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wrench.”
    “Ben.”
    “All right, all right, all right.” Ben took off again.
    Dekker said, “I can’t see my watch.”
    Bird floated over where he could read the time on Dekker’s watch. “2014. You’re about three hours slow.”
    “No.”
    “That’s what it says.”
    “What day is it?”
    “May 20.”
    “You’re lying to me!”
    “Bird,” Ben said ominously, and came drifting up again to reach for Dekker, but Bird grabbed him.
    “I can’t take four weeks of that, Bird, I swear to you, this guy’s already on credit with me already.”
    “Give me a little slack, will you? Shut it down. Shut it up. Hear me?”
    “I’ve dealt with crazies,” Ben muttered. “I’ve seen enough of them.”
    “Fine. Fine. We get this guy out of a tumble, he’s been whacked about the head, he’s a little shook, Ben, d’you think you wouldn’t be, if you’d been through what he has?”
    Ben stared at him, jaw clamped, grievous offense in every line of his face.
    Ben was in the middle of his night. That was so. Ben was tired and Ben had been spooked, and Ben didn’t understand weakness in anybody else.
    Serious personality flaw, Bird thought. Dangerous personality flaw.
    He watched Ben go back to his work without a word.
    Good partner in some ways. Damned efficient. Good with rocks.
    But different. Belter-born, for one thing, never talked about his relatives. Brought up by the corporation, for the corporation.
    Talk to Ben about Shakespeare, Ben’d say, What shift does he work?
    Say, I come from Colorado—Ben’d say, Is that a city?
    But Ben didn’t really know what a city was. You couldn’t figure how Ben read that word.
    Say, I went up to Denver for the weekend, and Ben’d look at you funny, because weekend was another thing that didn’t translate. Ben wouldn’t ask, either, because Ben didn’t really want to know: he couldn’t spend it and he wasn’t going there and never would and that was the limit of Ben’s interest.
    Ask Ben about spectral analysis or the assay and provenance of a given chunk of rock and he’d do a thirty-minute monologue.
    Damn weird values in Belt kids’ mindsets. Sometimes Bird wondered. Right now he didn’t want to know.
    Right now he was thinking he might not want Ben with him next trip. Ben was a fine geologist, a reliable hold-her-steady kind of pilot, and honest in his own way.
    But he had some scary dark spots too.
    Maybe years could teach Ben what a city was. But God only knew if you could teach Ben how to live in one.
    Bird was seriously pissed. Ben had that much figured, and that made him mad and it made him nervous. He approved of Bird, generally. Bird knew his business, Bird had spent thirty years in the Belt, doing things the hard way, and Ben had had it figured from the time he was 14 that you never got anywhere working for the company if you weren’t in the executive track or if you weren’t a senior pilot: he had never had the connections for the one and he hadn’t the reflexes for the other, so freerunning was the choice… where he was working only for himself and where what you knew made the difference.
    He had come out of the Institute with a basic pilot’s license and the damn-all latest theory, had the numbers and the knowledge and everything it took. The company hadn’t been happy to see an Institute lad go off freerunning, instead of slaving in its offices or working numbers for some company miner, and most Institute brats wouldn’t have had the nerve to do what he’d done: skimp and save and live in the debtor barracks, and then bet every last dollar on a freerunner’s outfitting; most kids who went through the Institute didn’t have the discipline, didn’t refrain from the extra food and the entertainment and the posh quarters you could opt for. They didn’t even get out of the Institute undebted, thank God for mama’s insurance; and even granted they did all that, most wouldn’t have had the practical sense to know, if they did decide to