“Busy?”
Jeffers turned around slowly and grinned. “Hullo, old soul. Naw, I ain’t busy. Nothin’ outside but stars, and we don’t figger on gettin’ too close to ’em right off the bat. What’s the beef?”
“I have,” said Mike the Angel succinctly, “goofed.”
Jeffers’ keen eyes swept analytically over Mike the Angel’s face. “You want a drink? I snuck a spot o’ brandy aboard, and just by purty ole coincidence, there’s a bottle right over there in the speaker housing.” Without waiting for an answer, he turned away from Mike and walked toward the cabinet that held the intercom speaker. Meantime, he went right on talking.
“Great stuff, brandy. French call it eau de vie, and that, in case you don’t know it, means ‘water of life.’ You want a little, eh, ol’ buddy? Sure you do.” By this time, he’d come back with the bottle and a pair of glasses and was pouring a good dose into each one. “On the other hand, the Irish gave us our name for whisky. Comes from uisge-beatha, and by some bloody peculiar coincidence, that also means ‘water of life.’ So you just set yourself right down here and get some life into you.”
Mike sat down at the computer table, and Jeffers sat down across from him. “Now you just drink on up, buddy-buddy and then tell your ol’ Uncle Pete what the bloody hell the trouble is.”
Mike looked at the brandy for a full half minute. Then, with one quick flip of his wrist and a sudden spasmodic movement of his gullet, he downed it.
Then he took a deep breath and said: “Do I look as bad as all that?”
“Worse,” said Jeffers complacently, meanwhile refilling Mike’s glass. “While we were on active service together, I’ve seen you go through all kinds of things and never look like this. What is it? Reaction from this afternoon’s—or, pardon me—yesterday afternoon’s emergency?”
Mike glanced up at the chronometer. It was two-thirty in the morning, Greenwich time. Jeffers held the bridge from midnight till noon, while Black Bart had the noon to midnight shift.