35
It had snowed overnight, and Dekker was shivering as he climbed the hill to where his mother was staying. When he got there, he thought at first he was in the wrong place. He knew he had never been in the VIP quarters before, but the funny thing was that as he walked into the lobby of the building, leaving clumps of snow from his feet to mark his trail, it all looked familiar. It was familiar, and when he heard someone call his name and turned to see Annetta Bancroft coming toward him out of the breakfast room, carrying a cup of coffee and looking startled, he realized why. He was in the former resort hotel where she had her tiny room.
She gave him a hostile look. "What are you doing here, DeWoe? Are you looking for me?" she demanded.
"No. My mother's supposed to be here somewhere, if this is the VIP quarters."
"Oh, right," she said, thawing slightly. 'They're up in the tower. You have to take those other elevators, down the hall." As he nodded and started to turn away she stopped him. "Listen. Let's talk. I'm shipping out with you, you know. We may not be friends, but we might as well act friendly."
He shrugged, impatient to get on but accepting the logic of the statement. "All right."
"Good, then. Did you get your extra-duty assignment yet?"
It seemed that the acting-friendly directive was to take immediate effect, so Dekker followed her example. "I drew damage control," he said, just like any two colleagues comparing notes. "I guess it could've been worse."
"Yes, it could," she said, approving. 'That's about as good as you can get—outside of actual controller, I mean. You'll be working all over the station, so you'll get a chance to meet everybody and learn everything."
"It isn't what I trained for, though."
"Hell, DeWoe, whoever gets what he trained for right away? Your time will come, probably. Listen, do you know who Pelly Marine is? No, you wouldn't, yet, but Pelly's the station chief of Co-Mars Two, and he started out in damage control, too. I served with him two years. He's a good man." She gave Dekker an appraising look. "He's a lot like you, in fact," she added, leaving him to ponder that as he rode the elevator to the VIP floors.
He didn't ponder it long. Gerti DeWoe was waiting for her son, and at his first tap on her door she opened it, beaming at him. "Hey, Dek," she said fondly. "Come on in and let me get a look at what they've been doing to you."
When they kissed she didn't put her arms around him, the way she used to. She couldn't. She was holding onto a walker for support against the harsh Earth-gravity weight, but her lips were warm against his cheek.
"Do you want some breakfast?" she asked at once.
"I ate while I was waiting for you to phone," he said, shaking his head. They studied each other for a moment. She was, Dekker saw with discontent, looking tired and frail and—well, old. It was only her voice that hadn't aged at all. It was still the soft, clear contralto that had sung him to sleep as a child, now complaining that he was fat.
"That's the polysteroids," he said. "You get used to it."
She shook her head and hobbled over to a straight-backed chair by the window. "I won't be here that long," she said. "A week or two at the most, I hope; I have to be in Tokyo tomorrow morning."
"How does it look?" he asked.
She made a face. With an effort she leaned forward to the low table before her chair and took a flask out of her bag. When she poured something out of it into a glass, Dekker was startled to realize it was whiskey.
He tried to keep the disapproval off his face, but Gerti DeWoe wasn't fooled. She laughed. "Come on, Dek, honey," she said, chiding him. "It's not as bad as you think. I need a drink because I hurt. Anyway, it may be morning for you here but for me it's maybe midnight. So it's all right to have a drink, and don't worry; I'll be sober for your graduation." She took a quick sip, and then leaned back against the chair.
"To answer your question," she said, "the Earthies want to renegotiate the terms of the loan, and I'm here to try to persuade them to keep the terms the way they are." She thought for a minute, then said, "No, that's not quite true. What I'm really here for isn't to negotiate. It's to beg."
He blinked at her. "Oh, Dekker," Gerti DeWoe said sorrowfully, "don't you pay attention to what's going on? Just this morning on the blimp I heard a news story; now the Russians are talking about putting up farm satellites of their own, along with the Japanese. I think they'll do it, too, because when they figure out their spread sheets, the satellites come up as a better investment. One way or another, somebody's satellites are going to be shipping farm crops to Earth in five years. Ten at the most. We can't match that, so some of the underwriters are backing off."
"But they can't call the project off, can they? They've got so much invested already—"
"No, they can't—I hope. At least, they can't kill the project outright. What they can do, though, is hold us up for higher interest, and we can't afford that." She took another pull at her drink. "I guess the future isn't even as bright as we thought it would be, Dek. Not that we were that well off anyway."
Dekker gave his mother the kind of shocked look an American politician might have given a colleague who intimated that George Washington hadn't been a particularly good president. "What are you talking about? Mars is going to be self-supporting and free!"
"Mars is going to be their plantation and we're going to be their slaves," Gerti DeWoe corrected her son. "We're going to hoe their cotton and plant their corn, and sell them their raw materials and buy back their manufactured goods—like the old British Empire, the people at home getting rich on the poverty of their colonies. Oh," she said, looking remorseful, "I'm sorry to be talking this way today, Dek—on your big day, when you're just about to go out there and do your job for us. But that's the way it's going to be if I can't get them to leave the terms alone. See, they don't just want higher interest. They want guarantees."
"They already have guarantees!"
"Not like the ones they want. They want their loan treaty to be the basic law for Mars, superseding even the constitution. They want the treaty to give them the right of repossession of Martian land, using Earth police, in case we don't make the payments."
"Police? With guns?"
"Oh, no, nobody said anything about guns. Why would they need guns with us? They probably wouldn't even need those Peacekeepers of theirs, because Martians always keep their promises. All they want is to own us."
"You can't let them do that," he said positively.
"I'm afraid we can't not let them do it, if they insist. They're the ones with the money." Then she shook her head in annoyance at herself. "Anyway, that's what I'm here for, to try to get them to act decently; maybe I'll succeed. God knows I'll give it a good try. Earthies are human beings, too, and they're not all wicked exploiters. If I can just get them to remember that we're all part of the same human race—" She shook her head. "Change the subject; how are you doing?"
Dekker couldn't make the transition quite that fast—apart from the fact that he didn't really want to answer that question, or at least not all of it. "Fine," he said, getting up and wandering over to the window.
His mother turned painfully to look with him. "I was sitting here looking at the snow before you came," she said wistfully. "It's pretty."
"It is," he agreed, glancing at his watch. His mother didn't miss it.
"Should you be getting ready for your graduation?"
"Pretty soon. Not right this minute. It won't be much of a ceremony, you know," he added. "They don't make a big deal of graduating here. We just sign the articles of employment, and one of the instructors makes a little speech to congratulate us and wish us well, and that's it."
"It'll be a big deal for me, Dek," his mother said. She hesitated, then said, "You know, I was going to bring Tsumi with me as my assistant"
"Tsumi?"
"Well, I would rather have had you, but what you're doing is more important. Tsumi wanted desperately to go. I wish I did have somebody to help out. Somebody with younger legs than mine."
"But Tsumi!" Dekker said, unable to keep himself from remembering that it had been so very difficult to scrape up the fare to Earth for him—and so evidently easy to do it for Tsumi Gorshak.
"I know you don't like him, Dek. All the same, I felt I owed it to Tinker. But it didn't work out. Tsumi was going for a piloting license, and he failed the test, and—and he tried to bribe the instructor, Dekker. I didn't have any choice. I fired him."
"I see," Dekker said, seeing much more than she had said. She was looking at him curiously.
"Is something on your mind, Dek?" she asked.
He hesitated. But what was there to tell her? That he was a cheat, and covering up for other cheats, and, really, not that much better than Tsumi Gorshak?
He shook his head and looked again at his watch. "It's just that I'd better get on down there. We have to read the articles and get a blood test before the ceremony."
"A blood test? For narcotics?" And when he nodded she said sorrowfully, "Maybe I was wrong about the Earthies. Maybe we're not part of the same race after all."
And ten hours later they were on their way: Dekker's graduating class, the bunch from the Oort, and Annetta Bancroft.
There was only one surprise, and it was Toro Tanabe.
At the last moment, shamefaced and not looking at Dekker, Tanabe had stepped forward and signed the articles of employment with everybody else. It was only when they had broken ranks and were getting ready to leave that Tanabe saw Dekker's eyes on him. The Japanese grinned in embarrassment. "After all," he said, "it would be a pity to come this far and not go the rest of the way, would it not? And at least if I am to do the cooking, I may even be able to enjoy the food.