“What did you tell them?”

“I said he wasn’t too clear where he was. They asked about the bruises, and I said he got loose, all right? I said he was after the controls and he’s crazy, besides which he fought us when we had to get him back and forth to the head.”

“That’s a couple of times, Ben, for God’s sake…”

“Hey. We got this guy tied to the plumbing, bruises all over him, all ages, what are we going to say, it was a month-long party out there?”

“Yeah,” he said, and shut up, because the chute was sucking another load down, and down here you could hear the hydraulics. His stomach was upset. It had been upset for the last week, when it had been clearer and clearer Dekker was not going to be able to support a thing they said, that Dekker was liable to say anything or claim they’d met eetees and seen God. This is it, Ben had said when Dekker had tried to get at the engine fire controls. They’d put Dekker to bed taped hand and foot: Dekker had screamed for an hour afterward, and Ben had gotten that on tape too.

He had wanted to erase that video. Dekker had enough troubles without that on permanent record with the company: Dekker could lose his license, lose his ship, lose everything he had, and he didn’t want to hand BM the evidence to set it up that way—but Ben had said it: Dekker wasn’t any saner than he had been. Dekker would have been dead in a few days if they hadn’t found him, and as much as they’d done to patch the kid together, he didn’t seem likely to need much of anything but a ticket back to the motherwell and a long, long time in rehab.

“Poor sod,” he said.

Ben said: “Good riddance.” And when he frowned at him: “Hell, Bird, I’ve seen schitzy behavior before, I’ve seen damn well enough of it.” There was profound bitterness behind that: he had no idea why, or what Ben was talking about, but Ben didn’t volunteer anything else. Ben was talking about the school, he decided, or the dorms where Ben had spent what other people called childhood. It didn’t matter now. The trip was over, Dekker was with the meds, the whole business was out of their hands, and Ben knew Shakespeare wasn’t a physicist. Good for him. They’d patch up their partnership and take their heavy time while somebody else leased Trinidadout—and paid them 15-and-20 plus repairs and refit: could do that all the time if they wanted, but you didn’t get rich on 15-and-20 while you were sitting on dockside spending most of it.

Got to give up sleeping and eating, he was accustomed to joke about it.

Ben would say, intense as he always was when you talked about money, We got to get us a break, is what.

They got off the line in customs, explained they didn’t have their Personals, the cops had them, no, they didn’t have any ore in their pockets and they didn’t have any illegal magmedia on them, all the records were on the ship, yes, they had contacted another ship out there, they’d hauled a guy in, they hadn’t taken anything off it, no, sir, yes, ma’am, they’d tell Medical if they got any rashes or developed any fevers or coughs, Medical had already told them that, yes, sir.

God, no, they didn’t volunteer to customs that it was an out-zone ship, yes, sir, they’d reported the contact, no, it was an instructed contact: the agents questions were strictly routine and the stress-detectors didn’t beep once.

Customs validated their datacards, logged them both as active in R2, and they went back to the hand-line for the lifts.

Ben said, conversationally, while they were each trailing by a gripper handle, Ben in front this time: “You can quit worrying about the charts. Got the card in my pocket.”

His heart went thump. “Dammit, Ben,—”

“Hell, it was all right.”

“I told you leave it!”

“Where the cops’d find it?”

“You could’ve said. God!”

“Hey. You’re a lousy liar. Was I going to burden your conscience? You passed the detectors—so did I, right?”

Ben could. Stress detectors depended on a conscience.

“You’re just too damn nervous, Bird.”

“You could’ve left ‘em under that plate, dammit. You could’ve done what I told you to do—”

“You want to get caught, that’sthe way to do it—conceal something on the cops. I didn’t conceal it. It was right in my pocket. God, Bird, everybodydoes it. If they wanted to clamp down, why do they let us have gamecards? Or vid? Why don’t they check that? I could code the whole thing onto a vidtape.”

“If too many people get too cocky, just watch them. Some nosy exec gets a notion, and you can walk right into it, Ben, you can’t talk your way out of everything.”

“Everything so far.”

“Hell,” he muttered. They were coming to the end of the hand-line, where you got three easy chances to grab a bar and dismount in good order instead of (embarrassment) shooting on down to the buffer-sacks that forcibly disengaged a passenger before the line took the turn.

Ben was first on the bar, swung over and pushed 8-deck on the lift panel before he caught up. “I’ll ride down with you.”

“So where else are you going?”

“Where do you think?”

“Shit, Ben.”

“Somebody will. Probably there’s a line of creditors on the ship. But we’ll at least get the 50/50. Damn right we will.”

“You’re bucking for back trouble, and you won’t get a damn thing. There’ll be a rule.”

“Young bones. I won’t stay long. And there’s no real choice, Bird, you have to file the day you get in. That’sthe rule.”

“So file at the core office.”

“Trust those bastards? No do. Corp-deck’s it.”

“Out of your mind,” he muttered as the car arrived. They floated in, took a handhold. The car sealed, clanked and made its noisy, jerky interface with the rotating heart of the core, and started solidly off down the link. He didn’t argue any more with Ben. If Ben had the fortitude to go down a level past helldeck an hour after dock and stand in some line to file to claim the poor sod’s ship, he didn’t know what to do with him. He only sighed and stared glumly at the doors and the red-lit bar that showed them approaching another take-hold.

“Bird, you got to take better care of yourself. What have you got for your old age?”

“I’m in it, and I don’t plan to survive it.” The car clanked into the spoke, and they shot into it with the illusion of climbing, until they hit that queasy couple of seconds where distance from R2’s spin axis equaled out with the car’s momentum as far as the inner ear was concerned. Then the ear figured out where Down was, the car’s rolling floor found it a half-heartbeat later, and bones and muscles started realizing that the stimsuits you worked in, the spin cylinders you slept in and the pills you took like candy didn’t entirely make up for weeks of weightlessness. Knees would feel it; backs would. The red-lit bar that showed their distance from the core was shooting toward 8-deck.

Meg and Sal were on 6; he had found that out on their way in. He’d left a message for them on the ‘board, and he planned on company tonight. That and a drink and a long, long bath. Maybe with Meg, if she answered her messages.

If she wasn’t otherwise engaged.

The car stopped. He got out, on legs that felt tired even under 8’s low g, muscles weary of fighting the stimsuit’s elastic and now with gto complicate matters. Ben got out too, and said, “Meet you at the ‘Bow.”

Ben didn’t even slow down. He just punched the button to go on down as far as the core lift went, to 3.

Bird shook his head and headed off down 8-deck—damned if he was even going to call up his mail before he hit the bar at the Starbow. Mail would consist of a bank statement and a few notes from friends as to when they’d gone out and when they’d be back. His brother in Colorado wrote twice a year, postal rates out here being a week’s groceries and Sam not being rich. It wasn’t quite time for the biannual letter and outside of that there wasn’t mail to get excited about. So screw that. He just wanted a chance to get the weight off, get a drink, see a couple of familiar female faces if fate was kind, and never mind Ben’s wet dreams. Ships didn’t come without debts, probably multiple owners, not mentioning the bank, and the company would find some technicality to chew up any proceeds they could possibly make from the ship, til it was hardly worth the price of a good rock, plus expenses. Ben was going to work himself into a heart attack someday, if ulcers didn’t get him first.