Do him credit, Villy didn’t even try to defend the technicality. “Mitchell’s crew and mine. No subs. When Dekker passes the medicals and the reaction tests—ask the colonel then. He’ll put him back on. Just wait till the boy quiets. For his own sake. For the program’s.”
“Whose medicals? Yours or ours?”
Villy evidently hadn’t considered that point. “I’ll talk to the colonel. Maybe we can arrange something. We can’t afford another set-back. You know it and I know it. We’ve got to pull this thing together before we lose it.”
“I’m willing. But I want the heat o/Dekker’s tail. The kid’s had enough.”
“No argument here.”
A bite of cake. Time to reflect. “Captain Villy, —do you personally know what happened in the pod access?”
Villy didn’t answer that one straightaway either. “If I knew it was us I wouldn’t say. If I didn’t know anything, I wouldn’t have an answer. What does that tell you?”
“You dance well.”
Villy laughed, not with much humor. Tapped the table with his finger. “We got the senatorial and the techs out of here. We’ve got the program back in our hands. We’re not going to get another design. That’s the word.”
First he’d heard. Had they won one? “No redesign?”
“That’s the whisper going down the line. Heard it from the Old Man, We don’t get the AI. Rumor is, we’re going for another run in the sims, try to build a stricter no-do into the pilot, not the machine.”
Graff leaned back, heart thumping. Took a breath. He couldn’t tell whether Villanueva was happy with that situation or not. “So what’s your opinion?”
“Go with it. That’s what I’m saying. Your best. And ours. We try to set the tape, best we can. Then we fly with it. —You won it, J-G. Enjoy it.”
The nickname was traveling. And he wasn’t sure he’d won anything: he’d gotten extremely wary of concessions from Tanzer’s office. But Villy said:
“We’re not happy with the situation—I don’t trust your tape-teaching, and that’s evidently what they’re leaning on, heavier and heavier. 1 don’t like the damn system, I still don’t think drugging down and walking through any situation is any cure for some kid hitting his personal wall—we can’t guarantee your reflexes, or mine, are going to be in every guy that’s ever going to run through this program.”
Old argument. Graff said softly, delicately, “That’s why we’re getting them where we’re getting them.” But he didn’t say, And we’ll fill out the primary pilot list outside Sol System. You didn’t say that. On the captain’s orders you didn’t. Earth didn’t want to know that.
No.
“Listen,” Villy said, “you know and I know we’re reaching the bottom of the barrel. People don’t go out to be miners and Shepherds because they’re upstanding citizens. They’re ex-rab, they’re asocials ... These two girls you got in—-both of them have records...”
The rab was some kind of Emigration movement. Pro-space. Anti-Company. It had turned violent, ten years ago, big blow-up, company police had panicked, opened fire on a crowd...
“Dekker has a record,” he reminded Villy. “He’s also popular in the Belt. The Company system out there was crooked. He beat it. You know what the UDC’s setting up, making his life difficult? It’s certainly not the best PR move the UDC could make. And Kady and Aboujib were part of Dekker’s crew out there, such as survived—another pilot and a numbers man, as the Belters call it: good ones, for what the record shows.”
Villy made a wry expression, took a sip of coffee. “May be. We’ll see—once the boy’s back in the sims. Personally, I hope he makes it. He’s a son of a bitch, but Chad didn’t dislike him.”
“Wasn’t any animosity on either side, that I know. Dekker got along with Wilhelmsen.”
A pause. “J-G, off the record—between you and me: do you really buy it that Chad’s crew dumped him in that pod?”
“I don’t buy it that Dekker went crazy when he saw the ship blow. Not till the MPs tried to make him leave mission control, get him away from the senators and the VIPs. After mat, no, he wasn’t highly reasonable. Would you be? So he said something that wasn’t politic—people do that. Other people don’t necessarily try to kill them in cold blood. No, I’m not accusing the crew. I find it almost as unlikely as Dekker doing it to himself. You’ve got to understand, Villy: this kid spent a couple of months in the dark, in a tumble, in the Belt—bad accident. He couldn’t get the ship back under control. This isn’t a guy who’s going to suicide that way, of all the ways he could pick. And no Belter’s going to do mat to him. Not the way they did it. So you tell me what happened.”
Villy thought about that one, thought about it very seriously, by all he could tell. Then; “Let me tell you about Chad’s crew. They’re professionals, Rob’s got a father he’s supporting, guy got caught in a tractor accident, insurance won’t pay anything but basics; Kesslan and Deke are real close with Rob—they’re not going to risk it, for one thing, even if they were that mad, which I don’t think they were. I think they understood Dekker’s outburst. Might not have liked it, but understood it. Murder just doesn’t add.”
Made some sense—granted the father had no means of support; which he personally didn’t know—nor understand, inside Earth’s maze of cultures and governments, any more than he understood the motives and the angers that bred in the motherwell.
“Won’t say,” Villy added, “that there aren’t some others Dekker could’ve touched off. But don’t try to tell me it was Chad’s crew.”
“I respect your judgment.” Mostly, that was the truth. “But what do we do? Dekker doesn’t deserve what’s happened. His crew didn’t deserve what happened. Wilhelmsen—didn’t deserve what happened. Let me tell you, in that hearing, I never tried to suggest that Wilhelmsen was primarily at fault, because I never believed it. He was good. It was exactly what I said: that substitution killed him and it killed the rest of them.”
Villy was listening, at least. Maybe it was something in the coffee. Reason seemed possible of a sudden and he hammered it home. “It’s not possible, it’s not the way things work at light speed, Villy, it can’t be, you can’t treat people like that. An ops team is a living organism. You don’t split it and expect it to perform with anything like efficiency.”
Long silence. A sip of coffee. “We’ve changed the damn specs so often it’s a wonder anything mates with anything. The mechanics are overworked, they can’t do the maintenance in the manufacturers’ specs, on the schedule they’re being handed, with the staff they’ve got. That’s the next disaster waiting to happen and nobody wants to listen to them. We’ve got a program in trouble.”
“We’ve got a human race in trouble, Villy. I’ve been there, I’ve seen what we’re fighting—I don’t want that future for the species, I don’t happen to think that social designers can remake the model we’ve got—“
But when you thought about it, just trying to talk to Villy—you began asking yourself—however we, haven’t we, already? Hasn’t distance, and hasn’t time?
Like to take you outside the well, like to open your eyes, Captain Villy, and let you feel it when you drop out and in. They’d never get you back here again....
Because the part of Villanueva there was to like, came alive when he was talking about his job. You saw that sometimes in his face.
“You have no attachment,” Villanueva said, “no feeling for being from this planet.”
“I’ve met what isn’t,” Graff said.
Interest from Villy. Quirk of a brow. “What are they like?”
“They’re them. We’re us. Sociable fellows. They don’t fight wars.”