“Yeah. Sure.”
“Meg writes to you, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Real love affair,”
“We’re friends.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “You looked it when you said goodbye. Remember saying goodbye?” He took an envelope out of his pocket. Held up a handful of cards and pictures. “Remember these?”
He’d seen them before. They’d lied to him, the doctors had. They made all these things up. They told him they were his, he’d thrown them across the room.
Now Ben had them. Ben held up a picture of him with people he didn’t remember and he couldn’t look at.
“What are their names?”
He shook his head.
“Woman’s Elly?”
The name jolted. Elly was dead. Pete and Falcone.
“Pete?”
Guy on the right. Big grin. Pete smiled like that. Pete had his arm over the shoulder. But he couldn’t remember the photo.
“Which one’s Pete?”
“I don’t know.” But it was a lie. Ben just didn’t belong with them. Everything was scrambled. Gory and Ben and Bird. He was afraid Meg was going to be in that picture if he went on looking at it.
Blood. Exploding everywhere. Beads floating, fine mist.
He squeezed his eyes shut. The eggs didn’t sit well at his stomach. Everyone in that picture was dead. He was in mere too.
“Who’s the other guy?”
“Falcone.”
“Said not to worry about him. Didn’t he? Left you a note? You remember?”
He shook his head. He shoved the table away, tried to get up. Ben pushed him back against the pillows and a stabbing pain went through his skull.
He grayed out for a moment. When he came back Ben was quietly finishing his toast. Ben said, “You ready to talk now?”
The cup hit the grid. Sideways. Two out of five. Graff lifted the cover up and righted it before the coffee hit, collected his overdue morning caffeine and turned in the general noise of the end of breakfast, straight into Villy’s intercept.
UDC Flight Chief. Captain Alexandra Villanueva—senior test pilot for the UDC, who said, all friendly, “Hear you and the old man went one this morning.”
Fast. Must have ricocheted off Tanzer’s wall, Graff thought, and shrugged in mid-sip while Villanueva stuck his card in the slot and punched up a coffee. He said, “We differed.”
Villanueva rescued his cup. “Damn thing.”
“Ever since they changed the cups.”
Villanueva took the coffee out and let the cover drop, said, quietly, “You know, back when we were doing the A-89, we had one of these runs of trouble. Lost twelve guys in six months. The old man just sat in that office and filled out the reports: you never saw him crack—but it broke him up. Same now. He wants to pull this program out. But we’ve got to come out of this with an answer. A right answer.”
“Redesign isn’t it.” He got on well enough with Villanueva. Villanueva had started out calling him son—never did think he’d quite gotten the man out of the mindset. Gray hair on Captain Villy, legitimately come by, rumor had it: handful of crack-ups and a few pieces of luck—if dealing with Tanzer daily didn’t do it. They kept trying to promote him to a desk, God only wish he’d get Tanzer’s post and run the whole program, not just test ops—but Villy kept on making test runs himself, one of the UDC pilots who had real respect among the Shepherds.
“Graff,” Villanueva said, “dammit, we’re vulnerable on this project, we’re real vulnerable. Politicians are gathering like sharks. I know the old man’s hard to deal with. But let’s not hang the differences out in plain sight today.”
He thought about Mitch. About the frustration among the Shepherds, who wanted to fight Tanzer. And that did no good. “They won’t likely ask me anything but where I was, where the targets were. That’s all in the electronic record. Cut and dried, isn’t that the expression for it?”
Villanueva stood there a moment. Just looking at him. He expected Villanueva to say something in answer, but instead Villanueva walked off with his coffee and didn’t look back.
Maybe he should have given more back. Used a different expression. Read the signals otherwise. He didn’t dislike the man, God knew he didn’t dislike him. The man had been trying to say something, but somehow in the inevitable screw-ups between blue-skyer and spacer—he had the feeling the signals had gotten fuzzed.