They talked on and he handed out shower soap to a cousin named Susan, who came to the counter. She wanted to talk and make acquaintances: she was pretty, dark-eyed, looked twenty and was just curious, he thought, and then reminded himself this wasn’t a pretty girl, it was a cousin, and you couldn’t have thoughts like that aboard, even if he was having them, and was far more interested in her than in the game-chatter behind him. She said she worked in cargo. He said he was in planetary studies.
She said she didn’t know what there was to study about a planet. She wasn’t joking, he decided. His ardor cooled instantly, the conversation died a rapid, distracted death as the game-chatter actually became more interesting than talking to her, and maybe he managed to offend her. He was depressed after she’d left.
Truly depressed. The new had worn off. The body and brain had stopped having to move fast. Realization was settling in. He was among total strangers.
“What’s the matter?” Jeremy asked him after a while.
“Tired,” he said. And Vince took that as a cue to try to bait him:
“A little work get to you?”
He didn’t answer. “Let him alone,” Jeremy said and then Jeremy engaged Vince and Linda in a game of cards in the other room—which was one of the thousand little things that hinted to him that Jeremy might be wiser than twelve—or at least more mature than Vince was. They played cards. He did small squares on the handheld that he’d brought among his personal gear, a cheap, field-battered handheld that held a couple of games, all his personal notes from classes and sessions in the field. He didn’t want to access those. He couldn’t face the memories. He just built squares on the sketchpad, trying to forget cousins.
JR came by and stopped at the counter, the first time he’d seen JR since boarding, “So how are you feeling?” JR asked.
JR, who looked to be his age, and he was sure now both was and wasn’t.
“Fine.” He shut the handheld down and pocketed it, as inconspiciously as he could, fearful they might object either to his using it or having an unauthorized computer. Some places were touchy about it.
JR ignored it and took something from his breast pocket. He laid three little sealed plastic packets on the counter. “Jump drugs. It’s regulation you have them on you at all times. You didn’t report to infirmary when you boarded.”
They were inevitability, staring him in the face. The event he most dreaded. “Nobody told me.”
“Fine. I’m telling you now, for all future time. Scared to give yourself a shot?”
“No.” He’d never done it. But he’d watched it.
“You just put it against your wrist and push the button. Kicks. If you have one malfunction… they don’t, but if it should happen, you’re supposed to have a second. Whenever you use one, you’ve got to drop by medical, that’s A10. Day before jump, there’ll always be a box sitting out for you to take what you need. One packet on your person at all times when the ship is out of dock, an extra when you’re going for jump.”
“There’s three.”
“This time, yes. Tripoint’s supposedly safe as a dockside stroll these days, but nobody on this ship would bet his sanity on it. A jump-point’s a lot of dark where you can still meet somebody you don’t want to meet, and if we do, if we should , you’d hear the siren blowing when you come out of jump, and you’d have just enough time to hit yourself with that second shot. You’ve got to keep clear-headed and do that or you’re in serious trouble. Not to scare you, but this ship has enemies. And people have gone into hyperspace without trank, but most don’t come down the way they went in.”
He’d been scared of a lot of things in the last number of days. Being shot at by pirates hadn’t been on the immediate list. Coming awake in hyperspace hadn’t been. Now it was.
“When you board, for the record, next thing after you turn in your baggage at the dock, the packets are on the counter, pick ’em up.”
“Yeah, well, I had cops attached.”
“No excuses next time. As you board, you take your duffle to the counter, pick up the drugs, sign the list.”
“You’re going to let me off this ship?”
“Only seniors stay aboard. No deck space during dock. Unless you’re sick. You don’t plan to be sick. And just once, and just for the record, never take this stuff except when you’re told to by an officer. That box sits on the counter on the honor system. Take only what you’re supposed to.”
He’d been getting along well enough until cousin JR said that. “My mother was an addict,” he said. “That what you mean?”
“Never take it except when told by an officer. Standard instruction. That’s the rule. Nothing personal.”
“Like hell.”
There was the laundry counter between them. It was probably a good thing. The card game was going on in the next room. There was nothing else to separate them.
The silence between them went on a moment. JR’s jaw muscles stood out in shadow. But JR didn’t inform him it was Like hell, sir .
“Obey the regulations,” JR said. “Go back to work.”
JR walked off.
He didn’t know who was in the right about that encounter. He stood there with a pocketful of what had killed his mother. The ship was going into jump with him aboard, and if he didn’t take the drug he’d meet whatever it was in hyperspace that drove people crazy. The drugs were ordinary, they were what you had to take to get through the experience, and his mother had died only because she overdosed and depressed her nervous system. He knew all that.
And he knew that the clock was running down close to that event and that through an oversight he’d almost not had the drugs he was supposed to have. That was a fact, too, and if somebody hadn’t checked and there’d been some kind of emergency he knew he could have been in bad trouble. JR had come by to make sure he had the drug and knew what to do, so he couldn’t fault that as hostile behavior. It was just the little extra remark that just hadn’t been necessary.
He was scared. Scared of the event, terrified of the drug—he’d been tested for it: the court had wanted to know if his mother had given it to him, to a five-year-old. But her suicide had been solo. Probably not intended to happen while he was home. She’d loved him. She kept getting him back from the social system no matter how many times she gave him up. Wasn’t that love?
“So what’d JR want?”
The card game was over. Jeremy was back at his elbow. Assigned to be there: he suddenly drew that conclusion. Jeremy was always looking out for him not because Jeremy gave a damn but because Jeremy had orders.
He opened the counter and left, walking fast, nowhere, and then toward his quarters, which he realized was no refuge from Jeremy. He was cornered, and stopped, in mid-corridor.
“You can’t just walk off-duty,” Jeremy said. “What happened ?”
“Nothing happened,” he said, and drew a couple of calmer breaths. He didn’t want to explain it. He didn’t want to deal with it. And he didn’t want to have to hold together incipient panic with a twelve-year-old hanging on his arm. “When are we going into jump?”
“About four hours.”
“ Today? ”
“Is there a problem?”
Is there a problem? He wanted to laugh. Or cry. “No,” he said. And turned back toward the laundry. “Just keep Vince off me. I’m not in a good mood.”
“Sure,” Jeremy said, and walked with him.
He couldn’t walk in with no commotion, Vince had to say something.
“Well, is cousin Fletcher going to take a walk?”
He grabbed a fistful of Vince’s jumpsuit.
“Fletcher, stop!” Jeremy said, and tried to push him and Vince apart, no luck where it came to budging his arm. “No fighting. Vince, cut it, don’t hassle him! Hear me?”
“Vince,” Linda said, in what sounded like real fear, and pushed at Vince as if Vince had a choice about it. She acted as if she might have prevented Vince swinging at him. At least she gave Vince an excuse to take his thirteen-year-old self in retreat about five paces and toward the next section of the laundry.