For the first three weeks, everyone tried to be polite.
That was customary on every long-flight expedition. People spoke more quietly than usual, joked carefully, apologized to each other for too long. The ship was too small for conflict. Everyone knew that.
Tomas liked to watch breakfast.
Not for the conversations.
For the silence between them.
Silence showed how the crew was living far more precisely than words did.
At first it was light.
Later it began to grow heavier.
He couldn’t say exactly when it began.
Only one morning he caught himself waiting for Rojus to do something again.
The first time, it was a cup.
The captain had searched a long time for her blue enamel cup. She finally found it in the engineering section, on Rojus’s desk.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t notice.”
He smiled.
The captain did too.
It all ended there.
A week later the cup disappeared again.
Only this time it turned up in the medical bay.
A few days after that — in the gym.
No one said anything.
It was just a cup.
Once during dinner the mechanic put on an old jazz record.
The melody played quietly, barely audible over the hum of the ventilation.
When the piece approached its climax, the music cut off.
Rojus was standing at the control panel.
“I don’t like trumpets,” he said.
“You could have at least waited for it to end.”
“I would have forgotten.”
He said it so calmly that no one answered.
Only the mechanic didn’t speak again that evening.
A month later, Tomas noticed a strange pattern.
Rojus almost never caused problems himself.
He only created their beginnings.
If two people argued over the work schedule, it would turn out he had been the last to edit it.
If someone couldn’t find a tool, Rojus had borrowed it.
If someone was late for their shift, Rojus had told them a different time beforehand.
Every small thing had an explanation.
And not a single explanation was bad enough to accuse him of anything.
“Have you noticed?” the doctor asked one evening.
“What?”
“That he never apologizes.”
“He does apologize.”
“No.”
She shook her head.
“He says the word ‘sorry.’ But he never takes the blame.”
Tomas thought about that for a long time that night.
The next day Rojus accidentally dropped a lab sample.
“Sorry,” he said.
After a pause he added:
“Strange that it broke so easily.”
Two days later he accidentally shut a door in the captain’s face.
“Sorry.”
After a pause:
“I thought you were walking slower.”
A week after that he deleted part of the navigation notes.
“Sorry.”
After a pause:
“The system probably didn’t save them.”
Every time, the apology sounded sincere.
And every time, someone else was to blame.
Or something else.
In the fourth month of the flight, Tomas heard for the first time how the crew fell silent when Rojus walked into the mess hall.
No one had agreed on it.
No one had given a signal.
The conversation simply ended.
Rojus looked around.
“What were you talking about?”
“Nothing.”
“Shame.”
He took some coffee.
Tomas’s cup.
Without even asking.
Tomas only noticed once Rojus was already drinking from it.
He wanted to say something.
Not about the coffee.
About the gesture itself.
But he stayed silent.
A few seconds later he realized that everyone else wasn’t watching Rojus.
They were watching him.
As if waiting to see whether someone would finally say what everyone had long been thinking.
Tomas didn’t say it.
He only took another cup.
That evening, writing in his journal, he stopped on one sentence.
“Objectively speaking, Rojus hasn’t done anything serious.”
He stared at the written words for a long time.
Then beneath them he wrote one more line.
“And yet today, for the first time, I thought it would be more peaceful if he weren’t on the ship.”
He closed the journal.
And for the first time since the flight began, he didn’t open it again that evening.