Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (13 page)

The man said, “Did you quarrel?”

“We never quarreled.”

“She always did what you wanted? Or didn’t she, this time?”

He didn’t understand. He shook his head. He thought about the shower, but it wasn’t vivid this time. Even the green seemed faded.

The man asked: “Why did you cross the line? To cover what you’d done?”

He didn’t understand what they were getting at. He shook his head again, looked furtively at his wrist, remembered he mustn’t do that. It upset people. Like Ben. It upset Ben a lot…

“Tell me the truth,” the man said. “What were you doing out there?”

“We had a tag,” he said. “We were working it.”

He lost the room of a sudden. It was dark and there were the boards lighting and blinking. He tried to find the safe white wall again.

“Did you leave her there?” the man said. He couldn’t remember what he’d just said, he could only see the boards, and someone was holding him down. He got an arm free. People were yelling. There were flashes of the white room, there were faces over him and they were all holding him. He yelled: “Let me go!” and felt a sharp explosion against his shoulder, but they kept holding him, telling him to calm down.

He said, out of breath, “I’ll be calm. I’ll be calm, I don’t want any more sedatives—”

Because when they drugged him he had no idea where he was or how long he was out or where he went in that dark…

He opened his eyes again with a terrible leaden feeling, as if he weighed too much and he couldn’t wake up—but he knew where he was, he was in the hospital. Two very strong men were holding him down and asking him how he felt now.

He was out of the dark. He said, when he had gotten a whole breath, “I’m fine. I’m fine. Just don’t give me any more shots, all right?”

“Will you talk to us? Will you behave?”

“Yes,” he said.

The man in white leaned over him then, took hold of his wrist and asked him, “Are you still worried about your watch?”

His heart gave a little thump, making him dizzy. But he knew it was a test. He wasn’t supposed to ask the time. They beat him when he did that. Or gave him shots. He shook his head, wanting to stay awake now.

The doctor said, “We’re going to take some readings while we talk. Is that all right?”

Another test. He made up his mind then: it didn’t matter what the truth was. If he didn’t say exactly the right thing they’d give him shots. He’d been in trouble in his life—but this was serious. This was a hospital and they thought he was crazy.

The doctor asked him, “Are you still worried about your watch?”

Black. The siren going. He heard something beeping wildly. A timer was going off and he didn’t remember setting it. He could see the doctor frowning at him—he tried to track on the doctor: he knew how important it was. And when he did that, the beeping slowed down.

“That’s better,” the doctor said. “Are you all right? Do you want to tell me what just happened?”

He got a breath. He said, calmly, trying to pay no attention to the beeps, “Cory was outside. We were working this tag—”

“On which side of the line?”

“On this side.” Stupid question. The beeps went crazy a moment, when his heart did. He got it calm again. “We were working this tag. A big claim. Big. Kilometer wide…”

“Are you sure, Mr. Dekker?”

“It was that big. And we were out there. We’d shot our tag, but it wasn’t a good take. Cory said—” The beep sped up again and he slowed it down, staring at the wall, remembering Cory saying, We’re not letting those sons of bitches—”—We had to fix it. And she was going to go in—”

“You couldn’t handle a rock that size.”

“It was stable. Not that bad.” Again the beep. He said, before it could get away from him. “But this damn ‘driver—he wasn’t on the charts—he wasn’tslowing down. I said—I said, ‘Cory, get in here, Cory, he’s still not answering me, Cory, get inside—’”

“Get the trank,” the doctor said. The beep became a steady scream. Like the collision alert. Lights were flashing.

“I said, I kept saying, ‘You sonuvabitch, my partner’s out there, my partner’s outside, I can’t pull off—’”

They hit him with the trank. Two of them were holding him. But he kept screaming, ‘”I can’t pull off, you sonuvabitch!’ “

“It’s not working,” somebody said.

The doctor pushed his eyelid up, leaning close, said, looking elsewhere, “Get the chief,” while breath came short and the monitor was beeping a steady panic:

“They didn’t list it,” he said. “It wasn’t broadcasting—”

The doctor said, “Make up another dose. 50 ccs.”

“It wasn’t on the damn charts—”

“Easy,” the doctor said. “We understand you.—Cut that racket.”

The beeper stopped. He took an easier breath.

“Good. Good.” Another dark space then.

Somebody had had an accident, an Rl ship turned up in R2 zone, probable ‘driver accident—which should be BM’s job, but it was in William Payne’s day-file, straight from Crayton’s office, in General Administration.

The memo said: Handle this. We need minimal publicity.

Payne paged through the file. A freerunner pilot in hospital—making wild charges about a ‘driver captain violating regulations…

God. The Shepherd Association was hardnosing it in contract talks, the company trying to avert a strike—Payne shook his head. Not quite his job, but it was very clearly an information-control situation, and that
was
his department, as executive director of Public Information. One could even, if one were paranoid, suspect a set-up by the Independents—but it seemed the pilot’s physical condition was no fake, and a miner was dead.

Bad timing—damned bad timing for this to come in.

The question was how far the rumors had already gotten. Freerunners had done the rescue. That was one problem. News & Entertainment could run another safety news item, give the odds against a high-
v
rock, remind everyone it was a remote possibility—or maybe best not to raise the question. The Shepherd Association wanted an issue. It was begging for a forum. Meanwhile the police were going over the wreck, poking about—
that
was a department Public Information couldn’t entirely handle. Best keep them away from the issues in the case.

A release from the pilot was the all-around best fix. Evidently BM had a crack team going over that ship—that was good: if there was a mechanical fault, settle the problem there, no problem. Get a statement from the pilot, fix culpability if there was any—

Not with a company captain, damned sure, and not in a lawsuit that could bring the Shepherd Association in as friends of the court. That certainly wasn’t what Crayton meant by “settlement.”

A hand touched Dekker’s face. It gave him the willies. He couldn’t do anything about it. Couldn’t even open his eyes yet.

“Mr. Dekker, would you answer a question for me? There’s something I don’t understand.”

He got a breath. Two breaths. Did get his eyes open, marginally. “What?”

“Why the watch?”

“Kept the time.”

“Mr. Dekker.”

Clearer and clearer. It was the doctor again. He made a ‘ try at sitting up, inched higher on the pillows.

“How are we feeling, Mr. Dekker?”

“Like shit.”

“You were talking about the watch.”

Beep.

“
Explain
to me about the watch, Mr. Dekker. Why does it upset you?”

He wished he knew the answers to that one. The doctor stood there a long time. Finally he thought, Maybe this one’s going to listen. He said, tentatively, “We had some stuff linked to the main board.
Way Out
was old. The arm didn’t work off the main board. It was supposed to be a three-man, you know, the way some of the ships used to be…”

“Go on, Mr. Dekker. The watch.”

“You couldn’t work the arm and see the log chrono. Real easy to lose track of time when you’re working and we didn’t trust her suit indicators. So we used my watch.” His voice shook. He was scared the doctor was going to interrupt him and order him sedated if he lost it. And he wasn’t sure if he was making sense to the man. “It only timed an hour, you know, the alarm was a bitch to set—so we’d set it to January 1.—What day is it?”

“July 15th, Mr. Dekker.”

He despised crying. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. The doctor was getting impatient. He took deep breaths to help him. “Don’t give me any shots. I need to figure—how far is it…”

“Don’t distress yourself, Mr. Dekker.”

January has thirty-one days. February is 28. March, 12.

71.

Out there in space. Seventy-one days. She’d have been out of air in 4 hours. Oh, God…

“Mr. Dekker.”

“March has thirty days. Or 31?”

“31.”

12 from 31 is 19. Nineteen days in March. April is—

Thirty days hath September… April,
June
, and November…

The doctor patted his shoulder. One of the orderlies came back.

“No!” he yelled. “I’ve almost got it, dammit!”

They shot him with it anyway. “Be still,” they said. “Be still. Don’t try to talk now.”

49. They found me on the 21st. 49 and 21. Do you count the 12th twice?

I’m losing it… start again.

Or can I trust my memory?

It was still 6-deck and still a waiting game. Every day Ben went down and checked the lists. Every day it turned up nothing but PENDING.
Trinidad
herself was still hung up in the investigation—there was no way they could lease her, no matter that there were a dozen teams applying; there was no way they could even start her charge-up, and every day she sat at dock she was costing money instead of earning it. Bird haunted the supply shops, pricing the few small parts she needed; but they couldn’t even get access to her, the way Bird put it, to fix the damned clothes dryer.

“You can’t hurry the police,” Ben said, trying to put a reasonable face on things. “It can’t be much longer.”

And Sal, between sit-ups—they were working out in the gym: “I thought you could fix anything.”

“Not in my range of contacts,” he said, frustrated himself. Nudging Security was asking for more investigation.

“Hell,” Bird said, mopping his face, leaning on the frame of a weight machine. “I sincerely hope they just get something decided. My heart can’t stand much more of this prosperity.”

Meg didn’t say anything but, “Easy, Bird.”

Payne said: “No, dammit, just don’t answer. Tell Salvatore—no,
don’t
tell Salvatore. I’ll talk to him…”

Hell of a day. A Shepherd crew and a tender crew mixed into it in a bar and a bystander was in hospital; and
this—

Some clerk in Rl had return-sent the Salazar kid’s mail as Deceased, Return to Sender, and the sender in question, Salazar’s mother, had hit the phone asking for information on her daughter. The operator in ASCOM, knowing nothing about it, had sent the call to Personnel, the confused clerk that took the call in Rl Personnel there couldn’t find Salazar’s file and insisted to the bereaved mother there was no such person, while
her
supervisor had tried to stall for a policy clarification out of Rl’s Administrative levels, then realized she was out of her depth and tried to send it through to a higher level, after which it had bounced confusedly from department to department until a secretary in Legal Affairs put the call on hold and the woman hung up.

Salazar’s mother was on the MarsCorp
board
, for God’s sake. Nobody had told him. Nobody had told Towney. Nobody had flagged the dead miner as a problem—

Alyce Salazar’s next phone call had hit the president’s desk. Not Towney’s, in ASTEX.
Hansford
, in the Earth Company’s Sol Station headquarters. Hansford had called Towney, Towney had had to release the file, and Hansford’s office had released the details to MarsCorp.

Alyce Salazar had found out Dekker had survived, and immediately claimed it was no accident, he was a scoundrel who’d seduced her daughter, kidnapped her to the Belt, and killed her for her money.

Which turned out to have been a fair amount, before expenses. There was a binding surviving-partner clause—

But Alyce Salazar was an angry woman, one
damned
angry woman… and lawyers were talking to lawyers at very expensive phone rates.

“Mr. Crayton is on the line,” Payne’s secretary said.

God…

“Mr. Crayton, sir…”

Crayton said, “Have you got the letter?”

“Yes. I have it up now.”

“One went to Security.”

Oh, my God… “I’m sorry, sir. I certainly didn’t—”

“Not from your office. From Ms. Salazar. She wants that boy’s head. You understand the implications? We
need
this mess cleared up. We don’t want him in court. I want you to patch this up. Get the facts straight. We’ve got to have an answer for this one.”

Still no police clearance. And on a certain afternoon in the Bell, when Ben was in the bar doing some technical reading, Meg slipped into the chair across the table, leaned both arms on the table and said, “Benjie, cher, let’s go do talk.”

He’d thought at first Meg was just bored, Bird being out of sorts for the last couple of days; and he wasn’t totally surprised, back in her room, to end up in bed in mid-shift,—not the first time for him and Meg, but it was all the same unusual, even if he was entirely sure—and he was—that Bird wouldn’t take exception. The side-shaving was a turn-on. The mop on top and down the back was several shades brighter than elsewhere, but it was beyond a doubt Meg’s right color; and she had some kind of creature tattooed around one leg—snake, Meg had told him once, early on in their acquaintance. Bird had told him what kind it was and said if it bit you, you were dead in three minutes. He thought that might well fit Meg, if you got on her bad side.

But he wasn’t on her bad side. He had it figured by then that Meg had ulterior motives, though Meg wasn’t the sort to hold a man off while his brains scrambled—he swore he couldn’t do anything until she’d told him what was going on, but she proved that wrong: she had him truly gone before she started asking him about the ship, about Dekker, about the way Bird was stewing and fretting—

“Bird’s severely upset,” Meg said. “You think there’s a chance on that ship?—Because if there isn’t, you got to talk to him.”