Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(74)

She stopped. He realized that the next alcove didn’t have two ranks of bottles on the second shelf. Only the back one. So there was no way to continue the marking.

“Oh,” said Dabeet.

“What will we do?”

Dabeet stopped, reached for the next bottle in from the edge, and slid it over to fill the position of the missing bottle. Then he pushed it a centimeter back. He looked at her for approval.

She looked back at him.

“You know more than me,” said Dabeet. “Tell me if that’s the right move.”

“You have a brain of your own. Tell me if that’s the right move.”

“It’s the same chemical, so any custodian coming along won’t think it’s out of place. Or at least not completely out of place.”

She nodded. And waited.

“But the custodian might always take bottles from the outside edge and work inward. So having a gap between the edge bottle that we’re using as a marker and the next one in will register as a mistake. The custodian will move it back.”

“Erasing our marking,” said Monkey. She waited.

Dabeet thought a moment more. “The custodian will also wonder who came in here and messed up the stacks. She’ll comment on it to somebody. Or look up some duty roster and find out that officially nobody was in here. And she’ll wonder.”

Monkey grinned. “What will other people expect to see?” she said. “If you’re doing an official job, it won’t matter. But if you’re a couple of sneaks like us, then it puts our ability to get into the service corridors at risk.”

Dabeet pushed the bottle he had moved back into its original position.

“Now our marker is gone, but the custodian won’t be surprised.”

“Our marker isn’t gone,” said Dabeet. “We’ll remember that in position fifteen, there was no bottle, but that still means that in exactly the right position, the bottle isn’t flush on the outside edge.”

“Except that we won’t think ‘fifteen,’” said Monkey. “We’ll think position three, three. Third group of six, third alcove.”

“Six plus six plus three,” said Dabeet. “Fifteen.”

“You think inside your own system, and the memories sustain each other.”

“Now you sound like a Jesuit,” he said.

“Mansions of memory,” she said. “Exactly. The system works, so stay inside it.”

“How many of these are there going to be?” he asked.

“You’ve walked all the corridors on every level of this wheel. You tell me.”

“I wasn’t counting,” said Dabeet.

“Of course you were,” said Monkey, “or you wouldn’t have known whether you had checked the whole length of the corridor, all the way around the wheel.”

Dabeet thought for a moment. “I just remembered the colors of the barracks I started at, and kept going till I reached those colors again. Green green brown, and keep on till I get to green green brown.”

Monkey shook her head. “That’s what you thought you were doing,” she said. “But you have a number.”

Dabeet thought a little more. The colors had a pattern. Green green brown was followed by green brown brown, then brown brown yellow, then brown yellow yellow, then … “Each color appears on three adjacent doors. There were sixteen colors. So three times—”

“Two times,” she corrected him.

Embarrassed, he saw his mistake at once. “Each one overlaps with the two adjacent colors, so it’s two times sixteen to get a total of thirty-two barracks, and therefore thirty-two of these alcove entrances.”

Monkey still waited.

“Come on, that’s right.”

“Mess hall,” she said.

Dabeet turned his face to the wall and leaned his forehead on it. “How stupid do I have to show myself to be?”

“One mess hall, with its kitchen,” said Monkey. “And an upshaft and a downshaft.”

“We should have hit a shaft already,” said Dabeet.

“What would that look like?” she asked.

Dabeet thought about it. “Nothing. It would just be a longer space between alcoves.”

Monkey grinned. “Except that maybe that was where we had doors going out the other side.”

“Did I see anything?”

“I don’t know. You were looking so carefully and methodically that I assumed you were seeing what you looked at.”

“But not understanding it.”

Monkey rested a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t punish yourself by standing with your head against the wall. You were thinking like a dirtbaby, that’s all. You were expecting that you’d see unusual things that would call attention to themselves. But inside a spaceship—which is all a space station is—things get repeated and nothing looks unusual because spaceships are artificial. They don’t have scenery. Well they do, but nothing is designed to be scenery, so nothing will just happen to stick out.”

“I did wonder where those right-hand doors led,” said Dabeet.

“What was your conclusion?”

“I wondered if there were structures on that side of the wheel. Maybe ladderways going up and down from one level to another, so you didn’t have to go all the way to a shaft to change levels.”