44
Dekker was exhausted by the time he found Annetta Bancroft. He was not surprised to find her by the commroom because he had been pretty sure where she had gone. The surprise was that she was alive, waiting despondently to be discovered, with the bodies of the conspirators floating all about her.
"I was afraid—" he began, and didn't finish the thought.
She finished it for him. "You were afraid I'd kill myself, I guess. I thought of it, all right. Maybe I should have, but when I saw they were all dead, there just didn't seem any point to it."
"I'm glad you didn't," he said. "There are enough dead already." And there were. More than enough. Ven Kupferfeld's body was drifting no more than arm's-length away. Her hair was floating in all directions, her eyes were unseeingly open, and there was a froth of blood on her lips. He shook his head. He had been right about that little thudding sound that had shaken the station—when the conspirators had seen that they had failed they had opened the door of the commroom and let themselves die.
Inside the room the vanguard of the people he had released from the flare shelter were pushing past the bodies, making contact with all the alarmed incoming calls. Dekker shivered, cold for the first time in many weeks. The replaced air was chilly from its expansion from the reserve tanks.
"They weren't all Earthies," he said, mourning.
Annetta stared at him and he shook himself. He didn't want to explain his thought, but it stayed with him: Martians, not Earthies alone, had been part of this sad, terrible plan. The others were looking at her, silent and hostile, and he remembered that he needed sleep. He took Annetta's arm. "Come away," he said.
She didn't resist, but looked up at him inquiringly. "Are you arresting me?"
"Me? Of course not," Dekker said, astonished at the idea. "I'm not a Peacekeeper, though maybe when the ships get here—" Out of politeness he didn't finish the thought.
He didn't have to; Annetta knew very well what would happen when the ships began to arrive. She said morosely, "I'll be in Rehabilitation a long time, I suppose. But I'm not the only one. You people are still in trouble, too, Dekker. Do you think they're going to forget about the new terms for the Bonds?"
He shrugged, since he had been wondering about the same question.
"Well," she conceded, "maybe they will, at that. This time. With all the excitement and all. But what's going to happen a year or two from now, when everybody forgets what a wonderful person you were? Don't you see that nothing's really solved?" she demanded fiercely.
He looked down at her in surprise. "Nothing ever gets 'solved,' Annetta," he told her. "You just keep trying to make things a little better—for everybody, you see, and not just for yourself." He thought for a moment, and then added, "You do that if you can, I mean. And if you can't make them any better, then you just try to keep them from getting worse."
"That's all there is to look forward to?" she asked.
"What else could there be? But it's enough," he said. "You do what you can today, and then tomorrow, if you're lucky, maybe you can do a little more. We don't learn fast," he finished ruefully, "but maybe we will learn, sooner or later. At least we can hope, and what else do we need?"