The first few shifts were routine. Nasty, of course. The only pleasant part of spaceflight before the Halstead-Jenkins Mass Diminutors replaced Wilson drivers two years ago were the off-shifts when you could crawl into the cushions and turn on the sleep gas. Every sane and normal spacehand gassed out as much of the time as possible. It was safest. For the Wilsons radiated supersonics with a frequency somewhere in the neighborhood of a fingernail scratching down a blackboard. Only amplified a million, billion, jillion stinking times. That's why space wasn't crowded in those days, and why some of the earlier ships didn't come back. Wilsons did something to a man's nerves and emotions. A crew might be good friends on the ground, but that constant barrage of driver supersonics made them hate each other as long as they were in transit. Occasionally some poor guy would crack wide open, go space-batty, and when that happened the victim almost always wanted to kill his crewmates and wreck the controls. Earplugs were useless, for you don't hear supersonics. They sneak in through your pores and get under your toenails and even come down through the hairs of your head. They get in everywhere. Whenever the auto-timer cut the gas on me and I had to go on watch I always felt as though all the fiends of hell were digging at my nerves with red-hot power tools. I itched inside and couldn't get at the itches to scratch. But I was used to that. * * * * * Then, on one of my watches, the meters showed a heavy drain on the secondaries. I wrote a note asking Mike to limit his test calls with the Hustic, and then rewrote it six different times to keep it from sounding too nasty. That's how you get with Wilsons running. On my next time up I found a sketch of myself wet-nursing the power packs fastened to the bulkhead, and an alleged poem that was mostly putrid puns. Mike's idea of humor. Out of curiosity I put on the electrode-studded Hustic helmet and turned the set to receive. Wham! Stars wheeled and comets fizzed and vague dark shapes glided and circled and balls of fire grew and exploded in showers of multicolored sparks. I yanked the helmet off. But quick. There's really no excuse for what I did then, except that I wasn't thinking clearly and ten days of supersonics will bring out all the petty meanness in anyone. And I thought that for once the Professor had missed the boat and the Hustic was a floperoo. It didn't bring in thoughts. Just stuff, and I wasn't going to have such a no-good gadget draining the power-packs all the way to Mars and back. I forgot that first Hustic wasn't like a radio or these new universal models the space liners all carry. That experimental set had to be adjusted to the individual brain wave pattern of the operator. But I didn't remember that.