Gourmet by Allen Kim Lang (snow like ashes .TXT) 📕

"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."

"Crew morale on the ship...." I began.

"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.

I myself do not doubt that Bailey was the finest Cook ever to go into Hohmann orbit. His every meal established a higher benchmark in brilliant galleymanship. We were served, for instance, an ersatz hot turkey supreme. The cheese-sauce was almost believable, the Chlorella turkey-flesh was white and tender. Bailey served with this delicacy a grainy and delicious "cornbread," and had extracted from his algae a lipid butter-substitute that soaked into the hot "bread" with a genuinely dairy smell. "Splendid, Bailey," I said.

"We are not amused," said Captain Winkelmann, accepting a second helping of the pseudo-turkey. "You are improving, Belly-Robber, but only arithmetically. Your first efforts were so hideous as to require a geometric progression of improving excellence to raise them to mere edibility. By the time we are halfway 'round the Sun, I trust you will have learned to cook with the competence of a freshman Home Economics student. That will be all, Bailey."

The crew and my fellow-officers were amused by Winkelmann's riding of Bailey; they were in addition gratified that the battle between their Captain and their Cook served to feed them so well. Most spacers embark on an outward voyage somewhat plump, having eaten enough on their last few days aground to smuggle several hundred calories of fat and many memories of good food aboard with them. This trip, none of the men had lost weight during the first four months in space. Winkelmann, indeed, seemed to have gained. His uniform was taut over his plump backside, and he puffed a bit up the ladders. I was considering suggesting to our Captain that he curtail his diet for reasons of health, a bit of advice that would have stood unique in the annals of space medicine, when Winkelmann produced his supreme insult to our Cook.

Each man aboard a spacer is allowed ten kilograms of personal effects besides his uniforms, these being considered Ship's Furnishing. As his rank and responsibility merit, the Captain is allowed double this ration. He may thus bring aboard with him some forty-five pounds of books, playing-cards, knitting-wool, whiskey or what have you to help him while away the hours between the planets. Bailey, I knew for a fact, had used up his weight-allowance in bringing aboard a case of spices: marjoram and mint, costmary, file powder, basil and allspice, and a dozen others.

Captain Winkelmann was not a reader, and had brought no books. Cards interested him not at all, as card-playing implies a sociability alien to his nature. He never drank aboard ship. I had supposed that he'd exercised his option of returning his personal-effects weight allowance to the owners for the consideration of one hundred dollars a kilogram. To collect the maximum allowance, spacers have been known to come aboard their ship mother-naked.

But this was not the case with Winkelmann. His personal-effects baggage, an unlabeled cardboard box, appeared under the table at noon mess some hundred days out from Piano West. Winkelmann rested his feet on the mysterious box as he sat to eat.

"What disgusting form does the ship's garbage appear in today, Belly-Robber?" he asked the Cook.

Bailey frowned, but kept his temper, an asceticism in which by now he'd had much practice. "I've been working on the problem of steak, Sir," he said. "I think I've whipped the taste; what was left was to get the texture steak-like. Do you understand, Sir?"

"I understand," Winkelmann growled. "You intend that your latest mess should feel like steak to the mouth, and not like baby-food. Right?"

"Yes, Sir," Bailey said. "Well, I squeezed the steak-substrate—Chlorella, of course, with all sorts of special seasonings—through a sieve, and blanched the strands in hot algaeal oil. Then I chopped those strands to bits and rolled them out. Voila! I had something very close in texture to the muscle-fibers of genuine meat."

"Remarkable, Bailey," I said.

"It rather throws me off my appetite to hear how you muddle about with our food," the Captain said, his jowls settling into an expression of distaste. "It's quite all right to eat lobster, for example, but I never cared to see the ugly beast boiled before my eyes. Detail spoils the meal."

Bailey lifted the cover off the electric warming-pan at the center of the table and tenderly lifted a small "steak" onto each of our plates. "Try it," he urged the Captain.

Captain Winkelmann sliced off a corner of his algaeal steak. The color was an excellent medium-rare, the odor was the rich smell of fresh-broiled beef. Winkelmann bit down, chewed, swallowed. "Not too bad, Belly-Robber," he said, nodding. Bailey grinned and bobbed his head, his hands folded before him in an ecstasy of pleasure. A kind word from the Captain bettered the ruffles-and-flourishes of a more reasonable man. "But it still needs something ... something," Winkelmann went on, slicing off another portion of the tasty Chlorella. "Aha! I have it!"

"Yes, Sir?" Bailey asked.

"This, Belly-Robber!" Winkelmann reached beneath the mess-table and ripped open his cardboard carton. He brought out a bottle and unscrewed the cap. "Ketchup," he said, splattering the red juice over Bailey's masterpiece. "The scarlet burial-shroud for the failures of Cooks." Lifting a hunk of the "steak," streaming ketchup, to his mouth, Winkelmann chewed. "Just the thing," he smiled.

"Damn you!" Bailey shouted.

Winkelmann's smile flicked off, and his blue eyes pierced the Cook.

"... Sir," Bailey added.

"That's better," Winkelmann said, and took another bite. He said meditatively, "Used with caution, and only by myself, I believe I have sufficient ketchup here to see me through to Mars. Please keep a bottle on the table for all my future meals, Belly-Robber."

"But, Sir...." Bailey began.

"You must realize, Belly-Robber, that a dyspeptic Captain is a threat to the welfare of his ship. Were I to continue eating your surrealistic slops for another hundred days, without the small consolation of this sauce I had the foresight to bring with me, I'd likely be in no condition to jet us safely down to the Piano West pad. Do you understand, Belly-Robber?" he demanded.

"I understand that you're an ungrateful, impossible, square-headed, slave-driving...."

"Watch your noun," Winkelmann cautioned the Cook. "Your adjectives are insubordinate; your noun might prove mutinous."

"Captain, you've gone too far," I said. Bailey, his fists knotted, was scarlet, his chest heaving with emotion.

"Doctor, I must point out to you that it ill behooves the Ship's Surgeon to side with the Cook against the Captain," Winkelmann said.

"Sir, Bailey has tried hard to please you," I said. "The other officers and the men have been more than satisfied with his work."

"That only suggests atrophy of their taste buds," Winkelmann said. "Doctor, you are excused. As are you, Belly-Robber," he added.

Bailey and I climbed from the mess compartment together. I steered him to my quarters, where the medical supplies were stored. He sat on my bunk and exploded into weeping, banging his fists against the metal bulkhead. "You'll have that drink now," I said.

"No, dammit!" he shouted.

"Orders," I said. I poured us each some fifty cc's of rye. "This is therapy, Bailey," I told him. He poured the fiery stuff down his throat like water and silently held out his glass for a second. I provided it.

After a few minutes Bailey's sobbing ceased. "Sorry, Doc," he said.

"You've taken more pressure than most men would," I said. "Nothing to be ashamed of."

"He's crazy. What sane man would expect me to dip Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut and Backhahndl nach suddeutscher Art out of an algae tank? I've got nothing but microscopic weeds to cook for him! Worn-out molecules reclaimed from the head; packaged amino acid additives. And he expects meals that would take the blue ribbon at the annual banquet of the Friends of Escoffier!"

"Yours is an ancient plaint, Bailey," I said. "You've worked your fingers to the bone, slaving over a hot stove, and you're not appreciated. But you're not married to Winkelmann, remember. A year from now you'll be home in Ohio, fifty grand richer, set to start that restaurant of yours and forget about our fat Flying Dutchman."

"I hate him," Bailey said with the simplicity of true emotion. He reached for the bottle. I let him have it. Sometimes alcohol can be an apt confederate of vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature. Half an hour later I strapped Bailey into his bunk to sleep it off. That therapeutic drunk seemed to be just what he'd needed.

For morning mess the next day we had a broth remarkable in horribleness, a pottage or boiled Chlorella vulgaris that looked and tasted like the vomit of some bottom-feeding sea-beast. Bailey, red-eyed and a-tremble, made no apology, and stared at Winkelmann as though daring him to comment. The Captain lifted a spoonful of the disgusting stuff to his lips, smacked and said, "Belly-Robber, you're improving a little at last."

Bailey nodded and smiled. "Thank you, Sir," he said.

I smiled, too. Bailey had conquered himself. His psychic defenses were now strong enough to withstand the Captain's fiercest assaults of irony. Our food would likely be bad the rest of this trip, but that was a price I was willing to pay for seeing destroyed the Willy Winkelmann theory of forcing a Cook to make bricks without straw. The Captain had pushed too hard. He'd need that ketchup for the meals to come, I thought.

Noon mess was nearly as awful as breakfast had been. The coffee tasted of salt, and went largely undrunk. The men in the mess compartment were vehement in their protests, blaming the Captain, in his absence, for the decline in culinary standards. Bailey seemed not to care. He served the algaeburgers with half a mind, and hurried back into his galley oblivious of the taunts of his crewmates.

There being only three seats in the Sale's mess compartment, we ate our meals in three shifts. That evening, going down the ladder to supper, my nose was met with a spine-tingling barbecue tang, a smell to make a man think of gray charcoal glowing in a picnic brazier, of cicadas chirping and green grass underfoot, of the pop and hiss of canned beer being church-keyed. "He's done it, Doc!" one of the first-shift diners said. "It actually tastes of food!"

"Then he's beat the Captain at his game," I said.

"The Dutchman won't want to mess ketchup on these steaks," the crewman said.

I sat, unfolded my napkin, and looked with hope to the electric warming-pan at the center of the table. Bailey served the three of us with the small "steaks." Each contained about a pound of dried Chlorella, I judged, teasing mine with my fork. But they were drenched in a gravy rich as the stuff grandma used to make in her black iron skillet, peppery and seasoned with courageous bits of garlic. I cut a bit from my steak and chewed it. Too tender, of course; there are limits to art. But the pond-scum taste was gone. Bailey appeared in the galley door. I gestured for him to join me. "You've done it, Bailey," I said. "Every Slimehead in orbit will thank you for this. This is actually good."

"Thanks, Doc," Bailey said.

I smiled and took another bite. "You may not realize it, Bailey; but this is a victory for the Captain, too. He drove you to this triumph; you couldn't have done it without him."

"You mean he was just whipping me on, trying to make me do better?" Bailey asked.

"He was driving you to do the impossible," I said; "and you did it. Our Captain