“Come on,” Meg said, and he walked across a tilting, unstable floor, around a comer, down a short hall to a familiar door and a room that had been—images kept flashing on him out of a situation he didn’t remember—cold and empty the last time he’d left it, clothes in the lockers nobody was going to use any more....

Now it was alive with voices and faces out of a period of his life that never should have recrossed his track, except it was like a gravity well, things didn’t fly straight, they kept coming around at you again and he didn’t even know the center of mass. That should be a calculable thing. He should be able to solve that problem, with the data he had....

“Get him in bed,” Meg was saying, “he’s severely spaced,” and Ben said, “Damned fool had to walk it, where’s his head anyway?”

Ben never minced words. He could cope with Ben far better than he could Sal Aboujib, who, after Ben had got him onto his bunk, pinned him with hands on either side of him, looked him in the face so close he was cross-eyed and said, “Oh, he’s still pretty. Dek, sincerely good to see you. So good you’re in one piece—”

“Let him alone. God!” Meg shoved Sal aside. “Man’s severely had enough for a while. Go get his supper. Do you mind?”

Numb at this point. Completely numb. You hyped, and if things wouldn’t calculate, what could you do but handle the things you could? He said, “Not reg.”

Sal said, “Nyet. Lieutenant cleared it. Sandwich all right, Dek? Chips?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Sandwich meant fish of some kind and that nauseated him. Then he thought of what he did want. What he’d wanted in his lucid moments in the hospital. “Hamburger and fries. —” And simultaneously remembered what happened to Belters who ventured the quick food in the cafeteria. “You watch the hamburgers, Sal. It’s real stuff—”

“Dead animals,” Ben said, and shuddered.

“Fish are animals,” Meg declared.

“No, they’re not.”

The argument went completely surreal. The noise did. He was lying here and people promising to get him a hamburger were arguing Belter sensibilities, enzymes and whether fish were intelligent. “Milkshake,” he said. But he was tired and he wanted to get under the sheets he was lying on, which took far too much effort. He just shut his eyes a moment and something warm settled over him. Blanket. And a weight pressed the mattress beside him and an arm arched over him.

He focused blearily on Meg. “Why in hell did you come here? You got no business here—”

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“We’ll talk about it while there’s still a chance, before you get into the security stuff—” The meds would say his blood pressure was getting up again. His eyes were blurry. He made the effort to lean on one arm, the one that hadn’t been recently broken, and gathered all the detail of a face he’d never thought he’d see again. He’d wanted her once. He didn’t know if he still did—didn’t want to want her. Didn’t know if he could take another dead friend. “Damn thing’s a meatgrinder, Meg, the colonel’s an ass—”

“Yeah, so Ben said. —Are you getting out? Seems to me you got a serious excuse here. Thinking about a Medical?”

His mind went blank on that. He couldn’t see himself doing anything else. He couldn’t see himself shoving freight around, going back to pusher work. But the future he’d had before the accident was black and void in front of him, just—not do-able now. For the last year he’d chased after being the first pilot to run that course. Making it. He’d believed that, even through the funerals of those who hadn’t. And that wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen, now, everybody was dead but him—

“You want to get out of the service?” Meg asked him.

He kept trying to look at that dark ahead. And finally he shook his head. No, he didn’t want out. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he didn’t want out of the Fleet—didn’t know who might go with him next run, didn’t know what they could pull together into a crew that wouldn’t take another one apart—didn’t want that. Maybe that was why he couldn’t see where he was going. Crew was gone, they might well drop him back in training, let him shape up with Meg and Ben and Sal from the beginning up—granted Tanzer didn’t kill the program.

Meanwhile some other crew would make that first run; and the second; and the third—he’d take the controls after someone else had flown the ship and it was documented and tame enough for the second line to try.

And maybe that was sanity. Forget his notions: maybe it wasn’t what he’d trained for, wasn’t what he’d wanted, but it was a way back into the cockpit, forget the naive confidence he’d had in his invincibility. He wasn’t a kid any more. God hope he wasn’t a fool any more, who had to have that number one status or kill himself and everyone with him.

He gave up the prop of his arm, fell back again and gathered the bedspread and pillow under his head. He looked in Meg’s eyes and didn’t see a woman who was young and mind-fried with love—just a friend, a sane, brave friend, who was older than he was, and whose reasons he didn’t honestly know.

“Meg, I’m serious, don’t want to offend you. Good to see you. Good you came. But if you’ve got any loophole out of enlisting, any way in hell back to the berth you had, you should go back....”

“Five hundred-odd million ft, I come for this man. What about those letters you wrote? ‘Getting along fine, a real chance at something, the first thing in my life I know I want to do—’ “

“That was bullshit. It’s like anywhere else. We got a fool in charge.”

“Yeah, well, we dealt with fools before. Got no shortage of ‘em in the Belt. Some have even got seniority.”

“They got plenty of it here. —Too damn many funerals, Meg. I’m sick to death of funerals—”

“Death is, jeune rab. Better to burn than rot.”

Plasma spreading against the dark. Whiteout on the cameras. He said, urgently, “Meg, go back where you’ve got a life, for God’s sake. You’ve got a berth—”

“—without shit-worth of seniority.”

“Well, you won’t get any here. They won’t count your hours, just give you a flat 200. Spend your whole life out in the Belt and that’s all it’s worth. They’ll screw you any way they can.”

“Mmmnn. Yeah. Sal’s seriously pissed about that—but she’s computers anyway. Straight quantifiable skills stuff. / was an EC shuttle pilot, remember? Earth to orbit. LEO to Sol One. You name it, I ran it, four years riding the gravity slopes. And it’s all in the EC’s own infallible records. Here, I got seniority.”

“Shit,” he said, cold inside, he didn’t know why, except Meg was hell to stop when she had an idea, and Tanzer was a damned fool. It’d be like the UDC, to look at just that record of Meg’s hours and do something seriously stupid. Like put a shuttle jock on the combat line. “Meg, you don’t know. We got innate stupidity here, serious innate stupidity. The equipment’s a real stress generator, you understand me? They made the sims realtime to start, but the UDC guys won’t spend four, five hours in the sims, hell, no, we’re too short on sim-time for that, and we got guys too experienced to need that, so what do we do? We pitch the sims down to be do-able. Comfortable. Spread the time around. You read that?” His head ached. His voice was going. The capacity to care was. “They’re killing us. Take guys with reflexes to do the job, and then they fuck with the sims till you got no confidence in them. That’s a killer, Meg, that’s a damn killer, ship’s so sensitive you can screw the thing if you twitch—”

“You fly it?”

A memory chased through his nerves, oxygen high and an adrenaline rush, hyper-focused—

“Yeah,” he said, voice gone shaky with memory. “Yeah. Mostly the sims. But twice in the ship.” And he knew why he wasn’t going to take a Medical. Better to burn, Meg had said. And he did that. He did burn.

Door opened. “Mustard or ketchup?” Sal’s voice. “Got one each way....”