Bailey, his hands fisted at his sides, nodded. "Yes, sir. But I really don't know what I can do to please you."
"You are a spacer and a Ship's Cook, not a suburban _Hausfrau_ with the vapors," Winkelmann said. "I do not expect from you hysterics, tantrums or weeping. Only--can you understand this, so simple?--food that will keep my belly content and my brain alive."
"Yes, sir," Bailey said, his face a picture of that offense the British term Dumb Insolence.
Winkelmann got up and climbed the ladder to the pilot-cubicle. I followed him. "Captain," I said, "you're driving Bailey too hard. You're asking him to make bricks without straw."
Winkelmann regarded me with his pale-blue stare. "You think, Doctor, that my cruelty to the Belly-Robber is the biliousness of a middle-aged man?"
"Frankly, I can't understand your attitude at all," I said.
"You accuse me of driving a man to make bricks without straw," Winkelmann said. "Very well, Doctor. It is my belief that if the Pharaoh's taskmaster had had my firmness of purpose, the Children of Israel would have made bricks with stubble. Necessity, Doctor, is the mother of invention. I am Bailey's necessity. My unkindnesses make him uncomfortable, I doubt that not. But I am forcing him to experiment, to improvise, to widen the horizons of his ingenuity. He will learn somehow to bring good food from Chlorella tanks."
"You're driving him too hard, Sir," I said. "He'll crack."
"Bailey will have some fifty thousand dollars' salary waiting when we ground at Brady Station," Captain Winkelmann said. "So much money buys many discomforts. That will be all, Doctor Vilanova."
"That will be all, Doctor Vilanova," Captain Winkelmann repeated.
Bailey grew more silent as we threaded our way along the elliptical path to Mars. Each meal he prepared was a fresh attempt to propitiate the appetite of our splenetic Captain. Each such offering was condemned by that heartless man. Bailey began to try avoiding the Captain at mealtimes, but was frustrated by Winkelmann's orders. "Convey my compliments to the Chef, please," the Captain would instruct one of the crew, "and ask him to step down here a moment." And the Cook would cheerlessly appear in the dining-cubby, to have his culinary genius acidly called in question again.