Galaxy Blues by Allen Steele Page B

“He’s rather shy, and I hope that you’ll respect his privacy.”
    Rain stared after him. “Weird…”
    Yes, he was. Just the same as when I’d first seen him, peering in through the barred window of my jail cell.

PART 2
The Pride of Cucamonga

( SIX )
    Downtime…
    the nightlife on Coyote…
    the mysterious tenant…
    a tense breakfast during which various matters are discussed.
    I
    We hung around Liberty for another week, local time, more out of necessity than anything else. Our ship had recently undergone refit at Janus’s shipyard in Earth orbit, and we were told that it wouldn’t be delivered to Coyote until the chief engineer was satisfied that all the new work was up to spec. So we had little to do until then but wait for our ride to arrive.
    Before I left Lew’s Cantina, Ted handed me a data fiche for a Zeus-class shuttle. It was a different sort of boat than the ones I’d trained to fly—a single-stage-to-orbit heavy lifter—yet I had little doubt that I could handle it. The next day, I wandered around town until I found the comp store I’d spotted while Morgan was driving me to the inn and used a good chunk of the money I’d brought with me to buy a new pad, complete with hologram heads-up. Once I loaded the fiche, I was able to pull up a 3-D simulation of the flight controls, which I used to familiarize myself with what I’d find once I climbed into the cockpit.
    I used most of the remaining cash to buy other stuff. Goldstein had given me new clothes, sure, but he hadn’t anticipated everything that a well-dressed spacer might need. It took a while, but I finally managed to locate a shop that catered to pros like me. I picked up a pair of stickshoes for zero-g work, a pilot’s watch—electronic analogue, with three programmable time zones, a radiation counter, and a bevel—and a pair of sunglasses, along with a utility vest and a miniature tool kit to go with it. The sort of stuff I’d carried when I belonged to the Union Astronautica but which I’d been forced to give back when I was kicked out of the service.
    So I shopped, and I studied, and otherwise looked for ways to kill time until my ship came in. That turned out to be harder than I expected. Liberty was the largest colony on Coyote, but that didn’t exactly make it a hoppin’ party town. Most people there possessed a puritanical work ethic—get up in the morning, have breakfast, go off to work, come home in the evening, have dinner, go to bed—that they had inherited from the original settlers. Once the sun went down, the streets were just about dead. Oh, there was a theatre ensemble—one evening I caught a performance of a play written by a local author, a comedy packed with topical references that might have been side-splitting if I’d known what they were about—and I eventually found a bar on the other side of town that had a half-decent folk trio, if you like music played so slow and soft that you could fall asleep between songs. But even then, everything closed down long before midnight, leaving me to walk home as Bear ascended into the night sky, its silver rings illuminating deserted sidewalks and houses where the lights were going out one by one.
    A couple of other things got my interest. One was baseball. Late in the afternoon, once I got through my daily routine of memorizing the layout of the shuttle cockpit and practicing the tutorials, I would mosey over to the Colonial University and watch the Boids practice. For a bunch of kids who’d never set foot on Doubleday Field, they weren’t bad. Not great, by any means, but they had their hearts in the right place. I sat in the right-field bleachers and watched the team while they divided into two squads and played off against each other. At first, I winced while these boys and girls committed errors that would have put a Little League team to shame, until I