Stretching out in the privacy of his bunk, he knew that he was not going to be able to sleep yet. He pulled his notebook out of the cubby beside his head and, resting on one elbow, jacked it into the wall. He wanted to check the system board to see if Jackson and the department had left him any messages about their investigation. They had: Jackson wanted to know if he had heard anything in the rover before the nav and comm went out on him. He typed a short reply: No. He sent a separate query asking when they anticipated putting him back on survey duty. It was not that he had even the slightest idea what he would do when they put him back out there. But some of the posts on the general-comments board were from miners offering their services for survey driving, and it worried him that someone else wandering around in his territory might stumble into Charlie’s cavern.
The little screen seemed to glow back at him like a living thing on his bunk. He paused in his browsing of messages. There was really very little that he was interested in here; he was just postponing sleep. He was also, he realized, extremely tired. If nothing else, that made a fertile ground for silence-fugue. That was the last thing he wanted to deal with now. He unplugged the unit, stashed it in the cubby, and lay back, closing his eyes.
Sleep did not come easily. He seemed surrounded by irritating noises, sounds he ordinarily did not notice at all: the voices of men coming and going in the dorm rooms, even the adjoining rooms; the sounds of plumbing in the can, ten meters away; even someone’s holovid, in this dorm room or another. It was certainly strange for him to be hearing all of these things through his privacy curtain, which ordinarily screened out all but the loudest sounds. But he was too tired, too groggy, and too depressed to think anything more about it than how annoying it was.
Even his own heartbeat seemed to thunder in his ears.
He felt as though all of his senses, both inner and outer, were afire—as though Charlie, in his departure, had somehow flayed his nerve endings so that he would forever be adrift in a sea of noise, fretfulness, and chaos. /Damn you, Charlie, for leaving like that . . ./
His thoughts seemed to drift away like whispers on the wind, Damn you, Charlie . . . damn you, Charlie . . . and then it was gone, like the sound of a dream passing in the night. He thought he heard an answering whisper, Who is Charlie? and he blinked his eyes in the dark and searched his mind, and wondered: indeed, who was Charlie? And why did he come to me, and then leave before his work—our work—was done? And will I be hearing voices in my imagination for the rest of my life?
And he felt a creeping sense of inevitability wash over him, saying, yes you will . . . as he drifted off to sleep at last.