“… thinks nothing of boosting up to six or seven thousand metres and staying up there for hours,” Theo was saying. “Just think of it — seven kilometres straight up into the sky and thinks nothing of it.”
Hasson had lost track of the subject, but he guessed it was Barry Lutze. “He must think something of it,” he said, “otherwise he wouldn’t have bothered to tell you about it.”
“Why shouldn’t he? It’s more than…’Theo paused, obviously refraining a sentence. “It’s more than anybody around here has done.”
Hasson thought about his own brief sojourn on the edge of space, thirty kilometres up, but felt no desire to speak of it. “Doesn’t he think it’s a bit juvenile to go around calling himself Black Hawk?”
“Who said Barry is Black Hawk?”
“Have you got two top fliers around here? Barry Lutze and the mysterious Black Hawk? Do they never run across each other?”
“How would I know?” Theo demanded with a betrayed expression on his face as he felt for the coffee pot.
Hasson forbore to assist him, knowing that in the boy’s eyes he was guilty of prying into things an adult could never understand. For the first time in history young people could escape the surveillance of their elders, and that was a prize which was never to be relinquished. Complete personal mobility had shrunk the world, and enormously widened the generation gap. Barrie had been brilliantly prescient in his understanding of the fact that there could be no communication between Peter Pan and any member of the grown-up world.
Hasson maintained a contrite silence while Theo, aided only by memory and the thin ray from a sensor ring on his right hand, located a cup and poured himself some coffee. He was wondering how best to open peace negotiations when Al Werry entered the kitchen from the rear of the house in a flurry of cold air. Werry was breathing deeply, apparently as a result of his snow-clearing activities, Hasson was slightly taken aback to see that he had kept his uniform on while performing the household chore, but he forgot about the idiosyncrasy when he noticed that Werry was looking strangely flustered.
“Go upstairs, Theo,” he said without preamble. “Some people are coming to talk business.”
Theo tilted his head enquiringly. “Can’t I finish my…?”
“Upstairs,” Werry snapped. “Move it.”
“I’m going.” Theo was reaching for his sensor cane, which was propped against the table, when there was a sound of the house’s front door being thrown open, followed by heavy footsteps in the hail. A moment later the kitchen door opened and Buck Morlacher and Starr Pridgeon came into the room. Both were wearing flying suits and harnesses which bulked out their figures and made their presence in the domestic environment seem alien and hostile. Red patches glowed like warning pennants on Morlacher’s slabby cheeks as he advanced on Werry, while behind him Pridgeon examined the contents of the room with an amused, semi-proprietary interest. Hasson felt a mixture of outrage, sadness and panic.
“I want to talk to you,” Morlacher said to Werry, tapping him forcefully on the chest with a gloved finger. “In here.” He nodded towards the front room and strode into it without turning to see if Werry was following. Werry, after one stricken glance at his son, followed him, leaving Pridgeon behind in the kitchen with Hasson and Theo.
“You know why I’m here,” Morlacher’s voice was thick with anger, filling both rooms.
Werry, in contrast, was almost inaudible, “If it’s about that AC yesterday, Buck, I don’t want you to think…”
“One of the reasons I’m here is that you’re never in your God… damn office where you’re supposed to be, and the other one is about that murder on the east approach yesterday. It wasn’t an AC, as you put it — it was a Goddamn murder, and I want to know what you’ve done about it.”
“There isn’t much more we can do,” Werry said placatingly.
“Isn’t much more we can do,” Morlacher mimicked. “A VIP comes to this city on business and gets murdered by some crazy shit-head punk, and there isn’t much more we can do!”
Hasson, driven by the expression on Theo’s face, stood up with the intention of closing the interconnecting door. He turned without having made sufficient preparation for the move, and froze as his back locked with a sensation like a glass dagger having been thrust between his vertebrae. He leaned on the table for a second, then carefully extended his hand to the door knob.
“Now, Buck, he wasn’t really a VIP,” Werry said in the other room.
“When I say the son-of-a-bitch was a VIP,” Morlacher ground out, “that means the son-of-a-bitch was a VIP. He came up here to…,
Hasson slammed the door shut, reducing the overheard exchanges to a background rumble, and did his best to stand up straight. Pridgeon, who was walking around the room picking up small objects and replacing them, watched him with a kind of amiable contempt.
“Boy, you’re really in a mess, Al’s cousin from England,” he said, smiling through the wisps of his moustache. His teeth had the almost-greenish tinge that comes from a permanent accumulation of food residue, and there were charcoal-coloured pockets of decay close to the gums between the incisors. “Car smash, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right.” Hasson fought to keep back a conciliatory smile. Pridgeon shook his head and hissed in his breath. “Shouldn’t have been fruiting about in a car, Al’s cousin from England. You shoulda been treading sky like a full-grown man. Look at young Theo! Theo’s going to show “em something as soon as he’s able. That right, Theo?”
Theo Werry tightened his lips, disdaining to speak.
“Theo was on his way up to his room,” Hasson said. “I think he had finished breakfast.”
“Bull ! He hasn’t touched his coffee. Drink your coffee, Theo.” Pridgeon winked at Hasson, pressed one finger to his lips in a silencing gesture and poured a thick stream of sugar from the stainless steel dispenser into the boy’s cup. He stirred the resultant sludge and guided the cup into Theo’s hand. Theo, his face alert and suspicious, gripped the cup but did not raise it to his mouth.
“I think you put in too much sugar,” Hasson said lightly, sickened by his own complaisance. “We don’t want Theo to get fat.”
The playfulness disappeared from Pridgeon’s face on the instant. He performed his intimidatory trick of abruptly fixing Hasson with a frowning, baleful voodoo stare, then came towards him, head thrust forward, moving silently on the balls of his feet. This can’t be happening to me, Hasson thought, as he found himself nodding, smiling, shrugging, backing out of the kitchen, unable to bear the idea of the other man entering his personal space. Still under Pridgeon’s threatening gaze, he reached the foot of the stairs and put his hand on the banister.
“Excuse me,” he said, listening in fascinated dread to hear what words his mouth would utter next. “Nature calls.”
He went up the stairs with the intention of going to his bedroom and locking himself inside, but the bathroom door was directly ahead and — spurred on by the notion of trying to make it appear that he really had needed to relieve himself — he went through it and thumbed the concave button on the handle. The silence in the bathroom beat inwards upon him.
“Nature calls,” he breathed. “Oh, God! Nature calls!” Pressing the back of a hand to his lips to prevent their trembling, he sat down on the white-painted cane chair, remembering with a keen sense of loss the treasure trove of green-and-gold Serenix capsules he had so blithely thrown away. I’ll see a doctor and get some more, he thought. I’ll get some more Sunday morning pills, and I’ll get some television cassettes, and I’ll be all right. He lowered his head into his hands, feeling much as he had done while suspended in the high purple archways of the stratosphere — cold, remote, abandoned — and entered a period of timelessness.