“No speeches,” O’Rourke interrupted. “You know the rules. Tom Toole?”
“Justified killing. Self-defense.”
“Robert Doonan?”
“Justified killing,” Doonan’s words sounded dragged out of him, but they came. “In self-defense.”
It went along the line. Justified killing in self-defense. O’Rourke stopped short of asking Danny Shaker. Instead he shook his own massive head and said, “I don’t like it, but evidence is evidence. So I’ll make it unanimous. Justified killing, in self-defense. And I have to say, if you can tell me a more stupid, misguided idiot than Joe Munroe, going off half-cocked the way he did, and then being bested one-on-one by a young ’un who’s hardly clear of the ground, and letting him—”
“No speeches, Pat,” said Tom Toole. “Remember?” He didn’t laugh or smile, but with those words the whole atmosphere changed. The crewmen still looked grim, and no one would meet my eye, but a lot of tension had vanished from the room.
“That’s it, then,” O’Rourke said. “You, Jay Hara, you’re free and clear. And I’m going to say it one more time, no matter what the rules are: Joe was a damned fool.” He walked across to me, and after what looked like a big internal struggle reached out and shook my hand. “But that’s no fault of yours. This hearing’s officially over. It’ll be back to work as normal for you, next shift.”
He nodded, and headed for the cabin exit. I half expected that the others would come over and say something, too, but they didn’t. Without looking at me they filed out one by one, until I was alone in the room with Danny Shaker.
“It’s not really over,” I said, “no matter what Patrick O’Rourke says. They’re all still angry as can be.”
“Quite true. But it’s over, all the same.” Shaker hadn’t said one word during the whole proceeding. Now he was lolling back comfortably in his chair. “You don’t understand spacers, Jay. They’re upset, and they’re angry. But they’re not mad at you. They’re mad at Joe Munroe. He embarrassed them all. Even his best friend, Pat O’Rourke, is angry with him. From their point of view, what he did was stupid in more ways than you can count. First, he didn’t think to frisk you. A gun won’t beat a working brain, but it will beat a fist any time. Second, he lost out to a Downside kid, half his mass and less than half his age. Think what that does to the spacer image.” Shaker stood up. “You’ve been lucky today, Jay, in three different ways. With Munroe, with me, and with the hearing. Luck’s important. Just don’t start to count on it. Because if you do, that’s the time it won’t work.”
He headed for the door, too. “Busy day, eh?” he said over his shoulder. “But you’ve not helped the Cuchulain any. Extra work hours for you next shift, to make up. If you wanted to report sick because of that bash on the head, you should have done it sooner.”
He was gone, before I could frame the reply I wanted.
Busy day? It seemed years since I had run into Uncle Duncan on the stairway. It had been—I struggled to work it out— no more than three hours. A couple more days like this, and I’d feel as old as Doctor Eileen.
Chapter 25
“Life in space,” Tom Toole said cheerfully, “is like life in war. You go muddling along for ages with nothing much happening, and you’re bored as all get out; then something happens, and all of a sudden you’re so busy you don’t know which way to turn.”
I was scraping a grease-coated wall of the cargo hold, in a place where cleaning machines, despite Duncan West’s best fix-it efforts, refused to go. I grunted, and went on scraping. It was a rare philosophical statement from Tom, made as he watched me labor. I knew nothing about war, and hoped I never would, but the two weeks that followed Joe Munroe’s death had taught me that Tom was wrong about space. I wasn’t bored, even though we were crawling slower than ever toward our new destination. I didn’t have time to be. I was kept busy from the moment I got up to the time I collapsed into my bunk. Between them, Tom Toole and Pat O’Rourke never gave me a moment’s peace—particularly since every job took me three times as long as they said it ought to. It had to be intentional on their part. Thinks he’s a spacer now, does he? Well, we’ll show him. He still has a lot to learn.
I could have complained to Danny Shaker. I felt like doing it a dozen times, but I didn’t. I just gritted my teeth, swore under my breath, and stuck at it while the rest of the crew took it easy.
There was a bonus side to all my labors. I was learning about the workings of the Cuchulain in a way that no talking or lessons could ever have given me. But I didn’t realize how fast my hard work was making time fly by, until I heard an odd, fluting whistle over the communications system.
Tom said at once, “All hands call. Drop that. We have to get to the bridge.”
He set off at once and without waiting for me. I, full of worries of onboard disaster, hurried after him to the main control room.
“Can’t tell what it is.” Danny Shaker was at the controls when we entered, juggling displays. “It’s strange, I show a target when I use ultralong radio waves, but nothing on visible or infra-red, or on regular radar.”
“What are you going to do?” Pat O’Rourke asked. All the crew were crowding around.
“Keep flying and wait for a better signal. We’re still at extreme range, but we’re closing fast.” Shaker saw that I had joined the huddle. “Score one for the navaid, Jay. I don’t know if that’s the Net and the hardware reservoir we’re looking for, but something is just ahead with the orbital elements and motion you specified. Go get Eileen Xavier. We’ll be arriving in an hour or two. She’ll want to take a peek at this.”
Arriving. At Godspeed Base?
I hurried away, wondering again about Danny Shaker. He had been careful to keep me away from Doctor Eileen and the rest of the Erin party, so I had no idea how they were doing. But now, with the crew certain to stay around the control room for a while, he was in effect inviting me to go along and tell Doctor Eileen and the others anything that I liked.
Why? I didn’t know. I understood the ship’s workings a lot better after all my work, but I sure didn’t understand Dan Shaker. As Tom Toole had said, he was a deep one. I could now dismiss all the “two-half-man” stuff that had given me nightmares before, but I couldn’t get rid of the thought that Shaker might be testing me in some way that I couldn’t guess.
It was this feeling, more than any shred of fact, that made me cautious. I intended to do just what Shaker had directed: Find Doctor Eileen, and bring her back to the control room. And if we talked on the way? Well, that wasn’t ruled out in his instructions.
I intended to do that. What I hadn’t allowed for was the possibility that I would run into Mel Fury the moment I entered Doctor Eileen’s quarters.
She must have been hiding away and somehow watching the corridor, because she popped out in front of me as soon as I came through the door.
“Hi,Jay!”
“Hey!”
We stood staring at each other in pleasure—and something else, too, at least in my case. Concern.
“Mel, for God’s sake—you’re supposed to try to look like a boy.”
With her fair hair growing and combed loose in a different style, she was far more female than she had ever been. She would have been accepted as a girl, even by the primped and pampered primadonnas of Erin.
Mel shook her head, and her lengthening hair floated around it. “I can’t, Jay. I mean, I can try to look boyish, but I can’t succeed. Doctor Eileen says that any man on board would know, even if I cut my hair again. She says the trick is not to let anybody see me.”