Dekker said, “I can’t see my watch.”
Bird floated over where he could read the time on Dekker’s watch. “2014. You’re about three hours slow.”
“No.”
“That’s what it says.”
“What day is it?”
“May 20.”
“You’re lying to me!”
“Bird,” Ben said ominously, and came drifting up again to reach for Dekker, but Bird grabbed him.
“I can’t take four weeks of that, Bird, I swear to you, this guy’s already on credit with me already.”
“Give mea little slack, will you? Shut it down. Shut it up. Hear me?”
“I’ve dealt with crazies,” Ben muttered. “I’ve seen enough of them.”
“Fine. Fine. We get this guy out of a tumble, he’s been whacked about the head, he’s a little shook, Ben, d’you think you wouldn’t be, if you’d been through what he has?”
Ben stared at him, jaw clamped, grievous offense in every line of his face.
Ben was in the middle of his night. That was so. Ben was tired and Ben had been spooked, and Ben didn’t understand weakness in anybody else.
Serious personality flaw, Bird thought. Dangerous personality flaw.
He watched Ben go back to his work without a word.
Good partner in some ways. Damned efficient. Good with rocks.
But different. Belter-born, for one thing, never talked about his relatives. Brought up by the corporation, for the corporation.
Talk to Ben about Shakespeare, Ben’d say, What shift does he work?
Say, I come from Colorado—Ben’d say, Is that a city?
But Ben didn’t really know what a city was. You couldn’t figure how Ben read that word.
Say, I went up to Denver for the weekend, and Ben’d look at you funny, because weekend was another thing that didn’t translate. Ben wouldn’t ask, either, because Ben didn’t really want to know: he couldn’t spend it and he wasn’t going there and never would and that was the limit of Ben’s interest.
Ask Ben about spectral analysis or the assay and provenance of a given chunk of rock and he’d do a thirty-minute monologue.
Damn weird values in Belt kids’ mindsets. Sometimes Bird wondered. Right now he didn’t want to know.
Right now he was thinking he might not want Ben with him next trip. Ben was a fine geologist, a reliable hold-her-steady kind of pilot, and honest in his own way.
But he had some scary dark spots too.
Maybe years could teach Ben what a city was. But God only knew if you could teach Ben how to live in one.
Bird was seriously pissed. Ben had that much figured, and that made him mad and it made him nervous. He approved of Bird, generally. Bird knew his business, Bird had spent thirty years in the Belt, doing things the hard way, and Ben had had it figured from the time he was 14 that you never got anywhere working for the company if you weren’t in the executive track or if you weren’t a senior pilot: he had never had the connections for the one and he hadn’t the reflexes for the other, so freerunning was the choice… where he was working only for himself and where what you knew made the difference.
He had come out of the Institute with a basic pilot’s license and the damn-all latest theory, had the numbers and the knowledge and everything it took. The company hadn’t been happy to see an Institute lad go off freerunning, instead of slaving in its offices or working numbers for some company miner, and most Institute brats wouldn’t have had the nerve to do what he’d done: skimp and save and live in the debtor barracks, and then bet every last dollar on a freerunner’s outfitting; most kids who went through the Institute didn’t have the discipline, didn’t refrain from the extra food and the entertainment and the posh quarters you could opt for. They didn’t even get out of the Institute undebted, thank Godfor mama’s insurance; and even granted they did all that, most wouldn’t have had the practical sense to know, if they did decide to go mining and not take a job key-pushing in some office, that the game was not to sign up with some shiny-new company pilot in corp-rab, who had perks out to here. Hell, no, the smart thing was to hunt the records for the old independent who had made ends meet for thirty years, lean times and otherwise.
Namely Morris Bird.
Freerunning was the only wide gamble left in the Belt—and freerunners, being from what they were, didn’t have the advantage of expert, up-to-date knowledge from the Institute—plus the Assay Office. But with Morrie Bird’s thirty years of running the Belt, his oldcharted pieces were bigger than you got nowadays, distributed all along the orbital track, and he got chart fees on those every month, the company didn’t argue with his requests to tag, and those old charted pieces kept coming round again, in the way of rocks that looped the sun fast and slow. Sometimes those twenty-four- and twelve-year-old pieces might have been perturbed, and if somebody tried to argue about the claim, your numbers had to be solid after all those years—besides which, to find the good chaff that might remain to be found, you had to have more than guesswork. That was the pitch he had to offer along with 20 k interest-free to finance some equipment Bird badly needed; that was why Bird should take a greenie for a numbers man in a time when experienced miners went begging: company training, the science and the math and the complete Belt charts that Assay got to see—and they had done damned well as a team— damnedwell, til they’d got one of those absolutely miserable draws Mama sometimes handed you—a sector where there just wasn’t much left to find but a handful of company-directed tags on some company-owned rocks.
So right now they were in a financial slump, Bird was under a strain, and Bird had odd touchy spots Ben never had been able to figure—all of which this Dekker had evidently hit on with his crazy behavior and his pretty-boy looks. Dekker was up there in their sleeping nook mumbling about losing his partner (damned careless of him!) and now Bird was mad at him, acting as if it was hisfault the guy was alive and the find that might have been their big break turned out complicated.
Maybe, he thought, Bird did want that ship as much as he did, maybe Bird was equally upset that this fellow was alive, Bird having this ethic about helping people—Bird might well be confused about what he was feeling.
Dangerous attitude to spread around, Ben thought, this charity business—and unfair, when Bird even thought about forgoing that ship for somebody who owed him and not the other way around, at his own partner’s expense. It was a way for Bird to get had, and a man as free-handed as Bird was needed help from a partner with a lasting reason to keep him in one piece.
“Bird?” he called out from the workstation. “I got your prelim calc. No complications but that ‘driver and our mass.”
Bird came over to him, Bird said he’d finish it up and call Mama. Bird touched him on the shoulder in a confusingly friendly way and said, “Get some sleep.”
Ben said, because he thought it might make Bird happier, “You. I’m wired.” At the bottom of his motives was the thought that a little time next to Dekker’s constant mumbling about Cory and his watch might make Bird a little less charitable to strangers.
But Bird said, “You. You’re the one needs it most.”
“What’s thatsupposed to mean?”
“It means what it means. You’re tired. You’ve worked your ass off Get some rest.”
“I don’t think I’ll sleep right off. That guy makes me nervous. This whole situation makes me nervous.”
“Bad day. Hard day.”
He decided Bird was being sane again. He was relieved. “You know,” he said, “we might just ought to get a statement out of this guy. You know. Besides pictures. I’m going to get a tape of this whole damn What-time-is-it? routine, show what we got to cope with. Might just prove our case.”