Downbelow Station (7 page)

A last, parting nuisance came splashing after him on the trail. Bennett Jacint.
 
Jon half turned, kept walking, made the man work to overtake him in the mud and the downpour, “The mill dike,” Jacint gasped through the stops and hisses of the breather.
 
“Need some human crews over there with heavy equipment and sandbags.” “Not my problem now,” Jon said. “Get to it yourself. What are you good for? Put those coddled Downers to it. Take an extra crew of them. Or wait on the new supervisors, why don’t you? You can explain it all to my nephew.” “Where are they?” Jacint asked. A skilled obstructionist, Bennett Jacint, always on the line with objections when it came to any measures for improvement. More than once Jacint had gone over his head to file a protest. One construction project he had outright gotten stopped, so that the road to the wells stayed a mired track. Jon smiled and pointed across the grounds, far across, back toward the warehouse domes.

“There’s not time.”

“That’s your problem.”

Bennett Jacint cursed him to his face and started to run it, then changed his mind and raced back again toward the mill. Jon laughed. Soaked stock in the mill. Good. Let the Konstantins solve it He came over the hill, started down to the shuttle, which loomed alien and silver in the trampled meadow, its cargo hatch lowered, Downers toiling to and fro and a few yellow-suited humans among them. His trail joined that on which the Downers moved, churned mud; he walked on the grassy margin, cursed when a Downer with a load swayed too near him, and had the satisfaction at least that they cleared his path. He walked into the landing circle, nodded curtly to a human supervisor and climbed the cargo ramp into the shadowed steel interior. He stripped the wet rainsuit there in the cold, keeping the mask on. He ordered a Downer gang boss to clean up the muddied area, and walked on through the hold to the lift, rode it topside, into a steel, clean corridor, and a small passenger compartment with padded seats.

Downers were in it, two laborers making the shift to station. They looked uncertain when they saw him, touched each other. He sealed the passenger area and made the air-shift, so that he could discard his breather and they had to put theirs on. He sat down opposite them, stared through them in the windowless compartment. The air stank of wet Downer, a smell he had lived with for three years, a smell with which all Pell lived, if one had a sensitive nose, but Downbelow base worst of all: with dusty grain and distilleries and packing plants and walls and mud and muck and the smoke of the mills, latrines that flooded out, sump pools that grew scum, forest molds that could ruin a breather and kill a man who was caught without a spare—all of this and managing halfwitted Downer labor with their religious taboos and constant excuses. He was proud of his record, increased output, efficiency where there had been hands-folded complacency that Downers were Downers and could not comprehend schedules. They could, and did, and set records in production.
 
No thanks of it. Crisis hit the station and the Downbelow expansion which had limped along in and out of planning sessions for a decade was suddenly moving.
 
Plants would get the additional facilities he had made possible, manned by workers whose supply and housing he had made possible, using Lukas Company funds and Lukas Company equipment.

Only a pair of Konstantins was sent down to supervise during that stage, without a thank you, Mr. Lukas, or a well done, Jon, thanks for leaving your own company offices and your own affairs, thanks for doing the job for three years. Emilio Konstantin and Miliko Dee appointed Downbelow supervisors; please arrange affairs and shuttle up at the earliest. His nephew Emilio. Young Emilio was going to ran things during construction. Konstantins were always in at the last stage, always there when the credit was about to be handed out. They had democracy in the council, but it was dynasty in the station offices. Always Konstantins. Lukases had arrived at Pell as early, sunk as much into its building, an important company back in the Hinder Stars; but Konstantins had maneuvered and gathered power at every opportunity. Now again, his equipment, his preparation, and Konstantins in charge when it reached a stage when the public might notice. Emilio: his sister Alicia’s son, and Angelo’s. People could be manipulated, if the Konstantin name was all they were ever allowed to hear; and Angelo was past master at that tactic.

It would have been courtesy to have met his nephew and his wife when they came in, to have stayed a few days to trade information, or at the least to have informed them of his immediate departure on the shuttle which had brought them down. It would also have been courtesy on their part to have come at once to the domes for an official greeting, some acknowledgment of his authority at the base—but they had not. Not even a com-sent hello, uncle, when they landed. He was in no mood for empty courtesies now, to stand in the rain shaking hands and mouthing amenities with a nephew with whom he seldom spoke. He had opposed his sister’s marriage; argued with her; it had not linked him in to the Konstantin family: with her attitude, it was rather a desertion. He and Alicia had not spoken since, save officially; not even that, in the last several years… her presence depressed him. And the boys looked like Angelo, as Angelo had been in his younger days; he avoided them, who probably hoped to get their hands on Lukas Company… at least a share of it, after him, as nearest kin. It was that hope, he was still persuaded, which had attracted Angelo to Alicia: Lukas Company was still the biggest independent on Pell. But he had maneuvered out of the trap, surprised them with an heir, not one to his taste, but a live body all the same. He had worked these years on Downbelow, reckoning at first it might be possible to expand Lukas Company down here, through construction. Angelo had seen it coming, had maneuvered the council to block that. Ecological concerns.
 
Now came the final move.

He accepted the letter of his instruction to return, took it just as rudely as it was delivered, left without baggage or fanfare, like some offender ordered home in disgrace. Childish it might be, but it might also make a point with council… and if all the stock in the mill was soaked on the first day of the Konstantin administration here, so much the better. Let them feel shortages on station; let Angelo explain that to council. It would open a debate in which he would be present in council to participate, and ah, he wanted that.
 
He had deserved something more than this.

Engines finally activated, heralding lift. He got up, searched up a bottle and a glass from the locker. He received a query from the shuttle crew, declared he needed nothing. He settled in, belted, and the shuttle began lift. He poured himself a stiff drink, nerving himself for flight, which he always hated, drank, with the amber liquid quivering in the glass under the strain of his arm and the vibration of the ship. Across from him the Downers held each other and moaned.

ii

Pell Detention: red sector one: 5/20/52; 0900 hrs.

The prisoner sat still at the table with the three of them, stared at the guard supervisor in preference, his eyes seeming focused somewhere beyond. Damon laid the folder on the table again and studied the man, who was most of all trying not to look at him. Damon found himself intensely uncomfortable in this interview… different from the criminals he dealt with in Legal Affairs—this man, this face like an angel in a painting, this too-perfect humanity with blond hair and eyes that gazed through things. Beautiful, the word occurred to him. There were no flaws. The look was complete innocence. No thief, no brawler; but this man would kill… if such a man could kill… for politics. For duty, because he was Union and they were not. There was no hate involved. It was disturbing to hold the life or death of such a man in his hands. It gave him choices in turn, mirror-imaged choices—not for hate, but for duty, because he was not Union, and this man was.

We’re at war, Damon thought miserably. Because he’s come here, the war has.

An angel’s face.

“No trouble to you, is he?” Damon asked the supervisor.

“No.”

“I’ve heard he’s a good midge player.”

That got a flicker from both of them. There were illicit gamblings at the detention station, as in most slow posts during alterday. Damon offered a smile when the prisoner looked his way, the least shifting of the pale blue eyes… went sober again as the prisoner failed to react. “I’m Damon Konstantin, Mr. Talley, of the station legal office. You’ve given us no trouble and we appreciate that.
 
We’re not your enemies; we’d dock a Union fleet as readily as a Company ship—in principle; but you don’t leave stations neutral any longer, not from what we hear, so our attitude has to change along with that. We just can’t take chances having you loose. Repatriation… no. We’re given other instructions. Our own security. You understand that.”

No response.

“Your counsel’s made the point that you’re suffering in this close confinement and that the cells were never meant for long-term detention. That there are people walking loose in Q who are far more a threat to this station; that there’s a vast difference between a saboteur and an armscomper in uniform who had the bad luck to be picked up by the wrong side. But having said all that, he still doesn’t recommend your release except to Q. We have an arrangement worked out. We can fake an id that would protect you, and still let us keep track of you over there. I don’t like the idea, but it seems workable.” “What’s Q?” Talley asked, a soft, anxious voice, appealing to the supervisor and to his own counsel, the elder Jacoby, who sat at the end of the table. “What are you saying?”

“Quarantine. The sealed section of the station we’ve set apart for our own refugees.”

Talley’s eyes darted nervously from one to the other of them. “No. No. I don’t want to be put with them. I never asked him to set this up. I didn’t.” Damon frowned uncomfortably. “We’ve got another convoy coming in, Mr. Talley, another group of refugees. We have arrangements underway to mix you with them with faked papers. Get you out of here. It would still be a kind of confinement, but with wider walls, room to walk where you want, live life… as it’s lived in Q. That’s a good part of the station over there. Not regimented—open. No cells.
 
Mr. Jacoby’s right: you’re no more dangerous than some over there. Less, because we’d always know who you are.”

Talley cast another look at his counsel. Shook his head, pleading.
 
“You absolutely reject it?” Damon prodded him, vexed. All solutions and arrangements collapsed. “It’s not prison, you understand.”

“My face—is known there. Mallory said—”

He lapsed into silence. Damon stared at him, marked the fevered anxiety, the sweat which stood on Talley’s face. “What did Mallory say?” “That if I made trouble—she’d transfer me to one of the other ships. I think I know what you’re doing: you think if there are Unionists with them they’d contact me if you put me over there in your quarantine. Is that it? But I wouldn’t live that long. There are people who know me by sight. Station officials. Police. They’re the kind who got places on those ships, aren’t they?
 
And they’d know me. I’ll be dead in an hour if you do that. I heard what those ships were like.”

“Mallory told you.”

“Mallory told me.”

“There are some, on the other hand,” Damon said bitterly, “who’d balk at boarding one of Mazian’s ships, stationers who’d swear an honest man’s survival wasn’t that likely. But I’d reckon you had a soft passage, didn’t you? Enough to eat and no worries about the air? The old spacer-stationer quarrel: leave the stationers to suffocate and keep her own deck spotless. But you rated differently. You got special treatment.”

“It wasn’t all that pleasant, Mr. Konstantin.”

“Not your choice either, was it?”

“No,” the answer came hoarsely. Damon suddenly repented his baiting, nagged by suspicions, evil rumor of the Fleet. He was ashamed of the role in which he was cast. In which Pell was. War and prisoners of war. He wanted no part of it.
 
“You refuse the solution we offer,” he said. “That’s your privilege. No one will force you. We don’t want to endanger your life, and that’s what it would be if things are what you say. So what do you do? I suppose you go on playing midge with the guards. It’s a very small confinement. Did they give you the tapes and player? You got that?”

“I would like—” The words came out like an upwelling of nausea. “I want to ask for Adjustment.”

Jacoby looked down and shook his head. Damon sat still.
 
“If I were Adjusted I could get out of here,” the prisoner said. “Eventually do something. It’s my own request. A prisoner always has the option to have that, doesn’t he?”

“Your side uses that on prisoners,” Damon said. “We don’t.” “I ask for it You have me locked up like a criminal. If I’d killed someone, wouldn’t I have a right to it? If I’d stolen or—” “I think you ought to have some psychiatric testing if you keep insisting on it.”

“Don’t they test—when they process for Adjustment?”

Damon looked at Jacoby.

“He’s been increasingly depressed,” Jacoby said. “He’s asked me over and over to lodge that request with station, and I haven’t.”

“We’ve never mandated Adjustment for a man who wasn’t convicted of a crime.”

“Have you ever,” the prisoner asked, “had a man in here who wasn’t?” “Union uses it,” the supervisor said in a low voice, “without blinking. Those cells are small, Mr. Konstantin.”

“A man doesn’t ask for a thing like that,” Damon said.

“I ask,” Talley insisted. “I ask you. I want out of here.”

“It would solve the problem,” Jacoby said.

“I want to know why he wants it”

“I want out!”

Damon froze. Talley caught his breath, leaning against the table, and recovered his composure a little short of tears. Adjustment was not a punitive procedure, was never intended to be. It had double benefits… altered behavior for the violent and a little wiping of the slate for the troubled. It was the latter, he suspected, meeting Talley’s shadowed eyes. Suddenly he felt an overwelling pity for the man, who was sane, who seemed very, very sane. The station was in crisis. Events crowded in on them in which individuals could become lost, shoved aside. Cells in detention were urgently needed for real criminals, out of Q, which they had in abundance. There were worse fates than Adjustment. Being locked in a viewless eight-by-ten room for life was one.
 
“Pull the commitment papers out of comp,” he told the supervisor, and the supervisor passed the order via com. Jacoby fretted visibly, shuffling papers and not looking at any of them. “What I’m going to do,” Damon said to Talley, feeling as if it were some shared bad dream, “is put the papers in your hands.
 
And you can study all the printout of explanation that goes with them. If that’s still what you want tomorrow, we’ll accept them signed. I want you also to write us a release and request in your own words, stating that this was your idea and your choice, that you’re not claustrophobic or suffering from any other disability—” “I was an armscomper,” Talley interjected scornfully. It was not the largest station on a ship.