He walked to his quarters without looking back at her and Curran and the others, solitary… back to the museum that was his cabin, and to the silence. He closed the door, keyed in on comp with the volume very low.
“Hello, Sandy,” it said. That was all he wanted to hear. “How are you?”
“Fine,” he said back to the voice. “Still alive, Ross.”
“What do you need, Sandy?”
He cut the comp off, on again. “Hello, Sandy. How are you?”
He cut it off a second time, because while they could not access the room channels from the bridge without the keys, someone would see the activity. He stood there treasuring the sound, empty as it was. He could get one of the instruction sequences going, and have the voice for hours—he missed that But they would grow alarmed. His quarantine gave him this much of Ross back; in that much he treasured his solitude.
He showered, wrapped himself in his robe, went out to the galley—found Allison and Curran, still dressed, standing waiting for the oven he wanted to use. He stopped, set himself against the wall, a casual leaning, hands in pockets of the robe, a studious attention to the deck tiles.
A clatter of doors and trays then. He looked toward them, reckoning that they were through. Watched them pour coffee and arrange trays for the rest of them. “Here,” Allison said to him, “want one?”
He passed an eye over them: four trays. “I’ll do my own, thanks. It’s all right.”
“Galley’s yours.”
He nodded, went to the freezer, pulled an ordinary breakfast. His hands were shaking: they always did that if he was late getting food after a jump. “Did the jump real well,” he said to Allison, peace offering while she was gathering up the trays.
Small courtesies had to be examined. She looked up, two of the trays in her hand while Curran went out with the other two. Nodded then, deciding to be pleased. “Better,” she said, “when I can do all of it.”
She had to throw that in. He nodded after the same fashion, not without the flash of a thought through his mind, that it was several days through the nullpoint and that they might have something in mind. “You’ll be all right,” he said, offering that too.
She went her way. He cooked his breakfast, shivering and spilling things until he had gotten a spoonful of sugar into his stomach and followed the nauseating spoonful with a chaser of hot coffee. That helped. The tremors were at least less frequent. The coffee began to warm his stomach—real coffee. He had gotten used to the taste of it, after the substitutes.
The oven went off. He retrieved his breakfast, sat down, sole possessor of the galley and the table. It was a curious kind of truce. They retreated from him, as if they found his presence accusatory. And he went on owning his ship, in a solitude the greater for having a ship full of company.
When? he kept wondering. And: what next? They could go on forever in this war. He kept things courteous, which was safest for himself; and they knew that, and played the game, suspecting everything he did.
He wandered back to the bridge when he was done. He had that much concern for the ship’s whereabouts. The Dubliners sat on the benches at the rear, having the last of their coffee—a little looser than they had been, a little more like Krejas had run the ship, because it was safe enough to sit back there with Lucy on auto. Not spit and polish enough for some captains; not regulation enough: there was a marginal hazard, enough to say that one chance out of a million could kill them all before they could react —like ambush. Unacceptable risk for Dublin Again, carrying a thousand lives; with ample personnel for trading shifts—but here it was only reasonable. Four Dubliner faces looked up at him, perhaps disconcerted to be caught at such a dereliction. He nodded to them, went to the scan board—heard a stir behind him, knew someone was afoot.
Nothing. Nothing out there. Only the point of mass, a lonely gas giant radiating away its last remnant of heat, a star that failed… a collection of planetoid/moons that were on the charts and dead ahead as they bore, headed toward the nadir pole of the system. Nothing for vid to pick up without careful searching: the emissions of the gas giant came through the dish. But no sign of anything living. No ship. That was nothing unusual at any null-point. But Mallory had made a point of saying that the points were watched.
He straightened and looked at the Dubliners—Curran and Allison on their feet, the others still seated, no less watching him. “Got our course plotted outside the ring,” he said quietly, “missing everything on the charts. Old charts. You might keep that in mind. In case.”
“You might come across with the keys,” Curran said.
He shrugged. Walked the way he had come, ignoring all that passed among them.
“Stevens” Curran’s voice pursued him.
He looked back with his best innocence. No one moved. “Thirty-six hours twenty-two minutes to mark,” he said quietly. “What do you think you’ll find where we’re going? A station Pell’s size? Civilization? I’d be surprised. Do you want to start this over—try it my way this time?”
“No,” Allison said after a moment. “Partners. That’s the way it works.”
“Might. Might, Reilly.”
“If we go at it your way.”
“This isn’t Dublin. You don’t get your way. You signed onto my ship and my way is the way she runs. Majority vote wasn’t in the papers. Cooperative wasn’t. My way’s it. That’s the way it works. You sit down and figure out who’s on the wrong side of the law.”
He walked off and left them then, went back to his own quarters—entertained for a little while the forlorn hope that they might in fact think about that, and come to terms. But he had not hoped much, and when no one came, he curled up and courted sleep.
A suited figure rumbled through his vision, and that was himself and that was Mitri. He opened his eyes again, to drive that one away; but it rode his mind, that image that came back to him every time he thought of solitude. He shivered, recalling a boy’s gut-deep fear, and cowardice.
(“Ross,” he had called, sick and shaking. “Ross, he’s dead, he’s dead; get back in here. I can’t handle the ship, Ross—I can’t take her alone. Please come back—Ross…”)
The feeling was back in his gut, as vivid as it had been; the sweating cowardice; the terror—He swore miserably to himself, knowing this particular dream, that when it latched onto his mind for the night he would go on dreaming it until Lucy’s skin seemed too thin to insulate him from the ghosts.
He propped himself on his elbows in the dark, supported his head on his hands… Finally got up in the dark and turned up the light, hunting pen and paper.
He wrote it down, the central key to comp, and put it in the drawer under the mirror, afraid of having it there—but after that he could turn out the lights and go back to bed.
Mitri gave him peace then.
He slept the night through; and waked, and fended his way past Deirdre and Neill at breakfast. In all, there was a quiet over all the ship, less of threat than of anger. And a great deal of the day he came and sat on the bridge, simply took a post and sat it— because it was safer that way, for the ship, for them. He took his blanket and his pillow that night and slept there, so that there was that much less distance between himself and controls if something went wrong.
“Give it up,” Allison asked of him, on her watch.