The doctor took the slate, put in another card. “Are you ready to get out of here, Mr. Dekker?”
“Damn right I am.”
“You’ll be in outpatient for a while.” The doctor passed him the slate. “You’ll have a prescription to help you sleep—I understand you still have trouble with nightmares. That’s only normal. You have to work these memories out. You have to remember and deal with this tragedy. I think you understand that. But you will have the prescription, if you need it.” He reached forward and offered a stylus. “Sign the bottom of the document and date it.”
Dekker pushed the button, scrolled back. It said… agree to the findings hereabove stated…
“No,” he said, and shoved the slate at the doctor. “I don’t agree.”
“You don’t feel you’re ready to be released.”
The doctor didn’t take the slate. It stayed in Dekker’s hand and his hand shook. He thought, If I sign this lie nobody will ever pay for what they did. They’ll have killed Cory, and I’ll have run out on her, finally even I’ll have run out on her…
But if I stay in here they’ll make me crazy. They can tell any damn lie they want.
What’s justice? What’s justice, when there’s nobody can call them liars?
He set it in his lap, shaking so badly he could hardly write his name, but he signed it. His eyes blurred. He handed it over.
“Can you say, right now,” the doctor said, “at least maybeit was an explosion? Maybeit was an accident? Can you get that far, Mr. Dekker? Can you admit that now?”
He nodded.
“Mr. Dekker?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Good,” Visconti said, and took the datacard from the slate and put it in his pocket. He got up from the edge of the desk. “Come with me, Mr. Dekker. I’ll take you to Dismissals.”
He got up. He hurt in every joint. They went out the side door and into a corridor he hadn’t known was there. He only wished Tommy had been there. He would have liked to have Tommy with him.
“Don’t mind a little stiffness,” Visconti said while they were walking. “I want you to walk. I want you to do low-impact exercises—you don’t need any broken bones to complicate matters. No jumping. No jogging. If there’s any pain in the back, stop. The card we’re going to give you has all your prescriptions, with dosages and cautions. I don’t have to warn you about calcium depletion, kidney stones, that sort of thing. The calcitonin regulators you’re surely familiar with. What I’ve given you shouldn’t have any interactions, but take any symptoms seriously, follow the exercise routines I’ve laid out exactly, precise number of repetitions. If you get any undue amount of sleep disturbance, see me, if you get blood in the urine, if you get sharp headaches, blurred vision, hallucinations or pain in the chest, put that card in the nearest reader, punch 888, and don’t leave that reader. An emergency crew will find you.”
“888.”
“That’s right. I’m your doctor of record. Don’t hesitate to call me.” They reached a counter in a hallway that stretched on toward the light. “This is patient Dekker, Paul E. Would you find his file and his belongings?” Visconti put out his hand. “Good luck, Mr. Dekker.”
Maybe it would have been braver to have told Visconti go to hell. But it might have landed him back in the other hall again, with more stuff being shot into him and the doctors saying, Are you still having those memory lapses?
He shook Visconti’s hand and waited at the counter alone when Visconti went away. His legs were shaking. His ears were buzzing. He was afraid he was going to fall and they were going to put him back to bed, so he sat down on a molded bench that made his back hurt and waited until someone at the window called his name.
They gave him his datacard and wanted him to sign another release, that he’d received his Personals and his card and his prescriptions. They handed him a bag of prescription bottles and another sack that had his watch and his old coveralls and stimsuit, he signed, and they wanted his card in the slot on the counter.
He punched Validate. He punched Read, to know what it would show him, and the reader screen showed two things valid: the ASBANK account number and his insurance. It said it was August 15. It said: ALL ACTIVE ACCOUNTS ARE IN PROCESS OF TRANSFER TO ASBANK R2 DIV.
And below that: PILOT CREDENTIALS: INVALIDATED.
He couldn’t move for a moment. The clerk said, “Mr. Dekker?” and asked if he was all right.
He couldn’t think. There was just a door to a lobby, a way out, and he took his card back, shoved away from the counter and walked for the light.
He had no idea where he was when he left the hospital, he only walked for a while down wide beige hallways with no clear thought in his head except that he was out of the hospital and nobody had stopped him.
But a cop did. The cop blocked his path and asked for his ID card, and he stood there scared they were going to take him back, while people in business suits walked past ignoring the situation.
The cop inserted the card in his pocket slate, with that expression that said he had to be a thief at best and that if there was anything wrong on this whole deck he had to be a prime suspect. Then the cop, still with that dead expression, stared off down the way and said to no one he could see, “Yeah. Yeah. Copy that. Thanks.” Then the cop gave the card back with marginally less chill and pocketed his slate. “Just out of hospital, is it?”
“Yessir.”
“You need any help, Mr. Dekker?”
“No, sir. I’m all right.”
“Where will you be staying?”
“Don’t know. Helldeck.”
“Trans is down the way, about a hundred meters. You’ll want the last car. About your fourth, fifth stop.”
“Thank you,” he said, and walked on in the direction the cop had pointed. ASTEX didn’t want a spacer walking on their clean deck, fingerprinting their beige paneled walls. He understood the rules. He didn’t even spit on the floor. He made it to the Transstation, leaned on the wall and waited til the Trans showed up and the doors opened.
People in suits got off, he stepped aboard, into an empty car, and sat down. One woman got on, sat down opposite, didn’t look at him, even if there was nothing else to look at. The Trans started up, whipped along to its next stop on the rim. Somebody else got in. Eventually all the business types got off and spacer and worker types got on: the screen said NEXT STOP 2 as the Trans started off in the other direction and climbed.
It would help if he could ask his way. But people didn’t do that. People kept their mouths shut in the Trans, the same here as at Rl. Ads lit the info screen, advertising upcoming facilities; music blared. The first stop listed mostly BM service offices. The second was commercial. The third listed sleeperies, gyms, and bars, and that was where he got off, into the echoing noise of helldeck.
He wobbled a bit when he walked, but that wasn’t unusual here, for one reason or another. He looked like a lunatic and carried plastic sacks full of everything he owned, and that wasn’t unusual here either—ordinary helldeck traffic. Some religious type jostled him, a religious type who yelled something about God and judgment and aliens and wanted him to come and hear a tape. But he didn’t, he just wanted to be let alone, and the guy told him he was going to hell.
For a while he was just lost—he could believe there had never been a hospital, there had never been a wreck: everything around him sounded and felt like home Base for the last two years—but the names were all different—
Cory had never existed here. His eyes and his ears kept telling him he had finally come home; but people around him were busy with their own lives, in shops with different names.
He walked, going through the motions people who belonged here went through. He didn’t know what he wanted. His knees and his feet and his shoulders began to ache with the unaccustomed exercise, and he recalled, out of the long nightmare of the ship, that he had wanted a beer very badly then. So, in the process of picking up his life, he walked into a comfortable-looking bar—The Pacific, it said, with plastic colored fish and plastic coral reefs and blue lights over the bar. The customers—there were ten or so—were tenders and dock monkeys, mostly. The shapes and shadows of creatures he’d never seen reminded him vividly of Sol Station, where he had a mother who honestly might care if she saw the mess he was in.