Dead Space: Catalyst (16 page)

Both were listed in the public directory. Swanson had a small apartment fairly near the spaceport, just a few blocks away from Jensi’s own place. Talbot lived on the far side of the dome. For a few days Jensi followed Talbot home from work, then hung around his place afterward to see where he went. He never seemed to go anywhere; from the street Jensi could see the blue light of the vid flickering on the walls around him. The man hardly seemed to have any sort of life.

So he switched to Swanson, who went directly from the spaceport to a bar called the Martyr almost every night. He would always take the same place at one end of the bar, easing his large body carefully down onto the narrow stool. He was apparently enough of a regular that the stool was always empty when he arrived.

The first night Jensi took a stool around the corner of the bar, a few stools between him and Swanson. He waited until Swanson had ordered his beer and then nodded. The man crinkled his eyes at him in confusion and then nodded back. He watched Swanson order half a dozen beers, one about every ten minutes or so, and then, promptly at the end of an hour, leave. Getting up, he waggled his way off the chair, a slightly waviness to his stride, but basically okay. Jensi considered following him home, but instead stayed where he was.

The next time, Jensi was already seated when Swanson arrived. He nodded once to the man, who nodded back and sat down. Jensi waited until Swanson was nearly done with his third beer and then got himself another beer, ordering a round for Swanson as well. The Swede nodded his thanks and quickly drained the glass, but, taciturn, said nothing to Jensi, made no attempts to start a conversation. And, just as before, after an hour had passed he promptly stood and left, moving awkwardly and ponderously out the door.

Later that evening Jensi began to think,
What if this doesn’t work? What sort of backup plan should I have?
But he could think of no plan. If he wanted to get on board the
Eibon,
this had to work.

The third night, when Swanson came into the bar, Jensi had already taken the stool beside his own. Swanson grunted once to him, nodded slightly, and then squeezed his way onto the stool. Jensi ordered himself a beer and turned to Swanson. “Want one, too?” he asked.

“You’re paying?” asked Swanson.

“Sure,” said Jensi. “Why not?”

Swanson nodded.

The bartender brought them their beers and they drank for a while in silence. Finally Jensi said, “You’re at the port.”

Swanson nodded. “You, too,” he said.

Jensi nodded back. “I’m a picker,” he said.

The big Swede cracked a smile. “A picker,” he said. “That’s no kind of life.”

“No? What do you do?”

“Freight, too,” said the Swede. “Not that much different than a picker, but the pay’s a lot better.”

He took a big sip of his drink and for a moment Jensi thought that was all he was going to say. He was afraid to push it. He didn’t want to seem too eager. Indeed, it was all he did say for a while, through the end of his first beer and all the way through his second, until somewhere well into the middle of his third.

“You have to get on a ship going off planet,” Swanson finally said, his speech slightly slurred now. “Somewhere that wants you to load up and travel with the goods and then unload, too. That’s where the money is.”

“Sounds good,” said Jensi. “How do I go about it?”

Swanson shook his head. “Have to just ask around,” he said. “Place I’m at is full.”

“And where’s that?”

“The
Eibon,
” said Swanson. “Nice ship. New. Specialized.”

“When do you ship out next?” Jensi asked.

Swanson frowned. “Week and a half,” he said. “More or less.”

That was as far as it went that night. The next night, though, Jensi was back, again buying the beer, and Swanson spoke a little more. “Best pay comes with cargo that you don’t know much about,” he said, and winked. “At least that’s what it seems like on the
Eibon
.”

“What do you mean you don’t know much about it? Someone’s got to know.”

Swanson waved one meaty hand. “Oh, the captain, he probably knows something,” he said. “But us, all we know are the basic categories listed on the bill of lading.”

“That’s all we usually know,” said Jensi.

“Yes, but you’re a picker,” said Swanson, becoming more loquacious. “You just pick up the job at the beginning or the end. All you have to know is how fragile it is or isn’t. We have to load the cargo and ride with it the whole way and unload it. Usual jobs, they give us pretty specific content listings so that we’ll know what to do if something goes wrong.” He swiveled on his barstool until he was looking directly at Jensi. His eyes, Jensi saw, were slightly glazed. “Something spills, say. Something goes wrong, it’s good to know what you’re carrying and whether it might blow up or explode or burn through the deck. But some of these jobs”—he said, and took a drink—“no, take that back, one job that we keep doing, they’ll put a label on a box that says medical supplies but when it accidentally gets knocked open it isn’t medical supplies at all but sealed vats of some sort of acid. I ask you, how can that be a medical supply?”

“So they’re smugglers,” said Jensi.

Swanson prodded Jensi’s chest with his forefinger. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “These are government men. They just don’t want people to know where they’re going and what they’re prepared to do once they get there.”

“But you’ve figured it out,” said Jensi.

Swanson shook his head. “No reason to figure it out,” he said. “Better just to go along with it and get paid. People who start trying to figure stuff like that out always end up in trouble.”

Which is probably exactly where I’m headed,
thought Jensi.

*   *   *

By the end of the week, they were more or less friends, with Swanson talking almost as much as an ordinary human though prone to odd fits of silence as well. Several times Swanson slapped him on the back, said he was going to miss him once he shipped out.

“Maybe a spot will open up,” said Jensi.

Swanson shook his head. “It won’t,” he said. “But if it does, I’ll put in a good word for you. You’re a picker, but I bet you could do it.”

Two choices,
thought Jensi as he waited in the bar the next day for Swanson to come in, just three days before Swanson shipped out. He could do as his original plan had suggested and simply drug Swanson, make him incapable of showing up for work. He had a twist of ground-up sleeping pills in his pocket that he could pour into the man’s beer. It’d be enough to knock the Swede out, maybe would make him sleep for a few days. And then when he didn’t show up for work, Jensi could be there, asking around for work, just happening to have a specialization in cargo.

But he liked Swanson, that was the problem. Talbot on the other hand he hardly knew. And Swanson was likely to think to call on him if Talbot didn’t show up for work. The odds were better. But the question was how to bring it smoothly about.

And as ideas flitted back and forth within his head, he began to ask himself:
How far am I willing to go for my brother? I’ll break the law for him, I’ll force someone out of their job just to have a chance to see him, what else will I do? Would I kill someone for him?

He shook his head. No, he had to be careful. He couldn’t let this quest for his brother—a quest for a brother who might now be damaged enough to not even recognize him if he were to find him—make him into a different person than he was. He couldn’t let go of himself just to find his brother.

*   *   *

That afternoon, he quit his job. His boss was a little surprised and started to protest that he needed some notice, but in the end he sighed, counted out Jensi’s back pay, and shook his hand good-bye.

Jensi went out and bought a roll of duct tape, then went to the apartment building where Talbot lived. He rang several bells until someone buzzed him in. The apartment was on the third floor, the door a cheap affair, and by leaning into the door and jiggling the knob while forcing a card in, he managed to pop the lock out of its groove and go in.

Inside, the apartment was immaculate, nothing out of place. Two clean plates sat side by side on the counter with a knife and fork crossed over each in an
X,
with two glasses arranged in perfect symmetry above them. The cabinets were mostly empty, though one was full of identical cans of food. The bed was made, the bathroom exceptionally clean. In a way, it was hard to believe anybody lived there at all.

He wandered around the apartment for a while, thinking. In the office he found a pen and a piece of paper and wrote: “Your next job?” followed by the picking company’s vid contact. Was that giving too much away, putting too much at risk? Maybe, but he’d had a hard enough life himself that he couldn’t see himself taking away a man’s livelihood, even a man as strange and repressed as Talbot. He left it on the kitchen table, where it lay awkwardly, the only object in the apartment to seem out of place.

By the time Talbot had come home from work and had opened the door, Jensi had his balaclava on and was hiding behind it. The small man came through and Jensi hit him hard twice in the temple, quick jabbing blows. Talbot gave a strange breathless cry and fell in a heap. Jensi dragged him over to a chair and taped his arms and legs to it.

When Talbot was secure, Jensi poured a glass of water and sprinkled the twist of crushed sleeping tablets into it. He waited for the man to come around. But nothing seemed to be happening.

He waited some more, then pulled a chair closer to him and placed his finger against his neck. No pulse.

It seemed absurd, an accident of fate. He stripped off his balaclava and quickly unbound Talbot and laid him flat, tried to give him artificial respiration, pumped his chest, but it had been too long. The blood was already seeping lower in the body and pooling, leaving the face pale and waxen.

He left the body and slumped into the couch, holding his head with his hands. It was his fault: he had hit the man too hard. Or maybe just bad luck: maybe Talbot had some sort of condition that he should have known about, a heart problem, say. In any case, the first thing he should have done when the man went down was check his pulse and made sure he was still breathing.

Now he had traded the chance of seeing his brother for another man’s life. How many other lives would fall forfeit along the way?

*   *   *

After a while, he got up and removed the remaining duct tape from Talbot’s arms and legs and from the chair. He dragged the man into the other room and positioned him in an armchair in front of his vid, then turned it on to one of the broadcasts. The body was already a little stiff, but it bent for him with a little pressure and settled into the chair. Maybe it would look like he died there.

He carefully positioned the kitchen chair back where it had been at the table, then washed out the glass containing the water and crushed sleeping pills, arranging it back where it had been before. The note he tore into fourths and slipped into his pocket, along with the twist of paper.

He took one last look over the apartment and then, thinking there was nothing else he could do, left.

*   *   *

The next morning he was down at the port early, ostensibly to see Swanson off. The big man, upon seeing him, came over and swatted his shoulder with his big hand.

“No more drinking together, eh?” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Now you’ll have to drink alone.”

He introduced Jensi to Captain Martin, who shook his hand. “My friend Jensi,” Swanson said. “One of the best pickers there is, but ready to move on to more serious freight. Keep him in mind if you ever have an open position.”

Captain Martin just nodded, made small talk for a moment, and then went back to making preparations and overseeing the loading of the shuttles that would take them up to the
Eibon,
currently in orbit. Swanson shook his hand again and then left.

Jensi hung around a little bit more and then, not wanting to seem too needy or conspicuous, went home.

The next few hours were hard ones, as he waited by the vid for them to contact him. What if they didn’t? What if they had someone else in mind or simply decided that they could manage without an additional person to take Talbot’s place? Then Talbot would have died for no reason, and he, Jensi, would have gotten no further toward figuring out how to see his brother.

He imagined the captain or perhaps Swanson or perhaps someone else realizing that Talbot wasn’t there, then trying to call him by vid, then sending someone running toward his place to check on him and finding the dead body. Would it seem that he had died of natural causes? Would there be a suspicious bruise on his temple where Jensi had struck him?

An hour went by, then two, without word. He was close to giving up and abandoning it altogether when the vid flicked on and he saw the captain’s face. He accepted the connection.

“Mr. Jensi Sato?” the captain said.

“Yes?” said Jensi.

“Didn’t know that I’d find you at home,” he said. “But here you are.”

“Swing shift today,” Jensi lied, hoping they hadn’t managed to track down which picker he worked for and discovered that he had quit. “I go in in a few minutes.”

“Maybe not,” said the captain. “How’d you like to come work for me?”

“Work for you?” he said. “Sure.” And then felt he had to backtrack and ask, “What’s the pay?”

The captain gave him a figure that was nearly double his picking job. “You come highly recommended by Swanson,” he said. “I trust his judgment. Only catch is that you’d have to start today.”

Jensi pretended to think about it, then nodded. “What time do you want me?” he asked.

“Immediately. We’re already in orbit and waiting for you. There’s a shuttle waiting in the port. Pack your things and catch it right way. No delaying now: we’ll leave as soon as you get up here.”

He nodded and cut the vid. He took a deep breath. He was one step closer to seeing his brother.

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