Rimrunners

. Mad, maybe; disturbed, confused, scared—all of that in a second's blink, then a scowl and a furious set of his jaw.

She said, "Where?"

He kept scowling at her.

"Front of the lockers?" she said cheerfully. " 'Bout 2100?"

"Shop-stowage," he said with no change of expression.

"You'll get us—" —spaced, she almost said, but that wasn't a good idea.

He didn't say anything. He didn't look happier, either.

"All right," she said, and walked on out before Bernstein could turn around and notice anything.

So she picked up her laundry from Services, walked on up-ring to rec, sat down on the bench and had a cup of tea with Musa during mainday shift's breakfast, waiting on mainday crew to clear the showers, then very purposefully dawdled through cleanup and through di

Because McKenzie had more notions. She saw the look he gave her when he spotted her, and she was dodging him. She took a seat close between two women, nodded a pleasant hello to two stony silences, then paid absolute attention to the stew; but McKenzie walked over and asked her how she was doing.

"Oh, fine," she said, thinking fast, "except I got to get Services straightened out, damn screw-up with my laundry—"

"What about tonight?"

"I du

So she smiled at McKenzie, wrinkled her nose in a sweet expression. "I tell you, I really want to take you up on that." She got up with her tray in hand, tried just to shake him, but at least the retreat moved McKenzie over where she could talk to him without the two women in earshot. "I owe you the truth, Gabe. Fact is, I got an appointment tonight—well, actually a couple of nights ahead, right now, and I don't think I ought to do any different—but you're on my good-list, you really are. I'm just not ready to go single, first off. Never been my policy."

Damn man was entirely out of line, coming on her twice in a row like that, putting her to it in public, making her defend herself when there was no wrong on her side. Damn!

she could pick them.

"After that," he said.

"Hey," she said, "I gotto be politic, Gabe."

"Nothing you don't want," he said.

"Did you hear don't want? I didn't hear that. But I just got this bad feeling about singularity first and right-off. Bad business. But I do make my favorites after the new wears off." She patted him on the arm, chucked the dishes and the tray, turned around and winked at him. "See you, luv."

She escaped. She didn't know how McKenzie felt about it, but he looked at least a little mollified. She got back to quarters, she ducked into the head for a bit in the case McKenzie was following her or one of his friends was, then ducked out again and escaped out the door of the quarters in the other direction without even turning her head, well down the corridor before she slowed down.

Damn! she thought, her heart pounding. McKenzie gave her the shakes. The appointment she was going to gave her the same.

Damn, she thought, why are you doing this, Bet Yeager?

No good answer for that one, besides hormones—and besides a real disgust with the skuz who was back there trying to buy her along with a beer, and disgust with the women's surly silence, and a disgust for what she was picking up for morals on this crew.

There were a lot of peculiar things on this ship, she thought, and only one crazy man gave her anything like a healthy feeling.

Hormones, maybe. But there was her own experience with Fitch. There was what Musa had said. And Gypsy Muller's ambiguous signal.

She headed on around past Ops and Engineering, past ordinary traffic, and ducked into the shop-stowage, quite business-like.

The lights inside were on power-save. The place was three long aisles of bins; and all around the edge, barrels of plassy for the injection-mold and pieces of the press, and pieces for the extrusion-mold, and hoses and rods and wire and insulation-bales that made the whole huge compartment a maze. She leaned against the door, looked left and right and listened for sound above the general white-noise that masked everything on a little ship.

"NG?" she called out, enough to carry in the place, in case he had gotten here ahead of her and just hadn't heard the manual-latch door.

Not a sound. But with him that was nothing unusual.

She had a sudden, bad case of the willies, felt the chill in the place, her breath frosting in the dim light. She chafed her arms and folded them, wishing she had a sweater under the jumpsuit.

God, the man wants to make love in a damn freezer.

If that's actually what he wants, she thought then, with a little upset at her stomach, thinking that a man on the edge could just be crazier than anybody thought, could be waiting somewhere in here with a knife or something, in some notion that she was pushing him—

What in hell am I doing in this hole? I got more sense than this, I always had more sense than this.

So I can take care of myself. Taking care of myself means getting the hell out of here, back to quarters, just tell him later I couldn't find him—

And, sure, he'll believe that. And then I got trouble with him.

You focus a crazy on you, you got trouble forever, that's what you've done, Bet Yeager. You know better, you known better since you were eight years oldc

She ought to get back to quarters, just go to bed, notwith McKenzie, not with anybody tonight, not for a lot of nights, maybe—just get her thinking straightened out and maybe figure out some things. She already had two problems on this crew, three, counting Fitch, and the smart thing to do now, the smart thing to have gone for in the first place, was to shed all co

She was about two jumps from scared about this crew, considering the confused signals she was getting out of McKenzie—scared of what she was picking up from the women the way she was scared with stationers, scared the way she'd been scared sometimes on Ernestine, like she walked around making wrong move after wrong move and people were putting their heads together and whispering at her back—look at her: look at the way she did that—that's not civ.

She triedto remember civ ma