“I’m not a damn mental case, Meg.”
Higgins said, smooth as silk, “We’re not maintaining that. He’s had concussion and broken bones. If you’re a friend of his, persuade him back to bed.”
“I’ve been in bed too damned long. Won’t let me up, won’t let me walk—“
“You’ve been to therapy, lieutenant. Don’t you remember?”
Scared him. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t argue with what they might be able to prove. Or fake records for. He was afraid he was going to pass out, and end the argument that way. “I want my release. Now.”
Higgins frowned, bit his lip. Finally, “I’ll release you to your CO. Personally. If he wants you. Ms. —?”
“Kady. Magritte Kady. Meg, to whoever.” She stuck out her hand. Higgins looked confused and angry. “Higgins, is it?”
He ignored the hand, “Do you mind explaining who the hell you are and where you came from?’’
“Manners,” Dekker said. Still with his grip on the MP, he looked the man close in the eyes and said, “You want to let go? I want to let go.”
Man wasn’t amused. Man said, “Doctor?”
“Let him go.”
Took a bit just to get his hand unclenched. The MP’s uniform had a circle of sweaty wrinkles. The MP refused to straighten it. Man was cold and thin-lipped, and mad as hell. UDC was full of those types. He reached for Meg’s hand and said, “Let’s go.”
“There are forms to fill out,” Higgins said. “And a physical.”
“Had one,” he said, walking—he hoped Meg knew where the door was: he didn’t. He halfway expected the MP was going to have his way after all. He remembered he was in pajamas when he saw the door. He didn’t know any way back to the barracks but the Trans. Didn’t know how he was going to stay conscious through that ride. Little bit of g it pulled would wipe him out.
But Meg steered him for a bench by the door and set him down. “You just stay mere a minute. I’m going to go back there and call your CO. Isn’t anybody coming near you. —Is your CO going to pull you out?”
“Yeah, yeah, I mink he’s already got somebody coming.”
“Then I’ll stand here and wait. If you’re sure. —You going to be all right?”
“Yeah,” he said. His teeth had started to chatter. He was barefoot. The pajamas weren’t worm much. Meg took off her coat, put it around his shoulders, and made him hold on to it. She left him a moment and came back with a blanket, God knew how.
She said, “Higgins is severely pissed. He’s on the phone.
But the nurse is all right. Nurse asked if you wanted a chair.”
Nurse was the one he’d hit. More than once. He shook his head, with some remorse for that—and regret for missing his chance at Higgins. Meg tucked the blanket around him, and under his bare feet, and sat down and offered him a warmer place to lean. They’d never been to bed together, had just been letter writers, at 830 million k remote from each other. They’d discovered they were attracted to each other too late to do anything about it, except that goodbye kiss. And now a hello one, a hug and a place to lean on, when he’d gotten to the absolute bottom of his strength. Meg never found him but what he was a mess. And here she was, he’d no idea how. She hadn’t come straight with him. And maybe sitting here with her like this was all another hallucination. If he was hallucinating this time he didn’t want to come back again, didn’t want to fight them, didn’t want to get even, didn’t want to prove anything to anybody. Just sit, long as he could, long as he could hold himself awake.
Meg said, “Well, well, blue uniforms, this time. That us?”
He focused stupidly on figures the other side of the glass. On one young, fair-haired.. .Graff, for God’s sake. With Fleet Security.
He bit his lip til it hurt enough. He said, “Don’t let me fall, Meg,” and stood up, letting go the blanket, as Graff came through the Perspex doors. “Lt. Graff, sir.”
Graff looked at him, up and down, Graff frowned—you could never tell what Graff was thinking. Could have been of skinning him alive, for all he could read.
Meg said, “They’ve been drugging him to the gills, sir. He never did do well with that.”
Graff said to the MPs, “Take him to the ship.”
“Barracks,” Dekker said, then was sorry he’d objected. He’d take anywhere but here. But he didn’t know the ship.
He wanted somewhere he knew. He wanted people he knew, namely Meg, and Sal, and Ben.
“Just long enough for a check-up,” Graff said. “I want you on record, Dekker. From the outside in. You behave yourself, hear? No nonsense.”
“Yessir,” he said. He let Security take hold of him, he sat down and they said they were going to borrow a chair; he heard Graff tell Meg Welcome in; and: “Hereafter, don’t start a war. Wait for the UN to declare it.”
“Yessir,” Meg said. Which wasn’t a word he ever recalled from Meg Kady. But Meg had enlisted. The fool. The absolute fool, if that was the price of Meg’s ticket here. He felt tears in his eyes, thinking about that.
But damned if he could figure out how she’d managed it, all in all.
Time had gotten away from him again. It kept doing that. So maybe he was, the way Ben said, crazy.
Chapter 6
WELCOME back,” they said, “welcome back, Dek.” Jamil and Trace, Pauli and Almarshad and Hap Vasquez—they intercepted him at the door when he was only calculating how much strength he had to get to his own quarters and fall into bed. Jamil warned the rest about grabbing hold of him, thank God, most of all thank God for Ben and Meg and Sal Aboujib showing up out of the depth of the room to rescue him from too much input too fast... he was tracking on too much: he knew and didn’t know in any detail what he’d said to the guys or what they’d said to him, and for one dislocated moment he really thought Pete or Elly or Falcone was going to turn up in the barracks; they always had... But they weren’t going to do that ever again, dammit, end report, o-mega; he was here on this wave of time, and by a break of bad luck they weren’t, and he was going to fall on his face if the guys didn’t let him get to his quarters. He’d spent hours out in a null g sickbay, been prodded and probed and sampled and vid-taped from angles and in a condition he didn’t want on the evening news, and his imagination until now had only extended to lying down in quiet, not running an emotional gauntlet of friends of dead friends— who could see how absolutely he’d been screwed over, dammit, when he should at least have gotten some of theirs back. He didn’t know what had happened to him in hospital, not all of it; he didn’t know what he’d admitted to, most of all he couldn’t remember what had put him there, and by that, he’d evidently let the lieutenant down, too, in some major way...
“Come on,” Meg said, and he walked across a tilting, unstable floor, around a comer, down a short hall to a familiar door and a room that had been—images kept flashing on him out of a situation he didn’t remember—cold and empty the last time he’d left it, clothes in the lockers nobody was going to use any more....
Now it was alive with voices and faces out of a period of his life that never should have recrossed his track, except it was like a gravity well, things didn’t fly straight, they kept coming around at you again and he didn’t even know the center of mass. That should be a calculable thing. He should be able to solve that problem, with the data he had....
“Get him in bed,” Meg was saying, “he’s severely spaced,” and Ben said, “Damned fool had to walk it, where’s his head anyway?”
Ben never minced words. He could cope with Ben far better than he could Sal Aboujib, who, after Ben had got him onto his bunk, pinned him with hands on either side of him, looked him in the face so close he was cross-eyed and said, “Oh, he’s still pretty. Dek, sincerely good to see you. So good you’re in one piece—“