God, no, they didn’t volunteer to customs that it was an out-zone ship, yes, sir, they’d reported the contact, no, it was an instructed contact: the agents questions were strictly routine and the stress-detectors didn’t beep once.
Customs validated their datacards, logged them both as active in R2, and they went back to the hand-line for the lifts.
Ben said, conversationally, while they were each trailing by a gripper handle, Ben in front this time: “You can quit worrying about the charts. Got the card in my pocket.”
His heart went thump. “Dammit, Ben,—”
“Hell, it was all right.”
“I told you leave it!”
“Where the cops’d find it?”
“You could’ve said. God!”
“Hey. You’re a lousy liar. Was I going to burden your conscience? You passed the detectors—so did I, right?”
Ben could. Stress detectors depended on a conscience.
“You’re just too damn nervous, Bird.”
“You could’ve left ’em under that plate, dammit. You could’ve done what I told you to do—”
“You want to get caught, that’s the way to do it—conceal something on the cops. I didn’t conceal it. It was right in my pocket. God, Bird, everybody does it. If they wanted to clamp down, why do they let us have gamecards? Or vid? Why don’t they check that? I could code the whole thing onto a vidtape.”
“If too many people get too cocky, just watch them. Some nosy exec gets a notion, and you can walk right into it, Ben, you can’t talk your way out of everything.”
“Everything so far.”
“Hell,” he muttered. They were coming to the end of the hand-line, where you got three easy chances to grab a bar and dismount in good order instead of (embarrassment) shooting on down to the buffer-sacks that forcibly disengaged a passenger before the line took the turn.
Ben was first on the bar, swung over and pushed 8-deck on the lift panel before he caught up. “I’ll ride down with you.”
“So where else are you going?”
“Where do you think?”
“Shit, Ben.”
“Somebody will. Probably there’s a line of creditors on the ship. But we’ll at least get the 50/50. Damn right we will.”
“You’re bucking for back trouble, and you won’t get a damn thing. There’ll be a rule.”
“Young bones. I won’t stay long. And there’s no real choice, Bird, you have to file the day you get in. That’s the rule.”
“So file at the core office.”
“Trust those bastards? No do. Corp-deck’s it.”
“Out of your mind,” he muttered as the car arrived. They floated in, took a handhold. The car sealed, clanked and made its noisy, jerky interface with the rotating heart of the core, and started solidly off down the link. He didn’t argue any more with Ben. If Ben had the fortitude to go down a level past helldeck an hour after dock and stand in some line to file to claim the poor sod’s ship, he didn’t know what to do with him. He only sighed and stared glumly at the doors and the red-lit bar that showed them approaching another take-hold.
“Bird, you got to take better care of yourself. What have you got for your old age?”
“I’m in it, and I don’t plan to survive it.” The car clanked into the spoke, and they shot into it with the illusion of climbing, until they hit that queasy couple of seconds where distance from R2’s spin axis equaled out with the car’s momentum as far as the inner ear was concerned. Then the ear figured out where Down was, the car’s rolling floor found it a half-heartbeat later, and bones and muscles started realizing that the stimsuits you worked in, the spin cylinders you slept in and the pills you took like candy didn’t entirely make up for weeks of weightlessness. Knees would feel it; backs would. The red-lit bar that showed their distance from the core was shooting toward 8-deck.
Meg and Sal were on 6; he had found that out on their way in. He’d left a message for them on the ’board, and he planned on company tonight. That and a drink and a long, long bath. Maybe with Meg, if she answered her messages.
If she wasn’t otherwise engaged.
The car stopped. He got out, on legs that felt tired even under 8’s low g, muscles weary of fighting the stimsuit’s elastic and now with g to complicate matters. Ben got out too, and said, “Meet you at the ’Bow.”
Ben didn’t even slow down. He just punched the button to go on down as far as the core lift went, to 3.
Bird shook his head and headed off down 8-deck—damned if he was even going to call up his mail before he hit the bar at the Starbow. Mail would consist of a bank statement and a few notes from friends as to when they’d gone out and when they’d be back. His brother in Colorado wrote twice a year, postal rates out here being a week’s groceries and Sam not being rich. It wasn’t quite time for the biannual letter and outside of that there wasn’t mail to get excited about. So screw that. He just wanted a chance to get the weight off, get a drink, see a couple of familiar female faces if fate was kind, and never mind Ben’s wet dreams. Ships didn’t come without debts, probably multiple owners, not mentioning the bank, and the company would find some technicality to chew up any proceeds they could possibly make from the ship, til it was hardly worth the price of a good rock, plus expenses. Ben was going to work himself into a heart attack someday, if ulcers didn’t get him first.
The meds said, and the Institute taught you, some null-g effects got worse every time you went out: your bones resorbed, your kidneys picked up the calcium and made stones, and the body learned the response—snapped to it faster with practice, as it were, and Ben believed it. Science devised ways to trick gravity-evolved human systems, and you took your hormones, you spent your sleeptime in the spinner and you wore the damn stimsuit like a religion. Most of all you hoped you had good genes. They told gruesome tales of this old miner whose bones had all crumbled, and there was a guy down tending bar in helldeck who had so many plastic and metal parts he was always triggering the cops’ weapon scans. He didn’t intend to end up like that, nossir, he intended eventually to be sitting in a nice leasing office collecting 15-and-20 on two ships, free and clear of debt, and letting other poor sods get their parts replaced. He had no objection to Morrie Bird sitting in that office as vice president in charge of leases, for that matter: Bird had the people sense that could make it work, and Bird couldn’t last at mining forever: they’d already replaced both hips.
So Bird went off to the easy adjustment of 8-deck in blind trust that Mama would do the right thing and assay their take in the sling and record all the data they’d shot to the offices during their approach—while the one of them who’d worked for Mama for two years and knew the way Mama worked took the immediate trip down to 3-deck, and the frontage of the debtors’ barracks he’d once lived in. Oddity was endemic hereabouts—you could look down the strip now and spot a guy dressed head to foot in purple, but he wasn’t necessarily crazy—at least you could lay money he didn’t claim the company’d done this or that or ask you the time every five minutes.
God, he hated remembering this place. But he still kept an ultra-cheap locker there, with a change of clothes—
Because you had to dress if you were going to go call in debts, nothing rad or rab, just classic. Good sweater, good pants, casual coat. Real shoes. You had to look like solid credit to get what he was after. And his legs were in good enough shape, all things considered: he’d foreseen this, and taken his pills and worked out all the way back—burning off the desire to strangle Dekker, Bird had probably thought, regarding those unusually long sessions on the cycle and the bounce-pads.