Mining the Oort (15 page)

"What does it look like?" What it looked very much like, Dekker thought, was a copy of an entry test for the Oort program. There was a list of fifty questions scrolling up the screen, and they weren't simple multiple-guess choices. Most of them called for complicated calculations or essay answers and all of them were hard.

Dekker gave his father a suspicious look. "Where did you get this?"

The old man was breathing hard now, but he managed a cocky grin. "I'd say that's nothing you have to bother about, Dek. It came from a friend. A lady friend." He started to turn away, then looked back at his son. "But you know something? The lady isn't a bad looker. You might've missed a pretty good chance there, boy."

"Who? What chance?" Dekker demanded, but his father was coughing again.

"Never mind," Boldon gasped. "Dek, I can't talk now. Just get on with it, will you? I'm going to bed."

And Dekker did get on with it, wonderingly, while his father was wheezing and coughing on the far side of the room, with his face turned away. He made up his mind that he was going to have a showdown on this as soon as his father was in shape to answer. Meanwhile he worked at the questions until he was too tired to think anymore.

His father seemed sound asleep. Dekker pulled the blanket over him, then lay down in his own bed, closed his eyes, was asleep in a moment . . . and woke up in the middle of the night, thinking he had heard something.

The room was very quiet. Alarmed, Dekker got up and peered at his father's cot.

It was empty.

While he was sleeping his father had got up and gone out again, and, in the morning, was still gone . . . and did not show up all that day.

When Marcus Hagland turned up for the day's cramming he knew nothing about Boldon DeWoe's whereabouts. "What are you asking me for, DeWoe? Your old man and I aren't close friends. It's just a business relationship. Did you report him missing?"

"Who would I report it to?"

"The Peacekeepers, for Christ's sake. Who else? Still," Hagland added comfortably, "I wouldn't be in any hurry to bother about that if I were you anyway. He probably passed out on some barroom floor and he'll show up when he feels like it." That was all he had to say on the subject of Boldon DeWoe, and he turned to the cartridge Boldon had given his son. He began to grin. "Looks like he does have some friends, anyway," he said. "What'd he pay for this?"

"I don't know." That was the simple truth, Dekker thought, though he also thought that the truth would be unpleasantly far from simple if he ever learned it.

Hagland nodded, with the faint half smile of a tolerant accomplice. "Maybe you just don't ask questions like that? Or," he said, looking thoughtful as his tone changed, "maybe I've misjudged you and your old man both. It looks to me like the two of you are willing to bend a few rules for a good purpose. Do you take after him, DeWoe?"

"My father wouldn't break any laws!"

"No? Whatever you say, but how about yourself, then?"

"I don't know what you're trying to say."

Marcus took his time about responding to that, studying Dekker. Then he said, "It's simple. You might be able to do some good if you wanted to. You know the Earthies are screwing around with the project. Suppose you could do something to straighten that situation out—say, maybe something that might be pretty much against the law. Would you be willing to take a chance?"

"On breaking the law? No. And," Dekker added, disliking this man, "if anyone seriously asked me to break a law I think that's when I would start thinking about talking to the Peacekeepers."

The tutor looked at him with sour contempt, then shrugged. "Okay," he said. "Forget I asked. Let's get to work." He scrolled the screen to the first question. "Here we are. 'Spectral analysis shows the following concentrations in a target comet. Evaluate for suitability. Show me how you'd start your evaluation."

And so they began the session, and as the day wore on Dekker's dislike of his tutor receded, replaced by growing worry about his father. It wasn't until Marcus had gone, and Dekker was fixing himself something to eat late that night, that it occurred to him that perhaps he should take the man's halfhearted advice after all and report his father's absence to the Peacekeepers.

Who knew all about it, it turned out.

The night clerk at their local precinct had the records right there. Boldon DeWoe had managed to go farther than even the usual tolerance for drunks allowed. He had been arrested for starting a fistfight in a barroom—
fistfight
! The trial was already over; Boldon DeWoe had been convicted and sentenced to rehabilitation, and he was already beginning to serve his time in the Colorado Rehabilitation Facility, in a place called Pueblo.

Pueblo wasn't that far from Denver, but the price of the train ride knocked a big hole in Dekker's few remaining credits. He couldn't help that. He didn't hesitate; he knew at once what he had to do, and at the crack of dawn the next morning he was on his way. It was his father.

Dekker DeWoe had never been in a maglev train before. The ride took him through tunnels and on bridges across deep, wooded valleys, and—he observed, without feeling much pleasure in it—the scenery was magnificent. The ride could have been a joyous new experience for Dekker DeWoe . . . if only there had been enough collateral joy anywhere else in his life to let him appreciate it.

There wasn't. Wherever Dekker looked his life was troubled, and the worry about his father was only the newest and most urgent of his problems. Conscience made him try to study on his pocket screen as he rode, but his mind wouldn't stay concentrated. He gave up, put the reader back in his pocket, and closed his eyes.

He dozed for the last fifty kilometers of the trip, and got out, stiff and aching, in Pueblo's noisy terminal. The city of Pueblo turned out to be only a smaller, slightly less dingy Denver, and it took him half an hour to find out just where the rehabilitation facility was and to locate the cheapest way of getting to it. The Pueblo people weren't that helpful, either. Clearly none of them had ever heard of the Pledge of Assistance, and when he did manage to get one of them to talk to him long enough to discover that there was a bus that went to the door of the facility he arrived at the terminal just in time to see one pull out.

It was an hour before the next one, and he nearly missed that one, too, because he fell asleep in the hot, crowded waiting room. Then it was half an hour more, after many stops, before the hot and crowded bus reached the gate of the facility.

Dekker was the only person to get off there. A Peacekeeper was standing before the barred gate, gazing at him without pleasure. When Dekker limped up to him, his braces heavier than ever, the man didn't respond to his greeting; he just nodded and tugged at the amulet around Dekker's neck before Dekker had a chance to remove it and hand it to him. The Peacekeeper thrust it into a hand-reader and studied the results. "Dekker DeWoe," the man read from his screen. "You're a Martian, aren't you? We don't get many Martians here."

"I hope not," Dekker said.

The man wasn't listening. He released the amulet and said, "You can go on in. Go straight to the main door and don't leave the walk. There are alarms, and you don't want to set them off."

Then there was the long walk along a gravel path to the main building, creamy-white and featureless. Evidently there were a lot of people in need of rehabilitation in Colorado, for the building was huge. Six stories at least, Dekker thought, though it was hard to be sure since the facility didn't have any windows that Dekker could see. And when he was admitted he was kept waiting for nearly an hour before a clerk consented to see him. "Yes," the woman said, nodding, "he's here. Boldon DeWoe. You're his son?"

"Yes."

"Well, let's hope you can do better than your father. He got picked up because he committed an act of violence at a place called Rosie's Bar and Grill in Denver. Convicted, Fifth Municipal Court, Justice Harmon; got the usual indeterminate sentence."
 

Dekker blinked. "Indeterminate sentence? What does that mean?"

She shrugged. "It means he stays here until he's rehabilitated. Whenever that is. Let's see, it's his third conviction"—Dekker blinked again; his father had said nothing about previous convictions—"so he isn't likely to get out very fast. I'd say he'll be with us for at least three months, probably, maybe six or more if he gives any trouble. But maybe he won't. He can't get anything to drink in here, and it looks like he generally keeps his nose clean when he's sober. I suppose you want to see him."
 

"That's what I came here for, yes."

The clerk cocked an eyebrow at him, but only said, "You can have a ten-minute meeting in the interview room. You can't have it now, though. Rehabilitees aren't permitted to leave their units during cycle hours, so you have to wait until the cycle ends. That'll be at half past six."
 

"Half past
six
?"

"You do want to see him, don't you?" Then, almost kindly, she added, "His shift's at meal now. You can look in on them if you want. Up two flights, where it says 'Mess'; don't go anywhere else, because there are alarms. There's a viewing window there."

There was. There was a whole viewing gallery, in fact, with a one-way mirror that allowed them to look in on the vast dining hall, and about twenty people there to look through it. Most of the people watching were visitors like Dekker himself, but four were guards, laughing among themselves, but their eyes were roaming over the prisoners, alert for infractions. There were at least five hundred prisoners at meal, seated stiffly erect on backless benches at bare wooden trestle tables. If Boldon DeWoe was among them, Dekker could not pick him out. The rehabilitees were of all kinds—old and young, male and female, skins of all the colors human beings came in—but they all looked alike from behind the one-way window: silent, quick in their movements, eyes fixed on their plates, almost like machines. At a harsh beep they all rose quickly and filed out of the room.

That was when Dekker recognized his father at last—when he stood up to leave, though he was limping and bowed, he was enough taller than those around him to stand out—though there were, surprisingly, three or four other Martians in the room. Boldon DeWoe looked old and sick, Dekker thought worriedly.

Then the Peacekeepers stood up. "Show's over," one of them called. "On your way, people. We need to get this place cleaned up."

Everyone else seemed to know what to do. They turned and headed for the exit, but Dekker tarried. "Excuse me," he said to the Peacekeeper. "I'm waiting to see my father."

The man stared at him. "Rehabilitees aren't permitted to leave their groups until the cycle's over," he said.

"I know that."

The Peacekeeper shrugged. "There's a visitors' lounge. One flight down, and don't try to go anywhere else; there are alarms. But he won't be able to see you until six or so."

"I know that, too," Dekker said. Most of the visitors were already gone, but as Dekker attached himself to the tail of the group he saw another door open. Six men and women in inmates' uniforms were waiting there, mops and brooms in their hands, their heads cast down. None of them was his father.

"Step it up," the Peacekeeper called. "They can't come in until you're all out, and they've got work to do."

The visitors' lounge was large enough for several dozen people, but the only other person in it was an elderly woman who was eating her lunch. She looked up at Dekker three or four times before she said, "Didn't you bring anything to eat?"

"I didn't think I was going to be here this long."

"They never tell you anything ahead of time, do they?" She considered for a minute, and then offered him half of a sweet roll. The price for that was conversation, but Dekker was glad enough to pay it. The woman knew the ropes. All those other people watching the rehabilitees eat? They just came in for that, to have a look at whoever it was dear to them now undergoing rehabilitation; each inmate was limited to one outside contact a month, but still you did want to see them now and then, didn't you? The one she was going to see today was her daughter, and, yes, she knew all about the place—had been there twice herself in her younger days. It wasn't so bad. It wasn't
good
, either, because the guards were always trying to get you to start a fight, or at least talk back—when they weren't spilling things on the floor or pushing over a pile of laundry just to make you have to do everything over. But you could stand it, mostly. And hardly anybody ever had to stay there more than a year.

When she had finished her lunch she gathered up the crumbs—"They'll just have to clean them up if I don't, you know"—and pulled two chairs together to make a place to go to sleep.

Leaving Dekker to his own thoughts. But he didn't like them, and so doggedly he pulled out his screen and immersed himself in trajectory planning and impact analysis, while slowly the room filled around him . . . and his time was being eroded away.

When the Peacekeeper finally bawled his name he was admitted to a tiny visiting room, and his father was sitting there already—as far as Dekker could see, older and sicker still. They were given two facing wooden chairs, a meter and a half apart, and they weren't allowed to touch. There was no guard present to enforce the rule, but one of those windows was set into the wall, and Dekker had no doubt there was someone behind it. "Hello, Dad," he said. "How are you?"

It was a rhetorical question. Boldon DeWoe's eyes were bloodshot and he looked ten years older than he had forty-eight hours before. He was still wheezing, but all he said was, "Well enough," and stopped there, leaving Dekker to try to think of something to say.

Ten minutes was not very much time, but even so there was not enough conversation available between them to fill it all up. After all, what was there to say? His father acknowledged that he had been guilty of the infractions charged—that took ten seconds, at most—and Dekker said he was keeping up his studies, and then there wasn't much left. Only at parting Dekker was galvanized into speech.