“Do it,” Bird said.

He keyed Send. In a moment the screen blinked, notified him his account had been debited 250.00 for the application and told him he had to pass the basic operationals within sixty days, after which he had to log 200 hours in the sims or at the main boards of a working ship, by sworn affidavit of a class 1 pilot—

And take a written exam.

Someone had as well have hit him in the gut. He stood there staring at the message til Bird laid a hand on his shoulder and said they’d go on to the core now.

He was down to 95 dollars in his account, he hadn’t yet paid his bill at The Hole, and he’d never takenthe writtens, he’d come up from the cargo pushers to the short-hop beam haulers to a miner-craft; but he’d never had to take the written exams.

Ben elbowed him in the back. “Come on, moonbeam. Don’t forget your card.”

He took it out of the slate, he walked out of the offices with them, in a complete haze. They got to the Transstation as the Trans pulled in and the doors opened.

“Come on,” Ben said, and Ben taking his arm was the last straw. He snarled, “Let go of me,” and shook free, wanting just to go on around the helldeck, wanting to go back to his room, lock the door, take a pill and not give a damn for the rest of the day; or maybe three or four days.

“Come on.” Bird got his arm and pulled at him. The Trans doors were about to close in their faces, the robot voice was advising them to get clear. “Oh, hell,” he said; and let them pull him aboard, because otherwise they were going to miss their ride and stand there til the next Trans came, asking him why he was a darned fool.

They fell into seats as the doors shut and the Trans started moving. “What in hell’s the matter with you?” Ben asked. “Are you being a spook again, Dekker?”

“No,” he said, and slouched down into the seat, staring at a point between them.

“You have some trouble about going onto the ship?” Bird asked him.

“No.” He set his jaw and got mad, lifelong habit when people who ran his life crowded him.

Ben said: “You’re being a spook, Dekker.”

Probably he was, he thought. And a kid might keep his mouth shut, but a grown man in debt up to his ears and about to end up on a heavyside job had finally to realize who he owed, and how much. He swallowed against the knot in his throat and muttered, “I can’t pass tests.”

Bird tilted an ear and said, louder: “What?”

So he had to repeat it: “I can’t take tests.”

“What do you mean you can’t take tests?” Ben objected, loudly enough for people around them to hear. “You had a license, didn’t you?”

Screw you, he wanted to yell at Ben. Let me alone! But he said quietly: “I had a license.”

“Without an exam?”

“You can do that,” Bird said to Ben. “Construction work lets you do that. You can jump from class to class that way, just the operationals and a few questions. Same as I did. Not everybody comes through the Institute.”

“Well, then,” Ben said, “—you’ve been a class 1. You claim you were good. You know the answers. What’s a test?”

Ben made him mad. Ben could make him mad by breathing. He tried to be calm. “Because I can’t pass written questions!”

“God,” Ben said, sliding down in his seat. “One of those. Can you read?”

He didn’t want to know what “those” Ben was talking about. He didn’t want to talk about it right now. He wanted to break Ben’s neck. He stared off at the corner, past Ben’s shoulder. He’d go to the ship, all right, he’d restrain himself from acting like a crazy man; he’d pass the operationals and put in his hours in Bird’s ship and he’d come back and fail the damned test.

But meanwhile he’d have gotten fed. He’d have gotten in with Bird. Maybe he could get a limited license to push freight, work up through ops again, on the ship construction out there: he didn’t know, he didn’t even know if it was possible out in the Belt. He didn’t want to worry about it right now, just take it as far as he could, and not think about the mess he was in.

Bird and Ben talked in low voices and he was the topic: he could catch snatches of it over the noise. It was two more stops til the core lift. He wanted this ride over with— wantedto get up to the dock, the ship, anywhere, to get them on to some other subject.

“Look,” Ben said, leaning forward, “on this test business, it’s easy done. It’s a system, there’s a technique—”

“Easy for you!”

“You a halfway good pilot?”

“I’m damned good!”

“Then listen to me: it’s the same as filling in the forms back there. Don’t give real answers to deskpilots. The whole key to forms ortests is never give an answer smarter than the person who checks the questions.”

He took in a breath, expecting Ben to have insulted him. He couldn’t figure how Ben had.

“We can get you through that shit,” Ben said, with a flip of his hand. “But first let’s see if you’re worth anything in ops.”

He didn’t wantto owe Ben anything. He told himself that Ben had probably figured out a new way to screw him—and if there was any hope at all, it was that Ben’s way of screwing him happened to involve his getting his license restored.

Slave labor for him and Bird, maybe: that was all right, from where he was. Do anything they wanted—as long as it got him that permit and got him licensed again.

He thought about that til the Trans came to their stop, at the lift. They got out together, punched up for the core, and waited for the car. He tucked his hands into his pockets and tried not to think ahead, not to tests, not to the docks, not to what the ship was going to look like—

Everything was going to be all right, he wasn’t going to panic, wasn’t going to heave up his guts when he went null- g, it was just going to be damned cold up there, bitter cold: that was why he was shivering when he walked into the lift.

He propped himself against the wall and took a deathgrip on the safety bar while the lift made the core transit: increased gat the first and none at the end—enough to do for a stomach in itself. The car stopped, let them out in the mast Security Zone, and they shoved their cards in the slot.

The null- ghere at least didn’t bother him—it only felt—

—felt as if he was back in a familiar place, and wasn’t, as if he were timetripping again: in his head he knew R2’s mast wasn’t anywhere he’d been before when he was cognizant—he kept Bird in sight to keep himself anchored, hooked on and rode the hand-line between Ben and Bird—

The booming racket, the activity, the smell of oil and cold and machinery—all of it could have been Rl. Here and now, he kept telling himself, and by the time he reached Way Out’sberth in Refit, his stomach might have been upset, but he could reason his way toward a kind of numbness.

Even entering the ship wasn’t the jolt he’d thought it would be, following Bird and Ben through the lock. Bird turned the lights up and the ship seemed—ordinary again. It smelled of disinfectant, fresh glue, and oil. He touched Way Out’spanels with cold-numbed fingers and looked around him. Everything around him was the way it had been, as if the wreck had never happened. Same name as she’d had—Cory’s joke, actually—but they’d given her a new number, and she wasn’t his and Cory’s anymore.

Most of all there was no sense of Cory’s existence here. That had been wiped out too. And maybe it was that presence he’d been most afraid to deal with.

“We’ve got the tanks replaced,” Bird was saying, reorienting toward him. “We’re stalled on one lousy part we’re trying to organize on the exchange market—but we’re closing in on finished.”

“How does she look?” Ben asked, point blank, and he could say, calmly, without his teeth chattering, “You’ve done a lot of work with her.”

“Want to get the feel of the boards?” Bird asked. “Main system’s hooked in. Want to run a check?”