“I’ll make a promise to you, Dekker. You’ve got one week. I’m not restricting you, you can do any damned thing you want, I don’t give a damn for the regulations, for the schedule, for whatever you want to do. You’ve got carte blanche for one week. But if you don’t pull those sim scores right back where you were before your ‘accident,’ then we put you into lab, input Wilhelmsen’s tape into your head, and see if it improves your performance. You understand that?”
“Yessir.”
“Are you clear on that?”
“Yessir.”
“Then get the hell out of here and do it, Dekker, while the labs try to straighten out the damage you’ve done to your crew. I don’t want to see your face right now. I don’t know if I want to see it again.”
Chapter 14
5EQ. 285MII. Dekker, Paul F. Authorized. He waited, clinging to the line, felt like a fool inputting the card and checking the tape serial number on the display for the second time, but the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach refused to go away, and nothing seemed right, or sure enough.
Couldn’t remember if he’d done it. Things he’d done weren’t registering. He was thinking on things other than here and now and the number didn’t damn matter. There wasn’t a training tape he couldn’t handle.
Come apart on an orientation run, for God’s sake? Their input couldn’t have overridden his displays if he hadn’t let it, and they were apologizing to him for screwing up? If he was glitching on their input, he could have spared a hand to shut them out. He could have let go the damned yoke and recovered it at leisure. The number one sim was a walk down the dock if you didn’t seize up like a fool—
Muscle spasm. Point zero five second bobble—not wide enough to invoke the braces or trigger an abort on a sleeper run like that; and he’d spaced on it—in that five-hundredth second, he’d been in the Belt, he’d been back at Sol, he’d been with Pete and the guys and lost with Cory—God only where his head had been but he hadn’t known his next move. He’d blanked on it, without reason, without warning.
Pod drifted up, opened for him. He grasped the handholds and slid into the dark inside—respiration rate coming up. Sweat starting. He could feel it on his face, feel it crawling under the flightsuit as he prepped the boards. Belts, confirm. Power up, confirm. Single occupant, tape 23b, Dekker, P, all confirm.
He adjusted the helmet. The dark and the glowing lights held a surreal familiarity. It was no time. It was every time.
Some drugs came back on you, wasn’t that the case?
But the guys weren’t with him now. If he screwed it he screwed it by himself. Wasn’t going to let them do to him what they’d done to Meg and Ben and Sal, wasn’t going to take that damned tape—
No.
“Dekker.”
Sim chief again.
“Dekker, you want to stand down for an hour?”
Didn’t like their telemetry. Picking up his heartbeat.
“No. I’m all right.”
“Dekker.”
Series of breaths. “Porey’s orders. Free ticket. I’m all right, let it go.”
Seemed like forever that light stayed red.
They had guys over in hospital that couldn’t walk straight, that never would fly again…
Had guys in the mental ward…
Sim chief was probably checking with Porey’s office.
Calm the breathing down.
Light went from red to green.
Punch it in.
GO!
“Dek,” it was, “how’d the run go?” and “Dek, you all right?”
He winced, shrugged, said, Fine, working on it.
And stopped the lift on three-deck, made it as far as the nearest restroom and threw up non-stop.
From Meg, back in barracks, a shake at his shoulder: “Dek, cher. Wake up. Mess call. You coming? You’d better come.”
He hauled himself out of half-sleep and off the bunk, wobbled into the bathroom to pop an antacid—the meds didn’t restrict those, thank God—-and to scrub normal color into his face. He walked out again to go with Meg, navigated ordinary space, trying not to see the glowing lines and dark, not to hear the mags or feel the destabilizing jolts of thrust.