Damn crazy life. Sometimes you sat out there in the Belt with one other guy in a little ship and wondered what would happen to you both if humanity did go crazy and blow itself to hell. Lately you kept an anxious ear to the news Mama doled out daily and tried to figure out who was actually running things in the motherwell, because damned if the company was going to tell you about it in so many words: ASTEX, Asteriod Explorations, was part of the Earth Company, which had the whole damn United Defense Command on its leash; the whole thing was a damn alphabet riot—ASTEX, EC, SS, UI, MEX, and FN, for starters, and everybody was sleeping in more than one bed, governmentally speaking—

Which he preferred not to. Maybe the kids in the colored hair and the glowpaint and the nose-rings were right. Maybe humankind would blow itself up. Maybe Belters would survive out here and breed themselves a whole new human race—

One that thought Shakespeare was a physicist.

He got up and carded himself a drink—canceled the rez for himself and Ben at the Starbow, while he was at it, since he hadn’t used the key that had dropped from the slot; and seriously wondered if his back was going to take it on 6—in various considerations.

“Bird?”

Well, so Ben had survived. Ben was back with excitement bubbling in his voice. He turned around as Ben stopped and caught his balance against the vending machine.

“Bird, we got a chance. We got a real chance.” A gasp for breath. “Broke my neck getting up here.” Another breath. “Ship’s got a double registry—over on Refinery One. Paul Dekker and Corazon Salazar. She’sCory, she’sthe partner—and his title’s completely clear.”

“You’re kidding. He’s no more than a kid.”

“Dunno what she was, but they owned that ship. They owned her clear—no liens, no debt, nothing, Bird, we got it! We got the only claim against it! We’re first in line!”

He picked up his drink out of the dispenser and just held it in a shaking hand. You didn’t think about things like that, you didn’t ever start wanting something that just couldn’t happen. But knowing they had bills to meet and the company paying claims so slow nowadays—

God forgive, he started thinking then—if Dekker was crazy—if they really were duethat ship…

“Your name’s Dekker,” they asked. Meds. He remembered them. But how he had gotten here he couldn’t remember. He didn’t know how long he had been here. He didn’t know how long he had been out just now. He asked questions back, but he never got much help from their answers.

Sometimes he thought he was on a ship like his own ship; sometimes he thought he had been hallucinating all of it. “Bird?” he asked sometimes. Sometimes he was afraid Ben was going to come floating up and hit him.

Sometimes he thought Bird and Ben had been something he’d dreamed in this place, and he simply couldn’t figure how he had gotten here, unless Cory had somehow gotten the ship straightened out and brought him in. He felt tranked. He thought, This is a hospital. This is Base. We’re home. We’re safe…

“Where’s your partner?” someone asked him.

He slitted his eyes open, lifted his head so far as he had strength to do. He saw a white coat, a man writing on a slate.

“Where’s your partner?” the med asked him. “Do you remember?”

Black. An alarm screaming. The ship jolted and spun—he struggled against the weight of his own arm to reach the controls, wondering whether the autopilot could possibly straighten them out or if it had engaged already. He didn’t know. He hit the switch. Something jolted the ship, threw him against the workstation—

“Mr. Dekker. Do you recall what happened?”

Green-walled shower. The watch showed March 12.

“What day is it?” he asked. But they didn’t answer him. He tried to see his watch, but he couldn’t move his arms. “Bird, what time is it? For God’s sake, what time?”

The man in white wrote on his slate and said, “What time do you think it is?”

“Give me my watch. Where’s my watch?” It wasn’t on his wrist. It had lied to him. Or it was his only way back. “Where’s my watch, dammit!—I want my watch!”

The man left. Others came in and shot something into his arm. After that he could hear his heart beating heavier and heavier, and he was slipping into dark.

“Bird?” he asked, thinking Ben must have something to do with this. “Bird, wake up—Bird, help me— Bird, wake up and help me!”

CHAPTER 6

GLASS touched glass, in the Liberty Bell, on 6. “Here’s to friends,” Sal said, and Bird, telling himself it was far too soon to plan on anything, had made up his mind not to tell Meg and Sal a thing.

But that had gone by the side the minute they’d seen Ben’s smugly cheerful face.

“You got it!” Meg said, before they even got their drink orders in.

“We’re at least tracking,” Ben said. “We’re gaining on it. They’re going to expedite the claim.”

For the life of him, Bird couldn’t figure how Ben managed to get around people in offices. But he did.

So here they were, on their way to feeling no pain at all, .7 gbe damned.

It wasn’t as if Meg and Sal would leave them cold tomorrow if the deal fell through. They weren’t that kind. But they sure as hell enjoyed the party tonight.

They enjoyed it afterward too, piled into two adjacent rooms in the Bell—actually the party traveled and they had to throw this one pair of tender-jocks out twice, who complained they’d been invited.

“No, you weren’t!” Sal Aboujib said. And shut the door and slid down it, laughing. Meg was laughing too much to help her, so they hauled her up and picked her up, Sal yelling that they were going to drop her on her head.

So they fell on the bed—which at low gmeant a slow bouncing, all of them, while up and down went sort of alcoholically crazed for a moment.

“God,” Bird said, falling back on what he thought was mattress. “I’m zee’d.”

Meg fell on him with a vaporous kiss and he stopped caring which way was up.

Turned out when they waked it was Ben and Sal’s bunk they were in, but that was no matter, Ben and Sal had just gone off next door. But they had last night’s sins to pay for—a hangover in low g, with your sinuses and your ears playing tricks, was hell’s own reward.

“Cory?” Dekker asked. “Cory?” But he was not in the ship, he was inside white walls with white-coated medics who asked him over and over “What happened to Cory?” and he couldn’t altogether remember what their truth was, or what they wanted him to say. He asked for Bird, and they asked him who that was, but someone said in his hearing that that was the man who’d brought him in.

From where? He tried to remember where he had left Bird, or what had happened, but it always went back to that shower stall, the watch showing him the time… March 12. And it was his choice what would happen that day…

He slept again. He was more comfortable when he waked. His hands were free and they let him sit up and gave him fruit drink. A man came and sat down by his bed with a slate and started asking him questions—How old are you? Have you any relatives? all rapid-fire. It was the sort of thing they asked if you’d had an accident, something about next of kin. It scared him. The shower in this room wasn’t the shower he remembered, he could see the white walls through the door. He’d jumped ahead. Cory wasn’t with him, and he was in a hospital having to go through these questions like some actor in a vid. It couldn’t be real. God, he didn’t want his mother to hear he was lying in a hospital somewhere she couldn’t help, he’d screwed up enough: he just said he was from Sol Station and shut up.

“What was your relationship with Corazon Salazar?” they asked him then, cold and impersonal. He said, going through the ritual, “She’s my partner.”