 What was Winkelmann's greatest insult to Bailey?
Should any groundsman dispute the importance of belly-furniture in history—whether it be exterminating whales, or introducing syphilis to the Fiji Islanders, or settling the Australian littoral with cross-coves from Middlesex and Hampshire—he is referred to the hundred-and-first chapter of Moby Dick , a book spooled in the amusement tanks of all but the smallest spacers. I trust, however, that no Marsman will undertake to review this inventory of refreshment more than a week from groundfall. Nimitz's men won their war on canned pork and beans. The earliest men into the vacuum swallowed protein squeezings from aluminum tubes, and were glad enough to drop back to the groundsman's diet of steak and fried potatoes. Long before I was a boy in Med School, itching to look at black sky through a view-port, galley science had fulfilled the disgusting exordium of Isaiah 36:12, to feed the Slimeheads for breakfast today what was day-before-yesterday's table-scraps and jakes-water. Four officers and twenty-one Other Ranks were rescued from the Ajax in deep space, half dead from deuterium poisoning. The Japanese vessel staggered to her pad at Piano West after a twenty-week drunk: the alien yeast had got into the stomach of every man aboard, where it fermented each subsequent bite he ate to a superior grade of sake . Our Captain was Willy Winkelmann, the hardest man in space and very likely the fattest. This isn't just a paragraph from the Spacer Union Contract. Twelve tons of water, oxygen, and food would have filled the cargo compartments to bursting, and left a small ship like the C. P. Sale no reason to reach for Mars. By allowing a colony of Chlorella algae to work over our used air, water and other effluvia, though, three tons of metabolites would see us through from Brady Station to Piano West and back. Every drop of water would have been intimate with the glomeruli of each kidney on the ship before we grounded in. Though I'm signed aboard as Ship's Surgeon, I seldom lift a knife in space. My duties are to serve as wailing-wall, morale officer, guardian of the medicinal whiskey and frustrator of mutual murder. This trip, the-man-you-love-to-hate was our Captain. If the Prussians had a Marine Corps, Winkelmann would have done splendidly as Drill Instructor for their boot camp. The planet Earth was hardly large enough to accommodate a wart as annoying as Willy Winkelmann.
 Slathering ketchup on Bailey's most proud concoction
 Slathering ketchup on Bailey's most proud concoction  Reducing his compensation  Refusing to eat the steaks that Bailey innovated  Remarking that the food in which he invested the least effort in making was the most delicious