sleepovers and a woman with something other than larceny in mind—
He had never had a place to go before, never had a destination. He had lived in
this narrow compartment most of his life and only planned what he would do to
avoid the traps behind him. Pell, Allison Reilly said; and deals; and it agreed
with the rumors, that there were routes opening, hope—hope for marginers like
him.
It was a joke of course, the best joke of a humorous career. A surprise for
Allison Reilly—she would turn and stare open-mouthed when he tapped her on the
shoulder in some crowded Pell Station bar. He knew what Lucy could do, and what
he could do that great, modern ship of hers would never try—
Stupid, she would say. That was so. But she would always think about it, that a
little ship had run jump for jump against Dublin Again. And that was something
of a mark to make in his life, if nothing else. There was, in a sense, more of
Lucy left than there was of him… because there was no end to the traveling and
no end to the demands she made on him. He had given all he had to keep her
going; and now he wanted something out of her, for his pride. He had no Name
left; Lucy had none. So he did this crazy thing—in its place.
He shut his eyes, yielded to that G that pressed him uncomfortably against the
bulkhead, drowsing while he could. The pulser was taped to his wrist so that the
first beep from the outrange buoy would bring him out of it. Station would have
his head on a plate if they knew; but it was all the chance he had to go into
jump with a little rest.
The pulser stung his wrist, brought him out of it when it only felt as if he had
fallen asleep for a second. He lurched in blind fright for the controls and sat
down and realized it was only the initial contact of the jump range buoy, and
engine shutdown, on schedule.
Number one for jump, it told him; and advised him that there was another ship
behind. A chill went up his back when he reckoned its bulk and its speed and the
time. That was Dublin, outbound, overtaking him much more slowly, he suspected,
than it could, because of their order of departure—because Lucy, ordinarily low
priority, was close enough to the mark now that Dublin was compelled to hang
back off her tail. The automated buoy was going to give them clearance one on
the tail of the other because the buoy’s information, transmitted from station
central, indicated they were not going out in the same direction.
And that was wrong.
He checked his calculations, rechecked and triple-checked, lining everything up
for an operation far more ticklish than calculating around the aberrations of
Lucy’s docking jets. Nullpoints moved, being more than planet-sized mass, in the
complicated motions of stars. Comp had to allow for that. No one sane would head
into jump alone, with a comp that had no backup, with trank and food and water
taped to the board: he told himself so, making his prep, darting glances back to
comp and scan, listening to the buoy beeping steadily, watching them track right
down the line. He put the trank into his arm. It was time for that… to dull the
senses which were about to be abused. Not one jump to face… but three; and if he
missed on one of them, he reckoned, he would never know it.
There was speculation as to what it was to be strung out in the between, and
speculation about what the human mind might start doing once the drugs wore off
and there was no way back. There were tales of ships which wafted in and out of
jump like ghosts with eerie wails on the receiving com, damned souls that never
came down and never made port and never died, in time that never ended… but
those were drunken fancies, the kind of legends which wandered station docksides
when crews were topping one another with pints and horror tales, deliberately