A straight-line rock was one thing to a Belter. Fall was a contradiction in terms. You didn’t have rocks on station, where things fell. And fall didn’t go straight-line. Thoughts and puzzlement chased through Sal’s expression, and rated a frown.
“What I said. Crazy.”
“A rock might fall on its own before it hit you. You got to know its size to know.”
‘’Why’d it move?”
“Because some crazy threw it at you. Bare-handed. But it might fall first.”
“So. On station, naturlich.”
“In the motherwell, everything’s like that. Gravity and friction are always in the numbers. Not a lot of blue-skyers can figure those numbers. Things just happen because they happen and sometimes they don’t happen and you don’t know why, so you were lucky or you weren’t. You don’t know. Very few can comp it. Ask a peacer what the answer is. He’ll tell you it’s not war. Ask him how you’ll get no war. He’ll say don’t make one. Half the time it works. You got, however, to convert the other side to this idea. Ask a peacer how to make peace. He’ll say, Don’t fight. Half the time that works too.”
“Guy was going to beat hell out of Dek.”
“Yeah, well, this rab did have such a thought. And I sincerely wasn’t going to sit and watch it.”
“So why’re the peacers paying for a lawyer for Dekker’s mama?”
“Peace on Earth’s like that rock. You got to calc things you don’t, in space. You got to ask, primarily, whose peace, whose way, how long? But Earthers don’t, generally. Blue-sky’s used to not caking all the factors.”
“Trez sloppy,” Sal said.
“The Corps don’t like you to calc all the numbers. Neither do the helldeck preachers. Listen all you like, you sojer-boys with the bugs. You sleep down with the Corp, you get up with fleas. How good’s your addition?”
“There is no excuse,” Tanzer said, “there is no mitigating circumstance except your personal decision to release Dekker from hospital without psychiatric evaluation, without appropriate procedures. The man’s a fuse, lieutenant. You knew that. Or don’t you read your personnel reports?”
Graff didn’t ask how Tanzer had. He said, patiently, standing in front of Tanzer’s desk: “Dekker didn’t do anything. He got up in a hurry and bumped a man he didn’t even know….”
“This is a finger you want on the trigger of the most sophisticated weapons system ever devised? Can’t navigate from a chair in the messhall? Is that his problem?”
“Your news service released a story without a next-of notice. Was that deliberate?”
“Is it a death situation? I think not. Your boy can’t tolerate a little stress? What in hell is he doing in this program? He blows and your whole side of the messhall comes out of the seats—“
“Your man did the grabbing and the shoving. Don’t try that one. It was simultaneous. There are too many witnesses.”
“Your witnesses were all in the middle of it. Your latest recruits were instigators. Is that what you call leadership? Is that what you call a cooperative relationship? Damned right, I don’t put all the blame on Dekker, / don’t blame the boy you dragged out of hospital and put into a high voltage situation, / blame the officer who made that boy a cause, which is damned well what you’ve done with your attitude and, for all I know, your direct statements to your command. You piled the pressure on that boy, you put those women in the middle of it, you set him up to draw fire—he was guaranteed to blow the first time he got any load more man he had. So his mama lost her job, damned right his mama lost her job—she was calling MarsCorp board members at two in the morning, threatening phone calls, you read me? She’s a spacecase—like mother, like son, if you want my opinion. It’s congenital!”
“You have no basis for any such conclusion.”
“Haven’t I? I’m telling you right now, right here, he’s never getting back in a cockpit and you aren’t giving any more orders in a UDC premise, not in the messhall, not the offices, not the classrooms, not the corridors or the hospital. Try that one, lieutenant. Take that one to your captain and see what he has to say.”