"To do Denis (that was Farquarson's first name, Denis) justice, I don't think he realized what he was letting us in for. The 'surreptitious' in the speech he'd made us about jet juice hadn't really registered with him. He probably thought the captain took a kind of 'spacies will be spacies' attitude with us.
"But Zinck fined us each two months' pay and ordered us confined to quarters except for necessary duty until we hit the first of the Rafts in the Ring. The confinement to quarters was all right, bein' disciplinary, but the pay docking, being financial, shouldn't have been imposed without a board meeting, an' we took it up with the union. There was months and months of rowing, and at the end the board affirmed Zinck's fine and slapped another month's penalty on us on its own account."
There was a dispirited silence. "About your saving his life...." I murmured.
McBream brightened. Plainly I had touched on a more pleasant segment of his recollections. The corners of his mouth, which had been austerely turned downward, began to right themselves. "Oh, that," he said.
"In order to know what happened, you got to know what the set-up was. Farquarson had already 'coped with' the cookery of the terra-type planets, and done what he could with the farther, bigger ones. It's pretty hard to get chummy with the inhabitants of Jupiter, even if their food was adapted to human digestions, and I notice Farquarson has only three Jovian dishes in his book. But anyhow, he was finishing up with the fringes, the cookery of the satellites, and he'd booked passage on the _Tisiphone_ because we touched at so many of them.
"Like I said, he was related to some dynast with a lot of tug, and the Old Man, after checking with an inspector at Marsport, agreed to let him have the use of the yellow life craft when he wanted it. It was sort of against regulations, but not too much.
"The craft's bein' yellow was important. Conformably to regulations, all the _Tisiphone's_ life craft were painted in the psychological primary colors, to make assigning personnel to them for evacuation easier, and all of them carried two paint bombs to 'provide adequate means for prompt renewal of said paint, pigment, enameloid, or tint.' You want to keep your eye on those paint bombs, because they come into the picture later on.