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. “ Rabsweater,” 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 mycard—”

“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, Reallynot 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 supposedto 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’scabin, 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.

CHAPTER 13

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.