A. Bertram Chandler- The Half Pair

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The Half Pair

BERTRAM CHANDLER

"NOTHING", he said, "is more infuriating than a half pair of anything."

"I've said that I'm sorry," she replied, in a tone of voice that implied that she wasn't. "But you're

making such a fuss about it. Who gave them to you? Some blonde?"

"I gave them to myself," he replied sulkily. "It so happened that the need for a decent pair of cuff links

coincided with my having enough money to buy them. I've had them for years ..."

"And you were very attached to them," she said. "Don't cry. Mummy will buy you a new pair when

we get back to civilization."

"I want a pair now," he said sulkily.

"But why?" she asked, genuinely puzzled. "We're alone together in this tub of ours, half-way between

the Asteroid Belt and Mars, and you have this insane desire for a pair of cuff links ..."

"We agreed", he said stiffly, "that we weren't going to let ourselves lapse, get sloppy, the way that

some prospecting couples do. You must remember those dreadful people we met on Px173A – the ones

who asked us to dinner aboard their ship. He dressed in greasy overalls, she in what looked like a

converted flour sack. The drinks straight from the bottle and the food straight from the can ..."

"That", she told him, "was an extreme case."

"Admittedly. And my going around with my shirt sleeves rolled up, or flapping, would be the thin end

of the wedge." He brooded. "What I can't get over is the clottishness of it all. I go through into the

bathroom to rinse out my shirt. I leave the cuff links on the ledge over the basin while I put the shirt on the

stretcher to dry. Picking up the cuff links, to transfer them to a clean shirt, I drop one into the basin. It

goes down the drain. I hurry to the engine-room to get a spanner to open the pipe at the U-bend. I return

to find you filling the basin to wash your smalls. I tell you what's happened – and you promptly pull out

the plug, washing the link over and past the bend …

"I wanted to see," she said.

"You wanted to see," he mimicked. He brooded some more. "It wouldn't be so bad if this were one

of the old-fashioned ships working on an absolutely closed cycle. All that I'd have to do would be to take

the plumbing adrift foot by foot until I found my cuff link. But with more water than we can possibly use

as a by-product of the Halvorsen Generator, and all our waste automatically shot out into space…"

"Anyone would think", she said, "that you'd lost the Crown Jewels.

"My cuff links", he said, "mean at least as much to me as the Crown Jewels mean to the Empress."

"I've told you", she flared, "that I'll buy you another pair!"

"But they won't be the same," he grumbled.

"Where are you going?" she demanded.

"To the Control Room," he answered briefly.

"To sulk?"

"No," he said. "No, my dear. No."

She lost her temper when the tangential rockets flared briefly to kill the rotation of the ship around her

longitudinal axis. She was in the galley at the time, preparing spaghetti for dinner. Spaghetti and Free Fall

don't mix – or they mix all too well. She did not wait to clean the clinging, viscous strands from her face

and hair, but went straight to the Control Room, pulling herself along the guide rails with a skill that she

had not been aware that she possessed.

"You ... You butterfly-brained ape!" she snarled. "Since when can I do without gravity – even though

it is only centrifugal force – in the galley? You've ruined dinner."

"I", he said proudly, "have found my cuff link. You know how the garbage ejection system works –

all waste is flung out tangentially, by centrifugal force, at right angles to the line of flight. There was, I

thought, just the smallest chance that anything metallic would show up on the screen, especially if I killed

the ship's rotation. I stepped up the gain and the sensitivity, too."

"So?" she demanded. "So?"

"There it is," he said, pointing happily to the beam-bearing fluorescent screen that circled the Control

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A. Bertram Chandler- The Half Pair

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