“Soon’s you shut your eyes, sir. Just be quiet. You loosened a couple of John’s teeth yesterday. You remember?”

He didn’t remember. But he said, out of breath, “I’m sorry. Sorry about that. I’m better. A lot better.”

“That’s good, sir.”

“Friend of mine was here,” he said. But the drug was gathering thick about his brain. He said it again, afraid he might not remember when he waked. Or that it hadn’t happened at all.

He went to sleep when they drugged him and he waked up and he never knew where or when. He was going out now. He felt it happening. And he was scared as hell where he would wake up or what would be true or where the lines would lead him.

“Ben,” he cried, “Bird. Ben, come back— Ben, don’t go— they killed my partners, Ben, they fuckin’ killed us—”

“This isn’t validated,” the check-in clerk said, and slid the travel voucher across the desk in the .6 g of 8-deck. “You need an exit stamp.”

Ben took the voucher with a sinking heart. “What exit stamp? Nobody said anything about an exit stamp. There’s no exit stamp in the customs information.”

“It’s administrative, sir. Regulation. I have to have a stamp.”

“God. Look, call Sol One.”

“You do that from BaseCom,” the clerk said. And added without expression: “But you need an authorization from your CO to do that, sir.”

“And where do I get that?” You didn’t yell at clerks. It didn’t get you anything to yell at clerks. Ben said quietly, restrainedly: “My CO’s on Sol One—I need the UDC officer in charge.”

“This is a Fleet transport voucher.”

“I know it is,” Ben said. “But this uniform is UDC. Is it at all familiar to you? Where’s the UDC officer in charge?”

The clerk got a confused look, and focused behind him, where someone had come into the office, to stand in line was Ben’s initial reckoning; but whoever it was said, then, “Lt. Pollard?”

Voice he’d heard before. A long time ago. He turned around, a little careful in the .6g, saw a blue uniform and a black pullover, a thin, angular face and nondescript pale hair. Brass on the collar.

The trip out from the Belt. The Hamilton. And Jupiter’s well.

Graff. Fleet Lt. Jurgen Graff. Carrier pilot, junior grade.

“There’s an office free,” Graff said, meaning very evidently they should go there. Now. Urgently. A Fleet lieutenant wanted to talk to him, and he was stuck on Fleet orders in something that increasingly felt like a deliberate black hole?

“I’ve got a flight out of here at 1800. They’re talking about an exit stamp. I need some kind of clearance.”

“You don’t have a flight out of here. Not this one.”

He slowed down, so that Graff had to pull a stop and look at him. “Sir. I need this straightened out, with apologies, sir, but I’ve got a transfer order waiting for me back on Sol One, I was told not to communicate with my CO, I’m not Fleet personnel. I understand the interservice agreements, but—”

“Five minutes.”

“I’m UDC personnel. I want to see a UDC ranking officer. Sir. Now.”

“Five minutes,” Graff repeated. “You don’t want your friend screwed. Do you?”

“My friend— Sir, I don’t care what happens to my friend. I’ve got an appointment waiting for me back on Sol One, and if I lose it, I’m screwed. I’m just a little uneasy about this whole damn arrangement, —sir. This isn’t what I was told.”

“There’s another shuttle out the 22 ^nd. 2100 hours.”

Ben caught a breath. Three days. But Graff’s moves meant business and you didn’t argue a security matter on the open dock—no. Even if it was blackmail. Extortion. Kidnapping.

Graff waited. He came ahead. He went with Graff into a freight office and Graff waved the lights on.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

“We need him,” Graff said. “We need him to remember.”

“Sir, I just graduated from TI. If I’m not back there for the interviews they’re going away. They’re going to assign those slots and I’m stuck teaching j-1 programming to a class full of wide-eyed button-pushers, —sir. Excuse me, but I’ve not been in contact with any officer in my chain of command, I’ve gone along with this on the FSO’s word it had notified my CO. I’m not sure at this point I’m not AWOL.”

“You’re not. You’re cleared.”

“I’ve got your word on that. I haven’t seen any order but the one that had me report to the FSO on One. What have you done to me?”

“You have my word. I’ll get a message to your CO.”

“You mean they haven’t?”

“I’ll double check. We’ve played poker, haven’t we, Mr. Pollard?”

“Yes, sir.” Days of poker. Him. Dekker. Graff. No damn thing else to do on a half-built carrier.

“This is poker,” Graff said. “For the major stakes. How is he?”

“What does it matter? What’s he into?”

“Say I need him sane.”

“He’s never been sane.”

“Don’t joke like that. In some quarters they might take you seriously.”

“I am serious. The guy’s good, but his tether on reality’s just a little frayed.”

“Maybe that’s what it takes to do what he does.”

He stood there close to Graff, looking into Graff’s sober face in this very unofficial office and suddenly wondering who and what Graff was talking about and what Dekker did regularly do that had put him where he was. He said, carefully, “Dekker got lost out in the Belt. Banged around a lot. Real disoriented.”

“We know that.”

And how much else? Ben wondered. God, how much else? News didn’t escape the Belt. Security didn’t let anything get out. Even yet. Everything about the mining operation out there was under wrap. You didn’t know how much the Fleet might know. Or what tiny, inadvertent slip would let them guess what they’d done track there and what they might have been involved in that might screw his security clearance for good.

“I knew this man a handful of months. I’ve seen him like this before—when he Fust got out of hospital on R2. I can’t make him make sense til he wants to make sense. I couldn’t then. Nobody can.”

“You made a good advance on it. Three days, lieutenant. I want him to talk.”

Bream came short. “Do I get to beat it out of him?”

“Let’s be serious, lieutenant.”

“What am I supposed to be asking? Have I got a clearance to hear it? Or what happens when he does talk? What am I looking for?”

“As much as you can know—and it’s not been released yet—there was an accident. Dekker wasn’t in it. Friends of his were. Dekker’s crew was lost.”

“Oh shit.”

“Top command subbed in another pilot with Dekker’s crew on a test run. The test didn’t go right. Total loss. Dekker was hospitalized, treated for shock. The day he got out—he either climbed into a simulator under the influence of drugs or something else happened. It’s a matter of some interest which.”

Ben chewed his Up. Missile test, they’d said on Sol One.

Tech committee meetings. Place crawling with brass and VIPs. Hell. “So isn’t there an access record?”

“Computers can be wrong. Can’t they?”

Ben’s heart rate picked up: he hoped to hell there wasn’t a monitor hearing it. He tried to think of some scrap to hand Graff, for good will’s sake. He finally said, “Yes. They can be.”

“I want him functioning,” Graff said. “Say you’re on jnterservice loan—at high levels. It could be good. It could be bad. To take maximum advantage of that... you need to deliver.” Graff pulled a thick envelope from his jacket and held it out to him. “He listed you next-of-kin. So you have a right to see this.”

“I’m not his next-of-kin. He’s got a mother—”

“She’s specifically excluded. Don’t worry. There’s nothing in this packet outside your security clearance.”

He took it. He didn’t want to.

“I wouldn’t leave that material lying about unattended,” Graff said, “all the same. —You’ve got your quarters in hospital. I can’t order you not to use the phone. But if you do, if you contact anyone else, do you understand me, you’re not behind our screen any longer. Take my personal advice: get back to the hospital and stay there—and don’t use that phone.”