Fletcher stood there considering what he said. He increasingly expected Fletcher to choose to stay to the sleepover, the safest choice, and the one, in the absence of Fletcher’s desire to cooperate, he still might order.

But Fletcher let go the frown, and glanced instead toward the doorway, where the junior-juniors were conducting their search. Then he looked back.

“Even if provoked,” Fletcher said. “As long as we’re in dock. You’ve got my promise.”

“I’m glad to take your word,” he said, and left the junior-juniors to their activity. He hunted down Chad with the same proposition, and that quest required a trip out into the rim, where in coats and gloves and with flashlights, Chad had paired up with Wayne. Another glow, from around the girder-laced curve, showed where Nike and Lyra were operating, in cold deep enough to get through boots.

“I don’t know why he picked me,” Chad said “That’s twice he’s come at me like I was the only one.”

“I don’t know why,” he said “I can’t defend it. I only know how important it is we keep the peace. On both sides of this.”

“I don’t even know what the damn stick looks like,” Chad said. “It’s hard to search for something when you only have a description of it. And that’s all I have.”

Chad wanted to convince him he was innocent. He wished he believed it himself. And yet he couldn’t dismiss the possibility it was the case. “It’s all I have, too,” he said to Chad.

“I think he did it,” Chad said, breath frosting in the light, “and he’s just putting us to running rings. I think it’s going to turn up somewhere and he’ll be the only one not surprised.”

“If that’s the case,” he said. “If it’s not the case, the real way this is going to get solved is when we sit down together and look at each other without suspecting the worst. Him. You. Wayne. Me. All of us.”

“Chad’s taking the brunt of this,” Wayne said. “And I don’t think he’s to blame.”

“He doesn’t want to be here, anyway,” Chad said.

“And I just talked to the Old Man, and asked for more time. Give me some help, Chad.”

“Yessir. I won’t fight.”

He had a confidence in Chad he couldn’t have in Fletcher, who hadn’t been a presence all his life. Chad might be on the wrong side of something, but he wouldn’t go against the answer he’d just given.

“Not even if he jumps you, Chad. If he does I’ll settle it. I know it’s hard what I’m asking, but you’re both of you strong hands we need, and I’d rather not have you sitting it out in quarters.”

“I got my tooth chipped the first time station-boy threw a punch out of nowhere!”

“Chad.”

“Yessir,” Chad said.

“And don’t call him that. No words, Chad, same as no fighting.”

“Yessir,” Chad said the second time.

“I take your word on it,” he said, wishing it weren’t Chad’s word that was utterly at issue.

And that Chad wasn’t the only potential explosive in their midst. There was Connor. There was Sue. There was Nike.

Vince seemed to have fallen in on the side of the offended, not the offenders. Vince was, at least, off his mind.

No sign of the stick, not the first twenty-four hours, not the second, and the junior-juniors, early and enthusiastic in their burst of energy, grew frustrated and short-fused.

“We’re not going to find it,” Linda said.

“Probably,” Fletcher said, “we have less chance than the ones in the outer ring.”

“We can go out there,” Jeremy declared.

“No, we can’t. I’m not being responsible for you clambering around in the dark. Senior-juniors are searching that.”

Jeremy’s shoulders slumped. The junior-juniors were tired to the point of exhaustion. They all had blisters.

And senior crew had found out, unofficially. A number had volunteered extra hours, and hiding places they’d known when they’d been young and foolish.

Some of those searches surprised the junior-juniors, that anyone but them did know those nooks and crannies.

Jake came, having gotten the general description, and said there’d been no stones in the recycling traps, which indicated it hadn’t gone into biomass, unless somebody had thought of that and removed the stones before chucking it into a disposal chute.

That was a logical place to search, one Fletcher hadn’t thought how to handle in terms of the chemistry; and Jake, the bioneer, had disposed of the question by something so basic his school-fed theory hadn’t even considered it.

Notes from all four of the captains turned up one by one in his personal pager, saying, essentially, that the captains were aware, and that official issues aside, if he wanted to discuss the matter, they stood ready to listen.

Fletcher didn’t know how to answer, so he delayed answering. The first impulse had been to say, Get me off this ship; and the second one had been a hesitancy to say what might not, even yet, answer where he wanted to go, or what he wanted to do.

He hadn’t expected the flurry of senior help in the search.

He hadn’t expected the junior-juniors, patching blisters, to keep looking.

He hadn’t expected the senior-juniors to show up in the mess hall, half-frozen from the ring skin, looking for hot coffee and looking exhausted as his own small crew. That included Chad, who avoided looking at him, who pointedly looked the other way when he stared.

It’s destroyed, he said to himself, and Chad’s scared to say so. It’s destroyed or it’s lost and Chad can’t find it.

But none of the senior-juniors talked much, least of all to him, and not that much to each other. There was no rec, meals were catch-as-catch-can, and no one associated together.

This is wrong, Fletcher said to himself, sitting in the A deck mess hall with a coffee cup cooling between his own hands. Jeremy had gotten himself a cup of coffee, and then Vince and Linda had, not their habit. Caffeine wouldn’t, Fletcher thought, improve Jeremy’s already hair-trigger nerves. He wasn’t sure any of the junior-juniors were used to it. But he drank it; and they drank it, a warm-up from the chill of places they’d searched.

Jeremy had fallen asleep yesterday night with the suddenness of a light going off. He’d lain awake with the increasingly heavy responsibility of the ship’s search lying on his pillow, and he thought, today, This is wrong , with the notion that if he stood up, said, Forget it, it’s lost, it may never turn up… he might free everyone, and relieve everyone’s nerves, and just let it pass.

He got up, finally, with the notion of doing exactly that, and immediately the junior-juniors wanted to jump up and follow.

“No,” he said. “An hour alone. All right? And don’t do anything stupid.”

“Yessir,” Jeremy said.

He went over to that other table, where Chad and Wayne and Connor were sitting. “Where’s JR?” he asked in a carefully neutral tone. “Do you have any notion?”

“Bridge,” Wayne said, “last I heard. What’s the problem?”

He couldn’t go to the bridge. No one could go there without an authorization.

“Thanks,” he said, frustrated in his resolution.

“What do you want?” Wayne asked, and he looked at Wayne, and the two he had most problem with, and took resolution in both hands.

“To stop this. Just give it up.”

“Why?” Wayne asked

“Because it’s getting nowhere! Somebody lost it. I accept that. Just everybody quit looking. It may turn up ten years from now. It may never turn up. That’s the way it is.”

“I’ll relay that to JR,” Wayne said carefully. Neither Chad nor Connor said anything. Chad did look at him, an angry look, a wary one. Connor didn’t do that much.

He went back to the juniors and sat down,

“We can’t give it up,” Jeremy said

“Even if we stop looking,” Linda said, “we can’t give it up.”

It was, he thought, the truth, however Linda meant it. He had the captains’ messages stacked up and waiting, that he hadn’t heard from Madelaine meant only that Madelaine was either under orders or trying to restrain herself, and in all the things that had happened aboard the ship, he could only fault a bad situation and a natural resentment.