Utility

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The Cassiopeia had a full crew that slept aboard the night before we left for Merans. That is, it was full except for McCord, Hydrophobia McCord, and nobody was very sorry about that. Three months cooped up in the small trading ship with McCord would be plenty long. We knew. We had shipped with him before.

Rumors are absolutely false when they say that Hydrophobia McCord had never had a bath in his life. I helped give him one once on Bonsby when things got so bad that the crew ganged up and carried him outside the shed in the middle of a Bonsby winter. We had to cut through three feet of ice and it darned near killed him, but McCord got a bath. That was five years ago, of course.

Nobody I ever met could recall seeing him ever take a drink of water, but there were witnesses to that one bath. McCord was allergic to water both externally and internally.

In desperation and in the middle of a huge drunk McCord had once gone to some quack psychologist who certified for ten dollars that McCord had a psychosis which made even the near presence of water an exquisite torture to McCord’s sensitive nerves.

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