The Book of Strange New Things(82)

Tuska shrugged. ‘No big deal. Different display panel, same machine.’ He sat down in the nearest armchair and nodded towards the Hot Goss in Peter’s hands. ‘That crap will turn your brain to jelly.’

‘I’m just checking out what’s available here,’ said Peter. ‘And I noticed a couple of pages have been torn out.’

Tuska leaned back, crossed one leg over the other. ‘Only a couple? Jeez, you should check out Lesbian Action. A third of it is gone, easy.’ He winked. ‘We’d probably need to break into Hayes’s quarters to get it back.’

Peter maintained eye contact with Tuska but did not allow his face to express approval or disapproval. This often acted as a moral mirror, he’d found, reflecting back at a person what they’d just said.

‘No disrespect meant, you understand,’ added Tuska. ‘She’s a damn good engineer. Keeps herself to herself. Like all of us here, I guess.’

Peter replaced Hot Goss on the racks. ‘Are you married, Tuska?’

Tuska raised one bushy brow. ‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,’ he intoned theatrically, wiggling his fingers in the air to emphasise the antiquated pop-culture reference. Then, in his normal voice. ‘Haven’t heard from her in twenty years. More.’

‘Is there a special person in your life right now?’

Tuska narrowed his eyes pensively, play-acted a thorough scrutiny of the available data. ‘Nope,’ he said after four or five seconds. ‘Can’t say that there is.’

Peter smiled to signal that he understood the joke, but somewhere in his eyes there must have been a stray glint of pity, because Tuska felt provoked to explain further.

‘You know, Peter, I’m surprised you got through the USIC screening process. Real surprised, as a matter of fact.’ For several beats, he kept Peter waiting for elaboration. ‘If you look at the guys and gals working here, you’ll find that pretty much all of us are . . . ah . . . free agents. No wives or husbands back home. No steady girlfriends, no dependent children, no moms checking the mailbox. No strings.’

‘Because of the high risk of us dying on the way here?’

‘Dying? Who’s dying? We’ve had one accident in all these years and it had nothing to do with the Jump, it was a freak thing that could’ve happened to a commercial jet plane on its way to LA. The kinda thing insurance companies call an Act of God.’ He winked, then got back to the point. ‘Nah, the screening process . . . it’s about conditions here. Life here. What can I say? “Isolated” would be a fair word for it. The big risk, for anybody, is going crazy. Not psycho-killer, axe-murderer crazy, just . . . crazy. So-o-o . . . ’ He drew a deep, indulgent breath. ‘So it’s best if you’ve got a team of individuals that understand what it’s like to be in permanent . . . limbo. To have no other plans . . . nowhere else to go . . . nobody in the picture who particularly gives a damn. Know what I’m saying? People who can deal with that.’

‘A team of loners? Sounds like a contradiction in terms.’

‘It’s the Légion étrangère is what it is.’

‘Sorry?’

Tuska leaned forward, in storyteller mode now. ‘The French Foreign Legion,’ he said. ‘An elite army corps. They fought in lots of wars back in the day. A great team. You didn’t have to be French to join. You could come from anywhere. You didn’t have to tell them your real name, your past, your criminal record, nothing. So, as you can imagine, a lot of those guys were trouble with a capital T. They didn’t fit in anywhere. Not even in the regular army. It didn’t matter. They were Legionnaires.’

Peter considered this for a few seconds. ‘Are you saying everybody here is trouble with a capital T?’

Tuska laughed. ‘Ah, we’re *cats,’ he schmoozed. ‘Fine and upstanding citizens one and all.’

‘In my interviews with USIC,’ reflected Peter, ‘I didn’t get the impression I could’ve lied about anything. They’d done their research. I had to get medical checks, certificates, testimonials . . .’

‘Sure, sure,’ said Tuska. ‘We’re all hand-picked here. My analogy with the Legion is not that there’s no questions asked. Far from it. My analogy is that we can deal with being here, period. Legio Patria Nostra, that was the motto of the Legionnaires. The Legion Is Our Homeland.’

‘Yet you’ve been back,’ observed Peter.

‘Well, I’m the pilot.’

‘And BG and Severin; they went back a couple of times too.’

‘Yeah, but they spent years here in between trips. Years. You’ve seen Severin’s files. You know how much time he spent in this place, doing his job every day, drinking green water, pissing orange piss, moseying on down to the mess hall every evening and eating adapted fungus or whatever the hell it is, maybe leafing through some year-old magazines like you’d find in a dentist’s waiting room, going to bed at night and staring at the ceiling. That’s what we do here. And we deal with it. You know how long the first USIC workers here lasted? The first couple batches of personnel, in the very early days? Three weeks, on average. We’re talking about ultra-fit, highly trained, well-adjusted people from loving families blah blah blah. Six weeks, max. Sometimes six days. Then they would go out of their skulls, weeping, begging, crawling up the walls, and USIC would have to send them back. Back ho-ome.’ While uttering this last word, he made a grandiloquent sweep of his arms, to add a sarcastic halo of importance to the concept. ‘OK, I know USIC has a lot of money. But not that much money.’