One benefit, if you could call it that, of the terrible alcohol the automat produced, Jim reflected, was that it served as an active disincentive to actually getting drunk. Oh, he doubted Staff Specialist Palmer felt that way—her approach was that the worse the alcohol, the more you should drink in order to get to the point where you no longer cared—but for him, it was true. The awful impression of beer that he was sipping on was only his second, because for all that he’d wanted to gulp the first one down he’d found himself unable to swig it any faster than a slow sip, and so it had taken him the best part of an hour to finish it off. The only reason he was still here was that he was alone, and it was nice to have a space to be alone with his thoughts that wasn’t his duty station or his bunk. He briefly pondered what it would take to reprogram the machine to produce real beer the way he’d tricked the system into producing real tea for Pam, but the thought of pouring that sort of effort into anything non-Pam-related was exhausting, and the thought of it being Pam-related made him just want to drown his sorrows, even in terrible beer-adjacent alcohol drink.
He took another sip, but that sip was not destined, as it turned out, for his stomach. Instead, it hit the wall across from him as he spat in surprise when the door swung open forcefully and Roy Anderson walked in, bellowing something about “getting something to drink on this spaceship.” He waited for a beat to see if Pam would follow Roy in—she had to be with him, right? He’d only just been resurrected and there was no way he knew his way around the ship already, though the datasleeve might have directed him—and then gestured over towards the automat before letting himself think any further about why Roy might be yelling for a drink already.
“Over there, man.”
“Oh, hey, thanks Halpert.” So Roy did recognize him. Great. Not that he was surprised; it wasn’t like there were all that many people on the ship, or at least awake on it, and he was nominally one of the leaders of the crew at that. But he would have preferred to continue wallowing in his own head, rather than having company, and Roy had apparently taken the mere courtesy of pointing out the automat as an invitation to join him. He slid into the couch next to Jim’s, something rotgut-y in his hands (it definitely did not smell like beer—given the state of the ship’s beer offerings, of course, that was probably a benefit).
“So, Halpert, how’s it going?”
Oh, just deeply in love with your fiancée and wishing you back in the Warehouse where you belong. “Eh, same old.” Ain’t that the truth.
“Hah. You tell me.” If the conversation had lapsed there, it would have been a typical interaction between Jim and Roy. Beyond being involved with Pam, the only other thing they really had in common was their upbringing back on Earth, in the vast metroplex west of Philadelphia, which meant a shared appreciation for certain sports teams and aversion to others. But Roy was apparently in a talkative mood—as Jim supposed he would be too after months of cryodeath. So he didn’t take Jim’s grunt as an indicator of disinterest (which it most certainly was) but as an opportunity to prolong the conversation in a new direction.
“So, you have any idea why Pammy’s decided to wake me up three days early?”
Something about the question made Jim want to jump to Pam’s defense, but more than that it made him wonder two things: why Roy was asking him this, with no Pam in sight, rather than having a conversation with his fiancée, and why Roy would think he’d know. This last, he decided, he could safely express.
“I dunno.” For some reason, around Roy he reverted to the communication patterns of his early teens. As a lieutenant in the colonization force, he was obviously capable of stringing three words together—or even more on occasion—in the pursuance of his duties. Around Pam, he could wax lyrical, and actually often had to stop himself from doing so. Bring Roy into the picture, though, and he became taciturn, laconic, curt (and wasn’t it ironic that he could think of more synonyms for his behavior than words to say out loud?). He supposed it must be at least partly the old, pre-spacefaring man in him coming out, the one who wanted to grunt and slug Roy in the face and take Pam back to his cave.
He desperately hoped that his face had not gone red at that thought, or that if it had Roy assumed it had to do with the alcohol instead of his lascivious thoughts about Roy’s fiancée.
But Roy wasn’t really paying him all that much attention, he realized. Instead, he was throwing back the rotgut like it was going out of style. And apparently he had mastered the art of talking and drinking through the same mouth at the same time (reportedly an ability they had gene-engineered into the inhabitants of Omicron Perseii VIII, Jim recalled, due to the incredibly dry conditions requiring all colonists to be constantly imbibing liquids at all times lest they dehydrate—but he did not think Roy was a native of that world) because he had taken Jim’s little “I dunno” as a license to go on the rant he’d evidently built up.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, Pammy’s the best, but it’s not like there’s anything for me to do between now and the wedding, ya know? Well, besides Pammy, but then she’s on duty all the damn time anyway” he slapped Jim on the shoulder, causing him to jump, and continued “like I guess all you poor bastards are. That’s why I never signed up for shipboard duty, even though Pammy kept suggesting it. Told me it’d mean we got to spend more time together! Like time working under someone crazy like Captain Scott is worth living. I’d much rather spend my journey nice and asleep, and that’s what I told her. She was welcome to join me, but she’s stubborn like that. Most of the time she’s just what you’d want in a woman, you know what I mean, but sometimes she just gets these ideas in her head. Like that design work she wanted to do, or the stupid idea of going to advanced technical academy to get shipboard duty. Or this thing with me working on the ship. Me! Usually she just gives it up when I point out how dumb it all is, but sometimes it’s like she’s just so damn stubborn it makes me crazy. Like this wedding thing! All that stuff’s chick stuff, you know. Not like I care. I’m going back in the hold anyway, three days or six, doesn’t matter. And it’s not like I don’t care about her, it’s just…I don’t care what color artificial flower they grow to put in my buttonhole, and I don’t care if I have a buttonhole, I just want it over with, you know?”
He paused and looked over at Jim, which seemed to imply for the first time that some response was needed or indeed wanted. Jim was fidgeting with the glass of almost-beer in his hand, just to have something to do to work out the frustrations that were boiling up inside him. Did Roy really not realize how good he had it with Pam, or how much he worked (apparently intentionally, if naively not understanding quite what he did) to crush her? Did he really think that time with Pam was worthless if it came with the occasional addition of Captain Michael Scott? Because Jim was quite willing to reassure him of just how wrong he was about that…
Only maybe he wasn’t wrong. Because when push came to shove, Pam had decided to be with this man, and not with him. Apparently time under Michael Scott didn’t count, because if it had, wouldn’t she have reacted differently when he’d told her he loved her? Not necessarily jumping into his arms (he’d already gone through all the variations of how dumb that idea had been) but at least not being quite so shocked?
So Jim had no idea how to respond to Roy, because he could kind of see the logic of what he was saying, in the way that you can almost but never quite get to the speed of light in an Einsteinian universe—the logic seemed solid, but it kept receding as he looked at it. But he did know how he would feel if he were engaged to Pam (treacherous but delightful thought!) and so he had, at least, a response available to the last question Roy had asked, if not to the whole spiel.
“Yeah. Like, you’re marrying her, that’s what matters, not the details, right?” Because if he were marrying Pam (oh, if only he were!) he wouldn’t care. Sure, he’d want her to have everything she’d want, and he had some ideas of his own too (dangerous to admit, but true) but as long as the crucial facts were still in place—him, Pam, wedding, married—nothing else would truly be critical.
“Right!” For a moment, a horrifying but at the same time steadying moment, he thought he and Roy were on the same page. That even though he hated this man’s guts and envied him his life with a painful degree of emotion, they were at least united in their shared love of one woman, their shared belief that marrying Pam would be the most important moment in their respective lives—one when it happened in the natural course of things, the other in his fervent imagination.
But then Roy kept talking again.
“Like, why does she have to bother me with this shit? Why wake me up early? I had a good thing, man. I got Pammy on lockdown, right? And at the same time, I don’t gotta do nothing—I’m cold storage, right, so she can make it everything she wants and not bother me. Then we get married, we have a party, we have a wedding night” he waggled his eyebrows suggestively and Jim wondered for a moment where Roy Anderson got the idea that he, Jim Halpert, was the right guy to share lascivious thoughts about Pam Beesly with—not that he didn’t necessarily have them, but maybe they weren’t best shared with Roy “and then I’m off to cloud-cuckoo land again until we dock. Perfect. And now she and Ice go and wake me up three days early. Like, what the hell? Now I gotta kill three days onboard, awake, wasting my time.” He threw back the last of the rotgut and reached out his hand absentmindedly to order a refill from the machine. Suddenly he turned to Jim and his face brightened. “But hey, if I’m here, that means I got time for a bachelor party. Whaddya think, Halpert? Wanna get shitfaced and party our guts out? Sounds like a great time.”
“Yeah, sure.” Had Roy Anderson just asked him to his bachelor party?
“Great. Tell me where and when, man, and I’ll be there.” Roy started pouring the next drink down his throat with equal gusto to the first. “And if you want to get some entertainment…” he grinned at Jim. “Maybe that little hellion from astrogation…what’s her name?”
“Chief Astrogator Angela Martin. Stars to you.” Pam’s voice rang out across the Almanac and caused both Jim and Roy to jump, turn, and stare at her. How long had she been there, Jim wondered. What had she heard?
His question was at least partly answered by the next words out of her mouth, which should have overlapped with Roy’s loud “Pammy!” but were said in such a flat, crisp monotone that they seemed to shrug Roy’s words off as one would a spacesuit upon entering from an airlock. “But don’t worry. You won’t be needing that party.”
Jim stared at her, and then at Roy, who apparently hadn’t registered Pam’s crossed arms or the deadly calm of her voice, because he continued on as if nothing was wrong. “Why, you have a better idea?” He grinned at her and repeated the eyebrow wag he’d given Jim a few minutes ago.
“Yes, Roy.” Pam turned to Jim with exquisite politeness. “Lieutenant Halpert, can we have the room?”
She never calls me Lieutenant Halpert. Am I in trouble? “Yeah, sure.” He put down the beer and made for the exit. As he passed her she whispered “Thanks, Jim.” Maybe I’m not in as much trouble as I thought.
And then he was out in the corridor, leaning against the wall, and wondering if he ought to be heading somewhere else, anywhere else, on the ship. But he wasn’t. He was leaning, and he was waiting, and he would be damned if he was going to go anywhere until Roy and Pam were finished in that room.
