It’s a sort of carefully bottled nervousness or a dead calm with a hair-trigger attachment. Whatever it is, it’s what you need sitting over a firing button when you’ve completed the dodge, curve, and twist that’s a sling-shot’s attacking dash and you’re barely within range of the target, already beginning your dodge, curve, and twist back to safety. Lamehd had it so strong that I’d have put money on him against any other gunner in the TAF I’d ever seen in action.

Astrogators and engineers are different. You’ve just got to see them work under pressure before you can rate them. But, even so, I liked the calm and confident manner with which Wang Hsi and Weinstein sat under my examination. And I liked them.

Right there I felt a hundred pounds slide off my chest. I felt relaxed for the first time in days. I really liked my crew, zombies or no. We’d make it.

I decided to tell them. “Men,” I said, “I think we’ll really get along. I think we’ve got the makings of a sweet, smooth sling-shot. You’ll find me—”

And I stopped. That cold, slightly mocking look in their eyes. They way they had glanced at each other when I told them I thought we’d get along, glanced at each other and blown slightly through distended nostrils. I realized that none of them had said anything since they’d come in; they’d just been watching me, and their eyes weren’t exactly warm.

I stopped and let myself take a long, deep breath. For the first time, it was occurring to me that I’d been worrying about just one end of the problem, and maybe the least important end. I’d been worrying about how I’d react to them and how much I’d be able to accept them as shipmates. They were zombies, after all. It had never occurred to me to wonder how they’d feel about me.

And there was evidently something very wrong in how they felt about me.

“What is it, men?” I asked. They all looked at me inquiringly. “What’s on your minds?”