He slept again. He was more comfortable when he waked. His hands were free and they let him sit up and gave him fruit drink. A man came and sat down by his bed with a slate and started asking him questions—How old are you? Have you any relatives? all rapid-fire. It was the sort of thing they asked if you’d had an accident, something about next of kin. It scared him. The shower in this room wasn’t the shower he remembered, he could see the white walls through the door. He’d jumped ahead. Cory wasn’t with him, and he was in a hospital having to go through these questions like some actor in a vid. It couldn’t be real. God, he didn’t want his mother to hear he was lying in a hospital somewhere she couldn’t help, he’d screwed up enough: he just said he was from Sol Station and shut up.
“What was your relationship with Corazon Salazar?” they asked him then, cold and impersonal. He said, going through the ritual, “She’s my partner.”
But if he went on answering, they’d write it down as true and he’d be here, he couldn’t go back to the shower, he’d be out of the loop and he’d have no chance to fix it: Cory would be dead then. No way back.
The man asked, “Did you have relations with her?”
That made him mad. “That’s not your business.”
The man asked: “Did you ever quarrel?”
“No.”
The man made a mark on his slate. “What did you invest in that ship?”
He didn’t understand that question. He shook his head.
“Did you put any money into it?”
He shook his head again. “That wasn’t the way it worked. Cory was the money.” Cory was the brains too, but he didn’t admit that to a stranger. Cory was the one who had no question what she wanted. But the man didn’t ask that. The man said, “What happened out there?”
He couldn’t go back to the shower now. No green walls. White. He thought, What should I tell them? And the man said, “Does that upset you? You said Ms. Salazar was working outside the ship. Why?”
He said, not sure what he might have changed, “We were working a tag.”
“Did Ms. Salazar regularly do the outside work?”
“I’m the pilot.” Two answers right. He felt surer now.
“I see. So she hired you. And gave you half interest in her ship. For nothing.”
He nodded.
“Where did you meet?”
“We wrote letters back and forth. We’d been writing a long time. Since we were kids.”
Another note on the slate. “Then it was more than a business relationship.”
“Friends.”
“You didn’t have a falling-out, did you?”
He looked at his watch. But it wasn’t there. They’d taken it.
The man said, “Did you quarrel?”
“We never quarreled.”
“She always did what you wanted? Or didn’t she, this time?”
He didn’t understand. He shook his head. He thought about the shower, but it wasn’t vivid this time. Even the green seemed faded.
The man asked: “Why did you cross the line? To cover what you’d done?”
He didn’t understand what they were getting at. He shook his head again, looked furtively at his wrist, remembered he mustn’t do that. It upset people. Like Ben. It upset Ben a lot…
“Tell me the truth,” the man said. “What were you doing out there?”
“We had a tag,” he said. “We were working it.”
He lost the room of a sudden. It was dark and there were the boards lighting and blinking. He tried to find the safe white wall again.
“Did you leave her there?” the man said. He couldn’t remember what he’d just said, he could only see the boards, and someone was holding him down. He got an arm free. People were yelling. There were flashes of the white room, there were faces over him and they were all holding him. He yelled: “Let me go!” and felt a sharp explosion against his shoulder, but they kept holding him, telling him to calm down.
He said, out of breath, “I’ll be calm. I’ll be calm, I don’t want any more sedatives—”
Because when they drugged him he had no idea where he was or how long he was out or where he went in that dark…
He opened his eyes again with a terrible leaden feeling, as if he weighed too much and he couldn’t wake up—but he knew where he was, he was in the hospital. Two very strong men were holding him down and asking him how he felt now.
He was out of the dark. He said, when he had gotten a whole breath, “I’m fine. I’m fine. Just don’t give me any more shots, all right?”
“Will you talk to us? Will you behave?”
“Yes,” he said.
The man in white leaned over him then, took hold of his wrist and asked him, “Are you still worried about your watch?”
His heart gave a little thump, making him dizzy. But he knew it was a test. He wasn’t supposed to ask the time. They beat him when he did that. Or gave him shots. He shook his head, wanting to stay awake now.
The doctor said, “We’re going to take some readings while we talk. Is that all right?”
Another test. He made up his mind then: it didn’t matter what the truth was. If he didn’t say exactly the right thing they’d give him shots. He’d been in trouble in his life—but this was serious. This was a hospital and they thought he was crazy.
The doctor asked him, “Are you still worried about your watch?”
Black. The siren going. He heard something beeping wildly. A timer was going off and he didn’t remember setting it. He could see the doctor frowning at him—he tried to track on the doctor: he knew how important it was. And when he did that, the beeping slowed down.
“That’s better,” the doctor said. “Are you all right? Do you want to tell me what just happened?”
He got a breath. He said, calmly, trying to pay no attention to the beeps, “Cory was outside. We were working this tag—”
“On which side of the line?”
“On this side.” Stupid question. The beeps went crazy a moment, when his heart did. He got it calm again. “We were working this tag. A big claim. Big. Kilometer wide…”
“Are you sure, Mr. Dekker?”
“It was that big. And we were out there. We’d shot our tag, but it wasn’t a good take. Cory said—” The beep sped up again and he slowed it down, staring at the wall, remembering Cory saying, We’re not letting those sons of bitches—“—We had to fix it. And she was going to go in—”
“You couldn’t handle a rock that size.”
“It was stable. Not that bad.” Again the beep. He said, before it could get away from him. “But this damn ’driver—he wasn’t on the charts—he wasn’tslowing down. I said—I said, ’Cory, get in here, Cory, he’s still not answering me, Cory, get inside—’”
“Get the trank,” the doctor said. The beep became a steady scream. Like the collision alert. Lights were flashing.
“I said, I kept saying, ’You sonuvabitch, my partner’s out there, my partner’s outside, I can’t pull off—’”
They hit him with the trank. Two of them were holding him. But he kept screaming, ’“I can’t pull off, you sonuvabitch!’ ”
“It’s not working,” somebody said.
The doctor pushed his eyelid up, leaning close, said, looking elsewhere, “Get the chief,” while breath came short and the monitor was beeping a steady panic:
“They didn’t list it,” he said. “It wasn’t broadcasting—”
The doctor said, “Make up another dose. 50 ccs.”
“It wasn’t on the damn charts—”
“Easy,” the doctor said. “We understand you.—Cut that racket.”
The beeper stopped. He took an easier breath.
“Good. Good.” Another dark space then.
Somebody had had an accident, an Rl ship turned up in R2 zone, probable ’driver accident—which should be BM’s job, but it was in William Payne’s day-file, straight from Crayton’s office, in General Administration.