IT was tests: put the washer on the stick, fit the pegs in the stupid holes. Add chains of figures. Dekker knew what they were up to when they gave him the kid toys.
“Screw that,” he said, and shoved the whole box onto the floor—wishing it was lighter g. But it made a satisfying racket. He looked up at the disconcerted psychologist and said, “Screw all of you. I’m not taking your tests until I see a lawyer.”
He stood up and the orderlies looked ready to jump, the petite psychologist frozen, slate held like a shield.
He coin-flipped the washer he had in his hand. Caught it before it fell, then tossed it toward the corner, looking at the orderlies.
“You want to come along?” Tommy said. He was the one who talked.
“Yeah,” he said, shrugged, and walked over to the door where Tommy and Alvie could take hold of him. They had worked it out: he walked and they didn’t break his arms.
If he was quiet they kept the restraints light and he could keep his hands free. It was hell when you couldn’t scratch.
“Vid,” he said when they were putting him to bed. There was vid in this room. Tommy turned it on for him. He didn’t even want to ponder where he’d been, what they were doing, it was just one more try, no different than the rest.
But it scared him.
Another doctor walked in, turned off the vid. He’d never seen this man before. But it was a doctor. He had the inevitable slate, the pocketful of pens and lights and probes. And a name-badge that said Driscoll.
Driscoll walked over, sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Don’t get friendly,” Dekker said. “I’m not in the mood.”
He enjoyed seeing the bastard sit back and take on an offended surliness. He was down to small pleasures lately. Driscoll consulted his slate mysteriously. Or Driscoll was the one who had the memory problems.
“I understand your impatience,” Driscoll said.
“I’ll talk to a lawyer.”
“We have your test results.”
“You didn’t run any test.”
Driscoll looked at his slate again: “Impaired motor function, memory lapses…”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Mild concussion, prolonged isolation, oxygen deprivation, exposure to toxic materials—a possibility of some permanent dysfunction—”
“Bullshit!”
“Inappropriate behavior. Hostility.”
“Get the hell out of my room. Where’s Pranh?”
“Dr. Pranh is on leave. I’m taking his cases.” Driscoll made a note on the slate. “I take it you’d like to get out of here.”
“Damn right.”
“I’ll order the forms.”
“I’m not signing any forms.”
Driscoll got up, reached the door and hesitated. “Try to control those outbursts, Mr. Dekker. Staff understands your problem. But it would be all around easier if you’d make an effort. For your own sake.—Are the hallucinations continuing?”
Dekker stared at him. “Of course not,” he said. He thought, That’s a damn lie.
But it scared him. It pushed his pulse rate up. They’d turned off the beep, but that didn’t mean they weren’t listening, or that it wasn’t going into storage somewhere.
Eventually a younger man came in, with another slate—walked up to the bed and said, “How are you feeling?”
The badge on this one said Hewett. He hardly looked twenty. He had a pasty, nervous look. Maybe they’d told him he was crazy.
Dekker didn’t answer him; he stared, and the young man said, “I’ve got your release forms.” He offered the slate. “You sign at the bottom—”
“I’m not signing this thing.”
“You have to sign it.”
“I’ve asked for a lawyer. I’m not signing that thing.”
Hewett looked upset. “You have to sign it, Mr. Dekker.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You want out of here, don’t you?”
“They want me out of here.” He was cold. The air-conditioning seemed excessive. He thought if there was a pulse monitor going it must be going off the scale. “I’m not going to sign that thing. Tell them they can do it. They’ve lied about everything else.”
Hewett hesitated this way and the other, said, in hushed tones, “Just sign it. That’s all you have to do.”
“No.” He shut his eyes. Opened them again as Hewett left.
He wanted out of here. He no longer thought he was safe from anything here. But he didn’t see a way.
Rush for the door? If he got to the outside, especially if he hit anybody, the cops would have him on charges, God knew what. Sign the form and then go for a lawyer? A signed form was all that mattered to these people. It was all they listened to. And what kind of legal help was he going to get here? A company lawyer? Company witnesses?
He’d had a brush with the law on Sol Station—kid stuff. He’d learned about lawyers. He’d learned about hearings. Judges went in with their minds made up.
Another white coat came in. With a slate. This one walked up, held it out, and said, “This is for your medical insurance. Sign it.”
He eyed the slate, eyed the woman suspiciously.
“It just authorizes payment of your bills. You’re damned lucky you have it. You’re a hundred percent covered.”
He took it, looked at it. It looked legitimate. It listed him and it listed Cory. He signed the thing, and he remembered fighting with Cory, an outright screaming argument about that policy, saying, We don’t need insurance, Cory, God, if you have an accident out here, that’s it, that’s all—it’s a damn waste of money…
And Cory had said, the college girl, from just a different way of life than his: I’ve never been without insurance. We’re at least having medical. I don’t care what it costs. If we need it, it’ll always be there…
In the crazy way Cory did things—argue about a damn jacket and spend a thousand dollars a year on a company policy that wasn’t going to do them a damn bit of good. He started crying. He didn’t even know why. The medic stood there staring at him a moment, and he put his arm over his face and turned as far over as he could. She left. But he couldn’t stop.
Tommy came in and said, “Do you want a shot, Mr. Dekker?”
He grabbed his pillow and buried his face in it. So Tommy went away.
“Got something for you,” Marcie Hager said, in her office in Records, with that peculiar smugness that Ben remembered. He came away from the doorframe—he had come to the Records office on a cryptic Drop by—from Marcie. This after a nice bottle of wine that showed up with a buzz at Marcie’s door some days past. You never paid Marcie’s kind in funds. But you did want to be remembered.
Marcie said, a very faint whisper, “Got a little flag on your claims case. Seems Dekker’s license has just been pulled.”
He pursed his lips. “Grounds?”
“Doesn’t say. Just turned up on the flag.”
“Mmmn,” he said. He winked at Marcie, said: “Thanks,” with a little lift of his brows. “Big thanks.”
Marcie looked self-satisfied. “I did enjoy that.” Meaning the wine, he was sure. But it didn’t mean the wine paid everything. Marcie had her sights set on promotion—something to do with personnel. He didn’t forget that.
So Dekker’s license was being pulled.
He walked out of the Records, hands in pockets, reckoning what he knew and who he knew, and finally decided to stroll over to a certain small office in Admin—nothing much. Records.
But Fergie Tucker worked there.
Fergie was just plain bribable.
“Hello, Fergie,” he said, leaning on the counter. “How about lunch?”
“The guy’s got no license now,” Ben said, over a sandwich in Io’s flashing neon decor. You never could tell what you were eating in here—everything flashed red and orange and green and the music made the wine shake in the glasses, but Tucker liked it. “He’s out on a medical. Psych, if you ask me. He was crazy, out of his head all the way back—no way in hell he was in control of that ship.”
Tucker took a drink. Strobe light turned the wine black, then flashed red on Tucker’s face as he set the glass down, a jerky movement synched with the bass flutter down the scale. The wine shook. The air quivered. Tucker said, more loudly than he liked, “What exactly do you want?”
“Ex-pe-dition,” he said, leaning close.
“Huh?” Tucker said. Tucker’s hearing had to be going.
“Expedite!” he said, over the bass line. “There’s no damn way he was in control. That’s the law. He has to be in control, or we own that ship.”
“I know the law.”
“Well?”
Tucker shrugged, and took a big bite of his sandwich. Which left him sitting there while he disposed of it. Tucker had been a pig in school and he was still a pig. But he was a high-ranking pig. And he could move data along if he wanted to.
“Everything in order?” Tucker asked finally, when the mouthful was down.
“That application’s so clean it squeaks. Vid. Before, after, and during. Clean bill from the cops.”
“Court of Inquiry?” This around a mouthful.
“We haven’t gotten any complaints. Nothing filed on us. On him, maybe. But I know that title’s clear. It’s his. The partner’s dead, died out there. Sole title’s with the guy, there aren’t any other liens on it. We’re it.”
Tucker’s face was orange now, with moving shadows. Sitar run. Clash of cymbals. Bass in syncopation.
“So what are we talking about?”
“Just slip it ahead in the queue.”
Tucker swallowed. Said, slowly, “Has to have a grounds. Give me one.”
He said, carefully, “What’s grounds?” and inclined his head as far across the table as he could get it. The music was on a loud stretch.
“Where is this ship? What’s its status?”
“At dock. Lifesupport’s a mess. Tanks are blown. Filthy as hell and the cops have it.”
“Chance of ongoing damage?”
“Could be. Depends. Have we got a better one?”
“Hardship.”
“On who?”
“The claimant? Have you suffered damage?”
God, it was so close he could taste it. “Financial?”
“Any kind of damage? Can you document it?”
“Yes!” He winced. The music vibrated through the table top. He held the explanation a moment, then shouted, “We spent our reserve getting that mother in. We’re short at the bank, we couldn’t lease our ship out when we came in because the cops had it impounded, now we don’t know what to do—she’s past time she should have gone, you know, here we are a good way through our heavy time, but she’s sitting idle; we got crews stacking up want to lease, and we need the money, but you only get a percentage on a lease if we do let her go out.”
“So? Where’s the hardship?”
“We could have to be here because of legal questions on the other ship—we’re trying to be in compliance with the rules, but we don’t know which way to jump. We’ve already lost a big chunk of our capital and we’re scared to leave for fear of sending the whole deal out the chute, you understand what I’m saying? We’ve been waiting months already. We’re coming to the time we should be out of here and we can’t be.”
“Yeah,” Tucker said. “You know, somebody else could even slip in with a bid and take that ship, if word got out she was up for claim, if you weren’t around to, sort of, oil the gears.”
Tucker was a real bastard. He stared at Tucker, thinking, Don’t you think about it, you scum,—while the music went from green to red and his blood pressure went up and up.
“Yeah,” he said, “but we are due a Hardship.”
“Yeah, well, you know those things are hell to fill out. You have to use the right words, say exactly what the clerks around in Claims like to hear. And you have to have somebody take it over there that can put it on the right desk.”
“Guaranteed?”
“Guaranteed.” Tucker’s pig eyes looked him up and down. “Ship owner has collateral like hell. Never has anything in pocket. How’re your finances running?”
“Five hundred.”
“Five thousand.”
“The hell!”
Tucker shrugged, slid his eyes away, filled his mouth with sandwich. The bass fluttered up and down the scale.
“All right!” Ben yelled.
Trinidad was free. That had come through this morning. Thank God. Bird nursed the beer to the bottom and the last lean froth—wanted a second one, but the tab at The Hole was already too high. August friggin’ 15th, and Trinidad was still at dock.
Meg patted his shoulder, went over to the bar. He figured what she was doing, then, and turned half around to protest, but Mike was already drawing the first one, and Sal Aboujib laid her hand on his from his other side. “Beer’s cheap,” Sal said. “Let her buy this one. We owe you a few.”
He had a slateful of figures that wouldn’t balance, Ben was still arguing about staying on, Dez Green and Alvarez and a good many of the other independents who’d been in when they arrived had all checked out on runs, and he was trying right now to decide whether old bones could run the risk of shortening their own time here, or whether they should just lease Trinidad out to Brower and his mate and sit at Base running up sleepery and food bills—maybe even lease her to Meg and Sal. Promise them the new ship if they got it. In that consideration they were short of supplies, the bank was not cooperating, and the damned LOS never had turned up again. They could try one more thing to get Recoveries to wake it up, but that computer time was expensive—and he just wasn’t sure it was worth it. They’d had another minor LOS yesterday, not on one of their own, but on one they had a 15-and-20 on, on Peterson’s lease; and he wished to hell he knew whether it was just bad luck, Peterson’s fault, or whether there’d been any assignment in that sector when the thing went dead: the company just didn’t like to hand out that kind of information. There were hotheads on helldeck that’d go for somebody if they got the wrongful or rightful notion they’d been robbed. Couldn’t blame Mama on that one. Fights with chains and bottles were hell on the cops.
So they took the second LOS and they were going to have to tighten belts, that was all. And he knew why Meg and Sal were moping around with him and Ben instead of out running down a lease or even hitting on them for Trinidad, when that would have been the logical thing.
Hard at this point to tell them they weren’t good enough to make enough to rate any prime lease, and they’d better go court somebody else, when Meg and Sal were courting them with all the finance they had and they were, dammit, day by day letting them do it, standing by them when anybody else would have called them fools.
You know, he’d told them more than once, at the first; I got to be honest with you: I don’t think that ship of Ben’s going to come through.
Did that drive them off? Hell no.
He should have said, plain and cold: Meg, I hear you’re one hell of a pilot, and Sal, you’re not bad at the numbers, but you just haven’t got the years—haven’t got the math, haven’t got the sense of how things work—
Should have said, a long time ago: You two shouldn’t ever have made a team: two greenies in the same ship is never going to get better fast enough for what you want.
But he knew what kind of slimespots they d already shipped with before they’d proved on Trinidad that they could go it alone, and started getting leases: and Meg had courted him real hard just before Ben showed up with the cash and the schooling—he still flinched when he recalled having to tell Meg that; and Meg taking it real well, though she looked as if she’d got it in the gut. Maybe Sal even knew. And she and Sal had stayed teamed, even so.
They’d take good mechanical care of a ship, and bring her back sound and clean. Last lease he’d had with Hall and Brower, you couldn’t say that. And they might do better with decent charts—and a little help from Ben.
Sal and Ben were a close pair lately. Those who knew Ben might snicker; and those who knew Sal would never in a million years win a bet on what really went on for some of those hours in the room, which was Ben talking numbers and Soheila Aboujib ticking away with her rented comp, with her lip caught in her teeth and this frown that would break glass—Sal could look madder than any individual he knew except Crazy Bob Crawford. Ben was hard to shake when he got an idea, but when it came to plain determination to make it, Aboujib and Meg Kady both were right up there with the cussedest.
We could do worse, Ben kept saying—when who to lease to had never been Ben’s department, just which draws to lease and which to work—but he couldn’t say Ben was wrong, except today it came to him that they’d blown near two months here, and they only now got Trinidad free. He and Ben could go ahead and make a run—
Yet here they both were, with karma piling up with the pair who’d stayed by them. He couldn’t figure how he’d gotten into this, or when it had gotten too late—but when the cops had raided them and thrown Meg and Sal’s stuff all over, that had been a real bad time to tell them shove off and forget it—
It seemed a worse time this morning, with their account bleeding money and him into Meg for a beer. He knew he ought to say, coldly as he could: Meg, Sal, don’t you buy me a damn other drink this morning, because you’re not getting what you’re after, and you’re wasting your money on what isn’t going to come through—
But Meg set the mug down in front of him, patted him on the shoulder and sank into the chair beside him. “We got an idea, Bird. You and Sal go out in Trinidad. Ben and I stay here to keep that application alive and take care of problems—we get us a little finance, put what Sal and I got in the pot with yours—make sense?”
“I got to say—” was as far as he got toward a desperate I don’t think this is a good idea, and I can’t take your money—
—when a familiar step came up behind him and a hand slapped a paper down in front of him.
His eyes must be going. For a moment it failed to make sense as what it was. A piece of real paper. With official print.
And Ben landing in the chair on his other side, grabbing his arm, shaking him and saying, “We got it! We got it, Bird!”
“The ship?” Of a sudden he knew it was a ship title. He’d handled Trinidad’s—years ago, before he put it in the bank vault. “It says Two-Two-Ten-Charlie. That’s not the number…”
“Same ship. Same ship with the blown tanks. They renumbered it. Like she was new. New start. Everything. We can sell her or we can fix her. We got her, Bird!”
He felt a little dizzy. He took a drink of the beer. Meg grabbed his arm from the other side. Sal was on her feet hugging Ben, and Ben was ordering drinks.
“Wait a minute!” he said, “wait a minute! Free and clear?”
“Free and clear,” Ben said. “We got a few charges to pay, but hell, we got the collateral, now!”
“What charges?”
“We got—8, 9 k to pay… plus the dockage.”
“Nine thousand!”
“Administrative. It’s nothing, Bird,—nothing, against the value of that ship. Figure it! It’s ours!”
“I don’t believe it.”
Ben pointed on the paper, where it said: joint ownership, and both their names. That wasn’t the terms of the split they’d always had, but, hell, he thought, Ben had hunted down the forms, Ben had done the legwork, Ben had pushed the thing when he never thought it would happen.
Mike came over, Mike heard how it was, and gave them a round of drinks on the house—The Hole never did that. But Mike did now.
They had more than was good for them.
Which was when Ben said how he’d heard Dekker was going to be in hospital a long, long time. How he’d gotten his license pulled.
Brain damage, Ben said.
“Shit,” he said, suddenly sick at the stomach.
“Hey, I told you,” Ben said. “Dekker’s a certified mental case.”
“They pull him all the way?” Sal asked.
Ben shrugged. “Close as makes no difference, if he gets re-certified there’s no way they give him a class 1. D3, maybe, but no way he can ever be primary pilot. Ship’s ours, on account of it was a tumbling wreck when we got it, and just because he was inside it is im-ma-terial. He was just baggage. He couldn’t stop it and he was in no shape to help himself.”
Poor guy, he thought.
“Fact is,” Ben said, “we still got a stack of bills against his account. And if he’s gone for a long walk, he doesn’t need the money: they’ll just ship him out to the motherwell. I got an attachment on his bank account.”
That was too much. “Now, wait a minute, Ben, we got the ship.”
“And the repair bills. And our fuel and our dock time—and its dock time, don’t forget that. They’ll stick us with all those bills.”
Unpleasant thought. “And the clean-up inside,” he said. “God, have you got any figure what that’s going to cost?”
“I dunno,” Ben said. “But we can get our expenses back.”
He was disgusted with himself, being happy to hear that. Maybe there was a lot of disgust at the table. Meg and Sal had gotten real quiet.
But Ben pulled out his pocket slate and started running figures. “What we can do, we do the repairs ourselves, we use the reserve cash—”
“Whoa, wait a minute. That’s our private insurance fund.”
“You don’t have to think like that now. That ship out there’s our insurance fund. We got flexible capital now, Bird, sure we want a reserve, but we got to get that thing in running order. We risk it now, while it’s in this shape; we don’t lease Trinidad this run, we can do that work in a month if we push it, and we build back our fund. It’ll work.”
“Hell,” he said, “I don’t know. This poor guy—”
“It’s not our problem,” Ben said.
“Ben…”
Ben gave him a bewildered look.
“We don’t take anything more from that guy. That’s flat. No more charges against him.”
Ben didn’t say anything for a moment. Ben looked as if he were worried about the objection, or confused. Finally: “Yeah, well, all right. But we’re talking about a guy that may not make it out of the psych ward.”
“If he does.”
“Yeah, if he does, fine. So we’re all right, so we collect it and if he gets out we can stand him a stake. If not, who cares?” Excitement got the better of him, he broke out in a grin and slapped Bird on the shoulder. “We got it, Bird, we got it, we got it made.”
The guys went off to somewhere, talking about checking out prices on tanks, happy, mostly—they all should be. Everything had worked.
But Meg sat there with Sal turning her glass in a pointless circle and scared for a moment that didn’t clearly make sense. She wasn’t superstitious, as a rule. Maybe she’d gotten to distrust a winning hand: it always seemed to be the big breaks that stung you, the ones that made you lose your sense of reality and pushed you to commit to big mistakes—like the break that had had her believing that sumbitch back at Sol.
“No damn luck at all,” she said. “Poor bastard’s had all up and down, isn’t he? Good old MamBitch. Screwed him good.”
“Yeah,” Sal said. “Didn’t Mitch say?”
“Suppose he is crazy?”
“Ben swears he is.”
“Brut bad luck for him.”
“Company’d only get that ship. That’s who we’re screwing.”
“That’s the truth.”
“Bet MamBitch passes a reg real fast says this can’t happen again. Bet MamBitch never severely figured somebody’d get through the shitwork and file all those forms. They don’t count on us knowing how.”
“Ah, but they paid off. That proves MamBitch is honest, doesn’t it? Then she’ll pass her rule.”
Sal gnawed her lip, tilted her head to one side, a clash of metal-clipped braids. “That gives Mama credit for brains. That’s never been proved.”
“That’s the truth. True here, true everywhere.”
Clink of glasses.
“Here’s to one more poor bastard,” Sal said. “Up the corp’s.”
“Yo,” Meg said. “Here’s to regulations.”
“Stupidity,” Sal said.
“Inefficiency.”
“Venality.”
“Is that a division?”
“Right under the corp-rat president.”
Clink. “Here’s to somebody Responsible.”
“Must be on Mars.”
“Sure ain’t here.”
A quiet snort. And a look in Sal’s eyes that was dead serious.
“Screwed,” Sal said.
“Yeah,” Meg said, “but what’s new? Maybe he’ll get lucky. Maybe they’ll ship him back to his zone, let him re-train.”
“Lay any bets? He could have friends there.”
“No takers,” Meg said, and stirred a water-ring with her finger.
Sal said: “Worth a nudge.”
Meg looked at her then, and Sal made a little shrug, gave her a lift of the brows with this smug look in her eye.
“You let it alone, you and your friends.”
“No worry, Kady.”
“Yeah.” Cold as ice, Sal was; but sometimes you got this feeling she was thinking of something that risked her neck and she was breathing it in like an oxygen high. Sal was a Shepherd’s daughter. Sal was also an orphan—in one deep dive into the Well.
That was worth remembering, too.
THEY’D asked his shoe size at breakfast. Now they turned him out of bed, gave him underwear and socks that came folded, likewise a cheap little Personals kit, a pair of brand new boots (black) and coveralls (blue) with fold-marks all over, so he looked like a mental case. They let him shave himself this time, but his hair hung around his ears and down into his collar: he didn’t even remember the last time Cory had cut it. He just stood there in front of the mirror staring at a hollow-cheeked, wild-eyed stranger and didn’t understand what Paul Dekker had to do with this gaunt crazy person. He didn’t remember that small white scar on his temple, didn’t understand how it could have healed so far without him ever knowing he’d gotten it… Tommy took him gently by the arm—he liked Tommy more than Alvie. Alvie just did his job; Tommy cared. Tommy always gave him that little moment to get his balance, that moment to figure out that he had to do what they wanted, because Tommy had his orders, but Tommy was never rough with him, and Tommy guided him now with a real concern for his comfort.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“Just down the hall,” Tommy said. “It’s all right, Mr. Dekker.”
“Not going to be any more tests.”
“No, sir. Just down to the office.”
Things kept echoing in his head. He said, “Tommy, did they give me something?”
“When they did the tests this watch, yes, sir. Still a little groggy?”
“Dizzy,” he said.
“Yes, sir. We’ll just take it slow, all right? Good chance you’re going to be leaving this afternoon.”
That scared him. He thought, Where to? Where is this place? They’d let him out and he’d be somewhere he didn’t know and Tommy wouldn’t be there. Just strangers.
Tommy opened a door for him and brought him into an office. He didn’t want to stay here. He didn’t want to be alone with any more doctors. Tommy set him down in a chair and he grabbed on to Tommy’s arm. “Stay here,” he said.
Tommy patted his shoulder. “It’s all right.” The doctor was coming in from the other door, same stamp as all the others. Tommy had said the doctor’s name and he didn’t care, he just wanted out of here. But Tommy stayed right there with his hand on his shoulder a moment and when the doctor ordered him, Tommy left him there.
“How are we doing?” the doctor said.
“Screw you,” he said—couldn’t muster any enthusiasm about it. He felt as if he was floating.
“Don’t like this place, do you?”
That question wasn’t even worth answering. He wanted to go back to bed. Wanted to watch vid or something. Or sleep.
“Still having the memory lapses, Mr. Dekker?”
He honestly didn’t know. He shook his head.
“I’m Dr. Visconti. Outpatient Services. Dr. Driscoll says you’re doing much better.”
Maybe he was supposed to say something about that. He didn’t. He just nodded.
Visconti said, “There’s an answer here from Management, on your request for a Court of Inquiry. Do you want me to read it to you? Do you want to read it?”
“I’ll read it,” he said, and Visconti pulled a card from his pocket, slipped it into the slate that was lying on his desk and offered it to him. It said,
Mary Finn, Special Judge
Legal Affairs Technical Division
Re inquiry: Belt Management, Div. 2,
Mining & Recovery
ASTEX
MEMO TO:
Mr. Paul E Dekker
c/o James R. Reynolds Hospital
R2/ASTEX MINING
8/01/23
Dear Mr. Dekker:
We have investigated your claims regarding the fatal accident that occurred on or about March 12th of this year. We enclose the testimony of 1) Recoveries, which has attempted to trace the course of 1-84-Z and to determine the location of the accident; 2) the testimony of Mohammed Fahdi, range officer and Lyle Xavier Manning, senior captain of the ship Industry, which was the only ship of its class operating near that path; 3) the testimony of Frances E. Rodrigues, Chief of Operations of BCOM/R1, 4) the report of Gianpaulo Belloporto, chief examiner, ASTEX R2 DIV ECSAA. It is the determination of this office that a catastrophic failure of the main intake value caused an explosion of the number two primary tank of 1-84-Z, which hurled the vessel in an unanticipated acceleration toward charted asteroid 2961…
“This is a damn lie. This whole thing is a lie—”
“Mr. Dekker.”
“There wasn’t any catastrophic failure.”
“Mr. Dekker. There was no ’driver in your vicinity at the time. The report doesn’t find you culpable. It was a very unfortunate double system failure. The pressure in that tank was building up during your maneuvering while your partner was outside. The valve had failed. The warning should have sounded. There’s no evidence it did. The blowoff apparently didn’t function—that part of the tank is missing and there’s no way to check—”
“What are you, a psych or a mechanic?”
“It’s part of our job, Mr. Dekker, to determine what did happen before we offer advice. The investigators don’t find any evidence of negligence, and they don’t blame you in any wise for the accident.”
He shut up, just stared at the wall. Useless to argue. Absolutely useless.
“It simply wasn’t your fault, you understand? It wasn’t any one person’s fault. There’s going to be a thorough investigation at Rl maintenance—but most serious accidents, they tell me, involve a triple failure, either of human beings or of equipment. As I understand it, the pressure warning didn’t sound. They’re sure of that from the log recorder. The blowoff can’t have functioned properly. It says here they’re investigating the possibility of a primary cause in a cross-wiring of a control module in an attitude control unit—the chance that the safety interlock system actually caused a pressure increase instead of a system shutdown. If it’s any comfort to you, there’s going to be a design review and a mandated inspection on that particular module. Whatever the technicalities—as the experts explain it, it was bound to happen at some point during a period of frequent brief firings—the investigating board thinks when you were moving in to pick up your partner. So it’s absolutely not your fault, Mr. Dekker. There’s no way you could have detected the malfunction: no way you could have anticipated it, nothing you could have done when it did happen. It’s not a question of blame. And you’ve carried a great deal of personal blame, haven’t you, Mr. Dekker?”
“Anything you say, doctor.”
“It’s called transference. A terrible experience, a long period of disorientation, periods of unconsciousness. Guilt for what you didn’t do. A ’driver accident is something every miner’s afraid of—something you can’t defend against, a shot arriving out of nowhere, faster than anything can warn you. A loss of personal control. Just like that explosion. That fast. Cory’s gone—”
“Not Cory.”
“Not Cory?”
“What’s the matter? Her being dead puts you on a first name basis with her? Go to hell, doctor!”
“Of course you’d have protected her. You’re still protecting her. But you have to accept you’re not to blame. Something blew up. There may be culpability on someone’s part, but it’s not with you. There was a ’driver, but it was a sector away. It wasn’t firing. The events you’ve fantasized just didn’t happen. They don’t have to happen in order for you to be innocent. You have to turn loose of that fantasy. Your partner’s gone. There’s no chance she’s alive now. There’s no hope. There hasn’t been from the first few hours after the accident. You have to give that up. You have to take care of yourself, now, Mr. Dekker.”
“It’s a damned lie,” he said. “You haven’t been here all the while, have you? They used to say there wasn’t a ’driver at all. Now it’s a different story.”
“It’s a different story, Mr. Dekker, because records are kept by zones and by sectors. You were almost correct, but you were remembering a recent position. The mind will do that to you. There wasn’t a ’driver in the vicinity. The BMO at Rl and here at R2 have compared records. They know your course now. They didn’t, at the start. Now they’re sure the ’driver wasn’t anywhere near the accident.”
He couldn’t answer that. His hold on what had happened had become too precarious. He decided to keep his mouth shut, before they argued him out of another piece of his memory.
The doctor took the slate, put in another card. “Are you ready to get out of here, Mr. Dekker?”
“Damn right I am.”
“You’ll be in outpatient for a while.” The doctor passed him the slate. “You’ll have a prescription to help you sleep—I understand you still have trouble with nightmares. That’s only normal. You have to work these memories out. You have to remember and deal with this tragedy. I think you understand that. But you will have the prescription, if you need it.” He reached forward and offered a stylus. “Sign the bottom of the document and date it.”
Dekker pushed the button, scrolled back. It said… agree to the findings hereabove stated…
“No,” he said, and shoved the slate at the doctor. “I don’t agree.”
“You don’t feel you’re ready to be released.”
The doctor didn’t take the slate. It stayed in Dekker’s hand and his hand shook. He thought, If I sign this lie nobody will ever pay for what they did. They’ll have killed Cory, and I’ll have run out on her, finally even I’ll have run out on her…
But if I stay in here they’ll make me crazy. They can tell any damn lie they want.
What’s justice? What’s justice, when there’s nobody can call them liars?
He set it in his lap, shaking so badly he could hardly write his name, but he signed it. His eyes blurred. He handed it over.
“Can you say, right now,” the doctor said, “at least maybe it was an explosion? Maybe it was an accident? Can you get that far, Mr. Dekker? Can you admit that now?”
He nodded.
“Mr. Dekker?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good,” Visconti said, and took the datacard from the slate and put it in his pocket. He got up from the edge of the desk. “Come with me, Mr. Dekker. I’ll take you to Dismissals.”
He got up. He hurt in every joint. They went out the side door and into a corridor he hadn’t known was there. He only wished Tommy had been there. He would have liked to have Tommy with him.
“Don’t mind a little stiffness,” Visconti said while they were walking. “I want you to walk. I want you to do low-impact exercises—you don’t need any broken bones to complicate matters. No jumping. No jogging. If there’s any pain in the back, stop. The card we’re going to give you has all your prescriptions, with dosages and cautions. I don’t have to warn you about calcium depletion, kidney stones, that sort of thing. The calcitonin regulators you’re surely familiar with. What I’ve given you shouldn’t have any interactions, but take any symptoms seriously, follow the exercise routines I’ve laid out exactly, precise number of repetitions. If you get any undue amount of sleep disturbance, see me, if you get blood in the urine, if you get sharp headaches, blurred vision, hallucinations or pain in the chest, put that card in the nearest reader, punch 888, and don’t leave that reader. An emergency crew will find you.”
“888.”
“That’s right. I’m your doctor of record. Don’t hesitate to call me.” They reached a counter in a hallway that stretched on toward the light. “This is patient Dekker, Paul E. Would you find his file and his belongings?” Visconti put out his hand. “Good luck, Mr. Dekker.”
Maybe it would have been braver to have told Visconti go to hell. But it might have landed him back in the other hall again, with more stuff being shot into him and the doctors saying, Are you still having those memory lapses?
He shook Visconti’s hand and waited at the counter alone when Visconti went away. His legs were shaking. His ears were buzzing. He was afraid he was going to fall and they were going to put him back to bed, so he sat down on a molded bench that made his back hurt and waited until someone at the window called his name.
They gave him his datacard and wanted him to sign another release, that he’d received his Personals and his card and his prescriptions. They handed him a bag of prescription bottles and another sack that had his watch and his old coveralls and stimsuit, he signed, and they wanted his card in the slot on the counter.
He punched Validate. He punched Read, to know what it would show him, and the reader screen showed two things valid: the ASBANK account number and his insurance. It said it was August 15. It said: ALL ACTIVE ACCOUNTS ARE IN PROCESS OF TRANSFER TO ASBANK R2 DIV.
And below that: PILOT CREDENTIALS: INVALIDATED.
He couldn’t move for a moment. The clerk said, “Mr. Dekker?” and asked if he was all right.
He couldn’t think. There was just a door to a lobby, a way out, and he took his card back, shoved away from the counter and walked for the light.
He had no idea where he was when he left the hospital, he only walked for a while down wide beige hallways with no clear thought in his head except that he was out of the hospital and nobody had stopped him.
But a cop did. The cop blocked his path and asked for his ID card, and he stood there scared they were going to take him back, while people in business suits walked past ignoring the situation.
The cop inserted the card in his pocket slate, with that expression that said he had to be a thief at best and that if there was anything wrong on this whole deck he had to be a prime suspect. Then the cop, still with that dead expression, stared off down the way and said to no one he could see, “Yeah. Yeah. Copy that. Thanks.” Then the cop gave the card back with marginally less chill and pocketed his slate. “Just out of hospital, is it?”
“Yessir.”
“You need any help, Mr. Dekker?”
“No, sir. I’m all right.”
“Where will you be staying?”
“Don’t know. Helldeck.”
“Trans is down the way, about a hundred meters. You’ll want the last car. About your fourth, fifth stop.”
“Thank you,” he said, and walked on in the direction the cop had pointed. ASTEX didn’t want a spacer walking on their clean deck, fingerprinting their beige paneled walls. He understood the rules. He didn’t even spit on the floor. He made it to the Transstation, leaned on the wall and waited til the Trans showed up and the doors opened.
People in suits got off, he stepped aboard, into an empty car, and sat down. One woman got on, sat down opposite, didn’t look at him, even if there was nothing else to look at. The Trans started up, whipped along to its next stop on the rim. Somebody else got in. Eventually all the business types got off and spacer and worker types got on: the screen said NEXT STOP 2 as the Trans started off in the other direction and climbed.
It would help if he could ask his way. But people didn’t do that. People kept their mouths shut in the Trans, the same here as at Rl. Ads lit the info screen, advertising upcoming facilities; music blared. The first stop listed mostly BM service offices. The second was commercial. The third listed sleeperies, gyms, and bars, and that was where he got off, into the echoing noise of helldeck.
He wobbled a bit when he walked, but that wasn’t unusual here, for one reason or another. He looked like a lunatic and carried plastic sacks full of everything he owned, and that wasn’t unusual here either—ordinary helldeck traffic. Some religious type jostled him, a religious type who yelled something about God and judgment and aliens and wanted him to come and hear a tape. But he didn’t, he just wanted to be let alone, and the guy told him he was going to hell.
For a while he was just lost—he could believe there had never been a hospital, there had never been a wreck: everything around him sounded and felt like home Base for the last two years—but the names were all different—
Cory had never existed here. His eyes and his ears kept telling him he had finally come home; but people around him were busy with their own lives, in shops with different names.
He walked, going through the motions people who belonged here went through. He didn’t know what he wanted. His knees and his feet and his shoulders began to ache with the unaccustomed exercise, and he recalled, out of the long nightmare of the ship, that he had wanted a beer very badly then. So, in the process of picking up his life, he walked into a comfortable-looking bar—The Pacific, it said, with plastic colored fish and plastic coral reefs and blue lights over the bar. The customers—there were ten or so—were tenders and dock monkeys, mostly. The shapes and shadows of creatures he’d never seen reminded him vividly of Sol Station, where he had a mother who honestly might care if she saw the mess he was in.
She’d say, Paul, didn’t I tell you so? Didn’t I say you were being a damned fool?
She’d say, teary-eyed and exasperated beyond endurance: Paul, now, how in hell am I going to get you out of this one? You cost me everything I ever got in my life. You’ve done every damn thing you could to screw up. What am I supposed to do for you now?
But he’d have been drafted if he’d stayed on the station. No essential job, 18, no medical reason not, they’d have taken him; and she hadn’t wanted that either, they’d agreed on that. She’d kissed him goodbye and he’d been embarrassed and ducked away, the last time he’d ever seen her—humiliated because his mother had kissed him in public. He understood now how he’d been a pain in the ass, and after all the grief she hadn’t deserved, the last thing Ingrid Dekker needed was her grown son calling up, saying he was coming home—to get sucked up by the military after all, if they wanted a certified schitz—
So what the hell good could they do each other? He wouldn’t take any more of her money. Or her peace of mind, whatever it was now. And she couldn’t help him.
He ordered a beer and handed the bar his card, hoping the hospital hadn’t cut off alcohol—not good for a man on trank, but he didn’t care. The bartender looked at him and stuck the card into the reader, where he could find out as much as a bartender needed to know, namely could he pay for what he’d just ordered, and had he any active police record?
A Medical showed up. He could see the screen from where he was supporting himself on the bar. But the guy didn’t argue about the beer, just drew one and gave it to him; and he found himself a vacant booth and fell into it, sipped his beer, shut his eyes and sat there a while in relative null before his brain started to conjure pictures he didn’t want to recall. So he looked at the stuff the hospital had given him—took his watch out of the bag and put it on.
It said, 06/06/23: 15:48:10. 15:48:11: he watched the seconds tick along, thought, No, that date’s not right. It’s August. August 15.
Cory’s somewhere out there. All that black. All that nothing around her.
She’d have seen the explosion, seen the ship—it could have run right over her—
Dammit, no! she wouldn’t have, because that wasn’t what had happened, that was the doctor’s story. There wasn’t any bad valve, there’d been a ’driver… he’d argued with it: This is our claim, hear us?
Instruments went crazy, collision alert sounding—he yelled over and over again, A-20, Mayday, Mayday, my partner’s out there—
You damned ass! What do you think you’re doing?
He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, thinking how the log would show those instrument readings. The doctors kept saying something different, but maybe the cops hadn’t even gotten into the ship—the doctors wouldn’t know shit about the technicalities and they didn’t care, they just made up stuff they thought was going to shut him up—it was their job, and they didn’t want him complicating it. The way the company worked, the cops probably hadn’t even looked, either, just some judge took all these reports from a ’driver that didn’t want any record of what it had done and operators in BM who didn’t want to admit—
—admit a ’driver had jumped a claim.
His head ached with a vengeance. He shied away from the company’s reasons. He thought about the pills and sorted through the lot, reading labels.
But beyond that…
He looked at the time again. August 15th. The accident—
(No accident, dammit.) That was the 12th of March.
March 12 to March 31 is twenty days. 20 plus 30 in April is 50. 50 plus 21 in May is 71.
January 1 to March 12. Thirty-one days in January, 28 in February, they said it wasn’t a leap year, 12 in March. 31 and 28 and 12 makes seventy-one days. Seventy-one days til they found me. Seventy-one days from January 1st to the accident. No. From the accident—that was why the watch read out the 12th. The numbers are a match—that’s all. And between then and now—is it coincidence? Or do months always do that? What do 30’s and 31’s have to do with anything sane?
He couldn’t think. His mind slid off any long track it tried to take. It made his head ache. He took his datacard and used its edge to reset his watch. August. The 15th. That was it. It said August 15 and Cory was out there somewhere, while he was sitting in an R2 bar. Half a year was gone, part of it lost in the dark, part of it on the ship, part of it in hospital. The 15th of August. And his card was active here, on R2, and they hadn’t said a word about sending him home: he supposed they didn’t want the expense.
Or they didn’t want him talking.
Screw that—if he knew anyone to tell anything to on helldeck—
If they’d gotten his ship in, if—he had anything to live on—
He remembered the license suspension—the doctors said it was oxygen deprivation and nerve damage because he dumped a stupid box on the floor and pissed off some doctor with an Attitude, that was what had gotten written down on his records. Or they’d pulled it because of the accident—but they’d cleared him of that. He could fix the license part of his problems, get the shakes out, get some sleep and do a few days in the gym—
All he had to do was sign up and pass the operationals again. No problem with that.
Except the hours requirement…
The company was going to be reasonable? The thought upset his stomach.
Retake the medical exam, maybe, put the damned washers on the stick, this time. He could prove it never should have been pulled. Getting the ship in order might take everything he had—tanks blown, all that crud when the lifesupport went down—but he could do a lot of the cleanup himself—but the dock charges… they’d come in, when? July 26th? June 26th?
God, he didn’t want to think about time any longer, didn’t want to add numbers or sweat finance right now or figure out how much he’d lost. But now that he’d started thinking about it he couldn’t let it go. He couldn’t keep any figures straight in the state he was in, and he had no idea what the tanks were going to cost. Twenty, thirty thousand apiece, maybe, counting the valves and controllers and hookups: some value for the salvage on the old ones, but it was going to take bank finance, and they had his account tied up—it might be smarter to sell it, buy in on some other ship—
The bar had a public reader. He got up with his beer and his bag of pills and his belongings, and went and put his card in, keyed past the surface information for detail this time.
APPLICATION MADE FOR FUNDS TRANSFER: 47,289.08 in ASBANK Rl branch to ASBANK R2. ACCESSIBLE AFTER 60 DAYS. PUBLIC NOTICE POSTED 08/15/23. CURRENT AVAILABLE BALANCE: 494.50.
Sixty days. God. What could take 60 days? He wanted to know where his ship was, what berth, what those charges were so far. He typed: 1-84-Z: STATUS.
R2’s computer answered: UNAVAILABLE.
Screwups. There wasn’t a thing in his life that some damned agency hadn’t messed up.
He took his card, went back to the bar, said, “Can I use the phone?”
The bartender held out his hand, he surrendered his card for the charges and the guy waved him to the phone on the wall at the end of the bar.
He punched up INFORMATION, asked it: DOCK OFFICE, pushed CALL, waited through the Dock Authority recording, punched Option 2, and patiently sipped his beer while his call advanced in queue. A live human voice finally acknowledged and he said, “I’m Paul Dekker, owner of One’er Eighty-four Zebra. Should be at dock. I’m getting an UNAVAILABLE on the comp, can you tell me what—”
“Confirm, One’er?”
“Yes. Towed in. Might be in refit.”
“Just a minute. You say the name is Dekker?”
“Paul Dekker.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Dekker.”
He took another sip of the beer, and leaned heavily on the counter, his breath gone short. He’d had enough of incompetence, dammit, he’d had enough of doctors arguing with him what he had and hadn’t seen and he wasn’t ready to start a round with the Dock Authority. A ship Way Out’s size was a damned difficult object to misplace.
“Mr. Dekker, that ship was here. I’m not finding any record of it. Just a minute.”
A long wait while he sipped his beer and his heart pounded.
“Mr. Dekker?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure that ship hasn’t gone out?”
He was on the edge of crazy now. He said, “I’m an owner-operator. No, it hasn’t gone out. It shouldn’t have gone out. Try Refit.”
“I’ll check.” The operator sounded concerned. Finally.
The barman was looking at him. A bunch of military drifted in and took his attention. He hadn’t seen them on Rl. But they were customers. He was glad of the distraction. He was in no mood for a bartender’s questions.
The bartender served the other drinks. The hold continued. The soldiers settled in at a table. The barman signaled him: Refill?
He slid the empty mug down the bar, still waiting, still listening to inane music.
“Mr. Dekker?” the phone said.
“Yes.”
“I’m going to put my supervisor on. Please hold.”
He had a bad feeling, a very bad feeling. The beer came sailing back to him, and he stopped it and sipped at it without half paying attention.
“Mr. Dekker?” A different voice. Older.
“Yes.”
“Mr. Dekker, that ship’s number was changed. I’m looking at the record right now. You’re Mr. Paul E Dekker. Would you confirm with your personal ID, please.”
“12-9078-79.”
“Yes, sir. That title was transferred by court order. It was claimed as salvage.”
He couldn’t breathe for a moment. He took a drink of the beer to get his throat working downward again.
“Mr. Dekker?”
“Did the guy who claimed it—happen to be named Bird? Or Benjamin-something?”
“I’m not supposed to give out that information, Mr. Dekker. I can give you the case number and the judge’s name. If you have a question, I’d suggest you go to the legal office. We don’t make the decisions. We just log what they tell us. I’m very sorry.”
“Yeah.” He was having trouble with his breathing. He didn’t have his card to take the note the Dock Office was putting in. He didn’t want to involve the barman to get it. It went wherever it went when you didn’t key a Capture. “Thanks.”
“Good luck, Mr. Dekker.”
The Dock Authority hung up. He pushed the flasher, keyed up Information and keyed into Registry. Took the 1 choice this time and asked the robot for M. Bird.
Bird, Morris L.: 2-29-T berth 29 and 2-210-C in Refit.
He signed Registry off and keyed up information on Morrie Bird. It gave a can-be-reached-at phone number.
He called it. The voice that answered said: “Black Hole?”
“Is this a sleepery?”
“Sleepery and bar. Help you?”
He hung up. He drank a big gulp of beer and picked up his. sacks off the bar. He asked the barman: “Where’s The Black Hole?”
“About three doors down. Something the matter, mister?”
“Yeah,” he said.
And left.
HEAVY time was, for a very major thing, a desperate chance at all the vids you’d missed, at food that Supply Services hadn’t blessed, at faces you wouldn’t see day after day for three months, and at the news you didn’t get out there where Mama’s newscast was the only gossip you got, telling you crap like, Gas production in R2 is up .3%; or: There was a minor emergency in core section 12 today when a hose coupling came loose, releasing 10,000 liters of water—
The mind conjured intriguing images—but they were thin fare to live on. Heavy time was real life: the reviews Mama radioed you out in the deep Belt of vids in the top ten only let you know what was a must-see when you got back. A stale rehash of handball scores was no substitute for seeing the interdivisional games, and electronic checkers with your shipmate was damn sure no substitute for sex.
Heavy time was anything you could afford besides your hours in the public gyms and your socializing in the sleeperies and bars and your browsing in junk shops—precious little you could buy except consumables and basics, because a miner ship had no place to store unusefuls, and mass cost fuel: but experience didn’t mass much except around the waistline—so those were the kind of establishments you tended to get on helldeck, those that catered to the culturally, sexually, and culinarily deprived.
And if a couple of your partners turned up absent since quitting time into supper, with a sudden lot of credit in the bank, you knew it was probably one of the above.
Even if it left you doing the supply shopping and handling the guys wanting a lease, you couldn’t blame him too much, and Bird didn’t: Ben had never been inclined to do it, Ben had worked hard on the legal stuff and the filings, and Ben had finagled a deal with a company repair crew to get the tanks installed.
But leaving him with the phone calls…
The regular lease crews wanting a piece of Trinidad or Way Out—those you could explain to. They weren’t overjoyed, but they understood. It was the horde of part-time unpartnered would-be’s, most of whom you wouldn’t trust to find their way up the mast and back, who called up every time a ship went on the list; and who, finding out that Trinidad, newly on the list, wasn’t to lease, argued with you; and, worse, that a brand new ship, Way Out, was already first-let to one Kady and Aboujib, of less seniority and a certain reputation—
Well, it told you that you sure didn’t want to lease to those hotheads anyhow. He said to the latest such to call, “Screw you, too, mister. Hell if you ever get any ship I’m handling,” and hung up.
After which he walked past the looks from the other tables, back to the table by the door and the figures he was working with Meg—bills and bills, this week, pieces and parts of Way Out, mostly. He sat down and shook his head.
“Another fool,” he said, and punched up the Restore on the slate beside his plate, trying to recall his previous train of thought, and wishing to hell they still gave you paper bills, instead of damn windows on a slate that caught the glare from the ceiling lights. “Wayland Fleming. I never let to that son of a bitch and right now I’m damn glad.—Where in hell’s Ben and Sal off to, anyway?”
“Vid, I think.”
“Spending money.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s got into Ben.”
Meg looked up with raised eyebrows and said, “Now, Bird, you know what’s got into Ben.”
No, he honestly hadn’t had it figured until Meg said that—and it somewhat upset his stomach. Ben and Sal? Cold, cool Ben?
With Sal Aboujib?
“You didn’t have it figured?” Meg said. “Come on, Bird.”
That they were sleeping together, hell, yes—going at it non-stop, absolutely, but that was youthful hormones. What Meg implied was something else. A guy like Ben, who’d saved every penny all his life, out spending it on a woman?
Ben, his best-ever numbers man—being courted by Kady’s? And advising him who to lease to, against his better judgment?
Meg had toted up the expense figures while he was at the phone: she had a better head for bank balances than he did, she was damned pretty, and sometimes, looking at her, even if an old blue-skyer’s eyes had to get used to fire-red hair shaved up the sides and bangles up the ears, it was the likes of Meg that could keep a man interested in living.
But what was he doing suddenly sleeping steady with Meg Kady, when there were whole stints ashore he’d spent without a woman so much as looking at him? And what was Ben doing spending his money on Sal?
He was afraid he did have the answer to that, and maybe he ought by rights to be mad. Maybe he ought to throw Meg Kady out on her scheming ear and rescue Ben from Sal’s finagling.
The problem with that scenario was—
A hand landed on his shoulder, jerked him around and out of his chair.
A fist sent him back over the table. He had his foot up to stop another attack, but he knew the wild-eyed lunatic that was standing there wobbling on his feet. Everybody in the room was out of their chairs, Meg had hers in her hands,
Mike was probably calling the cops, and Dekker was standing there looking as if standing at all was an effort.
“Where’s my ship?” Dekker yelled at him.
Bird got a cautioning hand up before Meg could bash him. “Ease off,” he said, and yelled at Mike Arezzo, behind the bar: “ ’S a’ right, Mike, I know this crazy man.”
“You’re damn right you know me!” Dekker said. “I get out of hospital, I call the dock to get my bills, and what have I got?”
The jaw wasn’t broken, but teeth could be loose. He rolled off the table and staggered to his feet with Meg’s hand under his arm.
“Is this Dekker?” Meg asked.
“This is Dekker,” he said. “—Sit down, son, you look like hell.”
“I’ve been there.” Dekker caught a chair back to lean on, getting his breath. “You damned thief.”
“Easy. Just take it easy.”
“Easy! You went and stole my ship, you lying hypocrite!”
It wasn’t a kind of thing a man wanted to discuss in front of neighbors. Mike Arezzo asked, from over at the bar: “Want me to call the cops, Bird?” At tables all over the room a lot of people were listening. “I’m not having my place busted up.”
“Why don’t you?” Dekker gasped. “Prove I’m crazy, this time, so you don’t have me to deal with. They can do the rest of the job on me—that’s what you wanted, isn’t it? That’s what you set up for me. You took everything else. Why don’t you just finish the job?”
“Mike, I’m buying this guy a drink. I want to talk to him. He’s all right.”
“ I don’t want to talk to a damn thief!”
“Beer, Mike, that’s what he’s been drinking.—Sit down, Dekker. Sit!”
Dekker breathed, still leaning on the chair, “I need those log records. Just give me the log records, that’s what I want—”
“I don’t have ’em,” he said. And when Dekker just stood there looking at him: “She was cleaned out when they turned her over. God’s truth, son. They’re not going to give somebody else’s log over to anybody else—I don’t know if they got it stored somewhere, but her whole tape record was clean when she came to us. Zero. Nada. Everything’s out of there.”
Dekker was absolutely white. “The damn company killed my partner, they’re saying there never was a ’driver near us—they erased my log—”
“Kid, shut up and sit down.”
“You know that ’driver was out there! You know what the truth was before they changed it—”
Meg pulled at his arm. “Bird,—”
“Ease off, Meg.—Just sit down, son.” People were headed for the door. People were clearing the place.
Dekker slumped against the chair-back, bowed his head, shaking it no, and Abe Persky said, brushing up close on his way out, “Not bright, kid. Understand?”
Abe left. Mike was pissed about his customers, and the noise—he brought the drink over and said, “Shut this guy up. We don’t need this kind of trouble in here.”
“We got him,” Meg said, got Dekker by the shoulder and steered him for the chair. “You just calm down, hear? Bird’s not a thief.”
“The company’s the thief—you just—”
Meg said, “Shut it down, just shut it down, jeune fils. We hear you. Listen to me. Sit fuckin’ down.”
Dekker fell into the chair, caught his head against his hands, in an ambient quiet even The Hole’s music couldn’t drown.
“Dunno if he ought to have this,” Mike said. “I give you guys a break and you give me a crazy?”
Dekker said, looking up: “I’m not crazy!”
“Them’s the ones to watch,” Mike said, and set the beer down.
Dekker was honestly sorry he’d hit Bird. It was Ben he wished he’d found, before the cops came and got him. He might have killed Ben. And that might have satisfied him.
But Bird had told the bartender not to call the cops, for what good that would do, the red-haired woman had made him sit down at their table and they gave him a beer he didn’t need—
God, his head was pounding. His eyes ached.
The two of them—Bird and this woman with the red hair, who might be a Shepherd—sat at the table with him and told him how the company would have taken everything he owned anyway, how he had to be smart and keep his mouth shut, because he was only making trouble for people who didn’t have any choice…
“So what have I got?” he asked.
“Hush.” Bird grabbed his wrist, squeezed hard, the way Bird had done on the ship, telling him shut up, to keep Ben from killing him, and his nerves reacted to that: he believed in Bird’s danger, he believed in Bird’s advice the same helpless, stupid way he’d found himself from one moment to the next believing what the doctors told him, and he knew then he was lost. He said, pleading with Bird for help: “They’re lying to me.”
Bird whispered, “Hush. Hush, boy. So they’re lying. Don’t make trouble, if you have any hope of getting that license back.”
He didn’t remember he’d told Bird about his license. He couldn’t even remember how long he’d been sitting here, except his hand stung, which told him how long ago he’d hit Bird. Holes in his memory, the doctors said. Brain damage…
“Whatever’s happened,” Bird said quietly, still holding his arm, leaning close, “—whatever’s happened, son, we’re not against you. We want to help you. All right?”
He was alone in this place, he didn’t know anybody on R2 but Bird and Ben, a handful of doctors and Tommy. He sat there with Bird holding his wrist and keeping him anchored in reality, or he might go floating off right now. Bird said he wanted to help. Nobody else would, here; Belters didn’t; and he couldn’t get back to Rl—couldn’t go back home without Cory even if they’d send him. Their friends would say, Why did you let her die? Why didn’t you do something? And all those letters waiting from her mother…
“Guy’s gone,” the woman’s voice said.
“He’s on something.” Bird shook his arm. “Dekker, you on drugs?”
“Hospital,” he said. He was staring at something. He could see a haze. He had no idea why he was staring, or how he was going to come unlocked and move again, except if Bird would realize he was in trouble and bring him back…
Bird said, “Dekker?”
“Yeah?”
“Look, where are you staying?”
That question required some thinking. It brought the room a little clearer. “I don’t know,” he said, asking himself if it mattered at all. But Bird shook at his arm, saying,
“Listen. You’re pretty fuzzed. How are you set? You got any funds?”
He tried to think about that, too. Recalled the 60-day delay—when he’d been on R2 longer than that, dammit, and he didn’t know why the bank had waited til he got out of hospital to start transferring his account. He had no idea how he’d even bought the beers a while back. He had no idea how 500-odd dollars had arrived in his account—whether it was his, or whether he just didn’t remember…
Bird said, “We could put you up a few days—not that we owe you, understand? Let’s be clear on that. But I don’t really blame you for coming in here mad, either. Maybe we can work something out, put the arm on a few guys that might help, you understand what I’m saying?”
It sounded better than Pranh or the rest of them had offered, better than the cops had given him. Bird had always seemed decent—Bird was the one who’d told him about the ’driver.
“Out there,” he whispered, trying to turn his head and look Bird in the eyes to gauge his reaction, but he couldn’t manage the movement: “Out there—you saw. You remember what happened…”
Bird closed down harder on his wrist, numbing his fingers, hurting his arm, reminding him Bird had another face. “Better you concentrate on where you’re going, son, and not think about anything else. You can’t help your partner now. She’s gone. Best you can do is get yourself clear. You think about it. Your Cory would want you to use your head, wouldn’t she? She’d want you to be all right. Isn’t that what she’d say?”
That made him mad. Nobody had a right to put words in Cory’s mouth. She’d hate it like hell. But he couldn’t get back from where he was. He said, staring off into nowhere, “Screw you, Bird.”
“Yeah, well,” Bird said. “Try to help a guy—”
Another hand landed on his arm, pulled him around until he was looking at brown eyes, shaved head, dark red crest—rab, radrab, Shepherd or whatever she was, he didn’t know. He was fascinated—wary, too. He’d been rab once. But Cory hadn’t approved—Cory was too frugal, too Martian to waste money, she’d say, or to waste effort on the system, even screwing it.
That senator—Broden—saying, when they’d opened fire on the emigration riots—“No deals with the lawless rabble—”
Newsflashes, when he’d been—what? Ten? Twelve? First real political consciousness he’d ever had, seeing people shot down, blood smeared on glass doors…
Rab style and rabfad was one thing. Shepherds wore it modified, he guessed because it annoyed the exec, and they would. But this one, extreme as she was, with marks of age around her eyes—“You’re from Sol Station,” the woman said. “Right?”
“Yeah.”
She stared at him a long time. It felt like a long time. She might be thinking of trouble. Finally she said, her hand having replaced Bird’s on his wrist without his realizing. “Severely young, severely stupid, cher juene fils. Company’ll chew you up. Bird’s all right. If Bird’s telling you, you do. Or are you looking for MamBitch to save you? That’s fool. That’s sincerely prime fool, petty cher.”
Rabspeak, from years ago. From before Cory. From a whole different life. Rabfad had turned into respectable fast-fad, except if you didn’t get it out of the trend shops, except if you were truly one of the troublemakers—
Dress like that on helldeck was a statement—a code he couldn’t cipher anymore, not what the colors were, what the earrings said, what the shave-job tied you to… like this woman, who looked him in the eyes and talked to him—as if she saw what he had been before Cory—a damned fool wearing colors and politics he hadn’t then known the meaning of—
A stupid kid, skuzzing around the station, no aims, nothing but mad and trouble on his mind—screw the system, make trouble, get high on the outside chance of getting caught—
He’d been so smart then, he’d known everything, known so much he’d gotten himself arrested, tracked into the System as a juvie Out of Parental Control—himself and his mother tagged for deportation to the well, til his mother paid everything she’d saved to get them both bailed out.
(God, Paul, you’ve been nothing but a disaster to me, you’ve done nothing but cost me from the time I knew I was carrying you—)
They’d put him in a youth program, special studies, writing letters to kids on Mars—
My name is Cory. I live at Mars Base…
“Hear me, jeune rab? Do you read?”
He said, “Yeah. I hear you.”
“Good,” Meg said, patted his face and looked away, at someone else. “Kid’s gone out. Beer’s not a good idea.”
Someone else came up close beside him. He could hear the footsteps. “Not doing real well, is he?”
He didn’t know that voice.
“Kid’s a little buzzed.” That was Bird. Something hit his face. Jolted him. “Dek-me-lad, pay attention. This here’s Mike Arezzo, owns The Hole.—Kid’s had a bad break. Just out of hospital.”
“This is the guy, huh?”
He could see this Mike when Mike moved back past Meg’s shoulder. But he couldn’t recognize him. He was only sure of Bird.
Then there was another voice he knew. “What in hell’s going on here?”
His heart turned over. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. Ben was on him, saying, “Call the cops, get this guy out of here…” and Bird said, “Calm down, Ben, just calm down.”
Ben was going to kill him.. He still couldn’t move.
Another voice said, clear and female, “Dekker, huh?”
Dark-skinned face. Hand holding his jaw, turning his head, making him look her in the eyes.
“Skuzzed out,” the dark woman said. She had a thousand braids, clipped with metal. She was right. He was entirely skuzzed out. He said, dim last try at sanity, “Trank. Hospital. Beer.”
She said: “Fool.”
Jack Malinski had grabbed Ben’s arm, him and Sal out shopping the ’deck, just walking home; Malinski had said, “Ben, some guy just pasted your partner down at The Hole, talking wild about that ship you got—”
He’d run. He’d outright run, getting here, Sal racing along with him—gotten here out of breath. He’d thought it was some guy mad about the lease-list. But they got to the door of The Hole and it was Dekker, no question—Dekker, sitting in a chair at their regular table, and Bird getting up to grab his arm and pull him aside before he hit the bastard. “I got to talk to you,” Bird said, and when he said it that way, Ben had this sinking feeling he knew exactly what Bird was going to say in private, Bird with his damned stupid guilt about that ship.
Bird said, “Dekker’s a little upset. They turned him out of the hospital.”
“Fine, let’s call the cops.”
“He’s all right. The guy’s just at the end of his tether.”
“Tether’s snapped, Bird, for God’s sake, a long time ago, nothing we can do—nothing we’re qualified to do.”
“Give him a chance, Ben. Guy’s just mad. Mad and upset.”
“Homicidal is what he is!”
“No. No. He’s not. Come on, Ben.”
“Come on, hell! Your mouth’s a mess.”
Bird blotted his lip with the back of his hand, looked for traces. “Can’t say I blame him. Guy’s lost his partner, lost his ship, lost his license—
“It’s not our fault!”
“Ben, I got to look at myself in mirrors. You understand? It’s not our fault, but it’s not like we didn’t get something from him, either.”
“That’s life!”
“Ben…” Bird looked utterly exasperated with him, with him, as if it was his fault, Bird just closed off from him again, he had no idea why, and it upset him. He knew he wasn’t likable: there weren’t a lot of people who had ever liked him—while other people got what they wanted just by the way they looked. Dekker was one of those people, the sort that scared him when they got anywhere near somebody he liked—dammit, he had everything he owned and everything he wanted tied up in Bird. And in Sal. And he was willing to fight for it, if he could figure out how to do that.
Go along with it? Or pull strings in Admin, use whatever points he had to get the guy back in hospital—
Bird had his shoulder to him, looking mad, watching the table where Meg and Sal were both making over Pretty-boy. You could figure. Women would—though he’d remotely hoped Sal had better sense. He gritted his teeth and said, “Bird, what do you want to do?”
“Just—” Bird was still upset. But Bird did look at him. “We got a chance to help the guy. Doesn’t cost us much—give him a chance to get his bearings and get his records in shape. You can pull those strings. You know how.”
It hit too close to what he was already thinking—in a completely opposite direction. “Look at him!” he cried. “The guy’s gone! He’s off the scope! You’re thinking about financing him? My God, Bird!”
“Not finance. Just get him introduced around, get him a start, maybe get him partnered up with somebody decent…”
“We don’t know what happened to the last one! Nobody damn well knows, Bird!”
Bird caught his arm and leaned close, saying, half under his breath: “Cut it. We know it wasn’t his fault—”
He said, under his: “We know what he said. But he hasn’t made a whole lot of sense. That’s the trouble, isn’t it?”
“For God’s sake, Ben, give the kid a chance—you said yourself, if we got the finance, give the guy a stake—”
“I don’t know why you want to hand this guy the keys to everything we own and say help yourself! What about me? What about the guy that’s tossed all his funds into this well, huh? This guy could be a slash-killer for all we know, and you’re wanting to use our credit on him?”
“Shut up, Ben.”
He shut up. Bird turned him loose and went over to talk to Mike at the bar. Mike stood there scowling. Dekker was still sitting there with his mind bent, staring off into deep space.
Meg was in the next chair talking to him. Sal was leaning over him, showing cleavage. He walked over to Dekker, laid a hand on his shoulder, ready to jump if Dekker wanted to throw a punch. He squeezed Dekker’s shoulder, said, casually, “Hello there, Dek. Remember me? Ben Pollard. How are you doing?”
He flinched, and he could move: he turned his head very slowly to look up at Ben, remembering they were not in the ship, they were in a bar in a sleepery on R2, and he’d just punched Bird. He figured Ben wanted to punch him, but Ben wasn’t doing it because this was a public place.
He said, “Hello, Ben.” He could almost come out of the haze. Ben was far clearer to him than the women had been. He was actually glad when Ben moved a chair and sat down, leaning into his face, holding his arm.
Ben said, “Well, how’ve you been, Dekker?”
“Not good,” he said; and, fighting to get back from where he was, he tried desperately to be civil so long as Ben was being: maybe he had been crazy. Maybe Ben was honestly trying to start things over. “You?”
“We’re fine. We’re real fine. Sorry about the ship.” He figured Ben was trying to make a point. He wasn’t going to accept it. But numbness gave him a self-control he wouldn’t have had otherwise. “Yeah, well,” he said.
Ben squeezed his arm. “A little zee’d, are we?”
“They gave me something.” Dekker held up white plastic sacks. Ben took them from him. Prescription bottle showed through the plastic. “I’m supposed to take those.”
“Not all at once,” Meg muttered. “He’s had enough damn pills and excessively too much beer. Man needs to get up and walk, is what he needs.”
He thought, All right, let’s keep people happy, give this guy a chance to show out crazy as he is—the poor little pet.
So he stood up and pulled at Dekker. “Come on, Dekker, on your feet. Walk the happystuff off.”
Dekker didn’t argue. He stood up. Ben got an arm around him before the knees went.
“The Pacific called,” Bird came over to say. “Seems he left his card there. They’re holding it.”
“Guy’s got a card.” Ben felt a little better then, hoping there was finance on it. “Has he got a room there?”
“No, I worked something out with Mike.”
Ben stopped, with his arms around Dekker.
He thought: Shit!
DEKKER waked, eyes open on dark, g holding him steady. But it wasn’t the hospital, it didn’t smell like the hospital. It didn’t sound like the hospital. It sounded like helldeck, before they’d left. His heart beat faster and faster, everything out of control. Nothing might be real. Nothing he remembered might be real.
“Cory?” he yelled. “Cory?” And waited for her to answer somewhere out of the dark, “Yeah? What’s the matter?”
But there was no sound, except some stirring beyond the wall next to his bed.
He lay still then, one hand on the covers across his chest. He could feel the fabric. He wasn’t in a stimsuit. He wasn’t wearing anything except the sheets and a blanket. He lay there trying to pick up the pieces, and there were so many of them. Rl. Sol. Mars. The wreck. The hospital. The Hole. His whole life was in pieces and he didn’t know which one to pick up first. They had no order, no structure. He could be anywhere. Everything was still to happen, or had. He didn’t know.
A door opened somewhere. Someone came down the hall. Then his opened, the ominous click of a key, and light showed two silhouettes before the overhead light flared and blinded him.
Bird’s voice said, “You all right, son?”
“Yeah.” His heart was still doing double-time. He put his arm up to shade his eyes. Time rolled forward and back and forward again. He began to figure out for certain it was a sleepery, and he remembered being in the bar with Bird and Ben. It was Bird and the red-haired woman in the doorway, Bird in a towel, the woman—Meg—in a sheet. Ben showed up behind them in the doorway, likewise in a sheet, looking mad. Justifiably, he told himself, and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Clearer-headed?” Bird asked.
“Yeah.” Things are still going around. He recalled walking up and down the hall behind the bar, up and down with Ben and Meg and a black woman, remembered eating part of a sandwich because Ben threatened to hit him if he didn’t stay awake—but he didn’t remember going to bed at all, or how he’d gotten out of his clothes. He had hit Bird in the mouth. Bruised knuckles reminded him of that. “Sorry. I’m all right. Just didn’t know where I was for a second.”
“Doing a little better,” Bird said.
“Yeah.” He hitched himself up on his elbows, still squinting against the overhead light. “I’m all right.” He was embarrassed. And scared. The doctors said he had lapses. He didn’t know how large this one might have been or how many days he had been here since he last remembered. “Thanks.”
Bird walked all the way in. “You’re sounding better.”
“Feeling better. Honestly. I’m sorry about the fuss.”
Ben edged in behind Bird, scowling at him. “Beer and pills’ll do that, you know.”
“Yeah,” he said. He earnestly didn’t want to fight with Ben. His head was starting to ache. “Thanks for the rescue.”
“Good God,” Ben said. “Sorry and Thank you all in one hour. Must be off his head.”
“I’ve got it coming,” he said. “I know.” He slipped back against the pillow, wanting time to remember where he was. “Leave the light on, would you?”
Ben said, “Hell, if it keeps him quiet—”
They left then, except Bird. Bird walked closer, loomed between him and the single ceiling light, a faceless shape.
“You had a rough time,” Bird said. “You got a few friends here if you play it straight with us. Watch those pills, try to keep it quiet. Owner’s a real nice guy, didn’t call the cops, just took our word you’re on the straight. All right?”
He recalled what he’d done. He knew he had maybe a chance with Bird, maybe even with Ben, if he could keep from fighting with him. “Tell Ben—I wasn’t thinking real clear. Didn’t know what ship I was on.”
“You got it straight now?”
“I hope I do.” His head was throbbing. He wanted desperately for them to believe him. He didn’t know whether he believed them—but no other way out offered itself. He put his arms over his eyes. “Thanks, Bird.”
Bird left. The light stayed on. He didn’t move. In a while more he took his arm down to fix the room in his mind. It was mostly when he shut his eyes that he got confused; it was when he slept and woke up again. He kept assuring himself he was out of the hospital, back with people who understood, the way the doctors didn’t, what it was like out there.
And the two rabs, who might be Shepherds, but who didn’t talk like it—he wasn’t sure what they were, or what they wanted, or why they zeroed in on him. They worried him the way Ben worried him—not the dress: the mindset—the mindset that said screw authority. No future. Get high. Get off. Get everything you can while you can, because the war’s coming, the war to end all wars.
Hell, yes, Cory had said, it could end Earth. But it won’t get the human race; that’s why we’re going, that’s why we’re heading out of here…
People in boardrooms had started the war over things nobody understood. And the rab had just said—screw that. And rattled hell’s bars when and as they could until the company shot them down. He hadn’t known that when he was a kid. He hadn’t understood anything, except he was mad at what they said was happening to the human race. He’d hated school, hated the have’s and the corporate brats—he’d understood corruption and pull, all right; he’d thought he was rab and scrawled slogans on walls and busted a few lights with slingshots, gotten skuzzy-drunk a few times and lightfingered a few trinkets in shops before he’d figured out what the rab was and wasn’t, and why those people had died trying to get through those doors—he’d been thirteen then, nothing could touch him and he’d be thirteen forever…
Til Cory.
And Cory—Cory wouldn’t at all have understood him sitting at the table with two women like that. Cory would talk to him later and say, the way she’d said more than once, Stay away from that kind, Dek, God, I don’t know where your mind is… we don’t want any trouble; we don’t want anything on our record—
Meg, the older one’s name was. Meg. With the red hair and the Sol accent he’d never realized existed until he’d gotten out here and heard Cory’s Martian burr and heard the Belter’s peculiar lilt. There might be a heavy dose of Sol in Bird’s speech. But none in Ben and none in the black woman—all of them the last types you’d ever think to be hanging around with a plain guy like Bird—or with each other. Not likely Shepherd women—who might drink with miners, maybe—but far less likely sleep with them… when women were scarce as diamonds out here and available, good-looking women could take their pick clear up to the company elite if they wanted, if they didn’t have a police record. They didn’t have to live on helldeck—unless they wanted to.
Maybe Bird didn’t understand the rab… wreck everything, take what you wanted, rip the company—
So much for ideals and causes. Same here as at Sol. Same in the Movement as in the company boardrooms. No difference.
He squeezed his eyes shut, felt tears leak out. Raw pain. He had no idea why. He thought—
—screw all of them. Company and not.
But he didn’t mean it the stupid way the kid on Sol had meant it, 13 and stupid and tired of bumping up against company types, scared as hell about the rumors that said his generation wasn’t going to have a chance to grow up—he’d gotten a knot in his stomach and lain awake half the night, the first time he’d heard how the colonies didn’t have to fire a shot—how the rebels could just drop a rock out of jumpspace, a near-c missile aimed right at Earth or Sol Station. Nobody could see it coming in time. That for Earth—that for all the history they were supposed to memorize, all the rules, all the laws. Over in five minutes. So why learn anything that was going to be blown up? Why try for anything except grabbing as much as you could before it went bang?
But nobody’d do a thing like that. Nobody’d really hit Earth, nobody’d really hit a station and kill all those people. Of course they wouldn’t.
Cory would say—just get me far enough, fast enough. Cory had told him about places he’d never cared about until she made it sound like there was an honest chance of getting there—if you had the funds. If you could get the visa. If the cops didn’t stop you at the last minute and say, Wait a minute, Dekker, you have a record—
The Earth Company said no more free rides, and you had to pay off your tax debt before you could get a visa. Then your own government, the only time you’d ever see anything from your government, wrote you down as belonging to the ship you’d bought a share on, and you could go
—Where there’ll be something left, Cory would say—Cory had an absolute conviction that Out There was much better than where they were—
—on a ship that had no use for an insystem pilot. He didn’t know whether that was living or not. Truth be known, he had never had any idea what he was going to do then—keep balancing on one foot, he supposed, saying yes and meaning no, going with Cory because Cory was going somewhere—and he didn’t trust the draft wouldn’t take the miners, too, once those ships were built—haul him off to live in a warship’s gut and get killed for the company, blown to hell for the company—
Step at a time, Tommy had used to tell him when he was too zee’d to walk. Step at a time, Mr. Dekker…
Dammit, he wanted to fly, that was all, just get that back—get his hands back on the controls again—
The last few moments he’d thought—he’d thought, clear and cold, not at all afraid, that he could still pull it out—
That he could still make that son of a bitch pay attention to his com—
Wake somebody up on that damned ship, rattle their collision alerts if that was what it took—
He looked at the ceiling-tiles. He supposed they were real. He supposed he’d gotten this far away from the wreck. But no matter how far he stretched it, time just looped back and sank into that moment like light in a black hole. One single moment when things could have worked and didn’t…
Those sons of bitches on that ’driver had known he was there. Had known they’d hit a ship. They must have. Even if it had never heard him—if somehow his com wasn’t getting through to them—if nothing else, when the tanks blew they’d have known it wasn’t a rock they’d hit.
And if his com wasn’t reaching them—wouldn’t they have listened to the E-band after they’d hit a ship? Wouldn’t they have heard Cory’s suit-com?
Damned right they had.
Meg leaned close to the mirror, painting a thin black line beneath her bottom lashes. Hell to keep the eyes from running right after makeup: she blotted with her finger, tried again. The next door over opened and shut. Ben and Bird were off to breakfast, everybody dressing where their wardrobe was. Sal, mirrored past her shoulder, was putting her boots on. “We got a day to do,” Meg said, with a flourish at the corner of her eye. “But we can take second shift. I vote we feel out the novy chelovek.”
“Severe spook.”
“Decorative spook.” Eyebrow pencil. Auburn. Hard to come by out here. If you were broke you used grease pencil, and that was expensive. “He came straight last night, after the bogies. Seemed to be coming in focus… Bird talked to him.”
“After the things he shouldn’t have said in the bar, Kady, a serious lack of governance there—everybody was talking about it.”
“He was drunk. Gone out. Everybody knows that.”
“So he’s got no failsafes? Shit, Kady! Ben’s got severe misgivings on this.”
“Tsss.” She did the other eye with three even strokes, heard Sal get up and caught her reflection with a rap of the knuckle at the mirror. “Remains to see. Later’s time enough. Bird says.”
“Bird says. Bird says. What’s Bird have in his head, here? ‘Find him a partner.’ Ben can’t scope it. And brut put, I don’t like this ‘partner’ talk and I sincerely don’t like Bird close with this jeune fils, whose tab I don’t know why we’re paying, with our funds, while he’s got a card and access, thank you.”
“So do I understand?” But she figured she did, more than Sal would. She looked at Sal, eye to mirrored eye, then turned and leaned against the counter, taking the mandatory three thoughts before a body should commit truth—as the saying went. But Sal was seriously upset this morning—Sal had had her eye on that ship, and Sal had been talking to Ben last night, in these rooms, that was point one, and scary enough—if that was all of it, and there were enough angles with Sal on a thing like this she wasn’t at all sure. “We got to talk, Sal.”
Sal stared at her a couple of beats, still hot, shrugged and picked up her jacket. “Na. Rather breakfast, actually.”
Meg didn’t move. Sal didn’t like brut talks, especially when she’d just snapped to a judgment about a thing, but Sal constitutionally didn’t like mysteries. She said, to Sal’s back, “Sal—do you want to know quelqu’ shoze?”
She waited, knew Sal was going to turn around with an exasperated look and say—
“What should I want to know?” As if there couldn’t possibly be anything worth the nuisance. Sal came at some things with her mind as tight as her fists.
She gave the room a significant glance around, then pushed buttons she knew were buttons with Sal. “Tell you later on second thought.”
Sal had this look like she’d knife something; but that only meant Sal’s mind was working again; and they’d been severely careful about bugs since the cops had torn the room apart. She snagged her jacket up. They walked out into the hall and through the door into The Hole proper, where the guys had a table in the shiftchange rush—Ben and Bird already into their breakfast. You went over to the hot table at the end of the bar, you told the second shift cook, Price, that you were breakfast, and he dumped whatever-it-was into a plate while you drew your own coffee.
They took their plates and their cups to Bird and Ben’s table and sat down. “Morning,” Bird said. “Morning,” Meg said back, and thought how that, too, was one of those things native Belters didn’t just naturally say.
Spooky kind of partnership, when you got to thinking about it.
Spookier still, just as they sat down, that Dekker showed up in the doorway. He came part of the way to their table and made a cautious little gesture like Can-I-join-you?
Bird waved his hand, swallowed his mouthful. “Grab your plate.”
Dekker was clean shaven, hair wet and combed back—quiet and polite. That was a plus. Good bones, under a jumpsuit that didn’t fit. A woman did notice things like that, if she was alive.
“Could do with feeding,” Bird said.
Ben made a surly shrug. Meg tried to think of something cheerful, took a forkful of The Hole’s best stand-in for sausage and eggs and a sip of not bad coffee, while they were all waiting for a lunatic to come and sit down with them.
“Want to bet he’ll ask the time?” Ben asked.
“Don’t you open your mouth,” Bird said sternly.
“Did I say a thing?”
“Nice rear,” Meg said.
“Doesn’t impress me,” Ben said.
“Quiet.”
“Yeah, he’d do that for hours.”
“Ben…”
“All right, all right. He’s doing just fine. Hasn’t jumped Price or anything.”
“Ben.”
Dekker came back, with his breakfast and his coffee—into a sudden quiet at their table.
“How are you feeling?” Bird asked him as he sat down.
“Hung over,” Dekker said, sipped the coffee with a grimace, and, from vials in various pockets, started laying out a row of pills: not unusual, for spacer-types—bone pills, mineral pills, vitamin pills; but Dekker’s collection was truly impressive.
“Dekker?” Ben said. “You having eggs with your pills, or what?”
Dekker gave this defensive little glance up, the cold sort that made Meg’s nerves twitch toward a knife she didn’t carry now—didn’t quite meet anybody’s eyes. “Yeah. Thanks, whoever put the crackers by the bed. Lived on them last night. My stomach was upset.”
“They give you a doctor’s number?” Bird asked.
Dekker nodded, swept up a fistful of pills, chased them one after another with coffee, and didn’t ever answer that. Bird shrugged. Dekker ate his eggs. They ate theirs. Finally Dekker got up and went back to his room, saying something about needing his rest.
“Yeah, well,” Ben said, staring after him.
“Man’s hung over,” Bird said.
Ben didn’t say a thing to that except, “Are we going in to the docks?”
“Yeah,” Bird said. “Afraid they’re not going to move if we don’t push. And we can pull those panels, right now. We can do that. But four’s too crowded up there.”
They were close to viable now on Way Out. They’d gotten the tanks mated three days ago, they’d gotten the interior blown out and certified for access, they’d gotten everything well toward completed, if they could just get the refit crews to keep after it and get the value assemblies connected… but when it was a case of getting skilled help on free time, it wasn’t easy. It took inducements and constant look-ins to make tired crews on overtime look sharp and do it right.
“We’ll be back about suppertime,” Bird said. “And if you two wouldn’t mind to be staying here…”
“Hey!” Sal held up a hand. “Don’t make us responsible for this guy!”
“Don’t let him cross Price. Or Mike. All right?”
“No!”
“ ’Appreciate that.” As Bird and Ben got up quickly and beat a retreat.
“Well, hell!” Sal said.
“There’s worse.”
“I’d rather vac the cabin.”
“Hey. Don’t judge too soon. That’s good bone structure.”
Sal gave her a flat, disgusted stare.
Meg said, “You can go up if you want. I can hold it here. Or we can take a walk and I can tell you what I won’t say in the room.”
“Yeah,” Wills said, on the phone, “yeah, we did find him.”
Salvatore got a breath. “Damn right you’d better have found him.”
“Yessir.”
“So where the hell is he?”
“Sleepery, sir, just hadn’t paid a bill yet. No problem.”
“There’d better not be. You listen to me. If you can’t tag him any other way you keep somebody on it. You don’t let that guy slip. Understand?”
“Yessir. Report’s coming to you right now.” Wills sounded upset. But he’d been on it, when a routine print had shown no card use for a sleepery. Couldn’t particularly fault Wills: Dekker wasn’t the only case Wills had on his lap, a couple of them felonies, while Dekker was Minimal Surveillance. But Human Services had dropped 5 whole C’s onto that card for the sole purpose of making sure Dekker stayed traceable, and it was embarrassing to the department to have him slip in the first couple of hours, in a place where he had no friends, no contacts, no credit and no way to get it.
Wills asked: “You want Browning to ask a few questions?”
Salvatore scanned the report, how Dekker had spent 5-odd dollars in a Helldeck bar, 5.50 on beer and phone calls, and nothing else—
Browning had talked to The Pacific, who’d referred Dekker down the row to The Black Hole, and sent his card there when the management at The Hole had called for it. Browning had had the sense to query Wills before any next step, and Wills had told Browning not to follow that lead too closely: Dekker was apparently still there, The Hole was a quiet place with no apparent reason to lie to The Pacific, but Dekker hadn’t used the card at The Hole after he’d gotten it—which indicated Dekker must have some acquaintance there—or that he’d found some means of support—meaning hiring out for something, ditching the card for a while, not an uncommon dodge for a man evading the cops: prostitution was the ordinary way for somebody with reason to duck the System—or if not that, he had to have friends.
Wills said: “Bird and Pollard are staying there. We checked them earlier.”
Bird and Pollard. Salvatore searched his recent memory.
“The ones that claimed his ship,” Wills said. “The ones that brought him in. Ship claim went through. The company paid. But Bird and Pollard saved his life. My guess is he looked them up, with what idea I don’t know, but evidently it wasn’t war. He’s staying there, evidently on one of their cards.”
Not necessarily looking for trouble, then—searching out the only two people he knew made perfect sense. Healthy sense, even. Salvatore sipped at a cooling cup of coffee, thought about it, and said: “All right, all right, the boy’s got himself settled. Long as he’s quiet, understand? Just get a list of the current residents. Run backgrounds. That sort of thing.”
“Copy that,” Will said. “We can do it on a tax check.”
“Do it.”
They’d gotten the lawsuit dropped—the report had convinced the EC board, a closer call than the kid knew about. But he’d signed the accident report—he was out of hospital and if he just for God’s sake got a job and settled, he was fine. Visconti said rehab might not be productive right now. There was a lot of hostility.
So let him run through the Human Services money. Let him settle and think about surviving. There wasn’t any negligence, there wasn’t any charge to file, and Dekker didn’t go to trial, however much Alyce Salazar wanted his head. Salazar was threatening civil suit now, to tie up the bank account and the insurance, but Crayton’s office said don’t worry about it: the daughter was over 18, the partnership was signed and legal, with a survivor’s clause, and the account was jointly acquired, anyway. Dekker was safe: there was no legal way Salazar was going to get at him.
That card could go in the pending settlement stack.
Strolling along the frontage spinward of The Hole, Sal had things of her own to say. And for openers, since Meg wasn’t getting started: “I’ll tell you this, Kady, we got to get him out of there, God, of all places for him to come!”
“Natural enough.”
“Natural! He said it, they friggin’ took every lovin’ thing he owned—what’s he going to do, forget it?”
Meg walked a few steps further. Kicked at a spot on the decking. “Dunno. Difficult to say. But what are we going to do, throw him out? That’s brut sure he won’t forgive.”
“Forgive, hell!”
Another silence. “You know, brut frank, Sal—there’s a difference in Ben and Bird.”
“We’re talking about Dekker. Or why are we out here?”
“We’re talking about that. Calmati, calma, hey?”
“So say! Doesn’t make sense so far!”
“I tell you, I never had any use for the mother-well. You less.”
“Damn right.”
“Watch it go, right? Screw it all, all that shiz.—But—I get out here, Sal, I dunno, thinking it over—I know why Bird paid for this guy a room.”
“So? Why did he?”
“You know you don’t say ‘morning’.”
“Of course I say morning. And what’s that to Flaherty, anyhow?”
“You say it because I say it. You didn’t come saying it. Or ‘evening’. Brut different, Sal.”
“So?”
“Different the way Bird’s different from us. Never saw how the motherwell matters til I figured that.”
“That’s shit.” Sal hated soppiness. This was getting soppy, it wasn’t like Meg, and it was making her increasingly uncomfortable.
“May be shit,” Meg said. “But I know why Bird paid.”
“Because the motherwell makes you crazy.”
“Dekker’s from the motherwell. At least from Sol Station—which is close enough for ‘mornings’.”
“Accent tells you that.”
“Yeah. But we think in accents. That’s what I’m talking about. Yours and mine. I can turn my back on the motherwell, I can take what I want and leave the rest. Bird’s not rab, Bird’s just norm, but I know how his mind works—I dealt with there, remember.”
“Are they all fools?”
“Fools, peut et’. But not the only. You mind me saying, Sal—you’re going to be a skosh bizzed at me over this—”
Puzzles and puzzles. A body could be irritated at motherwell Attitudes, too. “All right. So we got this deep secret difference. It’s worth five. Go.”
“Head-on, then—MamBitch is scamming her kids.”
“Is that new?”
“It is when you don’t see it. You know, even the vids that get out here, they’re pure shit, Aboujib, they’re company vids. They’re slash-vids, cop-chasers, fool-funnies, salute-the-logo shit, intensely company, intensely censored—you understand me? MamBitch has been robbing you all along, little bits and pieces. Robbing me too. Those sods brut like what’s rab. Rab’s no trouble to them, hell, rab’s where they’re going—forget Earth. Forget what’s old garbage.—Only out here the company’s going to pick what’s rab. Capish’?”
“Neg.” She looked at Meg with the slight suspicion Meg was talking down a long motherwell nose at her, a long thirtyish nose at that. But Meg hadn’t made sense enough yet to make her mad. “This going somewhere significant eventually?”
“It’s the Institute, all over again. Understand? You didn’t take the shit there. But you don’t say ‘morning’—”
“F’ God’s sake, Kady, good morning, then!”
“But Belters don’t say it. Bird remarked it to me once: Belters don’t and Sol Station will. Belters don’t give you a second cup of coffee without you pay for it. On Sol Station you expect it. Belters don’t give you re-chances. You screw up once, you’re gone, done, writ off—”
“E-vo-lution. Don’t let fools breed.”
“Corp-fad, Aboujib. It’s wasn’t always that way.”
Down a damned long motherwell nose.
“You take a look at corp-rat executives the last couple of years, Aboujib? Seen the clothes? Rab gone to suits.”
“So? Poor sods still got it wrong.”
“No. No. They got it right. I don’t say on purpose—I’m not sincerely sure they have that many neurons compatible—but they like the rab. In their little corp-rat brains, shit, yeah, dump the past, let the company say what’s fad, what’s rab, and what’s gone—they don’t ever like some blue-sky lawyer citing charter-law at ’em, so that’s gone. Don’t teach anybody about the issues: all us tekkie-types and pi-luts need is slash-vids and funnies, right? Tekkies don’t need to know shit-else but their job. Hell, the rab never said dump all the smarts, we said Stop thinking Earth’s it, wake up and see what’s really going on out there; but the stupid plastics said, Dump the past. We said Access for the People, and the plastics say Grab it while you can. Corp-fad. Plastic is, Aboujib, plastic sells, plastic doesn’t ask questions, plastic’s always dumber than the management, and hell, no, management didn’t plot with its brain how to take us over, they just wobble along looking for the easy way, and damned if we didn’t give it to them.”
Corp-fad made an ugly kind of sense. The Institute was without question MomCorp’s way of making little corp-rat pilots—she’d seen that happening: she wouldn’t salute the logo and they’d found a way to can her, right fast.
“I’m 35,” Meg said after a moment or two of walking. “I’m an old rab. Eight, nine years ago they shot us down at the doors and the politi-crats in the company’s bed said that good old EC was within their rights, it was self-defense, the rab was breaking the law and endangering a strategic facility, d’ you believe that? Corp-rat HQ is a strategic facility? —Time the miners and the Shepherds had the guts to tell the whole damn company go to hell, turn the whole operation independent. But where are they, Sal? Where are they? Freerunners are mostly gone. Brut few coming out here now: the company’s training the new generation, paying their bills and giving them the good sectors til they get it all in their pocket. The Shepherds let the company handle their outfitting and now they’re fighting to hang on to the perks they have. The rab got themselves shot to hell in the ’15 and here we got these damn synthetics swaggering around with the company label all over. The plastics don’t know what we were. They turn us into clothes. Into corp-fad. Damn young synths make the music without the words. The Movement’s probably dead back at Sol. Old. Antique. And where do I go?”
“Brut cold,” she said, and put her hands in her pockets, walking step for step with Meg, Meg seeming to have finished her say. Crazy as it sounded, she wondered if the Institute had censored the things it didn’t want them to know, on purpose, and when she thought about it, rights damned sure had changed—
Things like abolishing crew share-systems, the way they’d used to be on Shepherd ships. Like the bank refusing to honor cash-chits, the way Shepherds had paid out bonuses, and kept money outside the bank card system.
She thought about the courses she could have sailed through if she’d kissed ass. She thought about her mama and her papa’s friends, Mitch among them, who’d said… You’re a fool, kid. Should have kept your head down til you graduated. We can’t make an issue, you understand? A kid with a reckless endangerment on her record isn’t it…
So she was a fool and the instructors washed her out, told her the same as they’d told Ben: Insufficient Aptitude.
She was learning from Meg—she’d learned more from Meg than she ever let on with the licensing board; and when the time came Meg couldn’t teach her, then she’d go to Mitch a hell of a lot better than Mitch ever thought she was… flight school washout, Attitude problem and all.
But meanwhile her mama’s and her papa’s friends were going grayer and thinner and more brittle, some dying of the lousy shields they’d had in the old days, the old officers and crew hanging on to their jobs because they were the skilled crews the company urgently needed—
But the company was training new techs fast as they could, and the new head of MamBitch was talking about substituting Institute hours for the experienced Shepherds’ years, requiring re-certifications every five years after you were forty.
The Shepherds had naturally told MamBitch where they’d send the cargoes the hour they did that and the company threatened to pass those re-cert rules if the Shepherds ever did it—but the company didn’t have enough pilots to plug in those slots right now that wouldn’t dump more than cargo into the Well, or fry themselves and their ships by pure accident. Yet.
So Big Mama had had to assign her shiny new tech crews to tend the ’drivers for now, because Shepherd crews wouldn’t fly with the corp-rat cut-rate talent straight out of ‘accelerated training’—and because the military was hot on Mama’s neck about schedules. But time and the Belt were taking their natural toll and the day was coming, even a dumbass Attitudinal washout could see it ahead, when there’d be just too few of the old guard left to make a ripple in the company’s intentions: someday company was going to pass its New Rules, and she was the right age to be caught in it. She didn’t like Meg’s line of thought at all, and she couldn’t figure how it had much to do with anything present—which was what Meg had promised her.
“So?” she said. “So what’s this leading to? What’s this to do with our problem?”
“If you want to figure Bird,” Meg said, “you seriously need to understand, blue-skyers don’t know what short supply is. They don’t think by the numbers: air’s free and they got nothing but heavy time, so they give it away—they give it away even if they haven’t got it, because that’s their pride, you see? They have to say they can, even if they can’t, because natural folk can, and anything less they won’t admit to.”
“Way to starve,” Sal said. “Way to end up on a company job. That’s pure fool, Kady. And Bird isn’t.”
“Air’s free on Earth. Feet can go.”
“If you don’t mind dirt. And they got laws that say where you can go. I heard Bird say.”
“Yeah, well.” Meg walked a few more steps. Sal remembered then that, old business at Sol Station notwithstanding, Meg was a whole lot closer to blue sky than she ever could be, and she worried that maybe she’d cut Meg off with that zap about dirt.
But Meg went on as if she hadn’t taken offense: “That’s how it is for corp-rat execs, isn’t it? Air’s free wherever they are. Short for them is when they run out of their Chardonnay ’87—I know. Hell, I used to run that freight. I know what those sons of bitches are eating, them with their Venetian antiques and their mink bedspreads.”
“Venetian?”
“Italiano. Ochin expensiv. Fragil. Minks are fuzzy live crits. You wear their skins.”
Sal looked at her. Sometimes Meg scammed you when she was in a mood. Hard to be sure.
“No shit. I used to freight it. Pearls, fancy woods, stuff like that. If you skimmed that stuff, you could black market it to starships or you could sell it right back to guess where?”
Sal lifted a brow.
“I guess the corp-rat got his apartment furnished,” Meg said. “Or he got a cheaper source. SolCorp didn’t want me going to trial, hell no. They told me I could come here and fly for myself or I could pilot some pusher back and forth off Mars for good old EC if I sincerely didn’t want to go do mining.”
That was half what Meg had said and half what she’d never said—that she had been dealing black market with some exec, and it was that guy who’d blindsided her.
Things you found out, after this many years.
She liked Meg hell and away better than she had those years ago, that was sure—understood a good deal more of her thinking; but not all of it, never all of it, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know where Meg had been or what Meg had been trained to do. Dive into a planetary well or bring a ship out of one—the thought gave a Shepherd’s daughter the chills.
“So, well, Bird’s got a little ahead at this guy’s expense, he’s short—Bird’s not going to say no, isn’t going to make this guy ask, either. Machismo. Something like. Fact is, I’ve been where this guy is and it makes me a skosh mad, Sal. It sincerely does.”
“Well, I’d agree with you I don’t like to see the guy screwed, hell, I put it on Mitch, and they’re bizzed about it—but they’re going to do a real fast hands-off after what he did. I’ll tell you the word I don’t like, Kady, it’s what I heard from Persky—the guy yelled out about Bird and Ben knowing a ’driver was out there—”
“Yeah, well, he was drunk.”
“Doesn’t matter if he was drunk, Kady, dammit, I got very scarce favor points with Mitch—”
“Screw Mitch.”
“Yeah, the hell with Mitch—Mitch’ll give me a choice, get out and away from Bird, that’s what he’ll tell me.”
“Would you do it?”
“It’s all over the damn ’deck what he said—”
“Tss. They drugged him stupid, Aboujib.”
“We got a live charge here, Kady. We can’t afford this. They can’t!”
“All right, I’ll tell you what Bird said to me. This is a confidence. Black-hole it.”
“Go.”
“ ’Driver’s sitting out there right where the accident happened. Dekker gave ’em the coordinates. Said he and his partner had found a big rock. Class B. That’s where that thing is sitting, chewing it up and spitting it at the Well, fast as it can. Few more months and it won’t be there.”
“Why in hell didn’t you tell me?”
“I am telling you. I found it out from Bird last night. That’s what you can see on those charts you lifted.”
“Shit!—But that doesn’t make sense. Something rolls in from Out There—yeah, rocks like that happen, but we don’t get ’em. Those things show up on optics.”
“So somebody slipped—assigned the kids to it. MamBitch can’t make a payout like that to a freerunner. You want to know how many’d be kiting out here? Buying passage out here? If it was iron, the way Dekker claimed, that’s a friggin’ national debt!”
She let a breath go between her teeth. “God.”
“You know MamBitch’s help. Some lowlevel fool in BM screws up, puts this freerunner out there and then his super finds out. And does any freerunner call in til he’s got his sample? Not the way you and I do it: we’re not having the Bitch say no, don’t pursue, and then have her hand the good stuff to her lapdogs… and give the kids credit for some savvy about the system. They wouldn’t trust the Bitch. They’d go on and sample it—get a solid assay on that thing.”
“Dangerous as hell for a ship their size. Maybe it was the rock that got ’em, maybe they were just rushed…”
“Possible. I dunno. The jeune fils isn’t thinking so.”
“And a rock like that—untagged—where’d it come from? Thing had to have an orbit way the hell and gone. And iron?”
“We don’t know shit what it was. We do know one kid is dead and MamBitch wiped the log. But those loads are going to hit the Well any day now. Drop that on Mitch.”
“I can drop it, for what it’s worth. But with a mouth like that—”
“Severely young, severely green, Aboujib. We can pull him in line.”
“Kady.”
“I’m telling you. Tell you something else. We have to pull him in line: they know where he was last night.”
“What are you talking about?”
“MamBitch, Aboujib. MamBitch. He came there. He checked in. He knows Bird and Ben—”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah, ‘Oh, God.’ I’ve been through this. They’ve got a line on him. Not a short one, maybe, but that depends on what he gets into. And what are we going to tell Bird? Excuse us, Bird, but you sincerely got to pitch this guy out, on account of MamBitch is looking for trouble and on account of Sal’s slipped Ben’s charts to the Shepherds?”
“Dammit, why didn’t you say something?”
“How can I say what I didn’t know? I didn’t hear the word ‘’driver.’ I didn’t see those charts. I didn’t hear the word ‘rock’ til last shift—”
“Dammit!”
“You want another thought to sleep with? We’re going out of here in a couple weeks, and what’s he going to be doing—or saying—while we’re out there? Can we stop him?”
“God.”
“What’s Mitch going to say about that?”
“I don’t know!”
“We could shut him up for about three months, say.”
“What are you saying? Take him with?”
They walked past a noisy bar doorway. Meg said, the other side: “Well, here’s what I’m thinking: the jeune fils needs his license back. Say he passes the ops. He’s got to have board time. Couple hundred hours. Gets him off the ’deck. Gets him shut up.”
“Yeah, and where’s Ben in this figuring? Ben’ll kill that guy—”
“Who said Bird and Ben?”
“Oh, God. You’re out of your head, Kady.”
“Look. Bird’s got this debt—and we can pay it for him. We make it like a favor. Then Bird’s got karma for us. So does this guy—who’s also from the motherwell.”
“Who’s also bent. And we get tagged with him!”
“Tell Mitch what we’re doing. Tell him we’re going to bend this guy around the right way. Do they want him now? I don’t think so. We can solve Dekker’s problem, solve Bird’s problem, solve Mitch’s problem. Our rep can’t get too badly bent. That’s where we’re useful. We get this jeune fils’ sober attention and he’s no problem.”
Sal rolled her eyes. Hell of a situation wrapped around that ship that they were so close to—
Decorative is one thing, she thought. But where’s the payout?—Meg hands out this air-is-free and everybody-works-partners stuff, like the preacher folk. But what’s this guy really bring us?
They walked along, looking at displays in spex windows, in the deep bass rhythm of music blasting from the speakers, bouncing off the girders overhead.
She said to Meg: “I’ll tell you one thing, that chelovek better not have been skimming. We got rep enough. And he damn sure better not come into The Hole on drugs again. He really better not be that kind.”
“Couldn’t say that this morning,” Meg said.
“Couldn’t say he was on the beam, either. I hate those quiet types. No joke, Meg, if we get out there and he does go schitz—what in hell are we going to do? We don’t know we can get him straight. That guy could get severely strange out there. Then what do we do?”
“Keep him tied to the pipes, the way the guys did? I could go for that.”
She caught a breath. “Warped, Kady!”
“Well, hey,—he isn’t useless, is he?”
“Hell!”
“Gives Mitch three whole months. Do you want this jeune fils loose on the ’deck the way he is, talking about Bird and Ben and ’driver ships?”
“Point.”
“So we just got to figure how to sign him in with MamBitch.”
“What the hell do we call him? Ballast?”
Lascivious grin. “Systems redundancy?”
“Rude, Kady.”
“Yeah.” Meg grinned, with a sideways glance.
“Don’t con me! We got more than a small problem here. Say we get this guy straight, we still got him in the middle of things—we got Ben, who’s seriously put out, here… Ben’s not going to go easy on this, he’s not going to go shares with this guy.”
“Ben better not push Bird on this. Don’t expect him to figure it, just he shouldn’t push. Everybody needs some room sometime.”
“Serious room, here. Major with Ben, too.”
“He doesn’t have to work with Ben.”
“Who’s going to work with him? We got guys starving on the list, and any numbers man needing a pilot wants one who doesn’t see eetees, f’ God’s sake. That jeune fils made himself a rep yesterday that he’s got to live down a long time before they forget that—”
“There’s always Yoji Carpajias.”
“God.” Yoji was a great numbers man. But he didn’t bathe. “We’d have to steam and vac all over.”
“Yeah. But there is Yoji. There’s others. Leave Ben on prime with Trinidad. Us on prime with Way Out. If MamBitch lets Dekker re-certify, then quiet is exactly what she wants. And Dekker with his license back—is a whole lot more credible, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, and how do we keep a line on him? He’s poison right now. But we don’t know him. We don’t know what way he’s going to turn.”
“Dekker’s from Sol. He’s a lot more like Bird. You got to take into account he’ll do things for Bird-type reasons. He’s stuck by his partner, hasn’t he? He’ll owe us. Major karma.”
The idea got through to her then, what Meg was saying. “Karma, hell. If Bird gives that sumbitch board-time, he can charge for it. Take it out of his hide, he can. Either Dekker’s got finance to pay that time or Bird’s for sure got a pilot on a string. That old sonuvabitch!”
“I don’t think that’s why Bird’s doing this.”
Sal gave Meg a look, thinking that through the loop a couple of times, wondering if she was following Meg through everything she’d been saying. “Yeah, but are we that crazy? Bird owns Way Out—but we own our time. We log that guy’s board-time, and we own him til he can pay his charges with us—that’s the law, that’s the only damn useful thing the Institute ever taught me. We debt that guy to us for time, we get him re-certified, and the company won’t friggin’ get him, how’s that for charitable?” She came to dead stop on the decking, hands in pockets, with a whole new idea taking shape. Mitch, and Way Out, and a deal higher-value cards to deal with. “Maybe that’s why MamBitch left the preacher-stuff out of pilot training, you think?”
Bad business, working null, floating around for hours on end compromising everything your heavy time was supposed to mend, but, hell, the meds who made the health and safety regulations hadn’t priced help these days. Zero unemployment, the company claimed, or near enough as didn’t count: and you could hire some real zeroes to come up and scrub, all right, but they’d play off on you and steal what wasn’t bolted on, and to Bird’s way of thinking and Ben’s as well, it was better to take the extra dock time, do the steam and vac themselves and see what damaged systems they could fudge past the inspectors that really could be repaired instead of replaced—turn it over to a refitter like Towney Brothers, and you’d have a one hell of a bill, not least because Towney was in the pocket of half a dozen suppliers.
A-men.
So they didn’t replace the shower, they just unbolted the panels and took them to the rent-a-shop on 3-deck where they could sand down the edges—no way you could tell it from new, once you screwed it back together. They took things apart and ported it down to 3, cleaned it and reassembled it, right down to the electronics. And you steamed and you vacced, and steamed and vacced and took apart and put together. Likely Ben was learning more about a ship’s works than he’d ever opted for.
That was where Ben was right now, porting a big load of work down to 3 for the gals to handle or for them to do when they got down there after lunch.
Maybe they could put Dekker on time and board, if he could keep straight and if he was physically able: a miner pilot worth anything at all had to be a fair mechanic. Meanwhile—
“Bird?” Meg said out of the ambient noise of the core. He missed his purchase on a bolt and caught his finger with the power driver. He said something he didn’t ordinarily say and sucked the wounded finger, looking around at the open hatch, which they had half shut and plastic sheeted to keep the warm air in and the dock noise out.
“Sorry.” Meg drifted in, held the plastic aside, pretty sight in that lacy blue sweater. She turned herself so they were looking at each other right side up. “I’m sorry, Bird.—You want some help with that?”
“Doing fine,” he said. He turned around again, seated the driver and put the screw home on the board he was re-installing. He took the next off the tacky-strip. “Aren’t you cold, woman? And who’s watching Dekker?”
“Sal and I got this idea,” Meg said.
Which said it was something halfway serious. He wasn’t sure he was going to like this. He reached over and snapped the tacky-strip out of the air before air currents that blew and drew from the plastic Meg was holding sent it somewhere inconvenient.
“We got this idea,” Meg began again, “a kind of a partnership deal.”
He heard it out. He didn’t say a word while Meg was telling it: he slept with this woman and he figured he was going to hear it all night if he didn’t hear it now. It moderately upset his stomach.
Meg said, “Can’t help but make money, Bird.”
“Yeah, saying this guy is fit to go out this soon. Saying he can get his license back. Put you and Sal off in a ship with him for three months? Bad enough with Ben and me. You gals—all alone out there—”
Meg blinked and said in a considerate way: “Yeah, but we won’t take advantage of him.”
“Be serious, Meg.”
“We’re major serious.”
“You’re letting out the heat, Meg.”
“Listen to me. We can make this contract with him, Sal says it’s perfectly legal: we charge him his board-time for training, he’ll pay us in cash or he’ll pay us in time—”
“Indenture.”
“Huh?”
“It’s called indenture. I read about it. When we friggin’ had paper, before they made the toilet tissue fall apart. You’re talking about indenture. We got the guy’s ship. Ben wanted to put a lien on his bank account. Now you want him? That stinks, Meg.”
Meg got quiet then. Offended, he was sure. He picked off another screw and drove it into the hole.
“So what other chance has he got?” Meg asked. “Bird?—Who but us gives a damn what happens to that guy?”
He drove it in and looked around at Meg, suspicious now—it was worth suspicion when Meg Kady started talking about her fellow man.
“What’s this ‘us’?”
“Earthers.”
It was at least the third time he’d heard Meg change her planet of origin. He was polite and didn’t say that.
Meg said: “Dekker’s out of the motherwell too, isn’t he? Same as us.”
“Sol, the way he talks.”
“So you figure it, Bird—a greenie like him, paired up with another kid—she must have been. They never, ever got it scoped out, what the rules were. Worst kind of pairing he could make, nobody to show him the way—the guy didn’t set out to screw up. He just didn’t have any advice.”
There’d be soft music next. What there was, was the heater going and money bleeding out onto the cold dock. “You want to close that plastic, woman?”
Meg ducked back and closed it. It gave him time to think there had to be something major in it for Meg and Sal. It didn’t give him time to figure what it was.
“All right,” he said. “We’ve heard the hard sell. Now what’s the deal?”
Meg hesitated, rolled her eyes in a pass around that meant, We’d better not talk here,—and said, “Bird, what’re you doing for lunch?”
DEKKER drowsed in the muted music-noise of the bar outside, lay in a .9-g bed half awake, having convinced himself that there wasn’t anybody going to come through the door with hypos or tests or accusations. That was all the ambition he had: he was safe in this place and maybe if he just stayed very quiet there wasn’t going to be anybody interested in him for a while, including Bird and including Ben. Please God.
He got hungry, and hungrier—breakfast hadn’t been much. Finally he looked at his watch, just looked at it awhile—didn’t know the right hour, Bird had told him it had been off. But it was August 16th. It stayed August 16th. He knew where he’d gone off, and how absolutely unhinged he’d come—would never have thought he was capable of going off that far, would have hoped better of himself, at least. He’d kept a sort of routine on the ship once he’d slowed the tumble with the docking jets—enough to move about a little, do necessary things—irrational things, he thought now. Some of them completely inane, because Cory would have. God, he’d near killed himself doing housekeeping routines—because Cory would have.
He wasn’t sure how much he’d forgotten. There were some holes he never seemed likely to patch. Other memories—weren’t in any kind of order. He was scared to try to sort them—afraid he’d find some other memory to leap up and grab him by the throat, like that damned flash on the shower wall, the watch—he couldn’t even remember if he’d had a shower the day of the accident. No, he thought, there’d been too much going on—
Hole there. Deep hole. Scary one. His heart was thumping. It was just the green wall, the place aboard Bird’s ship that looked exactly like his own. That was where he’d gotten lost—but there were so many other places. The bar outside, the ’deck, the people he didn’t know—he was hungry and he didn’t want to go out and face people and questions and strangers. So he lay still a long while and listened to the beat of the music, and finally took his pills when he figured it must be time.
Then his stomach began to be upset in earnest: he figured he should go get something to eat to cushion the pills, so he ventured out as far as the bar—no one out there that he remembered but the owner, who didn’t meet him with any friendliness—
No, they didn’t serve lunch. There were chips. Dollar fifty a package. Want any?
He took a package and a soft drink—wanted them on his card, but the owner said he was on Bird’s, and wouldn’t take no.
He didn’t want a fight. He took his card back and moused back to his room, upset, he didn’t know why, except he didn’t know what the terms were or why he was too scared to demand the damn chips go on his card—but he was, and he was ashamed of himself. He ate the chips with a lump in his throat, sat there on the bed and thought about taking a sleeping pill and just numbing out for a few hours, because he’d been dislocated out there, nothing and no one out there was familiar. He couldn’t sit here and go around and around in mental circles all day, he hadn’t the routines that had kept him sane, he was sitting here waiting for something he didn’t know what, and he couldn’t keep out of mental loops.
He took out the sack of pills—looked at the size of the bottle that was sleeping pills—God, he thought. What are they doing? How many of these are there?
In which curiosity, he poured the pills out on the counter and counted them.
212 pills.
Didn’t intend for me to want refills on that one for a while.
He might be a little microfocused. He tended to do that lately. Maybe it was brain damage. But his amusements had gotten very narrow in hospital—bitter, constant harassment. Move, and counter. They moved. You moved. You didn’t trust them. They never made consistent sense.
He spilled pills out onto the nightstand and started counting. Vitamin pills, potassium, 30 or so each. The calcitropin stuff, enough for a month… Big bottle labeled: Stomach Distress: As needed. Another labeled: For Pain: 1 every 4 hours. 40 of those. Decongestant: 45 pills: 1 every 4 hours. Diuretic: 60 pills: 1 daily. Drink plenty of liquid. Anti-inflammatory: 40 pills, Take 2 before meals. Depression: 60 pills: Alcohol contraindicated.
He sat there with those piles of pills, the one of them making this towering great heap on the counter, and he stared at it, and he stared, and he thought: 212 sleeping pills?
What did they do, misread the prescription?
No.
That’s not it, is it?
Cory’s dead, they tell me I’m crazy, they take my ship and take my license and tell me I won’t fly again, and they give me 60 uppers and 212 sleeping pills?
They really don’t want me to screw up my exit.
He hadn’t known where he was going or what he was doing until he’d stared at that heap of pills a while.
He thought: First they kill Cory. Then they want me dead—
The hell with that.
He raked the pills into the appropriate bottles, wondering if there was a way to get into the corporation level—
No, that was crazy: really crazy people went into places and killed people who didn’t have anything to do with their problems. Some innocent little keypusher or some smooth corp-rat bastard—neither one was going to get to the people responsible—
Somebody was outside; somebody knocked on his door and cold panic shot through him.
“Dekker?”
“Yeah?” he said.
“Dekker?” A woman’s voice—one of Bird’s friends: he didn’t know why his hands were shaking, he didn’t know what he’d just been doing or thinking that deserved it, but his heart went double-time and reason had nothing to do with it. “It’s Meg Kady. You want to open the door?”
He raked the pill bottles into the plastic bag, the bag into the drawer. Not all of it fit. He made it.
“Dekker?”
Severe spook, Sal had called him, and face to face with him, Meg was very much afraid Sal might be right. He opened the door a crack, listened with a dead cold expression while she explained she and Sal wanted to buy him a drink. “Thought you might be tired of the walls. Come on. Get some air. Have a drink or two.”
He looked as if at any second he was going to slam that door and lock it in her face—maybe with reason, Meg thought: the man must know Ben didn’t like him, and he might have real suspicion about the rest of Bird’s friends.
“Hey,” she said, and gave him her friendliest grin. “You’re not afraid of us?”
If that and the sweater she was wearing didn’t get a man out of his room she hadn’t got a backup.
Dekker muttered under his breath, looked rattled, and felt over his pockets. “This place safe to leave stuff?”
“Yeah. Anybody boosts stuff from The Hole, he’s Mike’s breakfast sausage.—How’re you feeling?”
“All right.”
Dead tone: All right. Dekker came out, let his door lock, walked with her down the hall to the bar like he was primed and ready to jump.
Severe spook. Yeah. Or suspicious of them and their motives.
Sal was waiting. Easy to capture a table with space around it—traffic at this hour was real light, most people being about their business. They went through the social dance, Hello there, good looking, how’re you feeling? Sal pulled a chair out, got up, he sat down, she sat down, Meg sat. Mike, thank God, got right over for the orders.
“Spiced rum?” Dekker asked.
“Premium price,” Mike said.
Dekker hesitated, reached for his card. Meg put a hand in the way. “Let us buy.”
Upset him. He slowly put his card on the table. “Put it on mine. All of it. Rum and whatever they’re having.”
Meg shot a look at Sal, and gave Mike a shrug. “What the man wants,” she said, thinking: Pricey tastes he’s got.
Mike took the card. Dekker started to lean back, arm over the chair back—like it was a fortified corner he wasn’t going to be pried out of; but the hand was shaking. He put it on the tabletop.
Sal said, “What do you go by?”
“Dek—to friends.”
“Dek.” Sal reached out across the table. “Sal. Aboujib, if you got to find me.”
He hesitated, then made a snatch forward and solemnly shook Sal’s hand.
Meg reached hers out. “Magritte Kady.” Cold fingers. Scared spitless. “Meg’ll page me anywhere. There’s only one on R2.—You been out of that room today?”
“Lunch,” he said.
“Any good?”
He shrugged.
Mike got the drinks over, fast, thank God, a merciful few beats without conversation. Dekker picked up his drink. Meg lifted her glass with a flourish.
“Welcome to R2, Dek.”
“Thanks,” he said faintly.
“Thanks for the drinks.—You remember us at all?”
He nodded.
Sal said, “We’d better say, before anything else, we’re the ones that have Way Out leased.”
He didn’t react at all to that, just kept looking at Sal.
“I’m the pilot,” Meg said. “Sal’s my numbers man. You were the primary license on your team, right?”
Dekker nodded glumly, watching them, every move. He held the rum in one hand, the other arm over the chair back. “Yeah. I was.”
“Excuse.” She leaned her elbows on the table and cut down the distance. “Let’s be frank here. They busted your license. Bird and Ben claimed your ship—but they haven’t cut you off cold, either. They risked their financial asses saving your life. Understand? Lot of expenses.”
“Yeah.”
“So we got a lease on what used to be your ship, and probably you aren’t real happy with us.”
Dekker said tonelessly: “Yeah, well. Not your fault. No hard feelings.”
“But,” Sal butted in, “we got to thinking how we could do you and us both some good.”
Meg said, quickly: “We figure you want your license reinstated. Which you got to have board time for. Which could be expensive, if you had to get it from the company—and you still might need some help to get past the bureaucrats.”
Dekker gave her a quick, plain, a what-in-hell-are-you-up-to stare.
“Chelovek,” she said quietly, because even in the bar, even with the music going, you had to worry about bugs lately, since the cops had searched the place, “you ran into real trouble—got ground up in the gears entirely, you and your partner.—Where are you from? Sol Station?”
Dekker nodded.
“Neo out here?”
“Two years.” His jaw was set, not going to say a syllable more than he had to. Improvement on yesterday, she thought.
“Brut put, Dek, you got yourself in one helluva mess, and there’s beaucou’ guys on R2 who’d pick your pocket the rest of the way. But as happens we’re not them, and Bird’s a blue-skyer, so he knows where you come from.—Not that we owe you, mind. But Bird doesn’t like to take advantage. There’s some things we can’t fix. But suppose we could—what’s prime business on your mind right now? What can we do most for you?”
He shook his head, staring elsewhere.
“Mad, I don’t blame you, jeune fils. But are you going to spite yourself? What can we do to even things up? Anything you need?”
Another shake of the head.
“Yeah, well. You know what the corp-rats want, don’t you?”
That got a look, a nasty one.
“They want you all theirs, jeune fils. They really don’t like the independents. Their charter makes ’em have to accept us, but they got you right down to signing with the company.”
“They won’t sign me with the company. I haven’t got a license.”
“Oh, they’ll give it back to you, jeune fils. When you’re theirs. ASTEX regulations screwing you over and ASBANK ready to lend you money. What are you running on now? Mind my asking?”
“Yeah, I mind.”
“Good. Do mind. But do you want to get that license without them?”
A little reaction there. Not a word.
“We got a deal for you. You get time at our boards, you take our help, you, me, Sal, Bird and Ben, we all make our own little arrangement that gets you working again, gets you fed, boarded, and eventually reinstated. How’s that?”
Interest, at last. Hostility. “Why? Goodness of your heart, rab?”
“You pay us cash for our time if you can pay us, or you pay us a share plus lease after that—that’s Bird’s word on it, if you pass muster by Sal and me.”
He looked somewhere else. She let the silence hang there a moment, then said: “We’re not hard to get along with, Dek. We’re fair good company.”
“My partner’s dead, do you bloody mind?”
Sal said, “She fond of you starving? Cold bitch jeune rab.”
Dekker looked bloody death at her but Sal sailed right on:
“But I’ll guess she wasn’t a cold bitch at that, and she wouldn’t like what you’re doing to yourself, if she was here, which she isn’t, nor will be hereafter. She’s signed off, man, we all do. Death’s life, you know, and it keeps on.”
“Shove off.” Dekker pushed his chair back and got up. Meg did, laid a hand on his arm: he slung it off. Mike, over at the bar, was probably reaching for the length of pipe he kept.
She said, quietly, lifting both hands, “Easy. Easy. No cops here. No offense. Help, here. That’s all.”
“You’re an antique, you know it? You’re a friggin’ antique. Rab’s gone. You’re not in it anymore.”
She actually felt a painful spark of interest—the jeune fils more lately from Sol and more in the current. “True?” She tilted her head, took a damn-you stance and said, “You got better, little plastic?”
He was twenty, maybe—you wouldn’t tell it by the eyes; but the body, the way he let himself be jerked off course, scared as he was, that was all young fool. Maybe he didn’t really even want to care about what she thought now: he’d only attack blind, young-fool-like, and for just a single unquiet moment—knew she’d just attacked him back.
“Come out of it. It’s the twenties.”
“So? What’s the twenties got to offer us the ’15 didn’t? Corp-rats in fancy suits? Here at R2’s still the teens. Maybe I don’t like your tomorrow, little corp-rat.”
“It’s 2323 on Sol and they’re building warships to blow the human race to hell. Lot you changed, whole fuckin’ lot you changed!”
“So what’s the word, little plastic?”
“The word’s business suits, the word’s grab it before it goes. That’s Sol. That’s all the good you did.”
Bitter news, no better than she already knew. But she balanced on the balls of her feet, hands in belt, shrugged and said, “It goes on, young rab. Didn’t we tell you, back in the ’15, wake up! You’re going to fly for them?”
“I’m not flying for anybody.”
“You’ll be living off the corp-rat sandwich lines the rest of your life if you do the fool now. They’ll own you—and you’ll be flying some damn refinery pusher til you’re older than Bird.” She added quietly, gently: “Or you can sit down, jeune fils, listen to me, and use your brains for more than ballast.”
He stood there without saying anything. Meg thought, with Sal in the tail of her eye, God’s sake, don’t move, Aboujib, keep your friggin’ mouth shut, kid’s going to blow if you draw breath.
Dekker looked away from her, then, hooked a leg around his chair front and melted down into it.
Meg heaved a sigh, sank into the chair next to him, where he had to look her in the eyes. “Let us make up, jeune rab. Let’s not do deal right now. Let’s just take you out on the ’deck and show you the cheapshops.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Not far. Relax. We’re severely reprehensible, but we don’t take advantage. Won’t push you. Just a little walk.”
Kid was scared white. And he managed not to look her in the eyes.
“Come on,” she said. “You’ve seen too much of hospitals. Sal and I’d like to spend a little, see you get fixed up with a bit more’n a friggin’ plastic bag for a kit—like to stand you a few Personals, you copy? Even if you decide not to take the rest of our offer.”
She figured Sal was having a stomach attack right now, knowing Sal. Meg, Sal’d say, you want to pass out tracts too?
Dekker’s breathing grew calmer after a moment. He said, “Shove off.”
“You telling us you want to go with the company. We should leave you alone, just stay out of your life?”
A few more breaths. He picked up the glass with a shaking hand, drained it and set it down empty, except the ice. Then he nodded, and seemed to fall in on himself a little. “Yeah, all right, whatever.”
Like they could chop him up in pieces if they wanted to, he didn’t care.
She put her hand on the back of his chair, stood up, and he stood up. She showed him toward the door with: “Mike? Tell Bird we’re shopping.”
And Sal, damn her, with the nerve of a dock-monkey, locked on to Dekker’s arm as they headed him out the door, saying, “I know this place. Absolute first-rate. You got to see. All right?”
“Medium,” he told the dealer, embarrassed by his company, exhausted by the walk, not sure he wasn’t going to be had in various ways, some possibly dangerous—but he couldn’t prove it. He’d broken what Cory called Rule One, going off with Belters he didn’t at all know, into shops they did know, taking their word about who to deal with and who to trust—he didn’t know whether they were on Bird’s side of things or not. Ben’s, for all he knew, but they were having a good time and he was out of the funk he’d tried to sink into—
Drifting, a little, maybe. But they’d gotten him moving, they’d made him mad, but they’d done more for his nerves than all of Visconti’s pills. He was alive. He was thinking about something besides Cory, overwhelmed with music, with colors and textures and excited, cheerful voices—
He was halfway happy for a moment.
“Now, no shiz, Pat, you give him our deal, now,” Sal told the guy, whatever that meant, and Meg called after him, “No corp-rad, now! Something serious!”
The dealer brought back pants and a bulky sweater. The pants said medium. They were gray stretch and they didn’t half look medium. The price said 49.99, middling high for a cheapshop.
“That’s too much,” he objected. The dealer whisked out another pair of pants with diagonal stripes, black and red, that looked like a rab’s nightmare. Laid that out with a blue sweater.
“God,” Meg said, “not blue. Red. Can you match?”
“Let’s try for coveralls,” he said. “Blue or gray. Something that fits.”
“Oh, work stuff,” Meg said. “Dull, dull. No fun.—Try the gray pants, come on, Dek. You got the figure.”
“Starvation,” he muttered. He told himself he should stop this, just get the coveralls traded for something that fit. But they were both set on him trying the gray, they shoved sweaters at him, and in their enthusiasm it was just easier to do it, make a fool of himself and prove once for all it wasn’t going to work.
But the mirror showed him a walking rack of bones that actually didn’t look bad in the pants, and that could use a sweater twice its useful size to hide his thin shoulders.
He wasn’t sure, though, about the big slash stripes on the sweater. He stepped out of the changing booth to get the dark blue one, self-conscious as hell, and the women made appreciative sounds. “Rab sweater,” Meg said. “Oh, I do like that.”
He suffered a crisis of judgment, then, looking in the mirror outside the dressing-booth, and before he could reorganize, Sal said, “Suppose he’d fit those metal-gray boots? He’s got small feet.”
He didn’t really want a wide striped sweater. He hadn’t set out to get metal-gray boots that belonged on a prostitute. He damned sure didn’t need the bracelet Sal shoved on him, but: “This is my treat,” Sal said. “Man, you got to. Push the sleeves up.”
“I need work clothes worse. Blue. On my card—”
“He’s trading in the coveralls,” Meg said to the dealer. “Can you just size him down?”
“Yeah,” the dealer said, and hauled out a pair that said small. “If these don’t fit you can exchange. You’re a real small medium.”
That wasn’t what a man wanted to hear, who’d worked hard enough getting the size in the first place. But he decided he might be, after the hospital. He got the bracelet. He bought some cheap underwear and a pair of thermals, a plain gray stimsuit, his old one having been washed to a rag—that was expensive; and he ended up with the blue sweater too, along with a pair of black pants (stretch, like the gray) and black docker’s boots, used. He was tired now, dizzy, and shaking in the knees; he was ready to go back to his room and collapse, the man was toting up the charge and he felt a moment of cold panic as those numbers rolled up.
He wasn’t sure now what he’d just done, wasn’t even sure he dared wear what they’d talked him into: he’d had his turn with rab when he was thirteen—but not here, where rab was a statement he didn’t know how to deal with—where it was corporate or where it was a badge of things he didn’t understand…
I’m a fool, he thought. He thought how Bird and Ben were going to look at him when he got back—and the rest of the boarders at The Hole, some of whom might take serious exception to a show-off with no license: he’d forgotten his troubles, they’d made him forget for a few dazed moments and damned well set him up.
“I think we’d better go back,” he said, wanting time to think. His head was going around. But Meg said, “Neg, neg, you can’t go shaggy. Let’s get that hair trimmed.”
“Cut off that pretty hair?” Sal said, the way he’d protested once himself—when he was thirteen. “No!”
“Not all of it,” Meg said. “Come on, Dek. Let’s go get you fixed up. It’s on the way. Won’t take fifteen minutes.”
“No,” he said.
Which ended him up in a barber’s chair dizzy and remembering he’d missed at least one batch of pills, with two women telling a helldeck barber how he wasn’t to take too much off, “—except the sides,” Meg said.
He’d given up. It was like the hospital. He was just too tired to fight on his own behalf, and they were right, the shoulder-length hair and the shadows under his eyes made him look like a mental case. If the cut was too extreme he could trim the top himself, with a packing-knife or something, God, he didn’t care right now, it was a place to sit down.
Cory and he had cut each other’s hair, to save money, conservative, Martian trim—just practical. He watched what was happening in the mirror in front of him and kept thinking, in the strobe of the barbershop neon, Cory wouldn’t like this. Cory would get that disgusted, high-class look on her face and say, Really not your style, Dek.
Cory’s first letters had told him she didn’t like the rab. When she’d sent her picture and he’d realized he had to send his back—with the long hair and wild colors and, God, the gold earring, he’d forgotten that—
But he’d been thirteen. He’d seen a serious, soft-eyed girl as sober and as kind as the letters. So in another crisis of judgment he’d gone to a barber and borrowed a plain blue pullover—gotten a serious job, he’d forgotten that too—tried to hide it from his friends, but they found out and thought it was damned funny.
He hadn’t had those friends after that. Hadn’t had many friends at all after that—except Cory; and he’d never met her face to face.
Stupid way to be. He hadn’t planned it. He hadn’t been happy with his school, his work, with anything but flying. Worked the small pushers for the shipyard—he was supposed to be loading them: the health and safety regs didn’t let kids outside the dock there. But he’d got his class 3. And the super let him sub in until he was subbing in for a guy that ran a pusher into a load of plate steel…
“… up the sides,” Meg said. “Yeah. Yeah!”
Sal, with her metal-clipped braids, leaned to get a direct look at him, flashed a white grin and said, “That’s optimal!”
It didn’t hurt a guy’s feelings to have a couple of women saying he looked good, but what was developing in the mirror in front of him was someone he’d never met before: it was 2315 again—but he wasn’t 11, he was 20—It was the way the deep-spacer had said, the one they’d gotten in to talk to the class back then: You live on wave-fronts. You live on a station, you ride the local wave—the time you know. You go somewhere else, it’s a different wave. Maybe a whole set of waves, coming from different places, different times. There’s an information wave. There’s fads. There’s goods. There’s ideas. They propagate at different rates.
Some dumb kid had made a joke about propagation.
The merchanter had said, dead-sober, So do stationers. Some shouldn’t. And there’d been this scary two beats of hostile quiet and an upset teacher, because that was what deep-spacers were notorious for, on station-call, and what stationers were fools to do—especially with deep-spacers, who moved on and didn’t care. Cory’s mother had—and look what came of it… a girl who’d made up her mind that Mars was irrelevant. Who said that rab was irrelevant. Cory had used to say: The rab can’t really change anything. They can’t build. They’re saying reform Earth’s politics—but it won’t work. Worlds are sinks, they’re pits where people learn little narrow ideas—Luna Base was a mistake. Mars Base was. Once we’d got off Earth we shouldn’t ever have sunk another penny in a gravity well—
Cory had said more than once, I’d rather a miner ship for the rest of my life than be stuck on a planet—
He focused on the mirror where it wasn’t Way Out’s cabin, it wasn’t Cory’s face he was seeing, and the thin, shadow-eyed stranger who got out of the chair looked like someone who might have a knife in his boot. He wasn’t sure Cory would recognize him. He wasn’t sure Cory would ever have liked him if she’d met him like this.
“Serious rab,” Meg said, with a hand on his shoulder. She looked past his shoulder into the mirror, red hair, glitter and all. Sal was at his other side.
He stared at the reflection, thinking, I’m lost. I don’t know where I am.
This is who survived the wreck. It’s somebody Cory wouldn’t even want to know.
But it’s who is, now. And he doesn’t think the way he used to—he’s not going your direction anymore, Cory. He can’t.
I’ve seen crazy people. Faces like statues. They just stare like that. People leave them alone.
He doesn’t look scared, does he? But he is, Cory.
God, he is.
HE’D spent money he didn’t want to spend, that sliced deep into all he had to live on for the next sixty days; he had Meg on one arm and Sal on the other both telling him he looked fine, and maybe he did, but he wasn’t sure his legs would hold him—wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to fall in a faint—the white noise of the ’deck, the echoes, the crashes, rang around his skull and left him navigating blind.
Sal kept a tight grip on his left arm, Meg on the right, Sal saying in the general echoing racket that he looked severely done; and Meg, that they shouldn’t have pushed him so hard.
“We can stop in and get a bite,” Meg said.
“I just want to get home,” he said. They had his packages, they kept him on his feet—he had no idea where he was, and he looked at a company cop, just standing by a storefront, remembering the cop that had stopped him outside the hospital, the fact he was weaving—a fall now and they’d have him back in hospital, with Pranh shooting him full of trank and telling him he was crazy.
God, he wanted his room and his bed. He wanted not to have been the fool he’d been going with these people—he wanted not to have spent any money, and when he finally saw familiar territory and saw The Hole’s flashing sign, he could only think of getting through the door and through the bar and through the back door, that was all he asked.
It was dimmer inside, light was fuzzing and unfuzzing as he walked, only trying to remember what pocket he’d put his key in, and praying God he hadn’t left it in the coveralls back at that shop—
But Bird and Ben were sitting at the table they’d had at breakfast, right by the back door. Meg and Sal steered him around to their inspection and Ben looked him up and down as if he’d seen something oozing across the floor.
“Well.”
Bird said: “Sit down, Dek.”
“I’m just going back to my room.”
“His room, it is, now,” Ben said; and Meg, with a deathgrip on his arm:
“Ease off. Man’s severely worn down. He’s been shopping.”
“Yeah.” Ben pulled a chair back. “It looks as if.—Sit down, Dekker.”
His knees were going. But Ben suddenly took as civil a tone as Ben had ever used with him, walking out on him didn’t seem a good idea, and he was afraid to turn down their overtures, for whatever they were worth—there damned sure weren’t any others. He sank into the offered chair, Meg and Sal pulled up a couple of others, and he gave up defending himself—if they wanted something, all right, anything. Ben would only beat hell out of him, that was all, and Ben didn’t look as if he was going to do that immediately, for whatever reasons. The owner—Mike—came over to get his drink order—Bird and Ben were eating supper, and Bird suggested through the general ringing in his ears that he should do the same, but it was already too late: he couldn’t get up and stand in the line over there and he wasn’t sure his stomach could handle the grease and heavy spices right now. He remembered the chips. He said, “Beer and chips.”
“Out of chips. Pretzels.”
“Yeah,” he said, “thanks. Pretzels is fine.” Maybe pretzels were a little more like food, he had no idea; and beer was more like food than rum was. Anything at this point. God.
“That all you’re going to eat?” Bird asked.
Ben nudged him in the ribs and said, “Must be flush today. Who’s buying the pretzels, Dekker?”
Meg said, “Ease off, Ben. He’s seriously zee’d.”
“That’s nothing new,” Ben said, and Bird:
“Ben.”
“I just asked who’s buying the pretzels.”
“I am,” Dekker said. “If you want any, speak up and say please.”
Ben whistled, raised a mock defense. “Oh, well, now, yeah, don’t mind if I do. God, you’re touchy.”
He’d have come off the chair and gone for Ben, under better circumstances. He didn’t have it. It wasn’t smart. But something took over then and made him say, with a set of his jaw: “I didn’t hear please.”
“Oh. Please.” An airy wave of Ben’s hand. “Passing charity around, are we, now? Paying off our debts? Did finance come in?”
“Not yet. But it will. You want my card?” He pulled it out of his pocket, tossed it onto the table. “Go check it out, Pollard. Take whatever you think I owe you.”
Ben looked at him, and Bird turned his head and called out, “Mike, get those beers right over here, Ben’s had his foot in his mouth.—Excuse him, son. You want to get the pretzels, we’ll get the drinks.”
“I’ll pay my own tab,” he said. Too harshly. He was dizzy. He wished the drinks would hurry. He wished he was safe in his room and he wished he knew how to get there before he got into it with Ben. Mistake, he told himself, serious mistake.
“We mentioned to him about the board-time,” Meg said. “He says he wants to think about it.”
“What ‘think’?” Ben said. “He’s got no bloody choice.”
“Ben,” Sal said, sounding exasperated, “shut up.”
“Well, there isn’t.” Ben was quieter, scowling. “Try to help a guy—”
“Ben,” Bird said.
“We’re buying his effin’ drink!”
“Ben,” Meg said, and slammed her palm on the table, bang, a hand with massive rings on each finger. “We talked about the lease, and the jeune fils is thinking it over, that’s his privilege. Meanwhile he’s offered to pay his own tab, all right? So don’t carp.—Don’t pay him any mind, Dek. Sometimes you seriously got to translate Ben. He means to say Trez bon you’re on your legs again and mercy ever-so for the pretzels.”
The beer and the pretzels came. Dek picked his card off the table and shoved it at Mike, said, “Put it all on mine,” and tried not to think what his account must look like now.
Bird said: “You don’t have to do that, son.”
“It’s fine,” he said. He picked up his beer and felt Ben’s hand land heavily on his shoulder, the way Ben had done on the ship when Ben was threatening to kill him. Ben squeezed his shoulder, leaned close to touch glasses with him.
“No hard feelings,” Ben said.
He didn’t trust Ben any further than he could see both his hands. His stomach was upset, he was all but shaking as was, and the glass Ben had touched the rim of suddenly seemed like poison to him, but he sat still and took the requisite polite sip of his beer.
Ben said, “So do you want the board time?”
He looked at Bird, asking without saying anything whether this was Bird’s idea too. Bird didn’t deny it.
“Yeah,” he said.
“So there’s strings to be pulled,” Ben said. “Short as the time is, we have to expedite, as is, or you won’t get the ops test before we’re out of here—and if you don’t do those forms right, they’re not going through. Now, as happens, I know the people you need. You do the work in the shop—”
“What work?”
“Thought you’d talked to him,” Bird said.
“I said we’d mentioned it,” Meg said. “We didn’t exactly get down to that point.”
“Well, now we have,” Ben said. “There’s no other way to do it, Dek-boy. Only deal going. So you’ve agreed. We’re waiting to hear how you’re going to pay for it. Time? Or money? Or the pleasure of your company?”
They were coming at him from all sides. He wasn’t sure there wasn’t a moment missing there—his ears were ringing, they were all looking at him, Ben with his hand on his chair back—he lost things, the meds said he did; and he sat here surrounded by these people who as good as had a gun to his head. If they helped him he might have a chance—but if they figured out he did forget things, the word would get around and it was all over, he’d never get reinstated, he’d end up doing refinery work…
“You any good as a mechanic?” Bird asked.
“I kept Way Out working.”
“As a pilot?”
“I was good.” He didn’t expect Bird would believe him. He added, self-consciously, “We weren’t broke.” Bird had seemed the best of them, Bird had kept him alive and argued for him with these people. He was desperate for Bird to take his side now. And if they robbed him, there were worse alternatives. “Cory and I had 47 k in the bank. Not counting the ship free and clear. Rl bank’s sending it, but I can’t draw on it for another fifty, sixty days.”
“47 k,” Ben jeered. “Come on, Dekker.”
He didn’t look at Ben. He looked at Bird and Sal, clasped his hands around the wet chill of the beer glass. “Cory’s mom was pretty well set. Cory had her own account—trust funds. The hour she turned 18, she took it and she called me and bought my ticket and hers. She came out from Mars, I came from Sol—we met out here and we bought the ship. Paid a hundred fifty-eight k for her. Another 40 in parts. We made a few mistakes. We hadn’t made many runs—only been out here two years. But Cory knew what she was doing. She nearly had her degree in Belt Dynamics. 28 of that 47 k we didn’t have when we came out here. We were doing pretty well.”
“Damned well.” Bird said.
“College girl,” Ben said, “come on, the company’d have snapped her up.”
“She didn’t admit to it. She didn’t want a company slot.”
“With that kind of money? She was a fool.”
“Ben,” Bird said.
“Well, she was.”
He set his jaw, made himself patient. “She just didn’t want it. The fact is, she wanted a share in a starship.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Ben said.
“She wanted into the merchanters. You have to buy in. Her trust fund wasn’t enough—wasn’t enough for both of us. And she had this idea, it was all she’d listen to.”
“Why?” Sal leaned forward, chin on clasped, many-ringed hands, neon sparking fire on her metal-beaded braids. “Why, if she was rich?”
“Because,” was all the answer he could manage. There was a knot in his throat and he thought if Ben opened his mouth he’d lose it. Cory had been so damned private. Cory didn’t tell people her reasons. But they went on listening, waiting for him, so he shrugged and said, “Because she hated planets. Because her father was a deep-spacer—her mother wanted a kid, she didn’t want a husband and she didn’t want anybody in Mars Base to have that kind of claim on Cory. Cory was a solo project. Cory was her mother’s doing, start to—”
—finish. That word wouldn’t come out. He said, watching condensation trickle on the beer glass: “Didn’t even know his name. Cory sort of built on her own ideas. Stars were all she talked about. Wanted to do tech training. Her mother wouldn’t have it. So she studied astrophysics. She had the whole thing planned—getting the money, coming out here—getting us both out.”
Ben said, quietly, “Hell, if she could buy a ship, she could have gotten it faster working for the company. What’s the rate? Eighty, ninety thou to get your tax debt bought?”
And her mother there, he thought, her mother on MarsCorp board to pull strings, get her broke and get her back. But he didn’t say that. He said: “They’d have drafted me if I’d stayed at Sol. That was part of her reason. We were going together. That was the plan.”
“That crazy about you, was she?”
“Ben,” Meg said, “shut up…”
“I don’t know why everybody’s telling me to shut up. It wasn’t the damn brightest thing she could have done. She could have gotten to Sol Station, probably bought straight into a ship with what she had—she expected to make it rich here freerunning?”
“Her mother,” he said, “wanted Cory back in college. Wanted—God only.” His stomach hurt. He had a sip of the beer to make his throat work. “She was under age. Couldn’t get an exit visa over her mother’s objection. This was as far as she could get. Til she was twenty-one.”
“The ship and 47 k in the bank,” Ben began. “What do those sons of bitches want for a buy-in, anyway?”
“Maybe a couple hundred k apiece. With the ship, we had it for one of us, tax debt to get the visa, you’ve got to pay that off to the government before you ever get down to paying the ship share—and Cory’s was high: she had a degree. Another 70 k each to get back to Sol. I told her get out—I saw on our first run it was no good. We didn’t know how hard it was out here. We wouldn’t have done it this way—but by then we’d sunk so much into the ship… and just buying passage to Sol would eat up everything she had…”
He’d yelled at her the night before their last run, he’d said, The war’s getting crazier. They’ve got these damn exit charges, God knows when they’re going to jack them higher—if you don’t go now, there’s no telling what they’ll do next, there’s no guarantee you can get out…
He’d begged: Just leave me what’s left over. I’ll buy in on some other ship, work a few years—whatever ship you’re on will come back here. I’ll join you then—
He’d been lying about the last. She’d known he was, she’d known he didn’t want to go. And she’d known he was right, that both of them weren’t going to make it. She’d known she was going alone, sooner or later, or they were going to do what every freerunner ultimately did do—go into debt. That was why the shouting. That was why she’d burst into tears…
“—And she said?” Meg asked.
He’d lost the thread. He blinked at Meg, confused. He honestly couldn’t remember what he’d been telling them. He picked a pretzel out of the bowl, ate it without looking at them. Or answering.
Bird said, “The lad’s tired.”
“Yeah,” he said, remembered that he was behind on his medicine, remembered that the company management were all sons of bitches and they were the ones that handed out the licenses. Even that was in their hands.
Bird reached out, thumped a grease-edged fingernail against his mug. “Want another round? A beer? On us? To sleep on?”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m pretty tired.” He thought about his room. He thought about the bed and the medicine he was supposed to take.
All those sleeping pills…
Meg hung a hand on his right shoulder, leaned close and said, “We better get you to bed.”
He couldn’t answer. He shoved her hand off and got up and left.
“Man’s in severe pain,” Meg said under her breath, looking over her shoulder.
“Looked all right to me,” Ben said. “Looked perfectly fine, out spending money like there was no tomorrow.”
She muttered, “Yeah, add it up, Ben.” Across the table Bird looked mad. She figured Bird had somewhat to say and she shut up for several sips of beer.
Bird didn’t say anything. Ben set his elbows on the table in an attitude that said he knew he was on Bird’s bad side, but he looked mad too.
Things were going to hell fast, they were.
“Excuse us,” she said, and got up and took a pinch of Sal’s sleeve. Sal read a full scale alert and came with her over to the end of the bar where the guys couldn’t lip-read. “Aboujib, we got a severe problem.”
“Yeah. Men!”
“Easy, easy. We got a partner/partner problem developing here.”
“You know Ben’s a good lay. But he’s being a lizard.”
“I sincerely wasn’t going to say that.”
“I don’t mind saying it. I’ll bust his ass if Bird doesn’t. I told Ben what I’d carve off him if he got too forward with me. And Bird damn sure won’t take it.”
“Bird can handle him.”
“Yeah,” Sal said and got a breath. “With a wrench. I tell you, I’m not putting up with this act. And I’m not standing in the fire zone either. I vote we go out to a show, leave the boys to one room.”
Sometimes Sal made real good sense. “Yeah,” Meg said. “Sounds good.”
“I got a serious concern,” Bird said.
“Yeah, well,” Ben said, looking at the table. “Sorry about that, Bird.”
“Why’d you push on him?”
“Hell if I know,” Ben said, and didn’t know, actually. Meg and Sal came back to say they were leaving: “You guys work it out,” Sal said. And that made him madder. He watched them walk out. He had no notion where they were going, but he felt the ice on all sides of him.
“I don’t know what the hell it is,” he said without really looking at Bird. “I don’t know what it is that the guy’s got, but it seems to get in the way of people’s good sense.” He hadn’t liked this partners idea from the time Sal had showed up at the 3 deck shop telling him how dealing with Dekker was going to set them all up rich, how it was such a good idea, Dekker getting his license back and all—and he’d liked it less than that when pretty-boy came sauntering in here all manicured and looking like trouble.
Bird didn’t say anything for a while after that. Finally: “Maybe some people can’t figure out why you got it in for him.”
“Because he’s crazy!” Ben said. “Because we’re going to take this loony out there where he can get his ship back—cut the girls’ throats and run that ship back over the line…”
“You’ve been seeing those lurid vids again. What in hell’s he going to say about two more missing persons over at Rl? ‘Excuse me, they took a walk together’?”
“He doesn’t have to have a good excuse! He’s crazy! Crazy people don’t have reasons for what they do, that’s why they’re crazy!”
“They still have to explain it to Belt Management.”
“It doesn’t do Meg and Sal any fuckin’ good!”
“My money’d be on Meg and Sal.”
“Don’t be funny, Bird, it’s not funny.”
“I think it’s damned funny. We got a 95 k mortgage on Way Out with the bank, we got nothing but dock charges on Trinidad for the last several months, we still aren’t past inspection on the refit and we still got a filing to go before we can think about getting out of here. In case you haven’t noticed, Ben-me-lad, we could seriously use another pair of hands here. We’re bleeding money, with two ships sitting at dock.”
“Meg and Sal do just fine. We don’t know about this guy. And we’d have had two pair of hands today if Meg and Sal weren’t out spending money on this guy. He’s trouble, Bird, he’s been trouble from the first we laid eyes on him.”
“We can always say no, if he turns out to be trouble. We got time yet at least to find it out. Let’s just put him to work, see how he gets along.”
“You can’t say no, Bird, you got this severe problem with saying no. You crawl ass-backwards into what’s going to cost you money. If I didn’t—”
“I can say no real good, Ben, if you recall. I said no to Meg and I said no to quite a few would-be’s before I took you on. Now, you and me being partners, I give you a lot I wouldn’t give just anybody—but being partners goes both ways. And right now I’m asking you to just give me a little more line.”
“To do what? Wait until his money comes through? Then he’ll pay for his own bills? That’s real convenient, Bird, that’s real damned convenient. He doesn’t get to pay anything, he doesn’t do anything, and we’re buying his meals!”
“Ben,—”
“I don’t know why you believe him over me, that’s all!”
“Ben,—I dunno whether the gals are right about this deal: they could be. Here I am trying to figure whether I trust Dekker, and you’re acting so damn crazy I end up defending him. I can’t hardly take your side, without having him off down the ’deck in a fit now, can I?”
“It’d be good riddance!”
“Yeah, and what if the gals are right and this guy’s a good steady prospect?”
“Steady, hell! Bird, who are we going to get to go out with Dekker? ‘What time is it? What time is it?’ Who’s going to put up with that?”
“The guy really got to you out there, didn’t he?”
He hated being patronized. “He didn’t get to me.”
“Good,” Bird said. “Good.”
“Dammit, don’t—”
“—don’t what?”
Cut me off like that, Ben thought blackly. But what he said was, “All right, all right. We’ll see how he does the next week or so.” He took a pretzel out of the bowl. “Guy didn’t take ’em.” Wasteful habit. It was like somebody who had money, who was used to having it. And on the thought of the 47 k Dekker claimed to have: “If he’s got the funds he claims, he’s a damned walking bank. Where’d he get it, except this rich college girl? He had a lot to gain by her dying, you know.”
“Yeah, looked like he was having a real good time out there, didn’t it?”
He hated it when Bird got surly with him. It made him figure maybe he wasn’t being reasonable.
Bird said: “The Nouri thing, you know, changed a lot. Cops with warrants to do anything they wanted, the news full of friends informing on friends… I don’t think there was half the under the table stuff going on that the company claimed—like we were some major leak in the company accounts. We weren’t. We were making it. You understand? People used to help each other, that’s what was going on, then. If you got in trouble and you needed a part, you didn’t go to the bank, you went to a friend. You could borrow under bank rates, if you kept your promises, if you ran a good operation and paid your debts—and damn sure people knew if you did. We were making it, and the company wasn’t. Now you tell me who’s the better businessmen.” Bird lifted a shoulder and took a sip of a dying beer. “Now we’ve got a generation coming off Earth with the Attitudes. We got a generation coming out of the Institute that never heard of Shakespeare—”
“God, so give me a tape, Bird! I swear I’ll listen to the sumbitch.”
Bird looked at him oddly, then reached across the table, took hold of his hand, man/woman-like, which was odder still, scarily odd, coming from Bird, from the guy he shared a ship with. Bird said, “Ben, you’re a good guy. You really are. Stay that way.”
Ben rescued his hand, shaken. “What’s that mean?”
Bird only said, in that same peculiar way, “Ben-me-lad, I’ll look you up that tape.”
Dekker stared at the ceiling and thought about a sleeping pill, thought about the whole damned bottle—but hell if he’d give the company the satisfaction.
Ben wasn’t going to let him alone. That was the way it was, that was the way it was going to be. Ben didn’t like him, and with Belters, that well could be the final word on it. Ben had taken his ship and now Ben had him down as trouble—that was the way it was going to be, too.
He didn’t know why Ben set him off like that. He didn’t know why he’d said what he had, he didn’t know why he’d talked about Cory’s business, or whether he had a chance left with them, under any terms now he’d walked out—and he didn’t know what Bird might be thinking.
If nothing else—that he and Ben together were a problem: he had no question which way Bird would go if Ben wanted him out.
And Ben talked about getting his license back, with no dollar figure on it. Everything he had, he was sure—if they still took him after the blow-up out there. Ben thought he was crazy, Ben thought he’d crack if he got out there again, and, honestly speaking, he wasn’t sure of himself. The deep Belt was no place to discover you’d grown scared of the dark; and handling a ship making a tag was no time to have a memory lapse, to find the next move wasn’t there—or not to remember where you were in a sequence or what you’d already done. You didn’t get other chances. The Belt didn’t give them.
He didn’t know himself what would happen when the hatch shut behind him, whether he’d panic, whether he’d be all right—whether he’d think he was all right and, the longer he was out in that ship, slowly unravel between past and present, the way he had in the shower—that shower, the same surroundings, nothing but his current partners’ presence to anchor him in time.
Everybody seemed to be asking him to collect himself, get on with his life as if nothing had happened. It seemed to be the way everybody got by—they numbed themselves to feeling, made themselves deaf and blind to what the company got away with, just kept their mouths shut, chased what money they could get, and got used to seeing a lying sonuvabitch in the mirror every morning, because that was the only kind that had a chance in this place.
He didn’t know whether he could do that. He didn’t even know whether he could keep out of that pill drawer and stay alive tonight, or whether the gain was even worth it anymore.
Cory, he’d said that time they’d had the argument, maybe I don’t want to go. What in hell am I going to do on a starship? I failed math. I failed physics. I don’t have your brains, Cory, it was your idea all along. They won’t have work for me, I’ll be dead mass, the rest of my life, Cory. What kind of life is that?
She’d set him down, told him plain as plain he hadn’t any chance in staying, she’d told him the company was crooked, the company was screwing the freerunners, screwing the pilots, screwing everybody that worked for them. Cory had handled big money, she knew how banks worked with the big operations. She’d told him what ASTEX was doing with their electronic datacards and their policies on finds. She’d tried to explain to him exactly what that direct-deduct stuff on LOSes did to accounts and interest, and how they were skimming on the freerunners in ways that had nothing to do with rocks.
She’d said, Dek, don’t be a fool, you’ve no future here. They’re killing the freerunners, they’ll get the Shepherds in not too many years—there’s no hope here.
She’d said, Don’t ever think I’ll leave you behind…
Sal sipped her drink in the blue neon of Scorpio’s—the vid had been not-too-bad, chop and slash, the way Meg said, but not a long one, and as she had put it, it was way too early to chance walking in on the boys, besides which she had a word to drop on some friends next door. It was her favorite lounge—Shepherd territory, right next to the Association club—pricey, spif: you got the usual traffic of office types who went anywhere au courant on the edge of helldeck, but the Shepherd relationship with Scorpio’s was longstanding: Shepherds got the tables in the nook past the glass pillars, and Shepherd glasses came filled to the brim, no shorting and no extra water, either.
Not a place they could afford as a steady habit, damn sure, not unless they picked up some guys with Shepherd-level finance, and they weren’t shopping to do that this time.
No danger of walk-up offers this side of those pillars either, thank God: the women to men ratio on helldeck meant Shepherds were used to being courted, not the other way around, and two women who weren’t signaling didn’t get the pests that made sane conversation impossible in a lot of the cheaper bars, God, you got ’em in restaurants, in vid show doorways—this shift some R&R bunch was in from the shipyard, and the soldier-boys on leave down at the vid were the damn-all worst. They’d had a glut of male fools for the last few hours and Scorpio’s was a refuge worth the tab, in her own considered opinion.
“I tell you,” she said over an absolutely genuine margarit, “my instinct would be to take this Dek a tour before we go out, you know, personal, just friendly. Rattle him and see what shakes. I think that’s a serious safety question. But we got Ben in the gears, damn ’im.”
“You want my opinion, Aboujib?”
“Po-sess-ive?”
“Vir-gin, Aboujib. You’re probably the first that ever asked him.”
“Hell, he’s that way with Bird!”
“Yeah.”
She saw what Meg was saying, then. “That way about a lot of things, isn’t he?”
Meg stirred her drink with the little plastic straw. “Man’s got a serious problem. Hasn’t cost us yet. But it’s to worry about. Ni-kulturny, what he pulled on Bird tonight.”
“Ochin,” Sal agreed with an uncomfortable twitch of her shoulders, sipping her margarit, thinking how they weren’t doing as ordinaire with Ben, how if it was anybody else but the best numbers man on R2, she’d have handed him off to Meg—switch and dump, the old disconnection technique. But, dammit, Ben was special, the absolute best, and Meg with Ben didn’t do them any good. Meg didn’t know the right questions and she didn’t do the calc as well.
Besides which it wasn’t Meg who made Ben crazy enough to show her things the Institute hadn’t, that he’d figured, that he wouldn’t hand out to anybody. She’d never met a case like Ben—you felt simpatico with him one minute and the next you wanted to break his neck. She’d never met anybody she trusted the way she did Ben—except Meg and Bird; Ben was the only one but Meg and Bird she’d feel safe going EV with—and, counting his crazy behavior, she couldn’t figure that out.
At least he wasn’t like the greasy sumbitch who’d threatened not to let her back in the ship unless she did him special favors. Numbers men were always at a disadvantage, always got the problems until you were as good as Ben, that nobody wanted to lose. Meg had never been through that particular trouble—a numbers man didn’t dare antagonize his pilot, if he had any sense; and he didn’t send his pilot walkabout either—but a numbers man definitely could get out with some severely strange people in this business; and if you had some few partners you were sure of, you didn’t let them go—didn’t try to run their lives for them, not if you wanted all your fingers back, but hell if you wouldn’t go to any length to hold on to them, to keep things the way they were.
Kill somebody? If it came to it, if you ever would—then you would. And trying to keep two tallish young guys from killing each other out there…
“What are we going to do, Kady?”
Meg pursed her lips. “Just what we’re doing. Let Bird handle it.”
Someone brushed by their table. Touched her shoulder. “Aboujib?”
God. A walk-up? Meg’s frown was instant. Sal looked around and up an expensive jacket at a Shepherd—one of Sunderland’s crew, friend of Mitch’s—she didn’t know the name. He said, very quickly, slipping something into her pocket, “That question you left?”
“Yeah,” she said—different problem. Same problem. She held her breath. Felt something flat and round and plastic in her pocket, her heart going doubletime.
“This is Kady?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You can say.”
“Word is, problem’s gone major. You’re tagged with it. Go with it the way you said. Time’s welcome. But when you get your launch date… you let us know. Very seriously.”
The guy walked off then.
God.
“What the hell?” Meg asked.
“I dunno,” she said, thinking about a shadowy ’driver sitting out there spitting chunks at the Well. And MamBitch, who prepared the charts and their courses, and shoved them up to v and braked them. “I dunno.” Her stomach felt, of a sudden, as if she’d swallowed something very cold.
“Is that what I think I heard?” Meg asked. “They think we could be in some kind of danger?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, God, great!”
“Let’s not panic.”
“Of course let’s not panic. I don’t effin’ like the stakes all of a sudden.”
She leaned forward on the table, pitched her voice as low as would still carry. “Meg. They’re not going to let us run into trouble.”
“Yeah,” Meg whispered back. “Let’s not hear ‘run into.’ I don’t like the words I’m hearing. I don’t like this ‘Go with it.’ Maybe I want a little more information than we’re getting into.”
“They’re saying we’re doing the right thing—”
“Yeah, doing the right thing. We can be fuckin’ martyrs out there, is that what they want?”
She reached across the table and grabbed Meg’s hand, scared Meg would bolt on her. “We got a real chance here—”
“What real chance? Chance your high and mighty friends are going to hold us a nice funeral? Chance we can collect the karma and they stay clean?”
“Meg, I can get you in.”
“Screw that.” Meg jerked her hand back. “I don’t take their charity.”
“Meg. For God’s sake don’t blow it.”
Meg set her jaw. Took several slow breaths, the way she would when she was mad. “What’s their guarantee? Shit, we could be bugged here—”
Sal took the flat plastic out of her coat pocket, which had a little green light showing. Palmed it, fast.
“God,” Meg groaned.
“They’re ahead of the game. They’re not going to let us walk into it.”
“Oh, you’ve got a lot of faith in them. That’s contraband, dammit!”
“Meg, they’re not fools.”
“They must think we are.”
“We made them an offer, Meg, they’re saying they’re agreeing. They’re warning us.”
“Yeah,‘tagged with him.’ I like that. I really like that.”
“Meg.” She couldn’t lay it out better than Meg already knew it. Meg looked like murder.
But Meg said finally: “So we’re tagged with him.—Are we talking about giving up that lease?”
The answer was yes. Meg knew it. Meg knew it upside and down.
“Shit,” Meg said.
“We’ve got what they want. They want him. They paid their debts. That’s what they’re saying. They’re asking us take a risk, and we’re in, Meg, they’re making us an offer. If we screw ’em on this—or if we back out now—”
She was down to begging. There were pulls in too many directions if Meg skitted out on this one. God, everything she wanted, everything. “A Shepherd berth, Meg. One last run. We get Dek out in the big quiet for a few months and that’s it. Ben and Bird set up with those ships. Karma paid. We’re getting out of here, Meg. A chance at a real ship. Both of us.”
That scored with Meg. Only thing that could. Meg’s face got madder. Finally Meg said: “Hell if. Wake up, Aboujib.”
“Hell if not. This is big, Meg, dammit, this is it.”
Meg shook her head. But it meant yes. All right. We’re going to be fools.
“You better be right, Aboujib.—And that jeune fils damn well better get his bearings. Fast. If they’re going to make a case on him—he sincerely better not be crazy.”