He watched her leave one mainday evening; he watched her come in and sign the next morning, one of forty-seven other applicants. It was week-end, there was nothing in dock, little trade on the dockside, nothing in Thule's dying economy this week to offer even a temporary employment. There was a perpetual sense of despair all around Thule in these last months, of diminishing hopes, an approaching long night, longer than her first, when the advent of FTL technology had shut her down once: there was talk now of another imminent shut-down, maybe putting Thule Station into a trajectory sunward, to vaporize even her metal, because it was uneconomical to push it on for salvage, and because the most that anybody hoped for Thule now was that she would not suffer a third rebirth as a Mazianni base.
Nothing in port, no jobs on station except the ones station would allot for minimum maintenance.
And he watched the woman go to her accustomed table, her accustomed seat, with a view of the news monitor, the clock, and the counter.
He went to the vacant workstation behind the counter, sat down and keyed up the record: Yeager, Elizabeth A., Machinist, freighter. 20 yrs.
More?comp asked. He keyed for it.
Born to a hired-spacer on the freighter Candide, citizenship Alliance, age 37, education level 10, no relatives, previous employment: various ships, insystemer maintenance, Pell.
He recalled other applicants in the same category, as the records of hires floated across his desk. They were either employed at Thule on the insystemers—keeping Thule's few skimmers running took constant maintenance—and stacking up respectable credit; or they had shipped out to Pell or on to Venture. But Yeager got sweep-up jobs, subbed in for this and that unskilled labor when somebody got sick. Waiting all this time, evidently, for something to turn up. And nothing did, lately.
He watched her sit there till afternoon, when the Registry closed, watched her get up and walk to the door, wandering in her balance. Drunk, he would have thought, if he did not know that she had hardly stirred from that chair all day. It was that kind of stiff-backed stagger. On drugs, maybe. But he had never noticed her look spaced before.
He leaned on the counter. "Yeager," he said.
She stopped in the doorway and turned. Her face, against the general dim lighting of the docks outside, was haggard, tired, older than the thirty-seven the record showed.
"Yeager, I want to talk to you."
She came walking back, less stagger, but with that kind of nowhere look that said she was expecting nothing but trouble. Close up, across the counter, she had scars—two, star-shaped, above her left eye; a long one on the right side, one on the chin. And eyes—
He'd had a notion of a woman in trouble; and found the trouble on his own side, having gotten this close. Eyes like bruises. Eyes without any trust or hope in them. "I want to talk with you," he said. She looked him over twice and nodded listlessly; and he led her back into the inner, glass-walled hall, toward his office. He put the lights back on.
She might think about her safety. He certainly thought about his, the danger to his career, such as it was, bringing her back here after hours. He punched the com on his desk, waved Yeager to a chair as he sat down behind its defending breadth, hoping the other Registrar had not gotten out the front door yet. "Nan, Nan, you still out there?"
"Yes."
That was a relief. "I need two cups of coca, Nan, heavy on the sugar. Favor-points for this. You mind?"
A delay. "In both?"
He always drank his unsweetened. "Just bring it. Got any wafers, Nan?"
Another pause. A dry, put-upon: "I'll look."
"Thanks." He leaned back in his chair, looked at Yeager's grim face. "Where are you from?"
"This about a job?"
Hoarse. She smelled strongly of soap, of restroom disinfectant soap, a scent he had to think awhile to place. Under the overhead lighting her cheeks showed hollow and sweat glistened unhealthily on her upper lip.
"What was your last berth?" he asked.
"Machinist. On the freighter Ernestine."
"Why'd you leave her?"
"I worked my passage. Hard times. They couldn't keep me."
"They dumped you?" At Thule, that was a damned rough thing for a ship's crew to do to a hire-on, or she had deserved it by things she had done, one or the other.
She shrugged. "Economics, I guess."
"What are you looking for?"
"Freighter if I can get it. Insystemer's all right."
A little hope enlivened her face. It made him guilty, being in the least responsible for that illusion. "You've been here a long time," he said, and said, to be blunt and quick, "I haven't got anything. But there's station work. You know you can go station-work. Get basics that way, shelter, food, get an automatic no-debt ticket out of here if there's a fold-up. It's pretty empty here. Food's awful but the accommodations are take-your-pick all over station. A machinist—could damn sure get more than that, if she was good."
She shook her head.
"Reason?"
"Spacer," she said.
He never quite understood that. He had heard it a hundred times before—the ones who had rather starve than go station-side, take a job, draw the ration: the ones who would go by drugs or outright suicide, rather than lose their priority on the Registry hire-list, that little edge that meant who went to the interviews first.
"Papers?" he asked, because there had been none on the record, comp-glitch, he reckoned, nothing unusual in Thule's frequently screwed-up systems.
She touched her pocket, not offering to show them.
"Let's see," he said.
She took them out then, offered them in a hand that shook like an old woman's.
"My name's Don Ely," he said conversationally, since it occurred to him he had not.
He looked at the folder—not the official paper it ought to have been, just a letter.
To any captain, it said.
This is to attest the good character and work record of Bet Yeager, who shipped with us from '55 to 56 and who paid passage with honest work at watch and guard, at galley and small mechanics, general maintenance, in which she has many skills which she has gained under supervision of able spacers and which she performed with zeal and care. She leaves this ship with the regret of me personally and all crew.
She earned her passage and had credit in the comp at her leaving.
Bet Yeager boarded without papers under emergency conditions and this ship testifies that they know her to be the person Elizabeth Yeager whose thumbprint and likeness are hereto affixed, who served honorably on this ship, and hereby, by my authority, this stands in lieu of lost identification and swears her to be this person Elizabeth Yeager according to the Pell Convention, article 10.
Signed and Sworn to by: T. M. Kato, senior captain, AM Ernestine, lately based at Pell.
E. Kato, a/d captain.
Q. Jennet Kato, chief engineer, IS pilot.
Y. Kato, purser.
G. B. Kato, supercargo, IS pilot.
R. Kato; W. Kato; E. M. Tabriz;