Mining the Oort (34 page)

"Are you all right, DeWoe?" Ye asked worriedly. "Look, Dr. McCune is watching you."

Dekker opened his eyes, and the psycher definitely was. She was hanging by one foot, the sniffer in her hand, staring at him. "You there," she called. "What's the matter?"

"I'm fine," Dekker called back, stretching the truth.

"You don't look it. You're DeWoe, aren't you? All right, lay off while we get that taken care of. Garalek! Take this man in and get him a shot; we don't want him puking all over our supplies."

Dekker might not have made it to the aid room by himself, though it was only twenty meters away. He didn't have to. The man McCune had told to take him there tugged him by the collar, at high speed, and as soon as he had slapped a onetime shot into Dekker's arm Dekker began to feel better.

The man was grinning at him. "It passes," he said. 'Your name's DeWoe? I'm Lloyd Garalek, health services."

Dekker shook the man's hand. "I guess I'd better get back," he said.

"No big hurry," Garalek told him. "You won't want to miss Parker's big welcome-aboard speech, but he won't even show up in the hold until all the cargo's off the ship."

Dekker was feeling enough better to be curious. "Who's Parker? The station chief?"

"Station chief? No. That's Pelly Marine. Simantony Parker's just the deputy; he's one of you lot, you know. Anyway, after His Lordship gives his little speech he'll probably pull a practice flare alert just to get you new guys started off right—or," he said, thinking about it, "probably not right away, I guess, because Pelly Marine's off shift now and Parker's got too much sense to wake him up."

He stretched and yawned. Then he kicked himself gently across the room and caught himself at the door to look back at Dekker. "Give yourself another five or ten minutes, anyway," he advised. "I wish I could, but I have to get back to work, because Rosie McCune'll have her eye out for me. Can you find your way?"

"Well, sure," Dekker said, feeling slightly insulted. "I just turn left when I come out of the door."

The man laughed. "Turn left, huh? Which way is left when you're standing on your head? Watch the numbers, DeWoe; you want to go toward the down numbers. See you later."

Dekker didn't take ten minutes, but he did take three or four, mostly to practice kicking against a wall to cross a room the way Lloyd Garalek had. It took a little more skill than he would have thought, but by the time he risked the green-patterned corridor that took him back to the hold he was feeling reasonably confident of making his way around without skull fractures. He didn't really need to look for the numbers on the doors, either; the hold was instantly identifiable by the noise coming out of it.

The unloading was almost complete, and the old-timers had already hustled about half the cargo out. And Simantony Parker had arrived, identifiable by the orders he was shouting to everyone in sight.

Dekker understood immediately what Garalek had meant by "you lot." He meant Martian, because Simantony Parker was definitely that. He was also that strange and unusual thing, a
fat
Martian. "You cargo stores, hold it down," he commanded. "All you new people, grab a hold over here so I can talk to you for a minute." He waved to a reasonably bare section of the storage wall, and Dekker managed to loft himself over there with his classmates. In the awkward groping for places Dekker found himself holding to the same wall loop as Ven Kupferfeld, who gave him a friendly smile.

Dekker smiled back. It wasn't an instinctive reaction; it was the result of a conscious decision. They were going to be close together for a long time, he reminded himself, and the Law of the Raft told him what he had to do.

They didn't speak, because the deputy chief was getting ready to speak. "I said quiet down, all of you," he ordered. That didn't stop the crew members from continuing to shift cargo out or Rosa McCune from searching for contraband with her sniffer probe, but the new controllers did, after a fashion, quiet down.

"My name's Simantony Parker," the deputy chief said. "I'm sorry Pelly Marine isn't here to talk to you. Pelly's our chief of station, but he's off shift now, so it's up to me as his deputy to welcome you aboard."

He paused to survey his audience, then granted them a smile. "We're glad you're here, because we've been pretty shorthanded. We still are; with you people we're just a little less shorthanded is all. The good part of that is that we have more living space open than usual, so you've all got single room assignments. That's just temporary. If any of you want to double up with someone else you can be accommodated. You don't have to do it now; you can change over whenever you like." He looked at his hand screen for reminders. "Oh, yes. You all have your extra-duty assignments? Good. When you get to your quarters query your screen for your department head—I assume you all know how to use a station comm system?—and contact him; he'll let you know when to report for work." He looked at the screen again, then at the audience. "Are there any questions?"

Toro Tanabe's hand was the first up. "When will we start working at our primary jobs?"

Parker grinned. "You mean when do you get off your extra-duty? I can't promise anything about that; you'll have to work up to it. However, we know how you feel, so we're working out a rotation. We're going to put one of you new people on a shift team every day, so each one of you will get at least one tour at a control workstation over the next—what is it?—the next twenty-six days. After that we'll see. Anybody else?—oh, wait a minute. Have you got something for us, McCune?"

"Damn right, I do," Rosa McCune snapped from the door. She was standing by a carton, holding a probe that was beeping plaintively. "It's definitely narcotics, Parker," she said. "I've got a positive read."

"Jesus," the deputy chief snarled. "What son of a bitch is bringing dope onto the station? If any of you new bastards—"

But McCune was shaking her head. "It isn't any of theirs, I'm afraid. Come over here and take a look at the consignment tag."

Parker pulled himself over to the door, squinted quickly at the suspect package, then looked up with a face of thunder. "All right," he said. "Get on with your work, all of you. Leave everything here. I'll sort this out myself."

Dekker's room assignment was Yellow B3-43, and once he found out which of the corridors was Yellow B3 he had no trouble locating it. Several of his classmates were in the same area; he saw Doris Clarkson coming out of her door as he laboriously tugged his backpack to his own, and she told him that Shiaopin Ye was right across the hall.

The room itself was exactly as he had seen it on the virtuals: larger than a closet, without chairs or beds—because what would you use them for when you never sat or lay down?—but altogether bearable. The storage space in the walls was adequate for his few personal possessions. He didn't have a private bathroom, of course, but that wasn't serious; a Martian would not even have noticed such a lack if he hadn't been spending time amid the luxuries of the Earthies. He pulled out the sleep harness, fingering it curiously, and decided that he could get into it easily enough. Whether he could then sleep comfortably in it was another matter. Still, if the two hundred others on Co-Mars Two had learned to do that, Dekker DeWoe would certainly learn, too. Sooner or later.

The screen was easy enough to operate, and when he scrolled the menu to "emergency control" it supplied him with the call code for the head of the department, Jared Clyne.

Clyne was a surprise, not because he was black—although he was, as deeply purple-black as Walter Ngemba had been—but because Dekker had somehow not expected him to be a Martian, too. "Oh, hi," he said, peering out from the screen. "You're Dekker DeWoe? Good. Sorry I wasn't there when your ship came in, but I didn't want to get involved in one of Parker's all-hands-to loading bees. Anyway, I'm glad to meet you. Let's see." Clyne glanced up over the camera lens—at a clock, Dekker surmised. "We ought to get together pretty soon. How are you fixed for sleep?"

"Fine, I guess," Dekker said. With the adrenaline flow of arriving on the station the question hadn't occurred to him.

"Well, then. Come by when you get a chance. Not right away; better wait till the surprise flare drill is over, otherwise we'll just get interrupted. Red 2-11, do you know where that is?"

"No, but I'll find it."

Clyne laughed. "You're right about that. That's one of the many things you can't get on the station: lost."

His picture disappeared as he disconnected, and the screen went to its "ready" menu. Dekker hung thoughtfully before it for a moment, thinking about what to do next. Was he hungry? Not really, he thought, but still he would be, sooner or later. So he selected "food services," and was just learning that the dining halls were open twenty-four hours a day and that there were three of them scattered around the station when he heard a familiar polite cough from behind him.

It was Toro Tanabe, peering in the open door to Dekker's room. If he hadn't heard the cough, Dekker might not have recognized him at once, because he had never seen Tanabe's face at about a hundred-and-fifty-degree angle from his own vertical before. "Come in," Dekker said, waving Tanabe to a loop on the wall. "Well. How do you like Co-Mars Two so far?"

Tanabe took the question seriously. "It is not so bad, I suppose, if one does not expect comfort. But I do not care for this business of narcotics. I do not have strong moral feelings about dope, DeWoe, but it is foolish to have it on a station, when you must know you will be caught."

"Evidently somebody didn't think so. Do they know whose it was?"

"Not as far as I know. McCune would say nothing, and neither would this Parker person. Do you know him, DeWoe? No, I suppose not—I suppose it is only Earth people who think all Martians must know each other, just as Americans think of Japanese. Anyway," he said, beginning to look more cheerful, "in some ways this place is quite civilized. Voice-mail to Earth is available; I have already called my broker to buy my lottery tickets for this week."

"Good luck with them."

"Yes, thank you." Tanabe cleared his throat. He seemed slightly embarrassed. "I am just down the hall from you, DeWoe. I—ah—I think I should apologize for not asking if you would like to share quarters with me here, as we did at the academy."

"Oh, that's fine," Dekker said, having never for a moment considered that option. If he were going to share quarters with anyone, the roommate he would have wanted wouldn't have been Toro Tanabe. It would have been Rima Consalvo. Or Ven. Or even Annetta.

Tanabe appeared to be thinking along the same lines. "It is just that, if I have any luck, I think I may follow the local custom of 'duty wives' here. It has much to recommend it, I think."

Dekker tried not to grin. "Do you have anyone in particular in mind?"

"Not yet, no. I would not be surprised if you did, though. Although I do not think the choices are as large as one might have hoped; there are more men than women on the station, and I am told that most of the women are already taken."

Dekker digested that before asking, "Do you happen to know if any of our people have taken, ah, duty wives?" Or become duty wives, which was what he really wanted to know.

"I don't think so. I don't think they've had time. Still, if you have any particular plans I think it would be a good idea to start making your—holy God!" he interrupted himself, startled, as a harsh hooting sound blared all over the station. "What the hell is that?"

"I think," Dekker said, "that it's the solar flare alarm. I'm pretty sure it's only a test, Tanabe. But maybe it isn't, so I guess we'd better get on down to the flare shelter."

Dekker wouldn't have had to know where Co-Mars Two's flare shelter was—all he and Tanabe had to do was to follow the casually moving traffic, all in the same direction—but of course he did know; all those hours studying the virtuals had taught him the layout of the station. The shelter was not in the center of the structure, as it was on spaceships and on the terminals of the Skyhooks; on those things the safest places were central, because they rotated from time to time. Co-Mars Two didn't. The center of the station was filled with the reserve water tanks and the heavy machinery that pumped water and air around the station. The shelter lay just past those solidly radiation-opaque masses, on the side away from the Sun, and when there was no flare or drill in progress it was used as the station's gym.

For two people just up from the training school on Earth, the hard part wasn't finding it, it was getting there. Neither Dekker nor Tanabe had yet mastered the art of getting around in zero-g and so they floundered and bumped into each other and the walls of the passages. Tanabe panted, "Thank God this is only a drill. I would hate to have to do this in a real emergency!"

"It's never a real emergency," Dekker told him, with the wisdom of someone who had grown up on a planet where solar flares were sometimes a problem. He thought of explaining to Tanabe that the radiation from the Sun always came in two installments: first the visible-light sighting of the flare itself, then, hours later, the shower of particles. He would have done it, too, if he had been able to spare the breath. The two of them piled up at an intersection, and while they were collecting themselves to change direction from yellow to green Dekker caught sight of Annetta Bancroft and Dr. Rosa McCune, some way down the green corridor. They weren't moving toward the shelter. They were simply hanging there, and they were in the middle of an argument. It looked like a hot one, too; Dekker was astonished to see that Annetta was in furious tears, while the psychologist was stonily shaking her head.

Tanabe was staring at them curiously, but Dekker tugged at his arm and the Japanese followed reluctantly. "What was that all about?" he panted.

"Not our business, anyway," Dekker said, as a proper Martian. "They'll come along when they're ready. There's the shelter."

It took a while to get into it, because there was a knot of people waiting at the heavy air-seal door, and a loud babble of talk from inside. When they had got through, Dekker looked around curiously. The room was bigger than he had expected, all six of its walls lined with the spring-loaded exercise machines everyone on the station had to use regularly to try to keep their bones hard and muscles from weakening. People hung about the room in clusters, at all angles.