seriousness—which meant that he understood me and knew
that I understood him too.
“We’ll contact you day after tomorrow,” he said.
“There’s a lot of work to do. But, after what you’ve been
through, you deserve a little rest.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.”
Again. And grinning this time too…
I closed the door and walked down the hall to the bank
of elevators with a dark-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot-four-
inch guard as company. We didn’t say much of anything
to each other on our way downstairs, not so much out of
any particular dislike for each other as out of a sheer lack
of anything to say, like a nuclear physicist and an un-
educated carpenter at the same cocktail party, neither ex-
actly superior, but both separated by a mammoth com-
munications gap.
Down…
Harry was in the lobby, tearing his hat apart, and when
the elevator doors opened, he gave the thing a particularly
vicious mangling with his big hands and started toward us.
He was smiling the first genuine, friendly, uncomplicated
smile I had seen since I had awakened in Child’s body. He
hugged me, living up to the image of the father figure, and
he had tears in his eyes which he could not manage to
conceal.
I was not concealing my own tears at all. I dearly loved
this clumsy, pudgy, sloppily dressed Irishman, though most
of my life had been spent in playing down that love. Maybe
it was because I had learned early to hate and despise as
self-protection. When Harry separated me from that world
inside the AC complex and showed me what actual love
was, I never lost my suspicion. And it is easier to act less
involved so that if you’re hurt later, the anguish doesn’t
show so much and give your adversary satisfaction. Now
unchecked, evidence of that love flowed.
We hurried across the lobby to the second elevator bank
and went down to the underground garage, where the
attendant brought Harry’s hovercar, accepted a tip, and
stepped back as we drove out of that great, sparkling
building. In the street, we both sighed, as if some weight
had been lifted from us, and we began to talk for the first
time, out of the range of those microphones which infest
any government building.
“You’ll tell me about it now,” he said, his eyes flicking
from the shifting layers of new snow on the street to
where I sat against the far door. “They wouldn’t let me up
to see you but once a week, you know.”
“You’d only have been looking at flesh and blood,” I
said. “All this time, I’ve been inside of Child, locked down
there in his mind.”
“As I figured,” he said. “But those”—he jerked his
thumb behind us, twisting his face up to look disgusted—
“those pretty boys in their uniforms, I just don’t trust.”
“They didn’t exercise my body properly. And they
didn’t take any precautions against stomach shrinkage.
Otherwise, I’m fine.”
He snorted. “So tell me,”
“You first. I’ve spent a month in that place, and I don’t
have the foggiest notion what has happened out here.
When I went in, war had all but been declared. The
Chinese and the Japanese had crossed the Soviet border,
maybe nuked a town….”
He looked grim, stared at the street unfolding before us
for a long time before he said anything. It was dark, and
the crisp blue arc lights sent fantastic shadows wriggling
between the heavy fall of snowflakes. The streets seemed
almost empty of traffic.
“War was declared two days later,” he said.
“And we won?”
“Partly.”
I looked around at the streets, all undamaged, all occu-
pied by our own troops, our own police. Indeed, I saw
now that the amount of occupation of our territory spelled
some sort of trouble. Every other street corner contained
coppers parked in squad-carrying howlers, surveying the
dark boulevard. They watched us go by with quick, dark
glances, though they offered no pursuit.
“Partly?” I asked.
As we flitted across the city, he summed up the de-
velopments of the month-long war:
The Chinese had indeed nuked Zavitaya, for there was
nothing there any longer but powdered stone, splintered