Squee

Squee by Margaret St. Clair appeared in Future Science Fiction #35, February 1958. It is set among a ship's crew who have lived nearly three years in perpetual twilight, sleeping close together and breathing the same air over and over, with at least a year more before they get back to Earth. They quarrel a dozen times a day. Neil's laboratory is the one well lit, roomy place aboard. The crew hates him as the son of his father, yet hopes he can undo some of the damage that father did.

In one passage Adams and Venner play Go in the dimness, and Venner says Neil is trying to make an artificial human egg. In another, Venner asks whether people have learned there are things you must not do even to win, and Adams answers that when somebody hurts him he wants to hurt back. Ambarzumian asks Jacobsen to play his zither to cheer the crew, and Jacobsen says he does not feel like it. Ambarzumian puts their chances of a safe landing at about fifty-fifty.