She’d say, Paul, didn’t I tell you so? Didn’t I say you were being a damned fool?
She’d say, teary-eyed and exasperated beyond endurance: Paul, now, how in hell am I going to get you out of this one? You cost me everything I ever got in my life. You’ve done every damn thing you could to screw up. What am I supposed to do for you now?
But he’d have been drafted if he’d stayed on the station. No essential job, 18, no medical reason not, they’d have taken him; and she hadn’t wanted that either, they’d agreed on that. She’d kissed him goodbye and he’d been embarrassed and ducked away, the last time he’d ever seen her—humiliated because his mother had kissed him in public. He understood now how he’d been a pain in the ass, and after all the grief she hadn’t deserved, the last thing Ingrid Dekker needed was her grown son calling up, saying he was coming home—to get sucked up by the military after all, if they wanted a certified schitz—
So what the hell good could they do each other? He wouldn’t take any more of her money. Or her peace of mind, whatever it was now. And she couldn’t help him.
He ordered a beer and handed the bar his card, hoping the hospital hadn’t cut off alcohol—not good for a man on trank, but he didn’t care. The bartender looked at him and stuck the card into the reader, where he could find out as much as a bartender needed to know, namely could he pay for what he’d just ordered, and had he any active police record?
A Medical showed up. He could see the screen from where he was supporting himself on the bar. But the guy didn’t argue about the beer, just drew one and gave it to him; and he found himself a vacant booth and fell into it, sipped his beer, shut his eyes and sat there a while in relative null before his brain started to conjure pictures he didn’t want to recall. So he looked at the stuff the hospital had given him—took his watch out of the bag and put it on.
It said, 06/06/23: 15:48:10. 15:48:11: he watched the seconds tick along, thought, No, that date’s not right. It’s August. August 15.
Cory’s somewhere out there. All that black. All that nothing around her.
She’d have seen the explosion, seen the ship—it could have run right over her—
Dammit, no! she wouldn’t have, because that wasn’t what had happened, that was the doctor’s story. There wasn’t any bad valve, there’d been a ‘driver… he’d argued with it: This is our claim, hear us?
Instruments went crazy, collision alert sounding—he yelled over and over again, A-20, Mayday, Mayday, my partner’s out there—
You damned ass! What do you think you’re doing?
He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes, thinking how the log would show those instrument readings. The doctors kept saying something different, but maybe the cops hadn’t even gotten into the ship—the doctors wouldn’t know shit about the technicalities and they didn’t care, they just made up stuff they thought was going to shut him up—it was their job, and they didn’t want him complicating it. The way the company worked, the cops probably hadn’t even looked, either, just some judge took all these reports from a ‘driver that didn’t want any record of what it had done and operators in BM who didn’t want to admit—
—admit a ‘driver had jumped a claim.
His head ached with a vengeance. He shied away from the company’s reasons. He thought about the pills and sorted through the lot, reading labels.
But beyond that…
He looked at the time again. August 15th. The accident—
(No accident, dammit.) That was the 12th of March.
March 12 to March 31 is twenty days. 20 plus 30 in April is 50. 50 plus 21 in May is 71.
January 1 to March 12. Thirty-one days in January, 28 in February, they said it wasn’t a leap year, 12 in March. 31 and 28 and 12 makes seventy-one days. Seventy-one days til they found me. Seventy-one days from January 1st to the accident. No. From the accident—that was why the watch read out the 12th. The numbers are a match—that’s all. And between then and now—is it coincidence? Or do months always do that? What do 30’s and 31’s have to do with anything sane?
He couldn’t think. His mind slid off any long track it tried to take. It made his head ache. He took his datacard and used its edge to reset his watch. August. The 15th. That was it. It said August 15 and Cory was out there somewhere, while he was sitting in an R2 bar. Half a year was gone, part of it lost in the dark, part of it on the ship, part of it in hospital. The 15th of August. And his card was active here, on R2, and they hadn’t said a word about sending him home: he supposed they didn’t want the expense.
Or they didn’t want him talking.
Screw that—if he knew anyone to tell anything to on helldeck—
If they’d gotten his ship in, if—he had anything to live on—
He remembered the license suspension—the doctors said it was oxygen deprivation and nerve damage because he dumped a stupid box on the floor and pissed off some doctor with an Attitude, that was what had gotten written down on his records. Or they’d pulled it because of the accident—but they’d cleared him of that. He could fix the license part of his problems, get the shakes out, get some sleep and do a few days in the gym—
All he had to do was sign up and pass the operationals again. No problem with that.
Except the hours requirement…
The company was going to be reasonable? The thought upset his stomach.
Retake the medical exam, maybe, putthe damned washers on the stick, this time. He could prove it never should have been pulled. Getting the ship in order might take everything he had—tanks blown, all that crud when the lifesupport went down—but he could do a lot of the cleanup himself—but the dock charges… they’d come in, when? July 26th? June26th?
God, he didn’t want to think about time any longer, didn’t want to add numbers or sweat finance right now or figure out how much he’d lost. But now that he’d started thinking about it he couldn’t let it go. He couldn’t keep any figures straight in the state he was in, and he had no idea what the tanks were going to cost. Twenty, thirty thousand apiece, maybe, counting the valves and controllers and hookups: some value for the salvage on the old ones, but it was going to take bank finance, and they had his account tied up—it might be smarter to sell it, buy in on some other ship—
The bar had a public reader. He got up with his beer and his bag of pills and his belongings, and went and put his card in, keyed past the surface information for detail this time.
APPLICATION MADE FOR FUNDS TRANSFER: 47,289.08 in ASBANK Rl branch to ASBANK R2. ACCESSIBLE AFTER 60 DAYS. PUBLIC NOTICE POSTED 08/15/23. CURRENT AVAILABLE BALANCE: 494.50.
Sixty days. God. What could take 60 days? He wanted to know where his ship was, what berth, what those charges were so far. He typed: 1-84-Z: STATUS.
R2’s computer answered: UNAVAILABLE.
Screwups. There wasn’t a thing in his life that some damned agency hadn’t messed up.
He took his card, went back to the bar, said, “Can I use the phone?”
The bartender held out his hand, he surrendered his card for the charges and the guy waved him to the phone on the wall at the end of the bar.
He punched up INFORMATION, asked it: DOCK OFFICE, pushed CALL, waited through the Dock Authority recording, punched Option 2, and patiently sipped his beer while his call advanced in queue. A live human voice finally acknowledged and he said, “I’m Paul Dekker, owner of One’er Eighty-four Zebra. Should be at dock. I’m getting an UNAVAILABLE on the comp, can you tell me what—”
“Confirm, One’er?”
“Yes. Towed in. Might be in refit.”
“Just a minute. You say the name is Dekker?”
“Paul Dekker.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Dekker.”
He took another sip of the beer, and leaned heavily on the counter, his breath gone short. He’d had enough of incompetence, dammit, he’d had enough of doctors arguing with him what he had and hadn’t seen and he wasn’t ready to start a round with the Dock Authority. A ship Way Out’ssize was a damned difficult object to misplace.