“Without an exam?”
“You can do that,” Bird said to Ben. “Construction work lets you do that. You can jump from class to class that way, just the operationals and a few questions. Same as I did. Not everybody comes through the Institute.”
“Well, then,” Ben said, “—you’ve been a class 1. You claim you were good. You know the answers. What’s a test?”
Ben made him mad. Ben could make him mad by breathing. He tried to be calm. “Because I can’t pass written questions!”
“God,” Ben said, sliding down in his seat. “One of those. Can you read?”
He didn’t want to know what “those” Ben was talking about. He didn’t want to talk about it right now. He wanted to break Ben’s neck. He stared off at the corner, past Ben’s shoulder. He’d go to the ship, all right, he’d restrain himself from acting like a crazy man; he’d pass the operationals and put in his hours in Bird’s ship and he’d come back and fail the damned test.
But meanwhile he’d have gotten fed. He’d have gotten in with Bird. Maybe he could get a limited license to push freight, work up through ops again, on the ship construction out there: he didn’t know, he didn’t even know if it was possible out in the Belt. He didn’t want to worry about it right now, just take it as far as he could, and not think about the mess he was in.
Bird and Ben talked in low voices and he was the topic: he could catch snatches of it over the noise. It was two more stops til the core lift. He wanted this ride over with—wanted to get up to the dock, the ship, anywhere, to get them on to some other subject.
“Look,” Ben said, leaning forward, “on this test business, it’s easy done. It’s a system, there’s a technique—”
“Easy for you!”
“You a halfway good pilot?”
“I’m damned good!”
“Then listen to me: it’s the same as filling in the forms back there. Don’t give real answers to deskpilots. The whole key to forms or tests is never give an answer smarter than the person who checks the questions.”
He took in a breath, expecting Ben to have insulted him. He couldn’t figure how Ben had.
“We can get you through that shit,” Ben said, with a flip of his hand. “But first let’s see if you’re worth anything in ops.”
He didn’t want to owe Ben anything. He told himself that Ben had probably figured out a new way to screw him—and if there was any hope at all, it was that Ben’s way of screwing him happened to involve his getting his license restored.
Slave labor for him and Bird, maybe: that was all right, from where he was. Do anything they wanted—as long as it got him that permit and got him licensed again.
He thought about that til the Trans came to their stop, at the lift. They got out together, punched up for the core, and waited for the car. He tucked his hands into his pockets and tried not to think ahead, not to tests, not to the docks, not to what the ship was going to look like—
Everything was going to be all right, he wasn’t going to panic, wasn’t going to heave up his guts when he went null-g, it was just going to be damned cold up there, bitter cold: that was why he was shivering when he walked into the lift.
He propped himself against the wall and took a deathgrip on the safety bar while the lift made the core transit: increased g at the first and none at the end—enough to do for a stomach in itself. The car stopped, let them out in the mast Security Zone, and they shoved their cards in the slot.
The null-g here at least didn’t bother him—it only felt—
—felt as if he was back in a familiar place, and wasn’t, as if he were timetripping again: in his head he knew R2’s mast wasn’t anywhere he’d been before when he was cognizant—he kept Bird in sight to keep himself anchored, hooked on and rode the hand-line between Ben and Bird—
The booming racket, the activity, the smell of oil and cold and machinery—all of it could have been Rl. Here and now, he kept telling himself, and by the time he reached Way Out’s berth in Refit, his stomach might have been upset, but he could reason his way toward a kind of numbness.
Even entering the ship wasn’t the jolt he’d thought it would be, following Bird and Ben through the lock. Bird turned the lights up and the ship seemed—ordinary again. It smelled of disinfectant, fresh glue, and oil. He touched Way Out’s panels with cold-numbed fingers and looked around him. Everything around him was the way it had been, as if the wreck had never happened. Same name as she’d had—Cory’s joke, actually—but they’d given her a new number, and she wasn’t his and Cory’s anymore.
Most of all there was no sense of Cory’s existence here. That had been wiped out too. And maybe it was that presence he’d been most afraid to deal with.
“We’ve got the tanks replaced,” Bird was saying, reorienting toward him. “We’re stalled on one lousy part we’re trying to organize on the exchange market—but we’re closing in on finished.”
“How does she look?” Ben asked, point blank, and he could say, calmly, without his teeth chattering, “You’ve done a lot of work with her.”
“Want to get the feel of the boards?” Bird asked. “Main system’s hooked in. Want to run a check?”
He knew then what they were up to, bringing him up here: they were running their own ops test. They wanted to see on their own whether he was missing pieces of his mind—just a simple thing, bring the boards up. Run a check…
He took a breath of the bitter cold, he hauled down and fastened in at the main boards, uncapped switches and pushed buttons—didn’t have to think about them, didn’t think about them, until he realized he’d just keyed beyond the simple board circuit tests: memory flooded up, fingers had keyed the standard config-queries and he could breathe again, didn’t damn well know where he was going, didn’t know exactly at what point he was going to make himself terminate or whether they wanted him to run real checkouts that fed data onto the log—
—Number 4 trim jet wasn’t firing—he caught the board anomaly in the numbers streaming past, the rapid scroll of portside drift; he compensated with a quick fade on 2 and kicked the bow brakes to fend off before the yaw could carry him further—not by the book—he knew it a heartbeat after he’d done it.
The screen went black. The examiner said: “Been a cargo pusher, haven’t you?”
He said, trying not to let the shakes get started, “Yeah. Once.” The examiner understood, then, what he’d done. And why.
The examiner—he was a man, and old—punched a button. Numbers came up, two columns. Graphs followed.
“You’re a re-cert,” the examiner said.
“Trying to be,” he said. He kept his breath even, watched as the examiner punched another set of buttons.
“You can take your card out.”
“Did I pass?”
“D-class vessel, class 3 permit with licensed observer.” The examiner keyed out. “Valid for a year.—You in the Institute?”
“Private,” he said, and the examiner gave him a second look.
“Who with?”
“Morrie Bird. Trinidad.”
“Mmmn.”
He wished he dared ask what that meant. But examiners in his experience didn’t say what your score was, they didn’t discuss the test, they rarely asked questions. This one made him nervous, but he thanked God the man was more than a button-pusher, he must be.
He left the simulator room with his card in hand, took the B-spoke core-lift down to the ECSAA office, feeling the shakes finally hit him while he was at the Certifications desk getting the license, shakes so bad he had to put his hands in his pockets for fear the office staff might see it.