“What’s her name, Captain? Is there more to it?”
“Excuse me, please. I’m tired. I just want to get to the bank. I didn’t do
anything.”
“You cleared Viking to Pell in a month in a ship that size, solo? What kind of
rig is she?”
“Excuse me. Please.”
“You don’t call what you did remarkable?”
“I call it stupid. Please.”
He shoved his way through, with people surging all about him, his heart
hammering in panic. People—people as far as he could see. And of a sudden…
She was there. Allison Reilly was straight in front of him, wide-eyed as the
rest of the crowd.
He shoved his way past the startled curious and at the last moment kept his
hands off her—stood swaying on his feet and seeing the anger on her face.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You’re outright crazy.”
“I told you I’d see you here. I’m tired. Can we talk… when I get back from the
bank?”
She took his elbow and guided him through the crowd. The microphone caught up
with him again; the newswoman shouted questions he half heard and Allison Reilly
ignored them, pulled him across the dock to the line of bars—toward a mass of
quieter folk, a line of spacers. Fewer and fewer of the stationer crowd pursued
them; and then none: the spacer line closed about them with sullen and
forbidding stares turned toward the intruding stationers. He paid no attention
then where she aimed him—headed through the dark doorway of a bar and fell into
a chair at the nearest available table. He slumped down over his folded arms on
the surface in blessed quiet and tried to come out of it when someone shook him
by the shoulder.
Allison Reilly put a drink into his hand. He sipped at it and gagged, because he
had expected a stiff drink and got fruit juice and sugar froth. But it was food.
It helped, and he looked up fuzzily into Allison’s face while he drank. A ring
of other faces had gathered, male and female, spacers ringing the table,
silver-clad, white, green and gold and motley insystemers, just staring—all
manner of patches, all the same silent observation.
“Sandwich,” someone said, and he looked left as a male hand set a plate in front
of him. He disposed of as much of it as he could in several graceless bites,
then stuffed the rest, napkin-wrapped, into his jacket pocket, a survival habit
and one which suddenly embarrassed him in the face of all these people who knew
what the odds were and what kind of poverty would drive a man to push a ship
like that. Dublin knew what he had done. Someone on Dublin had talked, and they
knew he had done it straight through, stringing the jumps, the only way the
likes of Lucy could possibly have tailed Dublin. They would arrest him soon;
someone would talk it over with some official in station central, and they would
start running checks and talking to merchanters all over this station, some one
of whom might have a memory jogged: his now-notorious ship, his face, his voice
carried all over station on open vid. He could not deal quietly, take that
fourteen thousand gold off the ship, deal as he was accustomed to deal, quietly,
on the docks. Not now. He was dead scared. Allison Reilly was there, and the
look on her face was what he had wanted, but he was up against the real cost of
it now, and he found it too much.
“Allison,” he said, when she sat down in the other chair and leaned on her arms
looking at him, “I want to talk to you. Somewhere else.”
“Come on,” she said. “You come with me.”
He pushed the chair back and tried to get up… needed her arm when he tried to
walk, to keep his balance in station’s too-heavy gravity. Some spacer muttered a
ribald and ancient joke, about a man just off a solo run, and it was true, at
least as far as the mind went, but the rest of him was dead.
He walked, a miserable blur of lights and moving bodies—the dock’s wide echoing