He turned back to the watching circle of men. “So, as I say, you find this little surprise, and you ask, how much did he hear? We can’t be sure. So what do we do with him?”
No one spoke. But I looked from face to face, and saw murder on every one.
So must have Danny Shaker, because he laughed again and said, “Out of the lock, eh, for a bracing whiff of vacuum? Let’s think about that for a moment. Suppose we dump him, which is a natural temptation. Then it’s no more Jay Hara. And good riddance, you might say.
“But wait a minute. Once Jay is dead, there’s no bringing him back. Now, maybe you can think of cases where a man might be more useful dead than alive—I certainly can.…”
He stood up straight with his arms crossed, absent-mindedly kneading his biceps through his spacer’s jacket. There was a kind of group flinch, as everyone around him winced and drew back.
“But we’ll all admit that’s a rare event,” Shaker went on. “A dead Jay Hara is probably worth nothing to anyone. But a live Jay Hara is a valuable item in negotiation. Why do you think I wanted him here with us, when the others went exploring? What negotiation, you ask me? I don’t know, I reply. But since there’s no risk in keeping him alive, I’ll take the possible value of a live something over the guaranteed zero value of a dead one.” Shaker glanced around him. “Now, is there anyone who would like to debate my analysis? Or relate it in any way to my tastes and preferences?”
There was not a word, not even a murmur of assent.
“So I guess we keep him,” Shaker said. “Tom?”
Tom Toole stepped forward. “Yes, Chief?”
“Number Four confinement cabin. Locked, of course.” Shaker turned back to me. “This will be much more of a challenge, Jay. The brig has five-inch air ducts, solid door and walls, vacuum beyond. So far as I know, no one has ever managed to get out of a Number Four cabin and live. Don’t let that discourage you from trying, though—ingenuity and persistence bring their own rewards. All right, Tom. Take him.”
Tom Toole twisted my right arm painfully up behind my back and grabbed the nape of my neck, which was still sore from Patrick O’Rourke’s earlier grip. He marched me out of the control room and off toward the front of the spherical living region. It was a part that I had visited only on my first general tour of the ship with Danny Shaker. “You’re hurting,” I complained.
“You don’t know how lucky you are to be around to be hurting,” he said. “The chief’ a deep one. With anyone on board but him in charges—me included—you’d be gone. Aye, and before that I thought that Sean Wilgus was going, too. What with him taking on the chief, and then that ‘I love you like a brother’ bit.”
“Does Danny Shaker have a brother? A twin brother? Are they the two-half-man?”
I didn’t expect answers, and certainly not the ones I received.
“Of course they are,” Tom Toole said cheerfully. “Or were. Where else do you think the chief got his arms?”
“You mean Danny Shaker’s arms used to belong to Stan Shaker?”
“You heard the chief say he didn’t shy away from necessary death, and he could think of cases where a man might be more useful dead than alive. That was a good example. Stan Shaker was never the man that Dan is.”
“You mean that his brother didn’t just die—Shaker had him killed?”
“Well, you don’t think Stan volunteered to give away his arms, do you? His own preference would have been to take his brother’s legs.” Tom Toole laughed, as we reached the door of the cabin and he opened it. “Ah, that was a fine piece of planning. Stan didn’t just have to die, you see, he had to die at exactly the right time and place, when an operating team was in position and ready to go to work. That took real organization.”
I was thrown into the room and staggered forward to hit a hard wall only a few feet away. The door was already closing when I turned back to Tom Toole.
“Danny Shaker killed his own twin brother! He stole his arms, and destroyed the rest of the body!”
“Now when did I say any such thing?” Tom Toole’s tone was reproving. “The chief killed brother Stan, sure enough, and he did take his arms. But I’ll wager good money that he didn’t destroy the rest of the body, although I’ve never asked him about it. I’m sure he’s got it tucked away in cold storage somewhere out in the Forty Worlds. He can’t tell, you see, when he might be needing another few bits and pieces. I say it again, the chief is a deep one.”
The door slammed shut, leaving me in darkness. I lay on the floor, just where I had been standing. Even had there been light, I would not have had the strength to explore my cell.
Paddy Enderton had told me, long ago, of his fears. Now, at last, I shared them.
Chapter 16
The confinement cabin showed me a new side of spacer life. I don’t mean the rock-hard bunk, which in low gravity was no hardship at all. I don’t mean the dim lighting, either, or the sanitary facilities. None of those worried me a bit, because they were little different from ordinary crew quarters.
The difference was simple, but enormous: The confinement cabin offered no emergency exit. If a failure of any kind occurred on the ship, and no one came to let a prisoner out, that was the end. He would die. And it was clear to me that no one on board worried about that for one second. To them it was just part of the rules that a spacer lived with, and sometimes died with.
I lay in near-darkness, half-asleep, wondering what was going to happen to me. The cabin had running water to drink, but no food. Doctor Eileen and the others might be away on Paddy’s Fortune for days and days. Unless Danny Shaker gave explicit instructions to some crew member to feed me, I might starve. I could not see Joe Munroe or his buddies bringing me a meal from the goodness of their hearts. In fact, given a choice they would not only let me die of hunger—they would like to hurry it along.
So I had very mixed feelings when the door opened, and I found myself squinting in the bright light at a figure who stood on the threshold.
“Good news, Jay.” It was Danny Shaker, as cheerful as ever. “Come on. I know you’ve been aching since we got here to take a trip across to Paddy’s Fortune—we might as well all call it that now, though I can hardly think of a worse name for it. We’re going there, as soon as you’ve had something to eat.”
I had come to my feet at once when he entered, with some ridiculous idea of overpowering him. But I didn’t move toward him, and not just because he was a lot bigger and stronger than me. I was afraid.
“You killed your brother,” I said. “You killed Stan Shaker.”
“What!” He stared at me, the smooth high forehead wrinkling. And then he laughed aloud, throwing his head back so that I could easily have reached forward and slashed his smooth throat. If I’d had a knife, which of course I did not. But he could not have been sure of that.
“Jay, Jay,” he said. “What have you been dreaming, to keep you awake at nights?”
“You killed your brother. You stole his arms.”
“Who told you that?”
“Tom Toole. And don’t say he was just making it up to scare me. He believes it, himself.”
Danny Shaker walked casually past me and sat down on the bunk. “That’s good. I hope the whole crew feels the same way.” And, as I gaped at him, “Jay, I still say you’ll make a great spacer, but you have an awful lot to learn. You’ve seen the crew of the Cuchulain, every one of them. You know they’re tough men, and they’re rough men, and there isn’t one of them who couldn’t tackle me and destroy me, if he decided to try it. True?”