Teo Lusk had been running the dark for thirty-one years and had never once called the tab.
He did not boast about it. Boasting about it was asking for it. But it was known, at the bars on Altair and Pollux where the slack pilots drank, and when a younger pilot asked him how he had managed it he would say that he counted his fuel twice and his luck not at all, and then he would change the subject.
The contract was a Halloran & Vey survey, and it read like all of theirs.
The firm requires a complete survey of the anomalous return logged at the given coordinates. Accuracy is valued above speed. Speculation is not valued at all.
The coordinates were a long way past the edge of the chart. No lane went out there. That was why the pay was good, and why nobody younger had taken it.
'It's a ghost,' said Mother. 'Third one this season out that way. Two came back nothing. One came back somebody's lost cargo pod, which the somebody was very pleased about.'
He had named her Mother thirty-one years ago as a joke, because she fussed, and the joke had worn so smooth with handling that he no longer heard it. She had a grey face he had picked from the list on his first day and never changed. He had never asked her where the Desk was. He had never asked her anything about herself at all, and he thought sometimes that this might be the only rule he had kept longer than the one about the tab.
'Fuel?' she said.
'Out, survey, back, and a third again in the tanks.'
'A third.'
'A third's plenty.'
'A third's plenty,' she agreed, in the voice she used when she had been told something and did not believe it.
He ran out from Altair in the usual traffic and then left it. A long lane opens a long way out, and no lane at all opens nowhere, so at the last mouth light he did not drop. He kept going.
The run into the dark was the part he liked, and he had never told anyone that either. The lights fell away behind him. The band went quiet. For the first hours Mother was only a little late, three seconds, then five, and they talked about nothing in particular: a price at Gienah, a dipper they both knew who had married a cutter, which everybody said would never last and which had lasted twenty years.
By the second day she was eleven seconds behind him, and they mostly stopped talking.
He ate when the clock said to. He slept in the chair. He checked his fuel against his log, and then against his log again, because that was the rule, and both times it said what he had expected it to say. Ahead of him, filling more of the forward screen every hour, the Seam was up.
He had seen it from the far edges of the chart a thousand times. Out here it was different. It was not a line across the sky any more. It was the sky, or most of it, a long pale fracture of light that ran from one side of the screen to the other and did not stop at the frame. The instruments began to wash out at the edges. The heater ticked. He did not look at it more than he had to, and that was a rule too, though not one he could have explained.
The ghost came up on his scope as nothing at all.
That was wrong from the start. A ghost was a return, a reading, a smear of light or signal where none should be. This was a gap. A round patch of the slack, out ahead of him, where his instruments simply reported less than everywhere else. Less light. Less noise. Less of anything.
'Mother. I've got it. It's a hole.'
He waited out the delay. Fourteen seconds now.
'A hole in what?'
'In the readings. Like something's sitting in front of the sensors.'
He waited again.
'Then survey the hole,' said Mother. 'Accuracy above speed. Speculation not valued at all.'
He laughed, and she would not hear it for fourteen seconds, and he found he liked that.
He ran the pattern. It was a slow one, a spiral in toward the edge of the gap and out again, and the instruments chattered and he let them. Halloran & Vey wanted extent, depth, any return at all. He gave them everything he had. On the third turn of the spiral the cab went very quiet, quieter than the slack, quiet the way the hang was quiet, and he held his breath without meaning to, and then it passed and he was coming out the other side.
He finished the pattern. He logged it. He checked his fuel.
He checked it again.
It was wrong by a fifth.
Not his reckoning. The tanks. He had burned a fifth more coming through that spiral than any run of that length should cost, and his clock said the spiral had taken forty minutes and his engine log said the drive had been lit for very nearly an hour.
He sat with that for some time.
Then he did the sum he did not want to do. Back to the last mouth light, at his best burn, on what was in the tanks. He did it twice, because that was the rule. Both times the answer was the same, and it was short. Not by much. A few hours of sublight out of three days. Enough to leave him coasting in the dark, in a cold cab, a long way from anyone, on a tab he had never in his life called.
'Mother,' he said. 'Something in there ran the clock wrong. The drive was lit longer than the clock says. I'm a fifth down on fuel.'
The delay was seventeen seconds. He counted all of them.
'How short?'
'A few hours. I'll make it close to the mouth light.'
'Close isn't there, Teo.'
'I know what close is.'
He shut down everything he could. He killed the music and the cab lights and the heater, and the cold came in from the walls within the hour. He trimmed his burn to the thinnest line that would still get him home on time, and then thinner. He put on both coats. He sat in the dark, in the cold, with the Seam behind him lighting the cab grey, and he told himself that thirty-one years was a long time, and that a man who had been careful for that long was owed a few hours of luck.
He had never believed in being owed luck. He had never told anyone that, either.
On the third day he was still short.
The fuel said so, and the clock said so, and his own arithmetic, done in pencil now, on the back of the contract, because his fingers were too cold for the console, said so. He would run dry somewhere out past the last mouth light, close enough to see it and not close enough to reach it. Then he would sit there.
Mother had said nothing for a long time. He knew she was waiting.
He thought about the bars on Altair. About being the man who had called the tab after thirty-one years, and the young ones who would tell it, because that was what happened to a pilot who needed it. They would tell it for years. He thought it would probably make a good story. He thought it was a better story than the other one, the one where a careful old man sat in a cold cab out past the last light and waited, and was too proud to say so, and nobody told that one at all, because nobody knew.
'Mother,' he said.
The delay was shorter now. Nine seconds.
'Here.'
'Call the tab.'
He waited.
'Called it the minute you said a fifth,' said Mother. 'Tender's been running out to you for a day and a half. She'll meet you short of the mouth. You'll want to keep your lights off till she's close, you've not got the power to spare.'
He did not say anything for a while.
'You might have told me,' he said.
He counted the nine seconds.
'You might have asked,' said Mother.
The tender came up out of the dark late on the fourth day, a squat Union ship with her running lights turned low out of politeness. Her pilot was a girl of about twenty who talked all the while she was rigging the fuel line across, about her ship and her mother and a dipper she was seeing off the Raft. He let her. When the fuel was across he thanked her, and she said it was nothing, and that her dispatcher had told her who she was coming out for and she had not believed it, and could she ask him something.
'Go on.'
'Is it true you count your fuel twice and your luck not at all?'
He looked at the gauge, which was full, and at the Seam, which was still there, filling the screen behind them, pale and enormous and paying them no attention whatsoever.
'Three times,' he said. 'I count it three times now.'
He turned the heater on. He ran in toward the mouth light, and it came up ahead of him, and Mother's voice came closer with every hour, until it was hardly late at all.
'Halloran & Vey have your survey,' she said. 'They'd like to know what you think the hole is.'
'Tell them speculation isn't valued at all.'
'I've told them,' said Mother. 'They're quite cross.'
He laughed, and this time she heard it straight away.