she said. "But, well, we've got to stay friends. Give me your address. After I get my head in order again, I'll be in touch."
Brim suddenly froze. How to say he couldn't bear to see her again, that he was ashamed he was no longer a Helmsman? In a flash, it came to him. It wasn't necessary! She didn't seem to care what he did.
The subject had never even come up; he himself had been too busy to think about it. Before he quite knew what he was doing, he'd blabbed out his address. Then, in clicks she was on her way. This time, however, he got no kiss.
He watched her skimmer careen around a corner, and she was gone. Clearly she was still operating the same decrepit little vehicle she'd used all through the war. He wondered how either of them had survived her driving. Savoring the fresh memory of I that stunning face, he stood for a moment in silence, wondering... What if he'd persisted in his original resolve to give up Margot shortly after she married?
Would he and Claudia be together now?
He stopped pursuing that train of thought immediately. One chooses one's path he affirmed, climbing into the gravcycle's worn saddle, then one follows that path and never looks back.
Little more than a week later, Brim strode from his tiny apartment and picked his way through Atalanta's fragrant predawn darkness to his gravcycle. It was soaked with a dull glaze of dew, and he carefully wiped its seat with his huge red handkerchief. In doing so, he accidentally swiped loose a folded sheet of plastic that someone had wedged between the machine's tiller and readout panel. He shook his head.
Another advertisement. Hardly a morning went by that there weren't a few stuck somewhere on the powerful little machine. Imagine how many he'd accumulate if he were driving something the size of a limousine!
As usual, the gravity mechanism was difficult to start, and when finally it did catch, refused to maintain any kind of steady output, although it did manage to startle a large rothcat that was stalking a moth nearby. The little machine grumbled and hiccuped uncomfortably while Brim dismounted and hunkered down to peer through a tiny porthole in the ion chamber. The two plasma beams were completely out of sync, as usual. He chuckled and shook his head wryly. The weather must have changed again; it didn't take much to throw the whole thing out of kilter. He reached inside his saddlebags, retrieved a pair of torquing tools, and, inserting them almost by feel, delicately twisted first the left, then the right until...
there, the beams matched perfectly. But he didn't really need to see them at that point; he could hear the results. The dyspeptic belching had already tapered off into a silken growl that would have pleased even a Sodeskayan Drive engineer. Damned fine little machine, he thought happily—and fast as it was sweet.
As he drew the torquers from their sockets, his left hand brushed a heated cooling fin. Swearing, he dropped the tool. It landed squarely on the advertisement, which, close up, didn't look like an advertisement at all. No pictures, no headlines, simply a small folded sheet of plastic with... He switched on the cycle's headlamp. There were initials on the outside; CVN. CVN? Quizzically breaking the seal, he unfolded the sheet:
Wilf:
We have an opening here at the Fleet base that seems more suited to your talents than "axe operator," even though you do seem to have gained quite a reputation lately in the construction trades—I've checked. The job title is "Diagnostic Helmsman," and it calls for someone who can fly nearly anything that comes in for repairs. It's not a high position, but the work's steady. And it's a start.
If you think you might be interested, come to the main entrance tunnel of our new Headquarters building tomorrow at the beginning of Morning watch. Before you reach the leftmost turnstile, you'll see a door marked "Duty Crews, Base Operations." Use the "Visitors" button and give your name. Someone will be expecting you.
Claudia Valemont-Nesterio
Brim felt a surge of mortification crimp his gut. Just as he'd suspected! He was now an object of her pity.
He squeezed his eyes shut in humiliation. Why in all the Universe had he given out his xaxtdamned address? Crumpling the note into a ball, he tossed it into one of his faded saddlebags and gunned the grav, opening its verniers before he even mounted. Then, bitterly forcing all thoughts of Claudia and her note from his mind, he thundered off at high speed toward the day's construction site. Better to find any kind of work than accept charity. Especially from a former lover.
Early on, however, he discovered that the possibility of a flying job wasn't something he could brush aside so easily, even when his mind ought to have been elsewhere. Nearly half a Standard year had passed since he'd laid hands on a starship's controls, and almost four times that since he'd flown anything that was in any decent state of repair. If only he'd been able to locate Claudia's worse-than-damned offer for himself....
"Watch it, Brim!" someone bellowed in a panicky voice.
"You're cuttin' too far off the base line, for xax' sake. Look out!"
Blasted from his reverie, Brim released the trigger just before his bucking machine mowed down a whole set of foundation girders. "G-got away from me for a click," he said, his face burning with shame. He'd never done that before.
"Hey, Brim," a lanky, rumpled supervisor in scarlet shirt and blue overalls called from a nearby platform, "you all right?" The man's baggy eyes were mournful, he had a fat, bulbous nose, and one upper tooth was missing, square in the center of his mouth.
"Yeah," Brim assured him, "I'm all right. I just, uh, turned my ankle on a rock. See?" He kicked a small rock close to his foot.
"All right," the supervisor allowed, dubiously. He didn't buy the rock pretext any more than Brim expected. "You be damned careful from now on," he added. "That axe of yours coulda' took down the whole framework—and you'd have worked the rest of your life to pay us back for all that col-steel. Unnerstand?"
"Understand," Brim said penitently, "—it won't happen again, believe me."
Throughout the remainder of the morning, Brim concentrated on the axe as if existence itself depended on it. But even that didn't prevent him from dreaming about the Helmsman's job all during his lunch break and every click in which he wasn't actually using the axe to cut. The more he thought about the job, the more he wanted it, especially since the sky seemed to be perfectly saturated that day with every kind of flying vehicle known to intragalactic civilization.
His resolve crumpled before he even finished the day's work. Midway through the afternoon, he mopped his brow with the red handkerchief and ambled over to the supervisor's platform. "I won't be able to make it tomorrow," he called through the open door.
"Whadda' you mean you won't make it tomorrow?" the supervisor demanded angrily.
"Just what I said," Brim stated evenly. "I've got personal business."
"Who the xaxt's going to finish this hole here? There's a lot more work to go—and none of it's spec'ed for anybody that qualifies at less than Master Axeman. How'm I gonna get somebody like that on this kind of notice?"
Brim nodded. The man was right—contracting came with certain obligations. He took a deep breath.
"You won't have to get somebody," he promised. "I'll knock it off myself—tonight—before I go home."
"Voot's beard, Brim, you'll xaxtdamn well knock yourself off, too. Those axes are tough! I've seen 'em wipe out bigger men than you in just a morning."
"I'll live," Brim returned quietly.
"Maybe," the supervisor said. "But who's gonna inspect your work?"
"Who needs to?" Brim asked. "You ever see me fail a cut?"
"Well you sure as Zorkt weren't all that grand-lookin' when you damn near took down the framework a while back," the supervisor retorted. "Besides, rules is rules, ya know—and my rules calls for inspections."