Downbelow Station

iii

Josh sank down to the matting, sat, collapsed backward, in the gym’s reduced G. Damon leaned over him, hands on bare knees, the suspicion of amusement on his face.

“I’m done,” Josh said when he had a breath; his sides hurt. I’d exercised, but not this much.“

Damon sank to his knees by him on the mat, hunched and himself hard-breathing. “Doing all right, anyhow. I’m ready to call it.” He sucked air and let out a slower breath, gri

Josh grunted and rolled over, heaved himself up on one arm, gathered himself gracelessly to his feet, shaking in every muscle and conscious of the men and women in better form who passed them on the steep track which belted all Pell’s i

His knees shook, and his belly ached. “Come on,” Damon said, rising with more ease. Damon caught his arm and guided him toward the dressing rooms. “Take a steam bath, a chance to get the knots out at least. I’ve got a little while before I have to get back to the office.”

They went into the chaotic locker room, stripped and tossed the clothing into the common laundry. Towels were stacked there for the taking. Damon tossed a couple at him and showed him into the door marked steam, through a quick shower into a series of cubbyholes obscured by vapor, down a long aisle. Most places were occupied. They found a few vacant toward the end of the row, took one in the middle and sat down on the wooden benches. So much water to waste… Josh watched Damon dip up water and pour it on his head, cast the rest on a plate of hot metal until the steam boiled up and obscured him in a white cloud. Josh doused himself after similar fashion, mopped with the towel, short of breath and dizzy in the heat

“You all right?” Damon asked him.

He nodded, anxious not to spoil the time, anxious all the while he was with Damon. He desperately tried to maintain his balance, walking the line of too much trust on the one side and on the other — a terror of trusting anyone. He hated being alone… had never… sometimes certainties flashed out of his tattered memory, firm as truth… had never liked being alone. Damon would tire of him. The novelty would wear off. Such company as his had to pall after a while.

And then he would be alone, with half his mind and a token freedom, in this prison that was Pell.

“Something bothering you?”

“No.” And desperately, to change the subject, for Damon had complained he lacked company coming to the gym: “I’d thought Elene would meet us here.”

“Pregnancy is begi

“Oh.” He blinked, looked away. It was an intimacy, such a question; he felt like an intruder — naive in such things. Women, he thought he had known, but not pregnant ones, not a relationship — as it was between Damon and Elene — full of permanencies. He remembered someone he had loved. Older. Dryer. Past such things. A boy’s love. He had been the child. He tried to follow the threads where they led, but they tangled. He did not want to think of Elene in that regard. Could not. He recalled warnings… psychological impairment, they had called it. Impairment…

“Josh… are you all right?”

He blinked again, which could become a nervous tic if he let it.

“Something’s eating at you.”

He made a helpless gesture in reply, not wanting to be trapped into discussion. “I don’t know.”

“You’re worried about something.”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t trust me?”

The blink obscured his vision. Sweat was dripping into his eyes. He mopped his face.

“All right,” Damon said, as if it were.

He got up, walked to the door of the wooden cubicle, anything to put distance between them. His stomach was heaving.

“Josh.”

A dark place, a close place… he could run, clear this closeness, these demands on him. That would get him arrested, sent back to hospital, into the white walls.

“Are you scared?” Damon asked him plainly.

It hit as close to the mark as any other word. He made a helpless gesture, uncomfortable. Elsewhere the noise of other voices became like silence, a roar in which their own cell was remote.

“You figure what?” Damon asked. “That I’m not honest with you?”

“No.”

“That you can’t trust me?”

“No.”

“What, then?”

He was close to being sick. He hit that barrier when he crossed his conditioning… knew what it was.

“I wish,” Damon said, “that you’d talk.”

He looked back, his back to the wooden partition. “You’ll stop,” he said numbly, “when you get tired of the project.”

“Stop what? Are you back on that desertion theme again?”

“Then what do you want?”

“You think you’re a curiosity.” Damon asked him, “or what?”

He swallowed the bile risen in his throat

“You get that impression, do you,” Damon asked, “from Elene and me?”

“Don’t want to think that,” he managed to say finally. “But I am a curiosity, whatever else.”

“No,” Damon said.

A muscle in his face began to jerk. He reached for the bench, sat down, tried to stop the tic. There were pills; he was no longer on them. He wished he were, to be still and not to think. To get out of here, break off this probing at him.

“We like you,” Damon said. “Is something wrong with that?”

He sat there, paralyzed, his heart hammering.

“Come on,” Damon said, gathering himself up. “You’ve had enough heat.”

Josh pulled himself to his feet, finding his knees weak, his sight blurring from the sweat and the temperature and the reduced G. Damon offered a hand. He flinched from it, walked after Damon down the aisle and into the showers at the end of the room.

The cooler mist cleared his head somewhat; he stayed in the stall a few moments longer than need be, inhaled the cooling air, came out again somewhat calmed, walked towel-wrapped into the locker room again. Damon was behind him. “I’m sorry,” he told Damon, for things in general.

“Reflexes,” Damon said. He frowned intensely, caught his arm before he could turn aside. Josh flinched back against the locker so hard it echoed.

A dark place. A chaos of bodies. Hands on him. He jerked his mind away from it, leaned shivering against the metal, staring into Damon’s anxious face.

“Josh?”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”

“You look like you’re going to pass out. Was it the heat?”

“Don’t know,” he murmured. “Don’t know.” He reached toward the bench, sat down to catch his breath. It was better after a moment The dark receded. “I am sorry.” He was depressed, convinced Damon would not long tolerate him. The depression spread. “Maybe I’d better check back into the facility.”

“That bad?”

He did not want to think of his own room, the barren apartment in hospice, blank-walled, cheerless. There were people he knew in the hospital, doctors who knew him, who could deal with these things, and whose motives he knew were limited to duty.

“I’ll call the office,” Damon said, “and tell them I’m going to be late. ”I’ll take you to the hospital if you feel you need it.“

He rested his head on his hands. “I don’t know why I do this,” he said. “I’m remembering something. I don’t know what. It hits me in the stomach.”

Damon sat down astride the bench, just sat, and waited on him.

“I can figure,” Damon said finally, and he looked up, recalling uneasily that Damon had had access to all his records. “What do you figure?”

“Maybe it was a little close in there. A lot of the refugees panic at crowding. It’s scarred into them.”