Damn! she thought, her heart pounding. McKenzie gave her the shakes. The appointment she was going to gave her the same.
Damn, she thought, why are you doing this, Bet Yeager?
No good answer for that one, besides hormones—and besides a real disgust with the skuz who was back there trying to buy her along with a beer, and disgust with the women's surly silence, and a disgust for what she was picking up for morals on this crew. There were a lot of peculiar things on this ship, she thought, and only one crazy man gave her anything like a healthy feeling.
Hormones, maybe. But there was her own experience with Fitch. There was what Musa had said. And Gypsy Muller's ambiguous signal.
She headed on around past Ops and Engineering, past ordinary traffic, and ducked into the shop-stowage, quite business-like.
The lights inside were on power-save. The place was three long aisles of bins; and all around the edge, barrels of plassy for the injection-mold and pieces of the press, and pieces for the extrusion-mold, and hoses and rods and wire and insulation-bales that made the whole huge compartment a maze. She leaned against the door, looked left and right and listened for sound above the general white-noise that masked everything on a little ship.
"NG?" she called out, enough to carry in the place, in case he had gotten here ahead of her and just hadn't heard the manual-latch door.
Not a sound. But with him that was nothing unusual.
She had a sudden, bad case of the willies, felt the chill in the place, her breath frosting in the dim light. She chafed her arms and folded them, wishing she had a sweater under the jumpsuit.
God, the man wants to make love in a damn freezer.
If that's actually what he wants, she thought then, with a little upset at her stomach, thinking that a man on the edge could just be crazier than anybody thought, could be waiting somewhere in here with a knife or something, in some notion that she was pushing him—
What in hell am I doing in this hole? I got more sense than this, I always had more sense than this.
So I can take care of myself. Taking care of myself means getting the hell out of here, back to quarters, just tell him later I couldn't find him—
And, sure, he'll believe that. And then I got trouble with him.
You focus a crazy on you, you got trouble forever, that's what you've done, Bet Yeager. You know better, you known better since you were eight years old…
She ought to get back to quarters, just go to bed, not with McKenzie, not with anybody tonight, not for a lot of nights, maybe—just get her thinking straightened out and maybe figure out some things. She already had two problems on this crew, three, counting Fitch, and the smart thing to do now, the smart thing to have gone for in the first place, was to shed all connection with NG Ramey, and get in with a compatible crowd well on the Ins with everybody, some group with a woman in it, dammit, she wanted buddies as well as bed-mates, and the female crew was being more than stand-off right now. She was getting hostile signals out of certain people, all women, like she was doing something entirely wrong, or like she was crossing lines she didn't know existed—and she was less and less sure she was doing anything right.
She was about two jumps from scared about this crew, considering the confused signals she was getting out of McKenzie—scared of what she was picking up from the women the way she was scared with stationers, scared the way she'd been scared sometimes on Ernestine, like she walked around making wrong move after wrong move and people were putting their heads together and whispering at her back—look at her: look at the way she did that—that's not civ.
She tried to remember civ manners. She tried to act right. She'd been sixteen when she'd volunteered aboard Africa, but she remembered very little about home before that, couldn't even clearly remember her mama's face, just the apartment where you had to let down the bunks to sleep every night and put them up to move around, everything was so crowded; and mama's clothes hanging all along one wall and lying all over the deck—just the dingy metal corridors of Pan-paris number two refinery-ship, and the places she used to hang out, the holes there were—her mama trying to handle a kid who never did take to civ rules, who was always in trouble, people always making up their minds two and three times what they wanted, rules they never posted, exceptions they never told you—
But then, mama could have done a better job of telling her the regs in the first place. And mama never had a real grip on things. Mama would break something, mama would slap her for it, mama would come in mad and you just ducked out, didn't matter whether it was your fault or not.
Never could figure mama out, let alone mama's friends. Never could trust what one said, never dared get alone with them.
Because she never was In with civs. But when you got In on a ship, you could trust people. Like Bieji Hager, and Teo—the five of them—the times they had—
Damn!
She got a lump in her throat, suddenly felt like it was the refinery-ship around her again, felt herself strangled and had to get out, get a breath of air, get herself back to bright light and sanity—
She opened the door and ran straight into NG, inbound.
"I—" she said, face to face with him. She didn't want to upset him or act the fool, and then it was too late, she'd let him back her up inside and shove the latch down on the door. So there she was, in the middle of it.
She shoved her hands into her pockets and said: "Wasn't sure you were coming."
She felt like she was sixteen again. Or twelve. Only it wasn't mama they were dodging. It was Fitch.
"I wanted to talk to you," she said. He tried to take hold of her right off and she flinched back a couple of steps, fast, not even what she wanted to do, she was that spooked.
He turned his move into a throwaway gesture, a hell with you kind of shrug, and, God, her hands were shaking. She balled them into fists and stuck them back into her pockets where they were safe.
I like you, she wanted to start with, but that was stupid, there was no knowing what NG was capable of: he could go off the edge, do something violent later if he got the idea there was some kind of claim he had on her. She said: "Are we safe here?"
He just stared at her, talkative as he always was when he was crossed.
"Aren't," she concluded, and her skin crawled. Then she thought about Fitch, thought about NG getting on report about one more time.
Last chance for him, Musa had said.
"I don't want to get you in trouble," she said. "Ramey, dammit—"
Hell, I can't even get my own shit straight on this ship. What can I do for him?
She shook her head and raked a hand through her hair, and looked at him again. "Look, I got caught up with a guy last night, didn't really want that. I wanted to go over and ask you up to my bunk, that was what I wanted, I wanted to get things straight, but you said it'd make trouble. So I didn't come over and talk to you, I don't know what you're mad at."
Not a word, hardly a blink from him.
"Ramey, give me some help here."
Long silence. Then: "You can get in a lot of trouble," he said, so quietly she could hardly hear him above the ship-noise. "More than crew. Better not to be here. Better not to talk to me."