robe, a studious attention to the deck tiles.
A clatter of doors and trays then. He looked toward them, reckoning that they
were through. Watched them pour coffee and arrange trays for the rest of them.
“Here,” Allison said to him, “want one?”
He passed an eye over them: four trays. “I’ll do my own, thanks. It’s all
right.”
“Galley’s yours.”
He nodded, went to the freezer, pulled an ordinary breakfast. His hands were
shaking: they always did that if he was late getting food after a jump. “Did the
jump real well,” he said to Allison, peace offering while she was gathering up
the trays.
Small courtesies had to be examined. She looked up, two of the trays in her hand
while Curran went out with the other two. Nodded then, deciding to be pleased.
“Better,” she said, “when I can do all of it.”
She had to throw that in. He nodded after the same fashion, not without the
flash of a thought through his mind, that it was several days through the
nullpoint and that they might have something in mind. “You’ll be all right,” he
said, offering that too.
She went her way. He cooked his breakfast, shivering and spilling things until
he had gotten a spoonful of sugar into his stomach and followed the nauseating
spoonful with a chaser of hot coffee. That helped. The tremors were at least
less frequent. The coffee began to warm his stomach—real coffee. He had gotten
used to the taste of it, after the substitutes.
The oven went off. He retrieved his breakfast, sat down, sole possessor of the
galley and the table. It was a curious kind of truce. They retreated from him,
as if they found his presence accusatory. And he went on owning his ship, in a
solitude the greater for having a ship full of company.
When? he kept wondering. And: what next? They could go on forever in this war.
He kept things courteous, which was safest for himself; and they knew that, and
played the game, suspecting everything he did.
He wandered back to the bridge when he was done. He had that much concern for
the ship’s whereabouts. The Dubliners sat on the benches at the rear, having the
last of their coffee—a little looser than they had been, a little more like
Krejas had run the ship, because it was safe enough to sit back there with Lucy
on auto. Not spit and polish enough for some captains; not regulation enough:
there was a marginal hazard, enough to say that one chance out of a million
could kill them all before they could react —like ambush. Unacceptable risk for
Dublin Again, carrying a thousand lives; with ample personnel for trading
shifts—but here it was only reasonable. Four Dubliner faces looked up at him,
perhaps disconcerted to be caught at such a dereliction. He nodded to them, went
to the scan board—heard a stir behind him, knew someone was afoot.
Nothing. Nothing out there. Only the point of mass, a lonely gas giant radiating
away its last remnant of heat, a star that failed… a collection of
planetoid/moons that were on the charts and dead ahead as they bore, headed
toward the nadir pole of the system. Nothing for vid to pick up without careful
searching: the emissions of the gas giant came through the dish. But no sign of
anything living. No ship. That was nothing unusual at any null-point. But
Mallory had made a point of saying that the points were watched.
He straightened and looked at the Dubliners—Curran and Allison on their feet,
the others still seated, no less watching him. “Got our course plotted outside
the ring,” he said quietly, “missing everything on the charts. Old charts. You
might keep that in mind. In case.”
“You might come across with the keys,” Curran said.
He shrugged. Walked the way he had come, ignoring all that passed among them.
“Stevens” Curran’s voice pursued him.
He looked back with his best innocence. No one moved. “Thirty-six hours
twenty-two minutes to mark,” he said quietly. “What do you think you’ll find
where we’re going? A station Pell’s size? Civilization? I’d be surprised. Do you