Cops never told you a thing. Wills grunted, monkeyed along the lines toward the hatch as if he was going inside. The other officers followed. But one of the blue-suited meds was outbound, towing a stretcher with Dekker aboard, and the other meds were close behind. The cops stopped them at the lines just outside the hatch, delayed to look Dekker over, talk to the meds, evidently asked Dekker something: there was a lot of machinery noise on the dock—they must be loading or offloading—and he couldn’t hear what they said or what Dekker answered. They only let the meds take him away, and that course came past him.
They had wrapped Dekker up in blankets, had him strapped into the stretcher, and Dekker looked wasted and sick as hell. But his eyes were open, looking around. The meds brought the stretcher to a drifting stop and said, “You want to say goodbye?”
It was one of those faces that could haunt a man, Dekker’s lost, distracted expression—but Dekker seemed to track on him then.
“Bird,” he said faintly through the noise and the banging overhead. “Where’re they taking me?”
Dekker looked scared. Bird wanted it over with, wanted to forget Dekker and Dekker’s nightmares and the stink and the cold of that ship, not even caring right now if they got anything for their trouble but their refit paid. He sure didn’t want an ongoing attachment; but that question latched on to him and he found himself reaching out and putting a hand against Dekker’s shoulder. “Hospital. That’s all, son. You’re on R2 dock. You’ll be all right.”
Bird looked at the meds, then gave a shrug, wanting them to go, now, before Dekker got himself worked up to a scene. They started away.
“Bird?” Dekker said as they went. And called out louder, a voice that cut right to the nerves, even over the racket: “Bird?”
He exhaled a shaky breath and shook his head, wanting a go at the bar real bad right now.
Ben came out of the hatch with their Personals kits. The police stopped him and insisted on taking the kits one by one and turning them this way and that. They were asking Ben questions when he drifted up, and Ben was saying, in answer to those questions, “The guy was off his head. Didn’t know what he’d do next. Screaming out all the time. Thinking it was his ship he was on. We had to worry he’d go after controls or something.”
He scowled a warning at Ben, but not a plain one: there was the Optex Wills was making of every twitch they made. Ben was looking only at the officers. He said, to explain the scowl, “You’d be off your head too if you’d been banged around like that.”
“In the accident,” Wills said, fishing.
“Ship tumbling like that,” he said. “The wonder is he lived through it. Couldn’t have helped his partner. All he looked to have left was his emergency beeper, and when that tank blew, it didn’t go straight—you got this center of mass here, see, and you get this tank back here—”
You got too technical and the docksiders wanted another topic in a hurry.
Wills said, interrupting him, “Go into that with the Court of Inquiry. We’ll want to log those kits. Leave them with us and we’ll send them on to your residence. What’s your ID?”
“On the tag there.” Ben indicated his kit. “1347-283-689 is mine. Bird here’s 688-687-257. Ship’s open. Look all you like.”
“You can go now.”
You never got thanks out of a company cop either. Bird scowled, looked at Ben, and the two of them handed their way up lines toward the hand-line. A beep meant a boom was moving. Red light stained the walls. But the alarm was from the other end of the big conduit- and chute-centered tunnel that was the cargo mast. You could get dizzy if you looked at the core itself, if you let yourself just for a moment think about up and down or where you were. Bird focused on the inbound gripper-handle coming toward him, ignored the moving surface in the backfield of his vision—caught it and felt the first all-over stretch he’d had in months as it hauled him along. Ben had caught the one immediately behind him—he looked back to see.
“Customs,” he remarked to Ben, in a lull in the racket from the chutes. “I hope they’ve talked to the cops.”
“No trouble. We haven’t even got our Personals. Cops’ve got ’em. Cops have got everything. They gave me this receipt, see?” He used his free hand to tap his pocket. “Hell, we’re just little guys. What are we going to have? We’ll get a wave-through. You watch.”
“They’ll give us hell.”
“So don’t tell ’em it was out-zone. We reported it where the rules say. We got rights. Meanwhile we’re gone into a public contact area and there’s no use for them to check us, is there?”
“Rights,” he muttered. “We got whatever rights Mama decides to give us, is what we got.—What did you tell that cop about Dekker? Did you tell them he was crazy?”
“Hey, they don’t need my help to figure that. The meds belted him in good and tight when they took him away.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said he wasn’t too clear where he was. They asked about the bruises, and I said he got loose, all right? I said he was after the controls and he’s crazy, besides which he fought us when we had to get him back and forth to the head.”
“That’s a couple of times, Ben, for God’s sake…”
“Hey. We got this guy tied to the plumbing, bruises all over him, all ages, what are we going to say, it was a month-long party out there?”
“Yeah,” he said, and shut up, because the chute was sucking another load down, and down here you could hear the hydraulics. His stomach was upset. It had been upset for the last week, when it had been clearer and clearer Dekker was not going to be able to support a thing they said, that Dekker was liable to say anything or claim they’d met eetees and seen God. This is it, Ben had said when Dekker had tried to get at the engine fire controls. They’d put Dekker to bed taped hand and foot: Dekker had screamed for an hour afterward, and Ben had gotten that on tape too.
He had wanted to erase that video. Dekker had enough troubles without that on permanent record with the company: Dekker could lose his license, lose his ship, lose everything he had, and he didn’t want to hand BM the evidence to set it up that way—but Ben had said it: Dekker wasn’t any saner than he had been. Dekker would have been dead in a few days if they hadn’t found him, and as much as they’d done to patch the kid together, he didn’t seem likely to need much of anything but a ticket back to the motherwell and a long, long time in rehab.
“Poor sod,” he said.
Ben said: “Good riddance.” And when he frowned at him: “Hell, Bird, I’ve seen schitzy behavior before, I’ve seen damn well enough of it.” There was profound bitterness behind that: he had no idea why, or what Ben was talking about, but Ben didn’t volunteer anything else. Ben was talking about the school, he decided, or the dorms where Ben had spent what other people called childhood. It didn’t matter now. The trip was over, Dekker was with the meds, the whole business was out of their hands, and Ben knew Shakespeare wasn’t a physicist. Good for him. They’d patch up their partnership and take their heavy time while somebody else leased Trinidad out—and paid them 15-and-20 plus repairs and refit: could do that all the time if they wanted, but you didn’t get rich on 15-and-20 while you were sitting on dockside spending most of it.
Got to give up sleeping and eating, he was accustomed to joke about it.
Ben would say, intense as he always was when you talked about money, We got to get us a break, is what.
They got off the line in customs, explained they didn’t have their Personals, the cops had them, no, they didn’t have any ore in their pockets and they didn’t have any illegal magmedia on them, all the records were on the ship, yes, they had contacted another ship out there, they’d hauled a guy in, they hadn’t taken anything off it, no, sir, yes, ma’am, they’d tell Medical if they got any rashes or developed any fevers or coughs, Medical had already told them that, yes, sir.