“I suppose you listen to the radio a lot,” Hasson said, sitting down with his coffee, and realized at once that he had made a mistake.
“That’s what everybody supposes.” Theo’s voice had grown stony. “It’s fun being blind as long as you have a radio.”
“Nobody thinks that.”
But it’s supposed to be a great solace, isn’t it? Everywhere I go people turn on radios for me, and I never listen to them. I don’t enjoy being blind — unsighted, they call it at school — and nobody’s going to make me look like I’m enjoying it.”
“That’s a great bit of corkscrew logic,” Hasson said gently, all too aware of his own stumblings under the burden of illness.
“I guess it is — but then a wood-louse isn’t a very logical creature.”
“Wood-louse? You’ve lost me, Theo.”
The boy gave a humourless smile which saddened Hasson. “There’s a Kafka story about a man who woke up one morning and found he had turned into a giant cockroach. It horrifies everybody that one, the idea of being turned into a cockroach — but if he’d really wanted to sick people off Kafka should have made the guy into a wood-louse.”
“Why’s that?”
“They’re blind and they’re busy. I’ve always hated those things because they’re blind and so busy. Then I woke up one morning and found I’d been turned into a giant wood-louse.”
Hasson stared at the black, vapouring liquid in his cup. “Theo, take some advice from a leading expert on the gentle art of beating oneself on the head with a club — don’t do it.”
“Mine’s the only head I can get at.”
“It was rough on your father too, you know — he’s having a bad time as well.”
Theo tilted his head and considered Hasson’s remark for a few seconds. “Mr Haldane,” he said thoughtfully, “you don’t know my father at all. I don’t think you’re really his cousin, and I don’t think you’re really an insurance salesman.”
“That’s funny,” Hasson parried, “that’s what my boss used to say to me every month when he looked at my figures.” “I’m not joking.”
“He used to say that as well, but I surprised him by inventing a new kind of policy which let people insure themselves against being uninsured.”
Theo’s lips twitched. “I read a story once about a character called Nemo the Nameless.”
Hasson chuckled, impressed by the speed with which the boy had classified his absurdity and correctly matched it. “You sound like another Stephen Leacock buff.”
“No, I don’t think I ever heard of him.”
“But he was a Canadian humorist! The very best!” Hasson was mildly surprised to find he could be enthusiastic about anything connected with literature — for months he had been unable even to open a book.
“I’ll try to remember the name,” Theo said.
Hasson tapped him lightly on the back of the hand. “Listen, I’m about due to re-read some Leacock. If I pick up a couple of books perhaps I could read them to you. What do you say?”
“That sounds all right. I mean, if you have the time…”
“I’ve got loads of time, so we’ll make it definite,” Hasson said, musing on the fact that immediately he had started thinking about doing something for somebody else his own state of mind had improved. It seemed there was a lesson to be learned. He sipped his coffee, wincing occasionally as the hot fluid came in contact with a mouth ulcer, and tacitly encouraged Theo to talk about anything that came into his mind, as long as it had nothing to do with Hasson’s past and his supposed family connections with Al Werry. Theo’s interest in flying quickly came to the fore, and almost at once there were references to Barry Lutze and to a local gang of cloud-runners known as the Hawks. As before, Hasson was disturbed to hear a note of uncritical admiration manifest itself in Theo’s voice.
“I’ll bet you,” he said, deciding to risk endangering his new- found relationship with the boy, “the leader of that outfit is called Black Hawk.”
Theo looked surprised. “How did you know?”
“It had to be that or Red Hawk. Those characters always have to hide behind some kind of label and it’s amazing how limited their imaginations are. Practically every town I’ve ever been in has had a Black Hawk or a Red Eagle fluttering around the place at night terrorising the smaller kids, and the funny part of it is that each and every one of them thinks he’s something special.”
Theo stood up, carried his empty cereal dish to the recycler and returned to the table before speaking. “Anybody who wants to do any real flying has to cover up his name.”
“That’s not the impression I get from the sports pages and TV. Some people become rich and famous through real flying.” Hasson knew from the expression on Theo’s face that his words were having no effect. The phrase “real flying’, as used by youngsters, meant flying illegally and dangerously, Throwing off all petty restrictions and flying solely by instinct, flying without lights at night, playing aerial Catch-me-if-you-can in the canyons of city buildings. The inevitable consequence of that kind of “real flying” was a steady rain of broken bodies drifting to the ground as their power packs faded, but it was a characteristic of youth that it felt itself to be immune from calamity. Accidents always happened to somebody else.
One of the difficulties Hasson had encountered in his years of police work was that all the arguments were emotional rather than intellectual. He had lost count of the occasions on which he had interviewed members of a group who had just seen one of their number smeared along the side of a building or sliced in two on a concrete pylon. In every case there had been an undercurrent of feeling, akin to dawn-time superstition and primitive magical beliefs, that the deceased had brought misfortune down on himself by violating the group’s code of behaviour in some way. He had defied the leader’s authority, or had betrayed a friend, or had shown he was losing his nerve.
The death was never attributed to the fact that the young flier had been breaking the law — because that would have opened the door to the notion that controls were necessary. The nocturnal rogue flier, the dark Icarus, was the folk hero of the age. At those times Hasson had begun to wonder if the whole concept of policing, of being responsible for others, was no longer valid. The CG harness, as well as inspiring its wearer to flout authority, aided and abetted by giving him anonymity and superb mobility. A Black Hawk and his aerial cohort could range over thousands of square kilometres in the course of a single night and then disappear without trace, like a single raindrop falling into the ocean of society. In almost every case, the only way to bring a rogue flier to book was to go after him and physically hunt him down through the sky, an activity which was both difficult and dangerous, and it seemed that the number of hunters would always be pitifully inadequate. And when he was faced with a sky-struck youngster like Theo, automatically predisposed to worship the wrong kind of hero, it seemed to Hasson that he wasted his entire life.
“… 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.”