Anyone.
They took the lift. The lift car was on rails and sometimes it went sideways and sometimes up and down or wherever it had to take you. This time the car went through the core, around the funny little turn it did there and out another spoke of the station wheel.
Hold on, the cops told him at one point, and he dutifully tightened his grip, not arguing anything, not speaking, not looking at them.
During recent days, flat on his back in infirmary, while they dripped fluids into him and scanned his lungs for damage he half wished he’d done, he’d had ample time to realize the fix had been in before he ever ran, and to realize that his lawyers weren’t going to intercede this time. He’d sat by the window on the way up, unable to see much but the white of Downbelow’s clouds, until they put the window-shields up and stopped him seeing anything of the world. Necessary precaution against the chance tiny rock as they cleared Pell’s atmosphere. But he’d looked as long as he could.
Now, with cold and unfeeling fingers, he clung to the rail of the car while the car finished its gyrations through the station core and shot down a good several levels.
It jolted and clanked to a stop and let them out on more dockside, the cops talking to someone on their audio. They brought him out onto the metal decking, with the dark wall of dockside on one side, with its blinding spotlights and ready boards blazoning the names and registries of ships. A group of people were standing by a huge structural wall, ahead of him. One, the centermost, was the Stationmaster.
Dark blue suit, aides with the usual electronics discreetly tucked in pockets; security, with probably a fancy device or two—you couldn’t always tell about the eye-contact screens, or what the men were really looking at, but they weren’t station police, that was sure. He’d never met Elene Quen in her official capacity. He guessed this was it.
“Fletcher,” Quen said in a moderate, pleasant tone, and offered her hand, which he took, not wanting to, but he’d learned, having been trained by lawyers. When you were in something up to the hilt, you played along, you smiled so long as the authorities were smiling. Sometimes it got you more when you’d been reasonable: when you did pitch a fit on some minor point, you startled hell out of them, and consequently got heard if you didn’t also scare them.
But that wasn’t his motive right now. Right now all he wanted was not to lose his dignity. And they could take his dignity from him at any time.
“Do you have your visa?” she asked
He had. He’d expected to use it for customs. He fished it out of his coat pocket and she held out her hand for it.
She didn’t look at it. She slipped it into her suit pocket and handed him back a different one.
He guessed its nature before he looked at the slim card in his fingers. It hadn’t Pell’s pattern of stars for an emblem. It was the space-black of Finity’s End, a flat black disc for an emblem, no color, no heraldry, not even the name. The first of modern merchanters was too holy and too old to use any contrived emblem, just the black of space itself.
It was a fact in his hand. A done deal. This was his new passport
“You all right?” Quen asked him.
“Sure. No problems.”
“Fletcher…” Quen wasn’t slow. She caught the sarcasm. She started to say something and then shut it down, nodding instead toward the dockside. “They’re boarding.”
“Sure.”
“You went where you weren’t supposed to go,” Quen said, as if anything he’d done or could do had changed their intentions.
“I was invited to go.” He ought to say ma’am and didn’t. “I was coming back on my own when they found me.”
“You risked lives of your fellow staff members.”
“It was their choice to go out there. No one died.”
That produced a long silence in which he thought that maybe, just maybe, he could still throw his case back to the psychs.
“I tried to kill myself,” he said, “all right?” He knew a station, even with its capacity to absorb damage, didn’t want a suicide case walking around loose. A ship going into deep space couldn’t be happy at all with the idea. And for a moment he thought she really might send him off to the psychs and have a meeting with the ship. If he just got beyond this current try then he’d be at least eighteen by the time Finity cycled back again, eighteen years old and not a minor any longer.
“Fletcher,” Quen said, “you’re good. I’ll give you that. But you don’t score.”
She knew his game. Dead on. And he was too tired, too rattled, and too sedated to come up with another, more skillfull card.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, I tried.”
“Fletcher, I’ve tried to help you, I’ve set you up with people where I used up favors to get you set. And you’d screw it up. Reliably, you’d screw it up.”
“Yeah, well, they’d screw it up. How about that?”
“It’s a possibility they did. But you never gave anyone a chance.”
“The hell!” he said. Temper got past the tranquilizer, and he shut it down. She wasn’t going to needle him into reaction, or salve her conscience, either. “The Neiharts aren’t going to be happy with me. You know that.”
“It’s not a place to screw up, Fletcher. There’s no place to go.—You look at me! Don’t drop your eyes. You look straight at me and you hear this. You give it a good chance. You give it a good honest try and come back with no complaints from them and after a year, in the year it’s going to take them to get back here, you can walk into my office as a grown man and say you want to be transferred back. And I’ll intercede for you. Then. Not now.”
His heart beat faster and faster. He didn’t say anything for the moment. She waited. He threw out the next challenge: “I screwed up down there. Can you fix that?”
“I can fix it up here enough to give you a post in the tunnels. You’d work with downers. You’d stand a chance of working your way back to Downbelow.”
It was too good. It was everything handed back to him. On a platter. Everything but the downers that mattered. Years. Human years. A long time for them. Maybe too long for Melody and Patch.
“But,” Quen said, as firmly, “if you come back with anything on your record, I’ll give Finity the chance to decide whether they want you, and if they don’t, we’ll see about an in-depth psych exam to see what you do need to straighten you out. Do you copy, Mr. Neihart? Is that plain enough?”
“Yes, ma’am.” All cards were bet. Straighten you out. That meant psych adjustment, not just psych tests. It wasn’t supposedly a big deal. Just an instilled fear of sabotage was what they gave you, just a real horror of messing up the station. But they’d find out, too, what he thought of the human species. And they’d straighten that kink out of him. They’d rip the heart out of him. Make him normal, so he could never, ever want to go back to Downbelow.
“It’s serious business, Mr. Neihart. It’s very serious, life-and-death business. Are you unstable? Did you try to kill yourself?”
“No, ma’am. Not really.”