“You’re afraid of what your wife will say,” Charley said. “If you bring me home. She’ll think lots of things.”
“Well, there’s that,” he said. “And also the law called ‘statutory rape’. You’re not twenty-one, are you?”
“I’m sixteen.”
“There, you see—”
“Okay,” she said merrily. “Land and drop me off.”
“Do you have any money?” he asked.
“No.”
“But you’ll manage?”
“Yes. I can always manage.” She spoke without rancor; she did not seem to blame him for his hesitation. Maybe this sort of thing has happened before between them, he reflected. And others, like myself, have been lured in. With the best intentions in mind.
“I’ll tell you what may happen to you if you take me to your place,” Charley said. “You can be bursted for being in the same room with Cordonite material. You can be bursted for statutory rape. Your wife, who will also be arrested for being in the same room with Cordonite material, will leave you, and will never understand or forgive you. And yet you can’t just let me off, even though you don’t know me, because I’m a girl and I have nowhere to go to—”
“Friends,” he said. “You must have friends you could go to.” Or are they too much afraid of Denny? he wondered. “You’re right.” he said, then. “I can’t just let you off.”
Kidnapping, he thought; I could also be charged with that, if Denny felt like calling the PSS. But—Denny could not, would not, do that, because then, in return, he would be nailed as a peddler of Cordonite material. He can’t take that chance.
“You’re a strange little girl,” he said to Charley. “In some ways you’re naïveté itself and in other ways you’re tough as a warehouse rat.” Did selling illegal material make her like this? he wondered. Or did it happen the other way around . . . she had grown up hard, toughened, and hence had gravitated to such work. He glanced at her, now, sizing up her clothes. She is too well-dressed, he thought; those are expensive garments. Maybe she is greedy—this is a way of earning enough pops to satisfy that greed. For her, clothes. For Denny, the Shellingberg 8. Without this they would merely be teenagers, going to school in jeans and shapeless sweaters.
Evil, he thought, in the service of good. Or were Cordon’s writings good? He had never seen an authentic Cordon tract before; now, presumably, he had one and he was free to read it himself and decide. And let her stay if it’s good? he wondered. And if it isn’t, toss her out to the wolves, to Denny and the prowl cars with their telepathic Unusuals listening constantly.
“I am life,” the girl said.
“What?” he said, startled.
“To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I’m life and when you’re with me, some of it rubs off on you. You don’t feel so old, now, do you? With me here in the squib beside you.”
Nick said, “I’m thirty-four and I don’t feel old. As a matter of fact, sitting here with you makes me feel older, not younger. Nothing is rubbing off.”
“It will,” she said.
“You know this from experience,” he said. “With older men. Before me.”
Opening her purse she got out her mirror and cheekstick; she began to stroke elaborate lines from her eyes, across her cheekbones, to the rim of her jaw.
“You use too much makeup,” he said.
“All right, call me a two-pop whore.”
“What?” he asked, staring at her, his attention momentarily turned away from the mid-morning traffic.
“Nothing,” she said. She closed up her cheekstick, placed it and the mirror back in her purse. “Do you want some alcohol?” she asked. “Denny and I have a lot of contacts for alc. I might even be able to get you some—what’s it called—oh yes, scotch.”
“Made in some fly-by-night distillery out of God knows what,” Nick said.
She began to laugh helplessly; she sat, head down, her right hand over her eyes. “I can picture a distillery flapping through the midnight sky, on its way to a new location. Where the PSS won’t find it.” She continued laughing, holding onto her head as if the idea of it refused to leave her.
“You can go blind from alcohol,” Nick said.
“Smoke. Wood alcohol.”
“How can you be sure it isn’t that?”
“How can you be sure of anything? Denny may catch us any time and kill us, or the PSS may do it . . . it’s just not likely, and you have to go by what’s likely, not what’s possible. Anything is possible.” She smiled up at him. “But that’s good, don’t you see? It means you can always hope; he says that, Cordon—I remember that. Cordon says it again and again. He really doesn’t have much of a message, but I remember that. You and I might fall in love; you might leave your wife and I’d leave Denny, and then he’d go outright insane—he’d go on a drinking binge—and he’d kill all of us and then himself.” She laughed, her light eyes dancing. “But isn’t it great? Don’t you see how great it is?”
He didn’t.
“You’ll see,” Charley said. “Meanwhile, don’t talk to me for the next ten or so minutes, I have to figure out what to tell your wife.”
“I’ll tell her.” Nick said.
“You’d foul it all up. I’ll do it.” She squeezed her eyes shut, concentrating. He drove on, then, turning in the direction of his apartment.
Chapter 8
Fred Huff, personal assistant to PSS Director Barnes, placed a list on his superior’s desk and said, “Pardon me, but you asked for a daily report on apartment 3XX24J and here it is. We used standard tapes of voices to identify those who came by. Only one person—one new person, I mean—came by. A Nicholas Appleton.
“Doesn’t sound like much,” Barnes said.
“We ran it through the computer, the one we lease from the University of Wyoming. It made an interesting extrapolation as soon as it had all previous material on this Nicholas Appleton, his age, occupation, background, is he married, does he have any children, has he ever—”
“He’s never broken the law before in any manner whatsoever.”
“You mean he’s never been caught. We asked the computer that, too. What are the chances, given this particular man, that he would knowingly violate the law, at the felony level. It said probably no, he would not.”
“He did when he went to 3XX24J,” Barnes said caustically.
“So noted; hence the application from the computer for a prognosis. Extrapolating from his case, and others similar to it during the last few hours, the computer declares that the news of Cordon’s impending execution has already swelled the ranks of the Cordonite underground by forty percent.”
“Balls,” Director Barnes said.
“That’s how it works out statistically.”
“You mean they’ve joined in protest? Openly?”
“Not openly, no. In protest, yes.”
“Ask the computer what the reaction will be to the announcement of Cordon’s death.”
“It can’t compute. Not enough data. Well, it computed, but in so many possible ways as to tell us nothing. Ten percent: a mass uprising. Fifteen percent: a refusal to believe that—”
“The greatest probability is what?”
“A belief that Cordon is dead, but that Provoni is not; that he’s alive and will return. Even without Cordon. You must remember that thousands—authentic or forged—writings by Cordon are being circulated everywhere on Earth every minute of the day. His death isn’t going to end that. Remember the famous revolutionary of the twentieth century, Ché Guevara. Even though dead, the diary which he left behind—”