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 canget 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’ hadpaper, 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?”

CHAPTER 12

DEKKER drowsed in the muted music-noise of the bar outside, lay in a .9- gbed 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.