Starfishers Volume 2: Starfishers (23 page)

Education passed him to Psych. Psych eventually passed him to Medical. For a week every opening of his eyes meant he was fresh off another operating table. Then Education took another go at him. While he recovered he had to read. And when he slept computers pressure-injected information directly into his brain.

Dragons in the night. Golden chinese dragons. Starfishers . . . What the hell was it all about? Who was Moyshe benRabi? What was becoming of Cornelius Perchevski?

Sometimes he screamed and fought them, but they were as stubborn as entropy. They kept right on rebuilding their new man.

This was the most intensive, extensive prep he had ever undergone.

He saw Mouse just twice during the whole prep period. They shared the intense hypo-teaching sessions briefing them about Starfishers, but did not intersect again till they met in their master’s office. Perchevski thought they were prepping for different missions. Till the Admiral got hold of them personally.

“Boys,” Beckhart said, “you’ve just gone through hell. And I did it to you. I’m not proud of it. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. I don’t like operating this way. You’ll just have to take my word that it’s necessary. And I know what you think about that, Tommy. I don’t blame you. But give me the benefit of the doubt, and try to trust me when I tell you that it’s imperative that we bring the Starfishers into Confederation as soon as possible.”

Such was the opening barrage in a one-way discussion lasting more than three hours. Beckhart talked endlessly, and never answered even one of the questions Perchevski thought pertinent.

He once protested, “You promised no more team jobs.”

“And I meant it when I said it, Tommy. But this is the most hurried hurry-up job we’ve ever had. The CNI told me to put my best men in. She picked you. My God, Tommy, it’s only for a couple of weeks. You can’t put up with Mouse that long?”

“It’s the principle . . . ”

Beckhart ignored him, veering instead into another track.

Almost before he knew what was happening Perchevski found himself aboard a warship bound for the nether end of The Arm. For a world that was, galactically, only a stone’s throw from The Broken Wings.

He did not like that. It seemed to be tempting fate too much.

There wasn’t a thing he did like about this mission.

They hadn’t even let him say his good-byes. Bureau thugs had surrounded him from the moment he had departed Beckhart’s office . . . 

“Hey, Moyshe,” Mouse said cheerfully, within an hour of their going aboard, let’s go up to the wardroom and play some chess.”

Fifteen: 3048 AD
Operation Dragon,
Danion

Danion
became as comfortable as an old, well-worn shoe.

“Fact is, it’s getting downright dull,” Mouse complained toward the end of the third month.

“What?” benRabi demanded. “All those ball games, and you up to your ears in women, and you’re bored?”

“You got it, partner. Like the man in the joke said, women are fine, but what do you do the other twenty-three hours of the day?”

Amy made a remark that Moyshe did not catch.

“If that’s how you feel,” Mouse replied, laughing, “you can carry your own damned books.”

They were moving her into Moyshe’s cabin. BenRabi was not overwhelmed by the idea. Nor was he sure how it had come about. It had just sort of fenced him in, pushed by Amy and Mouse till the move actually began and he still had not said “No!”

He preferred living alone. Sharing struck him as synonymous with imposition. Amy’s mere presence foreordained increased demands . . . At least he would have someone around when the headaches came.

Mouse and Amy kept bickering. Mouse was teasing, but Amy sounded serious. She did not like Mouse much.

BenRabi’s migraines came several times a week now. He was scared. The voices and visions . . . He thought it might be a tumor, but the Seiner doctors would not take him seriously. They gave him pain pills and told him not to worry.

He had been on continuous medication the last ten days. He was pale, dehydrated, weak, and shaky.

Amy seemed to be the only one who cared, and she would not say why.

His old downdeep fear that he was going mad seemed ever more creditable.

This is a hell of a time to take a live-in lover
, he thought, dumping an armload of clothing. The relationship was paraplegic.

The inexplicable recurring memory of Alyce did not help. It frightened and disoriented him.

There was no reason for that old, dead affair to obsess him.

It was just another symptom of whatever was happening to him. But it was damned scary.

On The Broken Wings he had, almost, been the tough, hard character he had been portraying. Now, less than a year later, he was a spineless, whimpering . . . Disgusted, he tried to kick a chair across the cabin. It did not move. All shipboard furniture was bolted down.

He resumed work in grim silence.

“Moyshe, I need your help,” Mouse said a month after the move, voice sounding a plaintive note.

“What? How? I’ll do whatever I can.” He glanced over his shoulder to make sure Amy remained in the women’s head. He was surprised. This tone did not fit his partner at all.

“Figure out a way to keep me from killing her.”

BenRabi followed Mouse’s gaze. It was fixed on the Sangaree woman like the cross hairs of an assassin’s rifle scope.

“She’s working on me, Moyshe. She’s got me working on myself. I’ve been having trouble sleeping. I just lay there thinking up ways . . . Thinking about her being right down the passage. It’s because of the mess on Blackworld. I can’t get it out of my head. And I thought I had it under control.”

“You too? What the hell did Beckhart do to us?”

Amazing, Mouse’s finally owning up to a connection with the Shadowline War. He must be under real stress.

“Self-discipline, Mouse. That’s the only answer I’ve got. And maybe the notion that you ought to save yourself for a bigger target. She’s not worth getting burned over.”

“She’s the queen in the game. And the stakes are as big as they can get, Moyshe. Watch her. I’ve never seen anybody so sure they had a winning hand. She’s got a royal flush in spades look.”

“You’re mixing metaphors.”

“Metaphors be damned, Moyshe. I need help.”

Jesus
, benRabi thought.
Here I am halfway to the psycho ward and my partner is crying for me to keep him out. Are we going to have one nut stand guard over the cracks in the other’s noggin?
“Let’s take it to Kindervoort, then.”

“Oh, no. This stays in the family. Jarl doesn’t get anything free. How’s your head doing?”

“The docs keep saying there’s nothing wrong. It don’t sound right. I mean, how come I hurt so goddamned much? But maybe it’s true. For a while I thought it was a tumor and they were just jollying me so I wouldn’t panic. But the scans didn’t show anything when I finally got them to let me see them. Now I think something external is causing it.”

“Allergy?”

“No. I can’t explain yet. It’s just barely a suspicion so far.”

That suspicion did not leaf out, blossom, and bear fruit for months.

Time lumbered forward. Mouse worked himself into the shipwide chess finals. BenRabi had a falling out with the collector crowd, among whom he had been a brief, bright star. They were older, more prejudiced people, and unable to tolerate his alienness indefinitely. He trudged onward in his laborious relationship with Amy.

He tried to make it work. He sincerely believed he was giving it an honest go, and for a while the curious Alyce memories and attendant mental oddities withdrew, but he never saw any long-term hope.

He even abandoned his writing in order to give her more time. “I just don’t feel like writing,” he lied. “It isn’t me anymore.”

She protested, but with such restraint that he began to resent her presence during moments when he could have written.

Turn around twice and there went another month into the file cabinets of time. And here was Mouse with another. “Moyshe, I think I need help.”

“Stay out of her way.”

“Not the Sangaree woman this time, Moyshe. Another one.”

“What else?”

“Carrie just gave me the word. That Sally I was going with . . . She’s peegee.”

“Come on. You’re shitting me. People don’t get pregnant unless . . . Oh, my.”

“Oh, my, yes. Unless they want to.”

Moyshe fought a grin.

“You laugh and I’ll kick your head in.”

“Me? Laugh? I’m sorry. It’s just that . . . What do you want me to do?”

“Shee-it, Moyshe. I don’t know. Talk to me. I’ve never been up this tree before.”

“What is it? She figure you’d do the honorable thing?”
Why are you doing this to me, Mouse? I had a handle on the Alyce thing
.

“That’s the name of the game. That’s the way they do things here. And the way they lay their little traps. Straight from Century One.”

“No law says you’ve got to give her what she wants, though. Kiss her good-bye.” That was how he had failed Alyce, so long ago. He had not found the strength to say no until it was too late.

“I don’t like to hurt anybody’s feelings.”

“That’s the chance she took, isn’t it?” How come it was so easy to say, but so hard to do? “I don’t see how anybody could believe in a marriage that started out that way anyway. Go on. Tell her to kiss off.”

“Easier said than done, Moyshe.”

“I know. Advice is that way. Here’s some more, while we’re at it. Take your own precautions so it doesn’t happen again.”

“That much I figured out for myself.” Mouse went away. He returned within the hour, shaking his head. “She couldn’t believe that landsmen don’t give a damn if a kid’s parents are married or not. But I think I finally got through to her.”

For a while Mouse’s social calendar was less crowded. But only for a while. The ladies seemed incapable of remaining away.

“Tell me something, Amy,” benRabi said one afternoon. “Why are we here?”

She started giving him the standard story.

“That’s not true.
Danion
didn’t really need us. Certainly not a thousand of us. Even with only two hundred we’ll finish up six months early. Your own Damage Control people wouldn’t have taken much longer. So what’s really going on?”

She would not tell him. She even refused to speculate. He suspected, from her expression, that she might not know, that she was beginning to ask herself the questions that were bothering him.

His came of a long line of thinking sparked by snippets of information and flashes of intuition that had begun accumulating on Carson’s.

“Correct me if you can fault this hypothesis,” he told Mouse when Amy was out of hearing. “We’re guinea pigs in a coexistence experiment. They’ve got something big and dangerous going and they thought they could hire outside help to get through it. I’d guess they expect heavy fighting. Our job descriptions all deal with damage control. But the experiment was a failure. No takers.”

“I wouldn’t know, Moyshe. You’ve got your head working. Who were they going to fight? Not us.”

“Sharks?”

“Maybe. But it doesn’t add up. Still, I’m not much good at puzzles. How’s your head doing?”

“Real good. Why?”

“I thought so. You’re more like the old Moyshe lately.” They completed the last scheduled repair three weeks later. From then on there was little to do.

One day a long-faced Amy announced, “They just told me. Starting Monday you’ll be assigned to Damage Control. To the emergency ready room at D.C. South. I’ll take you over and introduce you.”

“Breaking up the team, eh?” Mouse asked. “Where are you going?”

“Back to Security.” She did not sound pleased.

BenRabi felt a guilty elation. Though he loved Amy, he did not like having her around all the time. He felt smothered.

The damage control assignment was a crushing bore. “A fireman in a steel city would have more to do,” Mouse complained. A few days later, he cornered benRabi in order to update him on his own snooping.

“Our fleet commander looks like a maverick. He won’t bow down to Gruber of Gruber’s Fleet as the head honcho Starfisher. He wants to do things his own way. The other fleets treat this one like an idiot cousin.”

“That why the Old Man targeted Payne’s Fleet?”

“No. He just jumped on a chance to get somebody onto a harvestship. You were right about the experiment, by the way. It was something Gruber put Payne up to. I get the impression that now he’s using the failure as an excuse to go haring off on some adventure of his own as soon as we’re done harvesting.”

“Speaking of which. Amy says it’s the best they’ve ever had. They’re going to hold their auction after we leave.”

“Kindervoort still on you about crossing over?”

“He mentions it sometimes. Came to the cabin last week.” Did Mouse suspect that he found the offer tempting?

Sports season became crazier than ever as playoff time approached. For Moyshe it was all bewildering color and madness. Mouse, of course, was right in the thick of it. Football was his latest passion. He could quote records and statistics by the hour. BenRabi studied the game just so he could carry on a conversation.

Their lives, increasingly, became frosting, sugar-bits having nothing to do with their assignments. They had come here to find starfish. Despite a thousand doubts and distractions, benRabi kept his wavering cross hair sighted near his programed target. He even resumed wrestling with
Jerusalem
so he could keep his invisible notes.

Sharing quarters with an agent for the other side constantly hampered him. He was not so naïve as to believe that Amy had been struck deaf and blind by love.

He had come aboard thinking starfish were a wonderful concept, a miraculous hook on which to hang modern myths and legends. They had been one with the lost planet Osiris and the fabulous weapons of Stars’ End. Now he knew that the hydrogen streams teemed with “life.” The fairy magic was gone, but still the fantastic fish were something to play with during his long hours of waiting for an emergency that never arose.