He took account of that on the instant, that in fact his humor was a facade, which she had seen through constantly. It might not work so well—here, with a Dubliner’s pride, on a Dubliner’s money. He reckoned suddenly that he could make one bad enemy or—perhaps—save something to remember in the far long darks between stations. She scared him, that was the plain fact, because she had all the cards that mattered; and he could too easily believe that she was going to laugh, or talk about this to her cousins, and laugh in telling them how she had bought herself a night’s amusement and had a joke at his expense. Worst of all, he was afraid he was going to freeze with her, because every time he was half persuaded it was real he had the nagging suspicion she knew what he was, and that meant police.
He steadied her face in his hand and tried kissing her, a tentative move, a courtesy between dock-met strangers. She leaned against him and answered in kind until the blood was hammering in his veins.
“Shouldn’t we close the door?” she suggested then, a practicality which slammed him back to level again. He let her go and pushed the door switch, looked back again desperately, beginning to suspect that the whole situation was humorous, and that he deserved laughing at, even by himself. He was older than she was; but he was, he reckoned, far younger in such encounters. Naive. Scared.
“I’m for a shower,” Allison Reilly said cheerfully, and started shedding the silver coveralls. “You too?”
He started shedding his own, at once embarrassed because he was off balance in the casualness of her approach and because he still suspected humor in what with him was beginning to be shatteringly serious.
She laughed; she splashed him with soap and managed to laugh in the shower and tumbling in the bed with the blue sheets, but not at all moments. For a long, long while she was very serious indeed, and he was. They made love with total concentration, until they ended curled in each other’s arms and utterly exhausted.
He woke. The lights were still on as they had been; and Allison stirred and murmured about her watch and Dublin, while he held onto her with a great and desperate melancholy and a question boiling in him that had been there half the night
“Meet you again?” he asked.
“Sometime,” she said, tracing a finger down his jaw. “I’m headed out this afternoon.”
His heart plummeted. “Where next?”
A little frown creased her brow. “Pell,” she said finally. “That’s not on the boards, but you could find it in the offices. Going across the Line. Got a deal working there. Be back—maybe next year, local.”
His heart sank farther. He lay there a moment, thinking about his papers, his cargo, his hopes. About an old man who might talk, and fortunes that had shaved the profit in his account to the bone. Year’s end was coming. If he had to, he could lay over and skim nothing more until the new year, but it would rouse suspicion and it would run up a dock charge he might not work off. “What deal at Pell?” he asked. “Is that what’s got the military stirred up?”
“You hear a lot of things on the docks,” she said, cautious and frowning. “But what’s that to you?”
“I’ll see you at Pell.”
“That’s crazy. You said you were due at Fargone.”
“I’ll see you at Pell.”
The frown deepened. She shifted in his arms, leaned on him, looking down into his face. “We’re pulling out today. Just how fast is your Lucy? You think a marginer’s going to run races with Dublin?”
“So you’ll be shifting mass. I’m empty. I’ll make it”
“Divert your ship? What’s your combine going to say? Tell me that”
“I’ll be there.”
She was quiet a moment, then ducked her head and laughed softly, not believing him. “Got a few hours yet,” she reminded him.
They used them.
And when she left, toward noon, he walked her out to the dock-side near her own ship, and watched her walk away, a trim silver-coveralled figure, the way he had seen her first
He was sober now, and ought to have recovered, ought to shrug and call it enough. He ought to take himself and his ideas back to realspace and find that insystemer kid who might have ambitions of learning jumpships. He had knowledge to sell, at least, to someone desperate enough to sign with him, although the last and only promising novice he had signed had gotten strung out on the during-jump trank and not come down again or known clearly what he was doing when he had dosed himself too deeply and died of it
Try another kid, maybe, take another chance. He talked well; that was always his best skill, that he could talk his way into and out of anything. He ought to take up where he had left off last night, scouting the bars and promoting himself the help he needed. He had cargo coming, the tag ends of station commerce, if he only waited and if some larger ship failed to snatch it; and if a certain old man kept his gossip to his own ship.
But he watched her walk away to a place he could not reach, and he had found nothing in all his life but Lucy herself that had wound herself that deeply into his gut
Lucy against Dublin Again. There was that talk of new runs opening at Pell, the Hinder Stars being visited again, of trade with Sol, and while that rumor was almost annual, there was something like substance to it this time. The military was stirred up. Ships had gone that way. Dublin was going. Had a deal, she had said, and then shut up about it. The idea seized him, shook at him. He loved two things in his life that were not dead, and one of them was Lucy and the other was the dream of Allison Reilly.
Lucy was real, he told himself, and he could lose her; while Allison Reilly was too new to know, and far too many-sided. The situation with his accounts was not yet hopeless; he had been tighter than this and still made the balance. He ought to stick to what he had and not gamble it all.
And go where, then, and do what? He could not leave Dublin’s track without thinking how lonely it was out there; and never dock at a station without hoping that somehow, somewhen, Dublin would cross his path. A year from now, local… and he might not be here. Might be—no knowing where. Or caught, before he was much older, caught and mindwashed, so that he would see Dublin come in and not remember or not feel, when they had stripped his Lucy down to parts and done much the same with him.
He stood there more obvious in his stillness than he ever liked to be, out in the middle of the dock, and then started for dockside offices with far more haste than he ever liked to use in his movements, and browbeat the dockmaster’s agent with more eloquence than he had mustered in an eloquent career, urging a private message which had just been couriered in and the need to get moving at once to Voyager. “So just fill the tanks,” he begged of them, with that desperation calculated to give the meanest docksider a momentary sense of power; and to let that docksider recall that supposedly he was Wyatt’s Star Combine, which might, if balked, receive reports up the line, and take offense at delay. “Just that much. Give me dry goods, no freezer stuff if it takes too long. I’ll boil water from the tanks. Just get those lines on and get me moving.”
There was what he had half expected, a palm open on the counter, right in the open office. He sweated, recalling police, recalling that ominous line of military ships docked just outside these offices on blue dock, two carriers in port, no less, with troops, troops like Viking stationers, unnervingly alike in size and build and manner, the stamp of birth labs. But tape-trained or not, Union citizen or not, there was the occasional open hand. If it was not a police trap. And that was possible too.