He didn’t know why Ben had decided to take the damn test this morning. Ben had skuzzed out on him. If Ben had held out, Ben might have persuaded Sal and Sal might have reasoned with Meg—

Like hell. He hadn’t seduced Meg out here. At least Meg and Sal weren’t his fault. The ship had done that. Some lying bastard in the Fleet had done that, who’d told Meg they’d give her a chance—

Yeah. A chance. Thanks.

Drug made you seriously spaced. You had sensor spots patched all over you, in places that made a body most emphatically wonder if it was procedure or the femme tech having a few loose circuits of her own—

“Do it where?” she remembered asking. But the examiner, that was a guy, nice-looking greyheaded man, asked her to match up all these shapes and holes—God, she hadn’t done this one in years. “I’m not good at this,” she said. “I don’t fly little cubes.”

Neither did he, he said. At least he had a sense of humor. So she ran the test and she tracked on discrimination stuff that flashed on screens, they moved her to another station and belted her in and the computer spun her around and around—easy piece, nothing hard at all. Til the floor dropped out from under her and then the thing went through its paces.

Wanted you to draw a straight line? Right.

Wanted you to get up and walk one?

Yeah. Maybe.

Sit in the spin chair again. Wait for the light and press the button while the chair spins?

Siren blast. Right before the light flash.

Dirty trick, sumbitch. Dirty trick. Flash again. Flash, flash. Pause. Flash.

Hold the yoke and the toggles, make the VR lines meet? This was a good one. Hadn’t done this one before....

Weight escaped his balance and bounced. Dekker ended up on one knee, caught a breath and waited for the room to stop spinning before he went to pick it up and rack it and lock it in. Good show he was going to make for the meds in an hour. He drew long breaths, sat down and felt after the towel to mop his face.

Stars came out of a vast dark. Lights on the panel glowed with information....

It was in his head, the same as, in the Belt, you got to seeing rocks in your sleep, not rocks as they existed in the deep dark, but the way they were in the charts, the courses they ran, falling sunward, faster and faster, and then more and more slowly outward—

He wiped the sweat that stung his eyes. He heard somebody come in, challenged at the office for numbers and names. “Yeah,” he heard someone say, far away and a door shut...

Echo. Door opening and closing. He’d seen a shape. He’d talked to someone. But he couldn’t remember to whom. He chased the memory. But the voice that came back lacked all tone:

Just checking. Do what you were doing....

Who in hell would he take that answer from?

Piece of nonsense. He could screw this test. They wanted him to discriminate a damn lot of advancing lines and dots? Easier if the sensors didn’t itch.

He muttered, “Quick way to solve this. Who programmed this?”

Examiner said, “Don’t talk.”

“This is a piece of shit, major. Begging pardon.” Zap. “Damn arcade game.”

“Watch that one.”

“This is fuckin’ armscomp! I’m not testing for this—”

Zap.

“You’re not damn bad, lieutenant... But you’re not real modest, either.”

“I’m damned good. But I’m not killing things.”

“You have a moral objection?”

He put hands and eyes on autopilot and left them to search for screen-generated threats. At definable intervals. Random number generator in the virtuals, for God’s sake. “I got a moral objection. I got a moral objection to getting shot at.”

“Exactly what we’re looking for.”

He thought about that reasoning. He thought about screwing the test, while he was zapping stupid dots. Faster now. “Screw it, you severely got a pattern in here.”

“I’ve been telling them that.”

“Tell you something.” Zap. “I’m supposed to be in Stockholm. Somebody skuzzed my records.” Zap. “Matched me up with the lunatic.” Zap. Zap-zap-zap. “Oh, hell.”

“See? Not all a pattern. You missed that one. Getting cocky, were you?”

Faster now. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“You have two hands, two keysets. Brain can do both operations. Hands can. How good are you?”

“Damned moonbeam partner of mine,” he muttered. “You give me programming. I’m telling you—anywhere else is a waste—” Zap. “I don’t want combat. —I know what this mother’s doing—”

Zap/zap/zap—

Hand on the other pad. Interrupt to Command level and invoke the chaos o/i off the internal generators. Obsolete as a security device, but certainly an improvement on this antique.

Resume. Let them figure that one. Let their techs come in and patch it if they didn’t like it.

“Where did you get that code?”

“Telepathy,” he said. “Sir. I told you. I belong in Stockholm.”

Watch the lights, track the dot, do you have any blurring of vision, Mr. Dekker?

Have you had any headaches?

Stand here, stand there, look at the light, bend over, Mr. Dekker...

He escaped with a grudging Release on his card and an admonition to take his mineral supplements, got to a phone outside the med station and put the card in to check the readout for messages. Lunch, he thought, might bring people to check then- messages. Might get a phone call, however muzzy, from Meg, telling him how she was doing.

None from Graff; none from Meg or Ben or Sal. No authorizations. Just a reminder of his appointment in Evaluations.

And a note from the gym that he hadn’t carded in his preferred time slot and was he interested in team volleyball?

Hell.

Marine guards at every intersection. Corridors everywhere had a decided chill. God, there were even guards in the messhall....

He started in, saw Mitch and Pauli and the guys at the tables and they saw him.

Upset him. He couldn’t say why. He walked by for politeness’ sake—”Sit down,” they said, offering him a chair. But he couldn’t face lunch of a sudden, in this place—too many faces in the room, too many people trying to be friendly who didn’t know all that was going on with him, and the guards and the UDC watching him from the other end of the room. He muttered, “No, I’m on medicals right now, just time for a soft drink, thanks.”

“Got anything back on the tests?”

Wasn’t a thing stirred in C-barracks but what everybody was in it. “No. Not yet.” He patted the back of Mitch’s chair and made his escape to the rec-area foyer, where he could card a soft drink and a granola bar that tasted like cardboard and hit his stomach like lead.

They probably were talking about him back mere. And he couldn’t talk to them, couldn’t deal with them until he knew what he was, whether he was going to clear the tests himself, whether his partners were passing theirs—he wasn’t anyone, until he knew who he was working with, what he was, where he’d be, what they’d assign him to—

Fly again, yeah. Porey would see to that. Front of the line-up. Or the bottom—at Porey’s discretion. He’d opened his damned mouth, he’d forgotten for a critical second he had partners who could be in danger from what he did or promised—

Couple of UDC guys came over and carded a candy bar. Names were Price and McCain. Techs. They hardly even looked at him, but he was sweating. He kept thinking, If I’d kept my mouth shut, if I’d done what the colonel wanted, if I’d only once ducked my head and played the game—

Tray banged somewhere. The room felt cold. His mother had said, Paul, what is it with you? Why do you always end up in the middle of it?

He wished to God he knew that. He wished to God he could go over there with the other guys and sit down and be what they wanted him to be, but he couldn’t even tell them what he’d done or what he was waiting to find out—

Please God, they’d Aptitude somewhere down the list, somewhere out of immediate usefulness, and he could go maybe to Chad’s crew, patch things up with them, he couldn’t think of a match-up else he could make that might have a chance. He should have offered that to Porey, Porey wasn’t crazy—he didn’t want to lose another ship, for God’s sake: Porey probably would have called it a good idea— good for morale, pull the program together. UDC and Fleet.