Outward Bound, page 17
Chapter Thirty-Two
LATER that afternoon, after Linc had returned to the South Tower and was debating with Flash and Arch whether to take in a movie or visit the Low-g Court, Linc's pager—a concession allowed senior cadets—buzzed, and an adjutant informed him that he was to report to Colonel Weyer's conference room at once. Weyer was another remote figure as far as the cadets were concerned. They saw him at inspections or when he gave occasional pep talks, but it was rare for them to have dealings with him directly He had already complimented Linc personally on his initiative in the capsule incident. Linc could only surmise that the summons had to do with some kind of follow-up to that.
"They're gonna give you a medal," Arch said; then he frowned. "Do they give medals to cadets?"
"I dunno," Flash answered. "Come to that, has the Zone ever awarded anything to anybody? It's never been involved in real combat."
"Dierot was in more than a few battles," Arch said.
"They were French or something."
"For valor in the face of the enemy," Arch recited. "That's what it'll say on it, Linc."
"There wasn't any valor involved," Linc pointed out as he finished knotting his tie and checked his hair in a mirror. "I was safe inside the Shack all the time."
"Maybe they're going to name one of the new ships after you then," Flash said. "The Linc Marani . . . I kinda like that. Do you have a middle initial, Linc—you know, like they do with the Armstrong? It sounds neater."
Linc snorted as he buttoned and straightened his tunic. "More likely they'll name the waldo after me," he threw back, putting on his cap as he left the room.
Colonel Weyer had a solemn, thick-lipped face with dark, protruding eyes, and slicked-back dark hair showing gray streaks at the temples. He was sitting at the head of the table dominating the conference room when Linc was shown in by a secretary. Two staff officers, one on either side, were sitting across the corners from him. Captain Ullerman was next along the table beside one of them. Opposite him, to Linc's surprise, was Arvin, his arm in a black sling. Next to Ullerman was a man wearing a crew officer's uniform, the shoulder insignia identifying him as from the Engineering Division. Arvin looked strained. Files lay open on the table in front of Weyer and Ullerman. One of the staff officers had an open screen pad, the other, an old-style notebook and pen. The two staff officers and the crew engineering officer, whom Linc had seen around but never had reason to be involved with more closely, looked at him curiously. "This is the young man who not only cut the cable but was the person who spotted the waldo and thought of using it, " Weyer said by way of introduction.
"Congratulations," one of the staff officers murmured.
"A quick piece of thinking," the engineering officer said.
"Thank you," Linc responded.
"Do you think you could use people like him?" Weyer asked the engineering officer.
"No question. With the ship construction that's being planned, we could use a hundred." There seemed to be some significance to the question that Linc was unable to grasp yet. He was ordered to ease and invited to sit down, which he did, at the far end of the table. Weyer drew the open folder in front of him a few inches nearer and stared down at it, as if to focus attention on the business at hand.
"Senior Cadet Marani," he said, looking up. "You came to us through what we call the 'special preparatory course,' Phase One at Camp Coulie, California, where you were made a section leader and received excellent appraisals, and Phase Two at Seville Trace in Texas."
"Yes, sir."
"We have the reports here from your principal Phase Two coach, Mr. Summer, and the other specialist instructors you were with there. It seems that you had thoughts about training in precision engineering crafts—maybe for instrument work or tool prototyping."
"That's correct, sir."
"Could I throw in a word here?" the engineering officer asked Weyer.
The colonel waved a hand. "Sure."
The officer looked back at Linc. "I'm curious as to why that was," he said. "Can you tell us?"
It was an unusual and unexpected question. Linc frowned, trying hard not to appear dumb, and answered as best he could with no time for thought or preparation.
"I guess . . . it was the first time in my life that I'd ever created anything that was any good to people—you know, with my own hands. I'd never really seen inside machinery before—engines, gear systems . . . like, really seen inside. And it just fascinated me. The thought of being able to make parts that exact, out of just . . . lumps of metal . . . . And then they all fit together and actually work. It was like learning an art or something." He wondered if he was perhaps starting to come across a bit too lyrically and spread his hands to cut it off there. "Anyhow, that was what I wanted to do." The engineering officer nodded, smiling faintly.
Weyer resumed, "And what happened to change that hope?"
"I, er . . . I guess I just couldn't handle the math and the geometric side of it," Linc answered.
"Could you elaborate a little, please?"
Linc was at a loss to imagine what could have brought all this up now. But there was no choice but to go along with it. "At the end of Phase Two we had a practical test," he said. "A set of parts that had to be machined and finished. Not exactly what you'd call the most complicated, I guess, but there were some dimensions that the drawings didn't give—that you had to work out. Thinking back about it, a big part of the idea might have been to see if your mind worked the right way." He shrugged and sighed. "I guess mine didn't."
"The results was that what you turned in was not up to an acceptable standard, was that so?" Weyer said, checking his file again.
"That's correct, sir."
Weyer sat forward to rest his elbows on the table. "And were you surprised?"
This was even stranger than the previous questions. Linc hesitated.
"Be honest, Marani," one of the staff officers put in. "This isn't a modesty contest."
Okay, they had asked him. "Well, yes, I was," Linc replied. "As a matter of fact, I thought I'd done pretty good. The instructor had been telling me I was a natural."
"A pretty devastating letdown," the other staff officer, who hadn't spoken so far, commented.
"I've pulled through worse, sir," was all Linc could think of to reply.
Weyer stared at him, nodding slowly to himself in a way that seemed to say he was satisfied. Then he turned, for the first time, to Arvin, who had been looking progressively more miserable as the exchange continued. "And now, Senior Cadet Lomax. Would you kindly repeat for Mr. Marani what you disclosed to us earlier."
Arvin stared down woodenly and began in a little more than a mumble, "The test pieces that were turned in—"
Weyer interrupted. "Don't tell the table. Tell him."
Arvin licked his lips and raised his head. He took a long breath and looked Linc in the face. "The test pieces that were turned in under your name were not the ones that you had made. Welsh switched them for some junk practice pieces that were in the store. It was me. I got him to do it."
Linc could only stare for what must have been ten seconds or more. "What?" was all he could manage, even then. It still hadn't registered fully. The others in the room waited, giving him time. He shook his head as if to help it clear. "Then . . . what happened to mine?"
"I told Welsh to get rid of them . . .." Arvin half lifted a hand from the table in a plea for some kind of understanding, even a little. "It was right after that thing, you know, in the gym. I was . . ." He let it go, realizing he was just sounding lame.
Colonel Weyer allowed a short silence. Then he asked, "Do you have anything you'd like to say at this point, Marani?"
The "at this point" sounded like a hint. Linc took it and replied, "I think I need a little time to think about that, sir."
Weyer seemed to have been hoping for that and nodded. "Do you want to talk the matter over privately with anyone here?"
"I'd rather be alone . . . thank you . . . sir."
"Very well." Weyer rose from his chair. "I have a few pressing things to do. Lomax will wait in one of the detention rooms, unlocked. Captain Ullerman will post a guard to prevent intrusions. We'll reconvene, gentlemen, in one hour."
Chapter Thirty-Three
LINC wandered around the corridors only half aware of his surroundings and the greetings tossed at him by others he passed. Perhaps drawn by some unconscious instinct, he found himself finally in the observation room in the outer hull, from where he had gaze out across space that evening that seemed long ago now, when he arrived at Grayling.
At first he felt nothing but anger and the impulse to hit back By the code of the streets he had grown up in, there was nothing to think about. He had been wronged, and now he had the power to get even. To do otherwise would be not only weak but dishonorable. That was the way he did business. So why had he asked Weyer for time to think?
As the reflexive emotions subsided and relinquished control, he began to realize that other parts of him existed now that made it a more complex issue. He was no longer a creature of those streets. He was learning there were other ways of life, in which people practiced a different kind of business. That was what they had been forcing him to see at Coulie. He thought of Angelo and the things he had risked or given up in order to help those like Linc see. Why should Angelo have done that? By the old code, he owed none of them anything, stood to get nothing out of it. The answer could only be that there was much that was worthwhile to be gained by his code. Could Linc learn to understand that also?
And then Linc did something he had never been able to, or would even have comprehended, before in his life. He turned the situation around in his mind and tried not just to see it but to feel it from the other side.
It had been a low, cheap trick on Arvin's part, sure. But that had been another world ago, as Dr. Grober had said. This was now. Yes, Arvin had been mad enough and hurt enough and mean enough to want to deprive Linc of the thing that Linc had wanted most. But then Linc thought of the humiliation Arvin had chosen to eat in the campfire incident rather than risk being RPO'd, how he'd surprised everyone by the way he pulled his team together at Coulie. The chance for this new life was something that he desperately wanted too, every bit as much as Linc. And yet he had come to Weyer now, prepared to put all that on the line in order to set right what needed to be set right. Linc realized then what it must have taken for him to do that. The thug who had pushed Kew off the seat of the bus on the way up from Fresno would never have been capable of it. The enraged animal that had slunk away from the confrontation at the campfire couldn't have conceived of it. So Arvin had been learning and changing, too.
Then he thought back to Julie and the way they'd talked about how different their life would be out there. What kind of life would it be, he wondered, if, at his first test, he took with him in his mind everything they'd thought they were getting away from? What would it mean if he let revenge be his first meaningful choice before they had even begun. He tried to make himself think the way he imagined somebody who knew how to live out there in the Outzone would have to think . . . .
And suddenly there was nothing more to think about.
He got up, left the observation room, and headed back toward the Admin Section and Colonel Weyer's office.
"It was a different world then. We were all different people," Linc told the room. "I can't really see that there'd be a lot of point in dragging something back up now and making a big thing out of it, when it doesn't belong here. I think it took a lot of guts for him to come and say what he said, and that's the way we should be looking at it. If my case gets to be reconsidered . . . then that's good enough. I know that what he did was serious. But then, it's Arvin who's trying to put things right too. I'd prefer it be left at that . . . . Sir."
"I take it, then, that your own recommendation would be for leniency in view of changed circumstances," Weyer said.
Linc closed his eyes, hoped it was for the best, and nodded. "That's right, sir."
"Thank you, Cadet Marani. You are dismissed."
And that was when Linc learned something else. The look he got from Arvin as he left the room was worth more than any satisfaction he could have felt from seeing him destroyed.
The verdict was announced the next day. Since the incident had occurred before Arvin's admission to the service, he had not been under the jurisdiction of the Outzone's armed forces, and there was therefore no case to answer. The matter was closed. Linc had seen enough before to have no doubt that had they wished to do so, the lawyers could have found equally good reasons for ruling completely the other way.
As for Linc, he was told his situation was to be reviewed, and he would be advised of the outcome shortly. In the meantime his place on the Neil A. Armstrong was confirmed, as were the places of the other cadets who had made senior. So was Julie's. Both of them would be going to Coombe, on the Jovian moon Callisto, the main transit base that most of the new arrivals to the Outzone passed through. Prior to the launch date, he was entitled to a five-day special leave to Earth to say farewells and so on. Since Julie had no family of her own she particularly wanted to visit, she readily agreed to accompany him. And his relationship with Arvin had changed so much that Linc invited him to go along too.
It wasn't just a celebration of their new buddiness and friendship. Linc figured that if he was going back to the neighborhood he'd come from, it might be wise to take along all the backup he could get.
Chapter Thirty-Four
LINC didn't know if it was his imagination, but the streets seemed to have gotten older and dirtier—more so, surely, then was possible in the time that had gone by. What he remembered as the center of where the action was, and where all of life happened had turned into tired and shabby remnants of an age that was running down. Had the storefronts always been so grubby with their cloudy windows, halfhearted displays, the paint around the doors dulled and peeling like the once-high hopes of some forgotten opening day long ago? Had trash always stunk like this, piled in alleys and strewn along the gutters?
Above it all, high-rental buildings that had once thrust proudly toward the sky crumbled silently amid the winds, the rain, and the corrosive fames eating into them. They had degenerated into cheap hotels and apartments while business fled the cities for manicured office parks by the interstates. But the people no longer stopped to gaze at these buildings, in any case. The figures on the sidewalks hurried on, avoiding each other's eyes, enwrapped in their own isolation. Even those who stood or walked together aimed words at each other from behind facades that had become so second nature that even they themselves now mistook them for the persons atrophying within. A city of brooding shells, inhabited by beings who hid inside shells.
"Hey, don't tell me that's . . . It is! Hey, Linc! How's it been going?" One of the two hookers standing outside Ozzie's Bar stepped forward as he approached—except that it was no longer Ozzie's but had been given a face-lift and become the Paradise Lounge. Linc recognized her as Irene, who used to be a cocktail waitress at The Domino along the next block, and before that, in some other city, a clerk in a shoe shop whose owner had packed the shelves with empty boxes so customers wouldn't know how run-down the stock was.
"Say, Irene, get a look at you!"
"We heard how you got pulled after that sting they set up. I guess you're back out now, then, huh? Did they slice you some time off or something?"
Linc smiled faintly. The girls liked to stay friendly with neighborhood muscle who carried pocket phones. You never knew when a trick might turn nasty or decide he was due extra time. "Yeah, I suppose you could say that," he said.
Irene put a hand on his shoulder and looked him up and down. "It can't have been too bad. You're looking in good shape, you know that? . . . Although, I can't say the clothes are really ya know what I mean? Is that something they gave you? The haircut too. You musta just got out."
Linc had on a low-key, regular-cut navy jacket, blue-gray pants, and a dark-blue shirt with tie. It was just a casual combination that felt comfortable to travel in. Although there was no bar on wearing uniform, he had preferred not to flaunt one. It would have felt like advertising a big difference that existed between himself and everyone else now—as if he had somehow risen above them all. At least, he hadn't wanted to risk their seeing it that way.
"I'm just kinda visiting before moving on," Linc said. "I have to go back. Then they'll be sending me a lot farther." He waited for a hint of curiosity, a question, maybe? . . . But Irene's eyes left him to scan a man walking past in a business suit, automatically assessing for signs of a potential client. Linc decided to let it drop. "So how's it been with you?" he asked. "Moving on to a different neck of the woods too, eh?"
