15
Getting to Earth was a blast for Dekker DeWoe, all of it. It was a dream come true.
First there was the little Skyhook capsule screaming up the cable from the Martian surface to the transfer point, with all of Sunpoint City falling away beneath him and his heart dragged down into his belly with the acceleration—but buoyant, too, because he was on his way. Then there was the ship itself and the private cubicle they had given to him for his own—no bigger than a bathtub, maybe, but on a spaceship, with all the wonders that that entailed to thrill the heart of a quite mature twelve-year-old. No! Earth years, now! A twenty-year-old.
Just to make it more exciting still there was even a solar flare alarm eleven days out. A solar prominence erupted, and its violent outpouring of particles radiated out from the Sun, which meant that everybody was stuck in the shielded core chamber for twenty-two hours until the ruddy loop of the prominence collapsed back on itself and the solar radiation died back down. The experience wasn't dangerous, really, but it was certainly something to tell Tinker's grandson and the other kids back in Sagdayev—if he ever got back to Sagdayev, and if, whenever that might be, the kids were still kids.
Of course, Dekker himself wasn't really a kid anymore. But even a young adult like Dekker DeWoe could feel a special tingling in his heart when he was getting into a spaceship for the hundred-million-kilometer flight to Earth. By any standards at all, that was really special.
But it took twenty-some days to traverse those hundred million kilometers, and with nowhere to go inside the ship and only the same eighteen people, passengers and crew, to talk to, the experience got old pretty fast.
Being on Earth, though—that was something else entirely.
Once Dekker had come down the vastly bigger Skyhook and first stood on Earthie soil, it didn't take him long to realize just how different it was. It was not going to be all fun. Earth hurt, hurt his bones at every step with its cruel pull. Earth was dirty. Earth was hostile—or the people were; or so it seemed to a skinny Martian kid who couldn't run or jump very well, and had a loser for a father besides. All the advice and warnings, all the calcium milkshakes and polysteroid injections, all the shipboard indoctrination hadn't prepared Dekker for the many ways in which Earth was nastier than Mars, but the thing he was least prepared for of all was Dad.
Dekker limped out of the customs hall at the base of the Nairobi Skyhook, pulling his wheeled duffel bag behind him like a puppy on a leash, he looked for his father, but didn't see him. Instead, he saw a stooped, slow-moving old man hobbling toward him, and knew before the man spoke—but only half a second before—that this wreck of a man was indeed Boldon DeWoe.
The man stopped to regard Dekker, half a meter away. When Dekker looked at him closely he could tell that the man had been a Martian once, because he had the slender, stretched Martian physique. But now he was bent almost to Earthie height, and he was leaning on a thick cane, besides. He did not look well. His shoulders were hunched forward, but his head was bent back and his chin thrust out as he squinted at his son. They didn't kiss, hug, or even shake hands. Boldon DeWoe nodded, as though he were getting just what he had expected and hadn't expected very much, and said, "Well. You're here. What's the matter with your ear?"
Dekker saw no reason to go into the complicated story of the hydrogen leak on the dirigible and the pain of the transplant. He just said, "Frostbite."
His father didn't comment on that. "That's all the baggage you've got?" he said. "Then come on. We've got a train to catch." He was turning away to limp down the ramp before he thought to add, over his shoulder, "Son."
Dekker followed, moving not very much more quickly than his father with his luggage cart to pull. They probably should have kissed, he thought, but he had been unwilling to make the first move.
They descended a moving staircase to a platform where eighteen or twenty little cars, not joined together like a train, were waiting. Boldon DeWoe led the way to the first car in line. When he got in he punched out a code on the keypad and inserted a shiny, pencil-thick thing that he wore around his neck in a slot. He looked at his son.
"That's how you pay for things, with your credit amulet. You have to pay for things here."
"We pay for things on Mars, too," Dekker said. "Of course, you probably wouldn't remember."
His father didn't comment on that. He lowered himself to a seat and, looking at Dekker, "Why is your face so red?"
"They give you whole-blood transfusions before you land, to help build up the red cells. That's plus all the other shots and—" He held up one leg to show. "—the braces."
"Hold on tight, then," his father said, just about in time. At that moment two or three other cars smacked into theirs, finally forming a train. When it moved off the acceleration was a good deal more violent than Dekker expected. He thought for one unhappy moment that he might get sick, but didn't. None of the other passengers seemed to be bothered. There were only four others in the little car, all apparently Earthies, and when the train stopped three of those got off.
The other cars uncoupled themselves, too, and their car lurched away. In five minutes it stopped and Boldon DeWoe got out.
"This is the neighborhood," he said over his shoulder.
It wasn't much of a neighborhood: Little cars and bigger vans were whining along the streets, trailing clouds of steam from their exhausts; people, most of them black, were cluttering the sidewalks; the buildings were astonishingly tall, by Dekker's Martian standards—eight to ten stories, some of them—but they seemed old and not particularly well cared for. Even the air had a funny sort of smell—smoky, perhaps, or spoiled. Dekker sneezed as his father turned and painfully began to climb some brick steps.
There were four or five tall black men lounging on the stoop, drinking beer. Most of them were wearing shorts and brightly—or formerly brightly—colored open-necked shirts. Some of the garments were faded, most were sweat-stained. The men themselves seemed friendly enough: they moved aside to make room, and all of them nodded amiably to Boldon as they approached.
This was not what Dekker had expected, none of it, and the man who was his father was not what he remembered. What Dekker remembered of Boldon DeWoe was a string-bean thin, smiling man, tall and skinny even for a Martian. Not this twisted, scrawny old guy, so bent that he was no taller than the black Earthies on the stoop. But when Boldon DeWoe introduced Dekker around he said, "This is my son." Then things began to look up a little for Dekker, because his father sounded actually proud when he said it.
Then they were in the lift, which took back some of that momentary optimism, because not only did it smell of stale sweat and worse but it jolted Dekker's troubled legs so that he staggered. But he was glad the elevator was there, because the alternative would have been worse; his father's apartment was on the top floor.
Then he saw the place where his father lived, where he would live. It wasn't just that it was small—Dekker was used to small—this place was also dirty.
"You get the couch," his father told him, limping over to a sink and beginning to rinse out a glass. "It's short, but you're young. I'm going to have a drink."
"No, thanks," Dekker said, though he hadn't been offered one. He picked a half-empty case of bottles off the couch and brushed the cushions off before he put his duffel bag on it. Then he began picking up dirty dishes from around the room.
"Leave that," his father ordered, sitting down heavily with the drink in his hand. "I want to find out what you know. What's an Augenstein?"
Dekker blinked. "What?"
"An Augenstein drive. What is it, how does it work?"
He was evidently serious.
Dekker put his collection of dishware on a sideboard, pushing a stack of clean, but unsorted, laundry out of the way to make room. He sat down. "Well," he began, "an Augenstein is what drives spaceships. Basically its power chamber is a porous tungsten block in a hydrogen atmosphere. There's a pipette through the block that admits antiprotons to the central chamber; the antiprotons react with the hydrogen, blam, and the heat propels the working fluid out the rocket nozzle. Mostly they use powdered rock for the working fluid, but it could be—"
His father stirred. "Don't say 'they,' Dekker. 'We.' Say 'we.'"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Get in the habit of saying it. I want you to think like an Oort miner so you'll act like an Oort miner. We use powdered rock for the working fluid, only, of course, out in the Oort we don't. What do we do there?"
"We use comet mass."
His father nodded, swallowing a sip of his drink. "Comet mass, right. We tank up with frozen gases from a comet. What about the antiprotons that fuel the Augenstein?"
"The antiprotons?"
"Where do they come from? How do they make them?"
For a moment Dekker was tempted to point out to his father that he had said "they," but it didn't seem like a good idea. This sudden pop quiz looked to be very important to the old man. Instead, Dekker said, as though called on in class, "Antimatter is made on the Moon, because of the vacuum environment, the ready availability of electric power, and the danger of accident. The photovoltaic power from the sunlight is used to run a ring accelerator that's about forty kilometers across, inside a big crater, and the accelerator produces antiparticles. Do you want me to write out the reaction?"
"I do," Boldon DeWoe said, and pointed to a memo screen under the piled clothing on the sideboard. When Dekker retrieved it, his father watched carefully while Dekker wrote the equation out on the tiny screen. When that was finished, he wanted to know how Dekker would go about determining the deltas for an orbit from Mercury to Mars, what sort of comets were the most valuable, and how their orbits were controlled. He didn't comment on any of the answers. Finally he said, "All right, now what kind of shape are you in?" He wouldn't settle for an answer but ordered Dekker to pull out his record cartridge and display the results of the tests for his physical parameters—reaction time, depth perception, concentration factor, and the rest. Then Boldon DeWoe leaned back thoughtfully in his chair, stared at the ceiling for a moment, and sighed. He levered himself erect and stumped over to the refrigerator. "You want a beer?" he called over his shoulder.
Dekker didn't, particularly; he'd never really enjoyed alcohol since Annetta Cauchy's party so many years before. Still, he said yes anyway, simply because drinking beer with his father seemed like a bonding kind of thing to do. He could feel the stuff bubbling ticklishly behind his nose. Then his father said, "I guess you're tired."
Dekker nodded, reminded to notice that he was.
"So let's get some sleep. You'll need all the rest you can get, Dek. There's a good prep school here in Nairobi. I know some of the teachers. The school isn't particularly aimed at the Oort, but they can brush you up on the theoretical stuff." He paused to sip from his drink. "The school isn't cheap, Dek, and I don't have much money. Do you have any cues?"
"Earth cues? No. You sent the money for the fare, but there wasn't anything left over."
"I didn't think there would be. Well, I'll get you an amulet—that's what you need to pay for things—and I'll transfer a hundred cues or so to your account, just for walking-around money. There won't be much, though, and I can't afford to keep you in the school forever. But you don't have forever, anyway. In about seven weeks you're going to have to take the tests for Oort training, and they're a bitch."
"I've already taken all the preparatory courses," Dekker said proudly.
"Sure you have. On Mars, a long time ago. Anyway, it's going to be harder here; just physically, you're not used to the gravity. It wears you. down. I hear you can work hard when you want to, is that right?"
"I guess so."
"Then want to, Dek. It's important. All I can give you is the one chance."
After a week Dekker decided the school was just as hard as Boldon DeWoe had predicted, and that was a surprise to him. In spite of what his father said, he hadn't expected it. He had been of the comforting Martians' opinion that, since everything on Mars was naturally better than anything on Earth—physical-environmental problems notwithstanding—anybody who could get along well in a Martian deme school would naturally jump right to the head of the class in any school Earth had.
He didn't, quite. The other students turned out to be damnably quick and smart. They were almost all black, too, a fact that surprised Dekker at first. To be sure, the existence of black people was no surprise to him; there were plenty of black people on Mars. But nowhere on Mars was there any place that was so overwhelmingly all black—or all white or all anything else—as this.
The major visible exception was the teacher, Mr. Cummings. He was a good deal paler than anyone else in the classroom, but his skin was still milk chocolate rather than cocoa powder, and a good many shades darker than Dekker's own. So Dekker stood out. Not only for his skin. Not only for his height, either, though he towered above the rest of the class. The other conspicuous difference was in the way they were dressed. Male and female alike they wore brightly colored tailored shorts and tailored shirts—both of which always seemed to stay neatly pressed no matter what sports their owner was in—as against Dekker's own scuffed poly-denims, and they all wore shoes made out of what Dekker was astonished to find was leather. It wasn't just a single kind of killed-animal skins, either, for some of them wore pigskin on their feet and some wore cow, and there was even a couple whose shoes were made from ostrich hide. It had never occurred to Dekker that anyone would ever wear anything that had been taken from a killed-animal.
There were other surprises, too. Not so much in the curriculum, though Dekker was dismayed to find that he was required to memorize a good many dates from histories that had never received much attention in Sagdayev. Still, most courses were easy enough for Dekker DeWoe to deal with. Mathematics was mathematics, no matter what planet you were on, and so were physics, chemistry, and astronomy. The biggest surprise was in the fact that Nairobi's students did not have compulsory docility Masses. What they had, instead, were the perplexing twice-a-week sessions they called shove-and-grunt. They were, the teacher explained when he saw the bafflement on Dekker's face, designed to reduce tensions so that people could get along with each other better, and the shoving and grunting were real—and very physical.
It was also, for a Martian newly arrived on Earth with his bones and sinews still making the adjustment, fairly dangerous. The first exercise they did was called "breaking in." All but one of the students formed themselves into a tight ring, arms locked around each other's bodies, pressed hard against each other, while the one student left out was charged with getting inside the ring. At first Dekker thought he might actually enjoy it, because the student next to him was an unusually tall young woman named Sally Moi. Holding her warm body pressed against his own was interesting in ways that were by no means unpleasant. But then Mr. Cummings signaled to begin, and the left-out student selected Dekker as the weakest link. He put his head down and came butting against Dekker's kidneys, hard and serious, and the wind went out of Dekker with a whoosh.
That was enough for Mr. Cummings. He excused Dekker from the exercise and in the next session, a kind of wrestling, paired him with the young man named Walter Ngemba, who promised to go easy. Going easy wasn't easy enough. Walter Ngemba was as careful as he had promised, but still when he flopped Dekker over onto his back and pinned his shoulders to the mat Dekker winced from the impact. Mr. Cummings intervened again. Dekker was retired to the side of the room, glad enough to save his Martian bones from splintering, but sorry to be found unfit to participate—and regretful to be giving up the chance to wrestle with Sally Moi. Women had no great place in his immediate plans, not when they might interfere with the prospect of getting into the academy, but her warm body had felt interestingly good within his arm.
Then Mr. Cummings blew his whistle. He gave Dekker a good-natured glance, and said, "I think we'll move along to the verbal phase a little early today. Dekker, since you didn't get much out of the physical part, this is your chance to get a bit of your own back with Walter. Perhaps you'd care to start by calling him some names."
"Why?" Dekker said.
"Why, in order to offend him. Don't you have hostility management on Mars? All the bad things you've ever thought, this is a chance to get them out of your system. Call him race names. Say something like, 'You stupid kaffirs aren't even human,' for instance."
Dekker looked at Walter Ngemba, who was waiting with an expectant grin, then back at the teacher. "What's a kaffir?" he asked.
"Call him a jungle bunny if you prefer. Or a wog, perhaps? Really, Dekker, you must have heard some ethnic slurs at some time in your life, haven't you?"
Dekker thought for a second, then remembered. "Dirtsucker," he said experimentally. "Walter, you're a dirtsucker, aren't you?" And was astonished when the whole class, Walter Ngemba included, broke out in laughter; and more astonished still when Mr. Cummings, to show Dekker how the process worked, allowed the whole class to insult Dekker himself at once, and he found out just how many scurrilous terms Earthies knew to express the simple concept of "Martian."
It was a long way, he thought, from the Law of the Raft.
After two full weeks on Earth, Dekker's body had begun to accept the fact that extra efforts were required of it on this planet. It still hurt to walk, or even to stand up; it just didn't hurt quite as much. Earth, Dekker DeWoe decided, wasn't really a bad place. It might actually be a good one if it were just a little less noisy and crowded . . . and if the Earthies had ever learned the Law of the Raft.
But, he concluded, they hadn't. Earthies didn't try to make each other comfortable and happy and satisfied with the world. They didn't even like each other, and the best they could do in their hostility-management sessions was to find ways to keep from showing it.
It was, Dekker thought, pretty childish of them.
It seemed to Dekker that his fellow students acted like children because they were treated like children. The worst part was that he felt as though the same thing was happening to him. For instance, every afternoon when Dekker got out of school there was his father waiting in his dumb little three-wheeled car to drive him home. The other students came hurrying purposefully out of the schoolyard, with the old Peacekeeper lady at the corner vainly trying to keep them from dodging traffic as they crossed the busy street, and Dekker was being met like some five-year-old. He wasn't the only one. Walter Ngemba, too, was picked up every day at the school—though in a pale blue limousine six meters long instead of a trike—but Dekker DeWoe, a full adult with a medal for heroism, resented it.
When Dekker was inside the wobbly little car, climbing in clumsily of his leg braces, his father reached over him to snap the door and stared at him for a moment before he started the car. "Didn't your mother teach you to say thanks?" he asked. There was whiskey on his breath.
"Thanks," Dekker said, to save time, but then he said, "I wish you wouldn't come for me, though."
"Bullshit. It's Thursday, did you forget? Anyway, you're not strong enough to walk all the way home."
"I want to get strong enough," Dekker said. He nodded toward the Peacekeeper, who was squinting at them under her sun hat. "She wants you to move on, Dad."
"Screw her." But the old man stepped on the speed pedal and the trike pulled away. The Peacekeeper, Dekker saw as they went through the intersection, had a funnily mixed expression on her face. Half of it was a smile, for Dekker himself—she always had a cheerful hello for him—and the other half was not smiling at all. Dekker was pretty sure that part was for his father. Dekker was pretty sure that all the Earthies had that kind of not-very-admiring feeling about his father, even the neighbors who greeted him so warmly from the stoop—because none of them spent all their time drinking beer and sitting around the stoop, since they had jobs to go to.
Boldon DeWoe didn't have one, and he never would.
Because it was Thursday, which was shots day and exercise-machine day, Dekker's father didn't make the right turn toward home but scooted right through the intersection, faster than the Peacekeeper lady would have preferred, and headed for the clinic. Dekker didn't like any of the shots, not even the fairly painless polysteroids, but he purely hated the calcium boosters, which left his thighs bruised and painful all day. When that nastiness was over, the two of them took the elevator up to the next ordeal in physical-therapy rooms on the top floor. There Boldon DeWoe limbered up his text screen while Dekker fitted himself into the whole-body exercise machines. The old man waved the attendant away, because he didn't trust anybody but himself to run the machine slow enough for his son, and while Dekker's Martian muscles were getting flexed and stretched in the iron grip of the machine, his father, with one hand on the speed controls, was reading study guides to the next day's lessons aloud for his son. "There'll be a history test tomorrow," he said. "You'll need to know about the Wars of the Roses, so let's review."
"Ouch," Dekker said, as the machine twisted his knee. "Dad? How come you know what's going to happen tomorrow?"
"I have friends, how do you think?" his father said, turning back the speed control a hair. "Here, is that better?"
Dekker didn't answer, partly because the slower speed wasn't any "better"—just a little less likely to crack his fragile Martian bones—and partly because he didn't want to admit that he needed any special care. "What kind of friends?"
"Good friends. Now shut up. Now, let's hear what you remember about the Wars of the Roses. That was York against Lancaster—?"
Dekker rebelled. "That's all old stuff from the crazy times, Dad. Why do I have to learn about wars?"
"Because the school requires it, and that's all the reason you need. Now what about it?"
Dekker gave in to logic. "It was in England," he said, panting. "Both sides wanted one of their people to be king, and the reason the wars were called that was that emblems for both sides were roses, white on one side and red on the other. They fought over it for a hundred years, and—" And so on, until they came to the time of the battle that killed King Richard and brought on the Tudors. Then, satisfied, or as nearly satisfied as Boldon DeWoe was likely to get, his father turned off the text machine and began to get that faraway, absentminded, thirsty look that Dekker had begun to recognize. He didn't cut the exercise session short, though. He let it go to the tick of the sixtieth second of the sixtieth minute of the hour, and then he released Dekker, limp, rubbing his sore limbs, and hurried him down and into the trike again.
Dekker noticed that his father drove even faster than usual on the way home. He didn't comment on it. He didn't say anything at all, much, until they were already in the apartment again and his father had pulled a beer out of the little refrigerator and, glancing at his watch, sat himself down in front of the old flat-plate video.
Dekker knew the routine by then. There was an hour's study time before his father would start assembling dinner, so Dekker said, "I'll get on with it," and started to sit down before his own screen without being told.
"No, not this time," his father said. "You can do that later, Dek. There's a special on Mars starting in a minute. You'd probably like to watch it."
"All right," Dekker agreed. He got up to stand behind his father's chair, but busied himself with picking things up around the room while the opening credits for the program rolled. That was a duty Dekker had taken on himself. Sacrificing sleep to make time for it, he had long since put away everything he could find a place for and scrubbed everything that could be scrubbed. The place was nowhere near Martian standards, of course, but at least it had become less offensive. His father had not seemed to notice, and every day there was a new fallout of socks, bottles, and dirty dishes to greet him when he came home.
Then, as the program began, Dekker stopped his housework and focused his attention on the screen.
Most of what the report had to say he already knew. Still, it was good to know that the Oort controllers could now get better than 99 percent of the fragments in a narrow ellipse no more than six or seven hundred kilometers long; there was no longer any need to evacuate whole demes. Of course, that remaining 1 percent could still do a lot of damage where it struck. But if Mars was rich in anything, it was plenty of barren space where there was no real damage to do. Not once, the program's narrator pointed out, in all the six hundred-odd strikes so far, had anyone been killed or any real damage done, and in one of the deeper parts of Valles Marineris they had actually measured a pressure of nearly forty millibars one day.
Then Dekker made a discovery. When the screen was showing the giant craters left by comet impacts, when it switched to some of the new demes with their windmills and bubble-farms actually on the planet's surface—when it was showing Mars as it was, his father's face was drawn and weary.
Dekker thought it over carefully, but there was really only one conclusion to be drawn. His father was homesick.
Dekker cleared his throat and started to speak, but his father hushed him. "Hold it," he said. "They're just getting to the important part."
"But it's over."
"The show is over. Now we get the experts commenting on it. That's what I want you to see."
Dekker shrugged. "All right." But his legs were protesting the long standing period, so he crossed the room for a chair, and while he was there got himself a drink of water, found a couple of overlooked dishes that needed rinsing off, and got back to the screen just in time to hear a middle-aged woman with a mop of golden hair say, "It just doesn't add up. Making Mars into a kind of national park is a sweet, do-goody kind of thing to do, but the cues aren't there. The farm habitats can deliver food faster, and in the long run cheaper."
"What's she talking about?" Dekker asked in alarm.
"If you listened," his father said grimly, "you'd hear."
So Dekker did listen, in alarm, then disbelief, then anger. A pale young man in a pale pink sweater protested that it was humanity's destiny in the long run to settle every piece of real estate that could be settled, so why not Mars? Then a darker, older, bearded man scoffed, "That's the kind of airy-fairy thinking that started the Oort project going in the first place." And Boldon DeWoe, grunting irritably to himself, snapped the set off and limped to the refrigerator for another beer.
Dekker followed him over. "What the hell was that all about?" he demanded.
His father shrugged. "You heard. It's what I've been trying to tell you. If you're going to get into the academy, you'd better do it now, because there are a lot of people who want to cancel the whole project."
"They can't do that!"
Boldon DeWoe considered that proposition for the length of time it took him to get back to his chair and sit down again. "No," he said at last, "they probably can't. At least I think they can't. But not for the reasons you think, Dek. I think they'll keep it going because they just have too much invested in it already, and they won't want to write it all off. But they can cut back, slow it down—"
"That's stupid!" Dekker flared.
"Sure it is, boy. Did I ever say Earthies weren't stupid? But it's a real possibility, so you can't fool around. You have to take the psychological test in a few weeks, and that's in Denver, so you're going to have to get everything you can out of the school here as fast as you can. What does that mean, Dek?"
"It means I have to study."
"Right. Now I want to watch the ball game."
He switched on the set again and started to put the earpiece for private listening in place, but Dekker tarried. He was remembering the expression on his father's face as he looked at the Martian scenes. He ventured, "Dad?"
His father dislodged one earpiece to hear his son. "Is there something you don't understand?"
"No, I just wanted to ask you. Why didn't you come back to Mars, after . . . ?"
His father gave him a hard look. "After I got hurt, is that what you mean?"
"Why didn't you?" Dekker persisted.
His father made a gesture of annoyance. "Hell, Dek. What would I do on Mars?"
"What do you do here?" Dekker asked, pressing his luck.
This time Boldon's look was actually angry. Then slowly it evolved into a grin when he decided it was a fair question. "Since you ask, I'll tell you. Here on Earth is where I have to be. This is where I draw my pension—"
"They'd give it to you on Mars, wouldn't they?"
"They'd give it to me in Martian funds. Here I get it in cues. Do you know the difference?"
"Sure I do."
"Then don't ask dumb questions." He hesitated, then added, "And there's another reason. Here I have repair shops handy, too."
"Repair shops?"
"They call them hospitals, but—" He slapped at his thigh. "—it's all electronics here, Dek, and when the system goes out they have to open it up and take the components out and fix them. Yes, they have repair shops on Mars, too, but they have to import the components from Earth. That means they have to be paid for in cues. I may not be much use anymore, Dek, but I don't want to be a liability, either. And anyway, here's where I've got my friends." He put the plug decisively back in his ear to show that the conversation was over.
Dekker couldn't let it go at that. "When you say 'friends,'" he said obstinately, "what you mean is drinking buddies, right?"
His father took the plug out of his ear again and studied Dekker's judgmental face. "You think I stay here just so I can drink up my pension without anybody interfering, is that it?" He waited politely for a response before going on, but Dekker was mute. "What I mean by 'friends,'" his father said then, "is people who can help us. Both of us, Dekker. I do drink, that's true. But drinking buddies are better than no friends at all when you don't have any future."
"You could have a future!"
His father shook his head. "I'm afraid not, Dek. You'll have to have it for both of us.