Heavy Time

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IT was a lonely place, this remote deep of the Belt, a place where, if things went wrong, they went seriously wrong. And the loneliest sound of all was that thin, slow beep that meant a ship in distress.

It showed up sometimes, sometimes missed its beat, “She’s rolling,” Ben said when he first heard it, but Morrie Bird thought: Tumbling; and when Ben had plugged in the likely config of the object and asked the computer, that was what it said. It said it in numbers. Bird saw it in his mind. You spent thirty years tagging rocks and listening to the thin numerical voices of tags and beacons and faint, far ships, and you knew things like that. You could just about figure the pattern before the computer built it.

“Got to be dead,” Ben Pollard said. Ben’s face had that sharp, eager look it got when Ben was calculating something he especially wanted.

Nervous man, Ben Pollard. Twenty-four and hungry, a Belter kid only two years out of ASTEX Institute when he’d come to Bird with a 20 k check in hand—no easy trick, give or take his mother’s insurance must have paid his keep and his schooling. Ben had bought in on Trinidad’s outfitting and signed on as his numbers man; and in a day when a lot of the new help had a bad case of the Attitudes and expected something for nothing, damned if Ben didn’t wear an old man out with his One More Try and his: Bird, I Got an Angle—

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