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go mining and not take a job key-pushing in some office, that the game was not to sign up with some shiny-new company pilot in corp-rab, who had perks out to here. Hell, no, the smart thing was to hunt the records for the old independent who had made ends meet for thirty years, lean times and otherwise.
    Namely Morris Bird.
    Freerunning was the only wide gamble left in the Belt—and freerunners, being from what they were, didn’t have the advantage of expert, up-to-date knowledge from the Institute—plus the Assay Office. But with Morrie Bird’s thirty years of running the Belt, his old charted pieces were bigger than you got nowadays, distributed all along the orbital track, and he got chart fees on those every month, the company didn’t argue with his requests to tag, and those old charted pieces kept coming round again, in the way of rocks that looped the sun fast and slow.
    Sometimes those twenty-four- and twelve-year-old pieces might have been perturbed, and if somebody tried to argue about the claim, your numbers had to be solid after all those years—besides which, to find the good chaff that might remain to be found, you had to have more than guesswork. That was the pitch he had to offer along with 20 k interest-free to finance some equipment Bird badly needed; that was why Bird should take a greenie for a numbers man in a time when experienced miners went begging: company training, the science and the math and the complete Belt charts that Assay got to see—and they had done damned well as a team—
    damned well, til they’d got one of those absolutely miserable draws Mama sometimes handed you—a sector where there just wasn’t much left to find but a handful of company-directed tags on some company-owned rocks.
    So right now they were in a financial slump, Bird was under a strain, and Bird had odd touchy spots Ben never had been able to figure—all of which this Dekker had evidently hit on with his crazy behavior and his pretty-boy looks. Dekker was up there in their sleeping nook mumbling about losing his partner (damned careless of him!) and now Bird was mad at him , acting as if it was his fault the guy was alive and the find that might have been their big break turned out complicated.

    Maybe, he thought, Bird did want that ship as much as he did, maybe Bird was equally upset that this fellow was alive, Bird having this ethic about helping people—Bird might well be confused about what he was feeling.
    Dangerous attitude to spread around, Ben thought, this charity business—and unfair, when Bird even thought about forgoing that ship for somebody who owed him and not the other way around, at his own partner’s expense. It was a way for Bird to get had, and a man as free-handed as Bird was needed help from a partner with a lasting reason to keep him in one piece.
    “Bird?” he called out from the workstation. “I got your prelim calc. No complications but that ’driver and our mass.”
    Bird came over to him, Bird said he’d finish it up and call Mama. Bird touched him on the shoulder in a confusingly friendly way and said, “Get some sleep.”
    Ben said, because he thought it might make Bird happier, “You. I’m wired.” At the bottom of his motives was the thought that a little time next to Dekker’s constant mumbling about Cory and his watch might make Bird a little less charitable to strangers.
    But Bird said, “You. You’re the one needs it most.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It means what it means. You’re tired. You’ve worked your ass off Get some rest.”
    “I don’t think I’ll sleep right off. That guy makes me nervous. This whole situation makes me nervous.”
    “Bad day. Hard day.”
    He decided Bird was being sane again. He was relieved. “You know,” he said,
    “we might just ought to get a statement out of this guy. You know. Besides pictures.
    I’m going to get a tape of this whole damn What-time-is-it? routine, show what we got to cope with.