“You take good care of this woman,” I tell him. “She’s a friend of mine, too, and she needs careful handling. Listen to what she says. There’s a real woman in that bikini.”
Now Erica looks at me with a grateful, romantic sigh. Collette gives me a soft punch in the ribs.
The ride up the crew elevator of the large ship is achingly familiar—twice during the thirty seconds I have the certainty I’m going on watch for the thousandth time. There’s a salt scum on the edges of my lips from this afternoon, I lick them to recall exactly where I am.
As usual, Dome A is almost empty—the circular room, twenty meters across, is ringed with electronics of the same order as the Daedalus—and the consoles grouped in the center still use whole rows for vanes. The transparent dome is canted toward the center of the three-cylindered ship. Through the slightly blue glass of the dome’s ground the tropical evening sky is just beginning to show; the day’s light is failing, but within this chamber there are no interior lights. I spot Taylor standing in the dimness at one of the consoles near the chart table.
“Does feel like home,” I say, walking over the familiar magnesium-alloy floor—and I am blithely there before I feel my blood come up, before I realize we aren’t alone.
“The technology has not changed very much,” the other party says crisply, her voice agonizingly familiar, absolute in the silence. “All new preprogramming, new autopilots over there. But technology develops only to a point. Beyond that point, the interesting instruments are human.”
It is Eva Steiner who steps from the vane consoles. Taylor clears his throat, sets down an amber envelope with my name on it, and takes off his glasses, begins wiping one lens. “You once were anxious to meet my commanding officer,” Taylor says flatly, nodding to Eva Steiner. “Well…”
The cutting edge of my feelings turns against myself. The sight of Eva Steiner, the dawning realization that she is Taylor’s superior, slice through me like a knife. I had never thought this through—feel myself flush, feel the anger I had earlier today bleed through and to the sight of her, standing with a tight, thin smile before me in a shiny black flight suit, the crop she held in Las Venus at her side, the amber double loops of SciCom insignia on her shoulder, faint on the handle of her crop.
“I’m glad you are surprised,” she says, her thin eyebrows raised, her nostrils wide. “So not even Massimo Giroti knew. Well, very good. I don’t go on vacations, Captain. Not even on this ship.”
“I don’t know if surprise is the right word,” I say, thinking, So that’s how she knew of my orders, that’s why Collette was transferred to her after the first leg. It stuns my imagination. My God, I think, the ship so familiar around me, thinking of the Daedalus crew, what did we do to unleash this?
“You look surprised,” Taylor says, his full eyebrows furrowing. “You’re right,” he says to Eva Steiner. “It was worth it to see his expression.”
I reach past him for the amber envelope he’s set on the navigator’s table. He draws away from my approach, as if my move were to grab him. A small wave of satisfaction’ runs through me, at least he knows my mind.
“We’re a little embarrassed at the way things have turned out,” Eva Steiner says in an oily voice as I break open the envelope’s seal. “I can’t tell you how much trouble this whole affair has caused between us and military.”
I pull out and unfold the stiff sheet within. Formal orders: through Washington via military cable, copies to SciCom. Clean leave orders; military’s worked again.
“So I’m authorized to tell you you’re officially on leave,” Taylor says as if he’s doing me a favor.
“I’ve been on leave since my appeal was approved,” I tell him, folding my orders, pulling on the fold, slipping the sheet into my breast pocket. “Neither of you seems to understand that. You’re going to hear from Flight, I can guarantee that.”
“Oh, Rawley,” Eva Steiner says, purring. “We’ve already heard from Flight.”
I look past her pale, lined face and down the row of vane consoles, light green instruments, winking lights at rest. Microweather systems look the same, the principle of propulsion and control identical. To work again, I think, to get away—I’ve had to put flying out of my mind, but in this instant I find myself wanting to work a ship again, to feel the bump and roll of light-speed flight, I’ve been away from it long enough. Yet how little difference there’s been, I think with a shock of recognition. On board the Daedalus, ship SciCom kept up a running battle with dome crew, bogged us down with Committee Pilot, multiple logs, redundant information, five-copy corrections. In the end it’s the same, I think, it’s an attitude. But at least we weren’t spied on then, not manipulated. Or were we? I wonder now, wonder about Cooper’s strangeness to all of us.
“So we’re through,” Taylor says. “I’m supposed to thank you for your cooperation. I don’t think I will.”
“Not through, exactly,” I tell him.
“I don’t think so, either, Voorst,” Taylor says, becoming engaged. “I’m not satisfied. There are just too many…”
“You’re finished here, Colonel,” Steiner says.
“We’re through on Guam,” Taylor says, slightly surly. “I don’t see what difference—”
“I want to know exactly what happened to Cooper,” I say firmly. “And I’m going to find out.”
Taylor takes a deep breath, exchanges hardening looks with Eva Steiner, then tells me he doesn’t doubt that I will. As for himself, he’s got nothing more to say. I bite my upper lip, my heart thumping. I stare blankly at the pastel charts laid out on the navigator’s table: tomorrow’s launch orbit and the sunloop are plotted, overlaid with interstellar courses. What’s going on? I look into Taylor’s eyes, they swim behind the thickness of his glasses as if underwater. I have the feeling I’ve been here before, looked into that face with the same exasperation, I have been here forever.
And then Taylor’s gone.
“You know something about Cooper,” I say, alone with Eva Steiner in the fading light, a mauve tropical sky huge through the dome above us, the consoles in deepening shadow.
Eva Steiner turns a little pale. “There are problems,” she says. “When Cooper came down, he was experiencing a gross psychotic episode. We held him on Guam for observation, then we had to ship him to Houston. He overdosed while he was there by ingesting a full gram of pure hallucinogens. We brought part of him back, part of him. And what there is of him is ours. He didn’t come back quite human. The man is not a human being.”
“He’s alive?”
“After a fashion.”
“What do you mean, after a fashion? What are you talking about? Cooper’s alive?”
“I can show you something,” she says with a thin smile. “Draw your own conclusions.” Steiner punches up a security code, then a video link, on the navigator’s rack of monitors. The small screen flips, then steadies in an eerie blue light to show what appears to be a cell, there’s a white-haired man sitting in a cell, broad shoulders, full bushy beard—the man is Cooper. His hair is white and he is slumped over on a stained cot, behind bars. The picture is fuzzy, its resolution poor, but there appear to be a series of dark patches on his exposed forearm, an ashtray overflowing with cigarettes on the floor beside the cot. He is slumped over, propped against a metal wall, his feet on a metal floor. No, Cooper never smoked, I am thinking as I watch him raise his face—he’s drooling, looks twenty years older, his eyes dark, blank sockets, horrifying.
“My God,” I say. “Where is he? Is this a tape?”