Bird said, “The lad’s tired.”
“Yeah,” he said, remembered that he was behind on his medicine, remembered that the company management were all sons of bitches and theywere the ones that handed out the licenses. Even that was in their hands.
Bird reached out, thumped a grease-edged fingernail against his mug. “Want another round? A beer? On us? To sleep on?”
“You’re right,” he said. “I’m pretty tired.” He thought about his room. He thought about the bed and the medicine he was supposed to take.
All those sleeping pills…
Meg hung a hand on his right shoulder, leaned close and said, “We better get you to bed.”
He couldn’t answer. He shoved her hand off and got up and left.
“Man’s in severe pain,” Meg said under her breath, looking over her shoulder.
“Looked all right to me,” Ben said. “Looked perfectly fine, out spending money like there was no tomorrow.”
She muttered, “Yeah, add it up, Ben.” Across the table Bird looked mad. She figured Bird had somewhat to say and she shut up for several sips of beer.
Bird didn’t say anything. Ben set his elbows on the table in an attitude that said he knew he was on Bird’s bad side, but he looked mad too.
Things were going to hell fast, they were.
“Excuse us,” she said, and got up and took a pinch of Sal’s sleeve. Sal read a full scale alert and came with her over to the end of the bar where the guys couldn’t lip-read. “Aboujib, we got a severe problem.”
“Yeah. Men!”
“Easy, easy. We got a partner/partner problem developing here.”
“You know Ben’s a good lay. But he’s being a lizard.”
“I sincerely wasn’t going to say that.”
“I don’t mind saying it. I’ll bust his ass if Bird doesn’t. I toldBen what I’d carve off him if he got too forward with me. And Bird damnsure won’t take it.”
“Bird can handle him.”
“Yeah,” Sal said and got a breath. “With a wrench. I tell you, I’m not putting up with this act. And I’m not standing in the fire zone either. I vote we go out to a show, leave the boys to one room.”
Sometimes Sal made real good sense. “Yeah,” Meg said. “Sounds good.”
“I got a serious concern,” Bird said.
“Yeah, well,” Ben said, looking at the table. “Sorry about that, Bird.”
“Why’d you push on him?”
“Hell if I know,” Ben said, and didn’t know, actually. Meg and Sal came back to say they were leaving: “You guys work it out,” Sal said. And that made him madder. He watched them walk out. He had no notion where they were going, but he felt the ice on all sides of him.
“I don’t know what the hell it is,” he said without really looking at Bird. “I don’t know what it is that the guy’s got, but it seems to get in the way of people’s good sense.” He hadn’t liked this partners idea from the time Sal had showed up at the 3 deck shop telling him how dealing with Dekker was going to set them all up rich, how it was such a good idea, Dekker getting his license back and all—and he’d liked it less than that when pretty-boy came sauntering in here all manicured and looking like trouble.
Bird didn’t say anything for a while after that. Finally: “Maybe some people can’t figure out why you got it in for him.”
“Because he’s crazy!” Ben said. “Because we’re going to take this loony out there where he can get his ship back—cut the girls’ throats and run that ship back over the line…”
“You’ve been seeing those lurid vids again. What in hell’s he going to say about two more missing persons over at Rl? ‘Excuse me, they took a walk together’?”
“He doesn’t have to have a good excuse! He’s crazy! Crazy people don’t have reasons for what they do, that’s why they’re crazy!”
“They still have to explain it to Belt Management.”
“It doesn’t do Meg and Sal any fuckin’ good!”
“My money’d be on Meg and Sal.”
“Don’t be funny, Bird, it’s not funny.”
“I think it’s damned funny. We got a 95 k mortgage on Way Outwith the bank, we got nothing but dock charges on Trinidadfor the last several months, we still aren’t past inspection on the refit and we still got a filing to go before we can think about getting out of here. In case you haven’t noticed, Ben-me-lad, we could seriously use another pair of hands here. We’re bleeding money, with two ships sitting at dock.”
“Meg and Sal do just fine. We don’tknow about this guy. And we’d have had twopair of hands today if Meg and Sal weren’t out spending money on this guy. He’s trouble, Bird, he’s been trouble from the first we laid eyes on him.”
“We can always say no, if he turns out to be trouble. We got time yet at least to find it out. Let’s just put him to work, see how he gets along.”
“You can’tsay no, Bird, you got this severe problem with saying no. You crawl ass-backwards into what’s going to cost you money. If I didn’t—”
“I can say no real good, Ben, if you recall. I said no to Meg and I said no to quite a few would-be’s before I took you on. Now, you and me being partners, I give you a lot I wouldn’t give just anybody—but being partners goes both ways. And right now I’m asking you to just give me a little more line.”
“To do what? Wait until his money comes through? Then he’ll pay for his own bills? That’s real convenient, Bird, that’s real damned convenient. He doesn’t get to pay anything, he doesn’t do anything, and we’re buying his meals!”
“Ben,—”
“I don’t know why you believe him over me, that’s all!”
“Ben,—I dunno whether the gals are right about this deaclass="underline" they could be. Here I am trying to figure whether I trust Dekker, and you’re acting so damn crazy I end up defending him. I can’t hardly take yourside, without having him off down the ‘deck in a fit now, can I?”
“It’d be good riddance!”
“Yeah, and what if the gals are right and this guy’s a good steady prospect?”
“Steady, hell! Bird, whoare we going to get to go out with Dekker? ‘What time is it? What time is it?’ Who’s going to put up with that?”
“The guy really got to you out there, didn’t he?”
He hatedbeing patronized. “He didn’t getto me.”
“Good,” Bird said. “Good.”
“Dammit, don’t—”
“—don’t what?”
Cut me off like that, Ben thought blackly. But what he said was, “All right, all right. We’ll see how he does the next week or so.” He took a pretzel out of the bowl. “Guy didn’t take ‘em.” Wasteful habit. It was like somebody who had money, who was used to having it. And on the thought of the 47 k Dekker claimed to have: “If he’s got the funds he claims, he’s a damned walking bank. Where’d he get it, except this rich college girl? He had a lot to gain by her dying, you know.”
“Yeah, looked like he was having a real good time out there, didn’t it?”
He hated it when Bird got surly with him. It made him figure maybe he wasn’t being reasonable.
Bird said: “The Nouri thing, you know, changed a lot. Cops with warrants to do anything they wanted, the news full of friends informing on friends… I don’t think there was half the under the table stuff going on that the company claimed—like we were some major leak in the company accounts. We weren’t. We were making it. You understand? People used to help each other, that’s what was going on, then. If you got in trouble and you needed a part, you didn’t go to the bank, you went to a friend. You could borrow under bank rates, if you kept your promises, if you ran a good operation and paid your debts—and damn sure people knew if you did. We were making it, and the company wasn’t. Now you tell me who’s the better businessmen.” Bird lifted a shoulder and took a sip of a dying beer. “Now we’ve got a generation coming off Earth with the Attitudes. We got a generation coming out of the Institute that never heard of Shakespeare—”