Текст книги "Rimrunners "
Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh
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"Yes, ma'am," she said.
Fletcher didn't say anything, Fletcher just dismissed her with a back-handed wave of the hand and kept writing.
Go. Be smart. Keep your head down.
Damn right, she thought, and she went, light-headed with relief, out into the corridor to pick up Musa and Freeman.
Notjust Musa and Freeman.
Liu was out there.
Bet stopped cold, off-balance and thinking, Oh, Godc
"All right?" Musa asked her.
"Gave me some pills," she said, clutching the packets and the paper Fletcher had given her, while the corridor went tilted and her head floated. Liu, senior mainday, gave her a head-to-foot sidelong stare and said to Musa, finishing something or another: "Much as we can, anyway."
Secrets. The whole corridor drifted and steadied on Liu's sullen face, before Musa took her by the arm and steered her down-rim toward the galley-section.
"What's going on?" she asked.
"It's all right," Musa said, and let her go at the step-up, where the deck narrowed.
Through the galley-cylinder to rec, in among others, not fast, just walking.
Liu was behind them until then, Liu dropped off at the galley counter and Freeman stayed with her a second, then caught them up again.
Place smelled of beer, the quarters had that same damned vid playing again, she could lip-synch the words. It could have been alterday rec, you could expect McKenzie and Gypsy and the rest to be here, but they were all the wrong faces, the faces that arrived in the morning and left in the evening, they were the bodies that just filled the beds during alterday, and they were standing, watching, conversation fallen off in this uncanny quiet.
Maybe it was just Fletcher's damned pill that made things seem so unnatural and so dangerous. Maybe it was the shots that still hurt and made her a little sick and shocked.
Maybe everybody waslooking at her and her company, and the rumor had gotten to mainday that there was the fool that had taken on Fitch and made all the trouble.
She wasn't navigating well when she got to Engineering. She did a fast scan to find out NG was there and safe, and that war didn't seem to have broken out—mumbled, "I got to sit, sir," when Bernstein asked what Fletcher had said, and then things were fairly fuzzed after that, except voices kept coming and going and things echoed.
"Think I'm sick," she said, not quite mad, not quite scared, she couldn't get that far, but she was sure now that she'd been dosed, and that she wasn't in pain anymore, and the back didn't hurt, and she could have worked, could have done most anything including float around the section, except Bernie came over, the skuz, and got her attention with a hand on the shoulder and asked if she wanted lunch—
–meaning the cup of tea and the little Keis-rolls Services brought you, the stuff that was about as appetizing as a glue-stick. Usually she skipped it, but Bernie said it was a good idea she eat it, and she couldn't find where she'd misplaced her objections to pushy people who wanted her to do things: so she did it
Just absolutely zee'd, no question. She sat there with the padded seat tilted a little back, watching and listening in complete placidity, heard people talking around her.
And finally, a while after lunch, the voices started coming clear and the boards in front of her came into a little clearer focus.
She had to go to the head. She was aware of being spaced, she sat there as long as she could stand it, until the discomfort was more or less overcoming the fuzziness, and finally she got up and walked.
Somebody grabbed her. It was NG. She blinked at him and said, "I got a prescription for you, the doc give it to mec"
She felt damned embarrassed by mid-afternoon, cold sober again and realizing, with a sudden snap to clarity, that she was sitting in Engineering at station three, and that people were talking near her seat, one of them being Freeman, one being Musa, and one being Bernstein.
"Awake?" Bernstein stopped to ask her.
"Yessir." She reached after the arm of her seat and got up, still wobbly and trying to remember how she had gotten there. The whole day was a blank. Just gone. And Bernstein hadn't thrown her out, just let her sleep it off in her chair.
"Damn," she muttered, "I hope to hell I didn't insult anybody."
Bernstein quirked an eyebrow at her and gave her a smile, in a good mood, for God's sake, after all she had told him, after everything that had happened. She leaned on the seat-back and looked at everybody, at Walden, Slovak and Keane, with their heads together—and NG over at station one, unscathed.
Hadn't taken Fletcher's pills, evidently.
"Been a real quiet day," Bernstein said then, and looked at Freeman. "Why don't you take off early?"
She might be zee'd. She wasn'tstupid. She stood there holding to the seat-back, a little pain in her back, a general rubbery feeling about her legs that said a long walk wouldn't be a good idea—and figured it wasn't out of simple muddled priorities that Bernstein let an Africatrooper drug-case sit his boards all day and sent a healthy Systems man back to quarters.
There was some talking going on, dammit, stuff was flying between alterday Engineering and Liu's team, on one level and another—Musa had had a go at Liu, Freeman was going back early, it didn't look like there'd been any bar-brawls in Engineering during the shift, and Bernstein wasn't pissed at anything—she knew him when he was, and this wasn't that kind of day, not at all.
Isn't what Fitch wanted, she thought, and thought with a little sense of things delicately balanced, that Fitch being out asleep all their day, he was going to wake up and find out things that wouldn't make him happy.
Then they were going to go to sleep and Fitch was going to be awake thinking of ways to fix that.
Hell of a way to carry on a war, she thought, and stood there watching Freeman check out and head back to quarters, doubtless, where he was going to be in time for breakfast with his proper mates.
"Feeling any pain?" Bernstein asked her, as if she was all right with him, as if everything was.
"Not much," she said slowly, wondering what the hell Bernstein was up to. But Bernstein wasn't about to say and she wasn't going to upset things with questions, hell, no.
She sat down again, she didn't bother anything, mostly she ran the sims and watched the colored lights, still phasing out a little—still with a little numbness about the common sense and feeling that she ought to be more spooked than she was.
She wasn't too bad by rec time, all right enough to have a beer or two, sitting with the new guys on the bench, with NG and Musa and McKenzie and Park and Figi; and NG
wasn't too bad either, a little tranked and placid on Fletcher's stuff—
Fletcher had herself an official scan record of a back that justified the happy-stuff she had dosed her with, no matter it didn't halfway hurt until Fletcher started messing with it, and Fletcher had poured enough different kinds of stuff into her to make it real unlikely a test would prove a damned thing. Her andNGc
God, NG was kind of pitiful, relaxed as he was, sitting on the bench between her and Figi and leaning against the wall—eyes large-pupilled and this sort of happy look on his face, like he was finally just gone, people could do what they wanted with him, hell if he cared.
"You doing all right?" she asked him, and he mumbled that he was, and took another sip of beer.
Not much for him, in that condition. She was getting his drinks for him and no way was he getting any more alcohol, beyond the one, just soft drinks. Probably wouldn't notice. Didn't remember to drink very often.
They sat, they talked, people came by to meet Freeman and his mates and say a welcome-in, and to say how happy NG looked—
Meech, the son of a bitch, even went so far as to reach over and shake NG by the shoulder, with a "Pleasantest I ever saw 'im," at which NG, conscious, might have gone for him, but NG took it with a kind of bewildered look.
Never trust a prescription with just one pill in it.
"He all right?" Gypsy asked.
"Fletch give him a relaxer," Musa said. "Prescription."
No sight of Hughes and his pair of skuz since dinner. Watching the vid, maybe. Not so easy to transfer, when it was the whole effing alterday longscan tekkie crew asking: that was what Musa said—bridge tekkies got used to their operators and vice versa, and mainday was higher rank than alter-day, and there was no way in hell the mainday operators were going to take Hughes and crew and no way they were going to shift-trade with alterday just because Lindy Hughes went and pulled a skutty trick.
So Lindy Hughes was somewhere being real quiet this evening, and it was absolutely amazing how nice people were being, just absolutely amazing, people like Liu and Freeman and all, having every right to be mad, being so friendly it could give you a sugar overload—
Because—it didn't take much brains to figure it—alterday had been hassled, alterday had been rousted and the mofs had come busting into quarters on what just had to be a tip—
–and beat hell out of somebody they couldn't prove a damned thing on.
And that, in the humble estimation of the 'decks, was just a step too far.
Now, I'm not saying what would be illegal to say, Musa's line had been, she heard him in action, but I do say if somebody's got the idea to roust us or any one of us we got to take a real firm position on that problemc nothing against the rules, no, but we ain't just the machinery on this ship, that you can kick and cuss, and maybe we got to make that clear for people that've gotten a little far from that fact—
So the Lius and the Musas and the McKenzies and the Gypsy Mullers of the 'decks were smiling and telling their mates to smile and be nice, and Bernie was being nice to Freeman and just bending double and twisting sideways to welcome them in, ditto Musa, and the beers were being bought and people were just walking around being deliberately, cussedly po-lite with each other. So it wasfunny, people startedhaving a good time and being in a good mood, like it was a joke going around—and NG being as tranked as he was, people came by just to look at him.
NG being as tranked as he was, he was going from bewildered to having a tolerably good time, especially when a delegation headed by Meech and Rossi bought him the second beer, the one she wasn't going to let him have. Rossi put it into his hands, got his attention with a little pop on the side of the face and said he looked like he needed another beer and a bunch of the bridge techs had gotten together and decided he should have one on them.
NG just stared at Rossi open-mouthed, Rossi walked off, and finally NG started drinking that one, totally glazed.
"Hey," she said, "sips."
She took it down a bit, enough to keep him from passing out where he sat, maybe, and Figi was on his other side—if he fell that way, Figi was built like a rock, probably wouldn't even notice.
You couldn't sit on the rec-deck. You could squat. In case somebody needed through in a hurry. Meech and Rossi and some guys brought some dice, and they squatted and they gambled for cred-points, dece a round.
Damn, even Freeman and his mates were in it, beyond loose, all the way to blown—
Battista and Keane headed off to bunks or a locker party, God knew, it was all getting noisy enough in rec nobody heard the first mof-alert.
But the noise fell off fast—real fast, when bridge crew showed up, small, dark fellow, and the squatters stood up and cleared the through-way.
"Kusan," Musa said under his breath.
Helm 2 himself, alterday command.
Kusan looked around him, Kusan scanned faces and said: "Yeager."
It was real, real quiet of a sudden, just noise from down at the end of rec and out of the quarters where the vid was going.
And there was damn-all to do but hand the rest of her beer to Musa and nudge NG
over upright so he wouldn't look as crashed as he was, and get up and say, "Yessir, I'm Yeager."
"Ms. Yeager," Helm 2 said, beckoning her to come, and to everybody at large: "As you were."
There wasn't a sound. Not a sound, except of a sudden NG said, "What's going on?"
and tried to get up, except Musa grabbed onto him. "Shut it down!" Musa had to say, too loud.
"Isn't any problem," Bet said.
She wished not. It was Fitch's watch, the tail end of Orsini's. Again.
And she hoped Musa could get a call through to Bernstein, or someone could.
"Bet!" NG yelled, mad as hell, crazy-sounding. Trying to get himself in trouble, that was what he was doing. But people must have shut him up. She was afraid to look back to see.
CHAPTER 21
SHE WAS STILL a little out-there while she was walking the corridors beside Kusan, too much beer and one of Fletcher's smaller pain-killers, which combination let her feel no real pain, but she remembered what pain was and who could cause it; and while there was certainly no reg against the 'decks drinking and gambling in rec, there damn sure was a reg against drunk and disorderly. She sneaked a tug at her jumpsuit, a rake of the fingers through her hair, a quick roll-down and snap of the safety-tuck on her sleeves, duty-like.
The beer-smell and the wide spill on her knee she couldn't do anything about, and there were probably three and four charges Fitch could think of, just looking at her.
Like beer and pills. Like spitting on the main-deck if Fitch said she'd done it, or a drunk and disorderly—real easy.
But it wasn't Fitch waiting at the step-up to the bridge, it was Orsini—and Orsini was clearly where Kusan was delivering her.
"Are you drunk, Yeager?"
"Not sober, sir, to tell God's truth." She was halfway upset—having gotten one set of ideas arranged in her head and then coming up against Orsini, who was being a fool if he thought it was safe to pull her in at this hour, where what had happened last night could happen again.
If Orsini cared about that.
Orsini looked her up and down. "Spent a lot of today in that condition, haven't you?"
What d'we got, a damn morals charge!
But it was Fletcher did it, Fletcher's Bernstein's friend– isn't she!
"Yessir, I apologize, sir."
"Come along," Orsini said, and led the way through the bridge-cylinders, past mainday ops, past Helm, past—
Fitch stood on the bridge watching them go past. He didn't challenge Orsini. She wasn't sure if he followed them, then. She couldn't hear, in the general racket two sets of footsteps made on the hollow deck, in the whisper of multiple cooling and circulation fans and other people moving around on business. She just stayed with Orsini, wondering what in hell he was after, telling herself it was all right, Bernstein hadn't acted overly upset with what she had told him—
Like they'd known already that something was wrong about me, and Bernie was still on my side—
But Orsini thought I was Mallory'sc
She did take a fast look back, to see where Fitch was. Not behind themc but Fitch undoubtedly knew where they were going, and maybe Fitch was just waiting for the shift-change, knowing that when Orsini was through, it was always his turn.
Hope to hell you got a smart notion how to stop that, Mr. Orsini, sir.
Hope to hell you got some concern about that.
Hope to hell you and Bernie came to some understanding about whatever's going onc
Orsini passed right by his own office, passed by Fitch's.
Where're we going? she thought. And: Oh, Godc
They stopped in front of a door with a stencilled: Wolfe, J. and no more designation than Fitch's office or Orsini's had.
Orsini pushed the button, the door opened on the office and the man inside, and Orsini said: "Yeager, sir."
Fancy place, carpet, panels, a big black desk and the captain sitting there waiting for her—blond, slight man in khaki. Pale eyes that didn't care shit what your excuse was for existing, just what you were doing that crossed his path for five minutes and annoyed him.
The door shut behind her. Orsini left her. Wolfe rocked his chair back, folded his arms.
Wolfe said, "Machinist, are you?"
She felt distanced from everything around her. Nothing added, except that everything she had told Bernie had spread, Orsini knew, now Wolfe knew. She thought, between one heavy heartbeat and the next: Bernie, damn you, well, you had to, didn't you?
She said, "I worked as that, sir. On Ernestine."
"Rank."
"M-Sgt. Elizabeth A. Yeager, sir." And she added, because she was a damn smartass fool, and she hated being crowded: "Retired."
Wolfe wasn't amused. Wolfe sat there looking up at her, with no expression at all.
" Africa, is it?"
"Yes, sir. Was." Nothing else to say. Bernie'd evidently said it all.
Damn sure.
And she'd had this dumb dim hope that Bernie didn't think she was a threat and that maybe all the way to top command, a ship that got its crew out of station brigs didn't give shit what it raked in for crew—
Except she'd all along discounted Wolfe.
Damn dumb, Yeager, damn dumb. So who do they think you're working for if you aren't Mallory's?
Effin' obvious, Yeager.
"You lied to me," Wolfe said.
"Nossir. Everything the way I said. Crew slot is all I wanted, it's all I want right now."
Long silence. Wolfe never had any expression. She stood there, just went away a little inside, figured past a certain point they were going to do whatever they wanted to do and if command had made up their minds to freight her off to Pell and Mallory or space her inside the hour, there was damn-all she could do about it.
But this man could. Couldhelp her, if he would, if what happened in the 'decks ever concerned him at all, if he didn't just leave crew to suffer Fitch and Orsini's private war and their maneuvering for power—
There were ships like that, in the Fleet.
"When did you leave your ship?"
"Pell, sir. When the Fleet pulled away. I was on dockside." She added, uninvited, hammering away at what she wasn't sure Wolfe had heard the first and the second time:
"Not my ship now, sir. This is."
She wasn't sure Wolfe wasn't outright crazy. She wasn't sure she ought to take one course or the other with him. Or maybe nobody was loyal to this ship, and Wolfe just didn't figure her. He had that kind of look, just the least doubt in that cold, ice-blue stare.
Maybe he would just throw her back to Fitch and Orsini and let them fight it out.
What in hell does Wolfedo on this ship? she had asked Musa. And Musa, uncomfortable in the question: He ain't a real activistc
Man had to be aware too, that he wasn't totally safe, if she wanted to commit suicide and take him with her.
But he sat there. He rocked back in his chair and looked at her a long time and said,
"What's the last contact you had with the Fleet?"
That was the question. That was the big one. "Last was my com breaking up. On Pell.
Nothing since." She could see him saying to Fitch: Find out what she knows. She said, quietly: "Decks never knew anything, no more than here, sir."
Long, long silence, Wolfe just sitting there.
"Master sergeant, was it?"
"Yessir."
"Mechanic?"
"On my own rig, sir. Some of us were."
"Tactical."
"Tac-squad, sir."
"Where before that?"
"Came aboard at sixteen, sir. Born on a miner-ship."
Wolfe pushed his chair back on its track, got up, walked to the side of the desk. He wasn't armed. She'd thought he might be.
He walked to the side of her, walked around to her back. She didn't know what a civ would do under the circumstance, gone straight from dumb smartass kid to shipboard manners a skut better have to survive in the 'decks. And those said stand still and keep your mouth shut when a mof wanted to think what he was going to do about you.
Anything you say, sir.
Till you prove you're a fool, sir.
Till I know I got no percentage in anything, sir. Then I'll take a few.
But—
God, what'd they do with NG then? What'd NG do, himself?
Wolfe walked over to the low table and the cushion-chairs at the side of the office, meddled with something as if he'd forgotten her.
Maybe he had. Maybe he was just slightly crazy. Maybe he was going to see how long a skut could stand there without panicking and doing something stupid.
Indefinitely. Sir.
"Sit down," Wolfe said. She looked at him. He was offering her a chair at the office table.
That spooked her, when yelling wouldn't have. "Yessir," she said, and came and started to sit down, and then thought about her work-clothes and the chance of beer-spills, deck-dust or worse on that pretty white upholstery. She dusted off, for what good that would do, but Wolfe having sat down, she sat, opposite him, and watched him open the little box there.
Chess set. Real one, not just a sim. Real board, real pieces, God knew how old.
"You play?" he asked.
"Some," she said. In the 'decks you played anything and everything.
"Black or white?"
God, he was crazy, she was sitting here in the hands of a crazy man. "Your pick, sir."
He turned the box, gave her white.
So the first move had to be hers.
She frustrated him a couple of times, which he took with that same dead-cold, appraising look at the board that he gave to her while she answered his questionsc long, long after the shift-change bell.
What mining-ship?
What's Porey like?
Finally: How much elapsed-time on Tripoint-Pell?
Question that could kill a ship. Kill everyone she'd served with—if she was tekkie enough to know that answer down to a hair, what Africa'srunning-cap was.
But you had to know how much mass she'd been hauling.
Wolfe asked that too. And she honestly didn't know. The elapsed-time down to a half hour, but not a thing about the massc
"Made many runs in the Hinder Stars?"
"A couple. Mostly Pell-Mariner-Pan-paris. Wyatt's. Viking."
You'd remember that, sir. Remember it damn well, if you were a spook during the war.
While his fine-boned fingers moved a piece to threaten a knight, and a rook, some moves down.
"You remember the Gull?"
Name ought to mean something. There'd been a lot of names. They'd taken the Gull, a little ship, hell if she could sort out whether that was the one they'd blown or one of the ships that had decel'ed and taken boarders when they were operating at Tripoint.
Ship-corridors through the mask, past the green readout glow. Scared faces. Mostly scared faces.
Except the fools who tried to make a fight of it, locked body to body with a rider-ship, with marines oh their deck.
"Dunno, sir, we took it. Tripoint. I recall the name."
Something to do with you, sir? Or this ship"?
Wolfe didn't say more than that.
She took a pawn, worrying was she supposed to do that. Wolfe was a better player.
Wolfe was moves ahead, and he set you up a route he wanted you to take.
Did it this time.
"Shee—" she started to say, and swallowed it in time.
"Tac-squad," Wolfe said, moving a pawn. "Boarding party. Stations or ships."
"Yessir."
"Know what you're doing with docking equipment."
"Yessir."
"Weapons systems."
"Yessir."
She lost a pawn. Was going to lose a knight. She saw it. Moved the rook.
Damn.
"Armor?"
"Yessir."
"What do you think about this ship, Sgt. Yeager?"
"I'm not a sergeant anymore, sir."
"What do you think about this ship?"
"I got friends aboard."
"On Africatoo."
That was a hard thought; and damned clear what he was asking. "Yessir. But no way this ship could take her, and if she could, that's the way it is, got friends there, got friends on board here." She moved the threatened knight. "Don't even know who's alive anymore. Here I do. Me, for one."
"If you weren't on board?"
She honestly thought about that, put herself back on Africa, with Lokifor a target. Her hand hovered over a pawn and she lost her focus. Saw herself up on charges, old Junker Phillips' face—
"Have to shoot me," she said, and made the move, giving up the pawn. "I dunno, dunno I could ever get to that, sir. But I got people here—got a lot of people on this ship."
"So I've heard."
Heard about me and NG. God, I got him in trouble, maybe Musa, too, if Musa wasn't what he is—
McKenzie—Park and Figi—all those guys—
Maybe Bernstein, too.
Wolfe took the pawn. She took his knight.
She saw it coming, then. Rook took queen in four moves. Check and mate.
She bit her lip, surveyed the board.
Knew Wolfe was several moves ahead in the other game, too.
"You can go," Wolfe said.
"Thank you, sir." She got up carefully, as if the whole place was rigged with explosives. She was sweating. She only half-felt the pain in her back.
What do I say? Enjoyed the game, sir?
Wolfe let her walk to the door, let her open it, let her walk out into the restricted section by herself.
She walked through to the bridge, through Fitch's territory to the med-area corridor, through the galley to rec and the darkened quarters.
0258 alterday.
She went to Musa, told Musa she was back. Musa was wide awake, asked her: "You all right, Bet?"
"Fine," she whispered back, only then getting a bad case of the shakes. She went right on over to NG's bunk, but Musa followed her, Musa said, "He's sleeping one off."
Sleeping one off, hell. He was tied to the damn bunk, out cold. "Dammit," she said, popped him a light one on the cheek and started working at the knot, shaking so badly she could hardly work the cord through, especially when NG came to a little and started pulling. "What'd you give him?"
"Figi's sleeper hold, for starters.—He's all right. I've been watching him."
"Hell!,—Hold still!"
"Betc"
He wasn't crazy. Not half as crazy as where she'd been. She got him loose, he hugged her till he hurt her back, but she didn't mind that. She had sore muscles and he had a bitch of a hangover, evidently, because he made a miserable sound and held his head.
"Fitch?" he asked.
"Wolfe," she said.
He dropped his hands. Musa said, beside her, "What happened?"
"Captain wanted a chess partner," she said, and almost spilled what Wolfe had been asking her for three hours, she was so aching tired and so rattled. She got it together, remembering nobody in the 'decks knew what the mofs knew about her. Most of all NG
didn't know. And she didn't know how long that would last or what he would do when he found out.
Merchanter, lost from his ship. And there was one way, in the War, that that would have happened.
"That was all," she said. "We played chess."
CHAPTER 22
WHAT HAPPENED?" was a question she got too damned often in the shower-line and at breakfast, everybody from McKenzie to Masad out of Cargo, people coming up to her, and then putting their heads together to whisper the business elsewhere.
The first time she was caught a little off-balance, and hesitated, and said, "The captain asked into it," as if it was the Fitch business, which was a damn lie, at bottom, and she wished she'd never been so stupid—like a challenge to Fitch, and using Wolfe's name for a weapon. It might get back to Fitch. It might make him think twice. It might also make him talk to the captain about it, and that wasn't the outcome she wanted, damn sure.
So she wished she could take that back. She changed it as far as she could the next time she was asked—said, "Captain wanted to ask me some questions, said keep my mouth shut."
Damn stupid, Yeager. That mouth's going to kill you someday.
She ate her breakfast with her mates, and they were worrying about Fitch, they were thinking about Wolfe and trying to reckon whether Wolfe was going to come down on her side, that was all they understood about it.
"I'd be gone," NG had said quietly, in the dark, before the little sleep she had gotten,
"except for Wolfe. I don't know why. Favor to Bernie, I guess. I don't understand it."
Most she'd ever gotten out of NG on that topic, that dozen or so words.
And when she thought about it this morning, she thought Fitch had to be worried right now, damn worried, and that she ought to be happy about that situation, ought to thank God Wolfe had stepped in, and ought to be a whole lot more cheerful than she was.
Except Fitch just meant to kill her. Wolfe seemed to have decided something last night, Wolfe had let her go, Wolfe had written her down as a liability or an asset, she didn't know which.
In either case—expendable.
Hell, she thought, sipping her morning tea, tail back in the fire. What's different than it ever was?
She had that answered until she saw NG looking at people this morning, looking around him, looking at her and Musa and paying attention to human beings the way he could those damn boards, saner this morning than she'd ever seen him.
He'd gotten drunk with friends last night, people had cared enough to sit on him and knock him stupid to save him, and she'd gotten back safe, God in the person of Wolfe had intervened to stop Fitch from killing her, and maybe things weren't going to be the hell they'd been for three years.
Yeah.
Nothing could hurt him before this. Not even Fitch. He wasn't sane enough to hurt, when I came aboard, and look at all I've done for him. Helped him no end, haven't I?
Man'd have died for me last night, all he could've done, but he'd have done it.
Maybe he's got some crazy notion my trouble is his fault. Maybe he thinks he's responsible for me, the same as for Cassel.
If he everwas responsible for Cassel.
Can't prove it, can't ever prove it, can't even do that much for him.
And what when he learns what he's been sleeping with!
Dealing with NG in a social situation was like handling a live grenade—you really had to pay attention, all the time, to the little things—like how he'd jump like he was wired if somebody touched him unexpected, he'd tense up when people came up on him, he'd do this little subtle flinch when he knew people were going to speak to him. You had to know him to know it was a flinch, but he was just on-alert all the time, schiz as hell, trying so damned hard, and sane enough to be scared, himself, that somebody was going to startle him and he was going to blow up—he held onto her and Musa like they were his lifeline, that was what he was doing at breakfast, with people asking him how he was doing, how's the head, NG?
Hughes had just made himself scarce. Headed off to work early, thank God.
And NG was doing all right, so far, with social acceptability cold sober, doing all right and once, with Freeman, even managing a thin, tentative grinc not the smartass one, the real, wide-open one.
