“Sharp-tongued and strong-willed and I-can-take-care-of-my-self-thank-you,” Derec supplied.
Katherine brightened as though she had been complimented. “Something like that. My father says that I have spice.”
“I think I’ll stick to Katherine. What were you doing on Aranimas’s ship?”
“Why, I was a prisoner just like you were. My robots and I were kidnapped off a courier ship.” She snapped her fingers. “I just remembered. Where’s the key? You didn’t let the robots have it, did you?”
“I don’t know where it is,” he said. “I don’t even know that it was ever where I thought it was.”
“Is the ship here? Have you been back in it?”
“Frost, I don’t know. I hadn’t even been out of the hospital until this morning,” Derec said, annoyed. “Will you tell me this-why is that key so important? What is it? What’s it the keyto? ”
“I don’t know,” Katherine said soberly. “I only know that Aranimas thought it was worth anything to get. Wait-I thought you said the key was your property. Don’t you know why it’s important?”
“It is my property,” Derec asserted. “Space salvage. Or a gift. Either way, I have the best claim to it.”
“But you don’t know what it is?”
“No.”
She seemed disappointed. “Maybe you do know-but it’s one of the things you’ve forgotten.”
“I guess that’s possible,” Derec acceded. “Did Aranimas come to the asteroid specifically looking for the key? Not because I was there?”
“I don’t think so-”
“You don’t think so what?”
“I think he went to the asteroid on purpose. I don’t think he knew the key was there. I’m almost positive he didn’t know you were there,” she said. “I think you were just lucky-or would it be unlucky?”
Derec considered. “Lucky, the way it fell out. I’d sure rather be here on Rockliffe Station than back on that asteroid.”
“Lucky, then.” She paused. “Look, if it is yours, maybe getting it back in your hands would help you remember something. And even if it doesn’t, we need to find out what happened to the key. Aranimas had to have some reason for wanting it.”
“Wolruf called it ‘the jewel’ when she talked to Aranimas,” Derec said thoughtfully. “But I don’t think she meant it literally.”
“Either way, it’s something valuable. Are we going to try to find it, or not?”
“We?” For a brief moment, Derec bristled defensively. Then he reminded himself what it had been like to be a loner on the raider ship. He felt at home here-but Katherine clearly didn’t. She was hurting, and she was alone, and she wanted to be his friend. And beyond that, she knew something about who he was-and wanted to help him remember.
“Sure,” he said. “Of course we are.”
Chapter 15. Oh Seven B
Despite all the good intentions, the partnership almost fell apart before it began. Derec had somehow visualized the arrangement with himself making all the decisions and Katherine gratefully following his lead. But he found out very quickly that it was Kate, not Katherine, with whom he’d made his pact.
Derec was eager to get started looking for the artifact. Since Dr. Galen had raised no protest about Derec’s excursion out of the hospital, he felt he had won the right to roam where he wanted. At the very least, it would be several days before Kate was accorded the same freedom.
But when Derec proposed that he go scouting alone and then report back to Katherine on his discoveries, she balked. “We go together or all promises are off,” she said firmly. “If we’re going to be a team, we have to work as a team.”
“Being a team doesn’t mean we have to be handcuffed together,” Derec argued. “Everybody should do what they do best, and right now what I can do best is be our eyes and ears.”
“What are you going to do?”
Derec shrugged. “Talk to the dock supervisor and the station manager. Start finding out what’s happened while we were here.”
“They’re robots,” she said. “Let them come here.”
It was a perfectly reasonable idea, and the fact that it had not occurred to Derec jarred him for a moment. He had been thinking of talking to the station staff ever since he had regained consciousness, but always in terms of going to see them. He realized that he had made an unspoken assumption:they’re busy-they don’t have time to come down here to talk to me.
He had never once thought of ordering them to leave their work. Katherine had thought of it immediately. Derec knew somehow that the difference said something important about the two of them-something about their background, the subculture which had shaped their attitudes about robots.
It was as though he respected the importance of the robots’ work and saw them more or less as equals, while she thought of them only as servants. But whether it meant he had more experience with robots than she or less, he could not say.
All the same, it was another tiny piece in his puzzle. He was not like Katherine. They came from different worlds-culturally if not geographically. It made him wonder how it was she knew him.
All these thoughts cascaded through Derec’s mind in a fraction of a second, allowing him to carry on the conversation with only the faintest hesitation. “Look, I’m willing to share the decision-making. Maybe we could get the robots to come here,” he said. “There’s still the ship. I should go have a look at it.”
“That’s something we should do together.”
“Why? What’s hidden there that you don’t want me to find?”
Katherine crossed her arms and sighed. “If you’re going to be suspicious of me all the time, this isn’t going to work.”
“I’m not suspicious of you!” Derec exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air. “I just don’t understand why you don’t seem to want to let me out of your sight.”
“And I don’t understand your hurry,” Katherine said stiffly. “You say that we’re a team, but you want to go run off and do everything yourself.”
“The hurry is because we want to get there first,” Derec said impatiently. “We don’t want anyone else taking it.”
She looked at him quizzically. “We’ve been here six weeks. Do you really think that they pulled us out and then locked the ship up somewhere until we could claim it? Think! That’s an alien starship. How long do you think it took them to realize they’d never seen one like it before-not just the design, but the whole technology? This is a frontier base. Do you think they just take it in stride when an unregistered ship shows up with two injured humans aboard?”
Belatedly, Derec understood. “So they’ve been all over it. Photographed it, X-rayed it, the whole works. They might have even torn it down, sent pieces of it out onFariis to the district offices. They’re probably wondering about us, too.”
“Of course they are. That’s why I sent Dr. Galen away.”
“Do you think he’s been spying on us?”
“All robots are spies for their masters,” she said bitterly.
“What?” Derec asked, surprised by her intensity.
“Nevermind,” she said. “I just think we ought to play innocents abroad for a while, do all the things they expect us to-until we understand what kind of game we’re in.”
“Be helpless and worried. Play dumb.”
“Just so,” Katherine said. “Sometimes it’s the smartest thing you can do.”
At their request, Dr. Galen had a multicom brought to the ICU and tied into the station net. Very quickly, they learned that the Rockliffe Station welcome mat was a bit threadbare.
The station manager was fully scheduled until the following morning and thought that they really wanted to talk to the dock supervisor anyway. The dock supervisor was conducting an overhaul of the dock pressurization system, a priority task which had to be completed in the shortest possible time, and had they tried the dispatcher?
The dispatcher couldn’t answer their questions without clearance from the security chief, who deferred to the associate manager for station operations. The AMSOP was one step down the ladder from the station manager and probably the robot to which they should have been recommended in the first place.