after Jeff. And Jeff had yelled at him. “It’s about time, you lazy lunkhead! Everything secure? Okay, I’m switching on the beam!” And I’d probably brought the whole thing about by telling him that damfool sled story—and then sticking to him so close he just had to get rid of me, so as to be with Joseph.
Meanwhile the ship was gathering speed in her sneaky way and the wavy safety line between me and the airlock was starting to straighten.
As you know, an ionic jet’s only good space-to-space. It’s not for heavy-G work ”

“ Then we’d hide. As soon as the pilot got aboard we’d jump on our sleds and each grab the free end of his line and have one comet of a ride, until the plane took off. Then we’d quick let go.
“Well, one frosty morning I let go and nothing happened, except I started to rise. ”