Rog Phillips

“ He walked toward me until he came to the edge of the desk, then planting his fists on the desk top, he said, "I've been wondering how long it would take for you to call me in for a little talk." He exuded an aura of quiet contemptuous strength as his eyes flicked over me in speculation.
"That's right," I said, hearing the nervous squeak in my voice, not sure whether my comment had any relation to what he had said or not. "I want to have a talk with you. Things can't go on the way they are!"
Resnick drew back in pretended surprise. ”

“ Sometimes I think he knows what happened in my office that day that I called Resnick in, but he has never given any hint whether he does or not.
You wonder that I am not ashamed to confess publicly to you that I was a coward? You shouldn't wonder. We are all cowards—or fools. I am not ashamed of the fact that once I was a coward. Bravery, in a way, consists in not being afraid of being afraid.
Just one thing remains in my story. When I reached North Marsport on that first leg of my first command, I was a Captain. ”

“ David Markham served my breakfast, the perfect orderly, quick to anticipate my wishes, so attuned to my habits by now that he almost seemed to read my thoughts before I was aware of them myself. He seemed to have not a care in the world. A cold shower can cover a multitude of inner tortures with a pink glow of well being....
Suddenly the idea came to me. I would talk to Oscar Resnick. I would plead with him. I would offer him money—my whole salary on this trip. Such men have their price. As Captain I made five times more than he. ”

“ Inevitably each of us has had some unusual experiences in his time, and we like to talk about them, boring each other to death, no doubt, as we repeat the same stories among ourselves meeting after meeting. So it's always a treat to us to get a new member and by so doing get some fresh stories to listen to. I am about to give you the floor, and what we would like to hear is the one experience you have had which you think is the most unusual, in some way, of your entire career. The floor is now yours, Captain Arthur Peabody! ”

“ Even if the Captain has provable justification for putting a man in the brig or fining him or giving him a demotion in assigned type of work, his ship will be delayed by the trial, and the owners will decide they need a Captain who knows how to avoid such costly delays.
A man like Oscar Resnick is a social cancer, and I saw the symptoms of his presence on the ship come into being, and grow, and I knew he was too cunning and too shrewd to let them get out of hand. ”

“ I sent him aboard with my bags to get my quarters in order, then steeled myself to check in the crew. You know how it is, you sit at the window and the men come by, one at a time, you introduce yourself, fix his face in your mind, size him up, then call for the next man. Finally it was Oscar Resnick looking through the window at me, his thick shock of sandy red hair glued down, clean-shaven, six foot eight, about two hundred and forty pounds mass, his brown eyes a little too large, his thin lipped mouth a little too small, his teeth a little too long. ”

“ Soon four or five of the crewmen start hanging around with the bully, admiring him too much, laughing too much at what he says, siding with him against others, and even doing a little minor bullying themselves by ganging up on this or that victim as soon as each has recognized the streak of cowardly sadism in the other which binds them together as human jackals.
A man like Resnick leaves the strong alone at first ”

“ In my own mind I was responsible for everything Resnick did to David Markham, which meant that by "punishing" Resnick I was punishing myself. When you descend to such levels of pure and obsessing emotional thinking, logic gets mixed up quite a bit. ”

“ While I plotted the courses of hundreds of chunks of meteor iron to search out safe holes through the intercepting meteor group my thoughts whispered gleefully, "All you have to do is pretend you don't know anything and maybe Resnick will be grateful and leave you alone."
Later, trying to get some sleep, I tried to think what could be done. Could I come right out and ask Markham about that bruise? Suppose I did, and he told me Resnick had done it, and I used that as an excuse to toss Resnick in the brig? Then the men would throw Markham's reputation in my face and claim it was a cowardly lie ”

“ When you are the victim of that sort of thing you really have only two courses of action open to you. Try to keep out of his way as much as possible, if you have any personal integrity, or kowtow to him, grovel in his presence, sneer with him at his other victims, flatter him, and hope he will direct his sadistic streak elsewhere. ”

“ But a Captain may not pick up something he has dropped, or do a lot of things that any ordinary man does for himself but which are the traditional duties of the orderly—if for no other reason than to keep him busy; so by necessity David Markham was with me during most of my waking hours. ”

“ He can't bring the thing into the open by fighting you without striking the first blow and being branded the aggressor in an unprovoked assault, and unless he is a professional fighter your sneering confidence bluffs him out of an open fight at first. ”