Presently Nina said: “I’d like to go to the apartment, first. I want to see how Jackie is,”
“Jackie?” Puzzled, Kaminski hurried down the concrete steps behind them. “Who’s that?”
“Our son,” Nina said distantly.
“That’s right,” Kaminski admitted. “You have a child. I’ve never seen him.” His voice trailed off… “With all this work, I don’t know if I’m coming or going.”
“Right now you’re going,” Nina said, standing on the curb, her body straight and disapproving, arms folded, waiting rigidly for a taxi. “Are you sure you feel up to this? It looks as if you’ve already had your share of celebrating.”
Cussick said sharply: “Cut it.”
The taxi came and Nina slipped gingerly inside. The two men followed, and the taxi shot off into the sky. Below them, the lights of Detroit sparkled and winked, evenly-spaced stars in a man-made firmament. Fresh night air swirled into the cabin of the taxi, a harsh but reviving wind that helped clear Cussick’s head. Presently Kaminski seemed to recover a trifle.
“Your husband and I haven’t been doing so well, lately,” he told Nina: a belated apology. “You’ve probably noticed.”
Nina nodded.
“We’re falling apart. The strain…” He grimaced. “It isn’t easy to watch everything you stand for falling apart piece by piece. One brick after another.”
“The graphs still going up?” Cussick asked.
“Straight up. Every region, every stratum. He’s getting through to everybody… a cross-section. How the hell can we isolate a thing like that? There’s gasoline frying on every street corner in the world.”
Nina said thoughtfully: “Does that surprise you?”
“It’s illegal,” Kaminski retorted, with childish venom. “They have no right to kill those things.”
The woman’s thin, pencilled eyebrows went up. “Do you really care about those—lumps?”
“No,” Kaminski admitted. “Of course not. I wish they’d all sizzle into the sun. And neither does he; nobody cares about the drifters one way or another.”
“How strange,” Nina said, in a carefully modulated voice. “Millions of people are resentful, willing to break the law to show their resentment, and you say nobody cares.”
“Nobody that counts,” Kaminski said, losing all sense of what he was saying: “Just the dupes care, the idiots Jones knows and we know—the drifters are a means, not an end. They’re a rallying point, a pretext. We’re playing a game, a big elaborate game.” Wearily, he muttered: “God, I hate it.”
“Then,” Nina said practically, “stop playing it.”
Kaminski brooded. “Maybe you’re right. Sometimes I think that; times when I’m working away, buried in graphs and reports. It’s an idea.”
“Let them burn the drifters,” Cussick said, “and then what? Is that the end of it?”
“No.” Kaminski nodded reluctantly, “Of course not. Then the real business begins. Because the drifters aren’t here; only a few of them are in our system. They come from somewhere; they have a point of origin.”
“Beyond the dead eight,” Nina said enigmatically.
Aroused from his lethargy, Kaminski pulled himself around to peer at the woman. Shrewd, wrinkled face dark with suspicion, he was still studying her when the taxi began to lower. Nina opened her purse and found a fifty-dollar bill.
“Here we are,” she said shortly. “You can come inside if you want. Or you can wait here—it’ll only take a second.”
“I’ll come inside,” Kaminski said, visibly not wanting to be left alone. “I’d like to see your child… I’ve never seen him.” As he fumbled for the door he muttered uncertainly: “Have I?”
“No,” Cussick answered, deeply struck by his aging instructor’s deterioration. Carefully, he reached past Kaminski and opened the taxi door. “Come on inside and get warm.”
The living room of the apartment lit up in anticipation as Nina pushed open the front door. From the bedroom came a bubbling, aggravated wail; Jackie was awake and cross.
“Is he all right?” Cussick asked anxiously. “Isn’t that thing working?”
“He’s probably hungry,” Nina answered, taking off her coat and tossing it over a chair. “I’ll go heat up his bottle.” Skirt swirling around her ankles, she disappeared down the hall into the kitchen.
“Sit down,” Cussick said.
Kaminski seated himself gratefully. He laid his package down beside him on the couch. “Nice little place you have here. Clean, fresh, everything new.”
“We redecorated it when we moved in.”
Kaminski looked around uneasily. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Help?” Cussick laughed. “No, unless you’re an expert in baby-feeding.”
“I’m not.” Unhappily, Kaminski picked at the sleeve of his coat. “Never had anything to do with that.” He glanced around at the living room, a wan hunger rising to his face. “You know, I sure as hell envy you.”
“This?” The living room was well-furnished and tidy. A small, rigorously-maintained apartment, showing a woman’s taste in furnishings and decoration. “I suppose so,” Cussick admitted. “Nina keeps it nice. But it’s only four rooms.” He added dryly: “As Nina occasionally reminds me.”
Fretfully, Kaminski said: “Your wife feels a lot of hostility toward me. I’m sorry—it bothers me. Why does she feel that way?”
“Police.”
“She resents the service?” Kaminski nodded. “I thought that was it. It’s not popular, now. And it’s getting less popular. As Jones goes up, we go down.”
“She never did like it,” Cussick said, his voice soft; he could hear the distant sounds of Nina stirring around in the kitchen, warming the baby’s formula, her heels clicking as she hurried into the bedroom, faint murmurs as she talked to the baby. “She came from an information agency. Relativism never sank very deeply into the communication media; they’re still tied up with the old slogans of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. The police aren’t beautiful, certainly… and she wonders if they’re good.” Sardonically, he went on: “After all, to admit the necessity of the secret police would be to admit the existence of fanatical absolutist cults.”
“But she’s heard about Jones.”
“Sometimes I think women are totally passive receptors, like pieces of litmus paper.”
“Some women.” Kaminski shook his head. “Not all.”
“What the public thinks of Jones she thinks. I can tell what they believe by talking to her. She seems to get it intuitively, by some sort of psychic osmosis.” Presently he added: “One day she stole some little glasses from a store. I couldn’t figure it out at the time. Later I understood it… but it took two more times to make it clear.”
“Oh,” Kaminski said. “Yes, of course. You’re a cop. She resents you. So she breaks the law… she asserts herself against cops.” He glanced up. “Does she understand it?”
“Not exactly. She knows she feels moral indignation at me. I like to think it’s nothing but outworn slogan-idealism. But maybe it’s more. Nina’s ambitious; she came from a good family. Socially, she’d like to be sitting up in the boxes, not down on the main floor. Being married to a cop has never been socially useful. There’s a stigma. She can’t get over that.”
Kaminski said thoughtfully: “You say that. But I know you’re completely in love with her.”
“Well, I hope I can keep her.”
“Would you leave Security to keep her? If it was a choice?”
“I can’t say. I hope I never have to make the choice. Probably it depends on where this Jones thing goes. And nobody can see that—except Jones.”
Nina appeared in the doorway. “He’s fine, now. We can go.”
Rising to his feet, Cussick asked: “You feel like going out?”
“I certainly do,” Nina said emphatically. “I’m not going to sit around here; I can tell you that much.”
As the woman collected her things, Kaminski asked hesitantly, “Nina, could I see Jack before we leave?”
Nina smiled; her face softened. “Sure, Max. Come on in the bedroom.” She put down her things. “Only don’t make too much noise.”
Kaminski gathered up his package and the two men obediently followed her. The bedroom was dark and warm. In his bassinet the baby lay soundly sleeping, one hand raised to his mouth, knees drawn up. Kaminski stood for a time, hands on the railing of the bassinet. The only sound was the baby’s muted rasp and the continual click of the robot watcher.
“He wasn’t really hungry,” Nina said. “It had fed him.” She indicated the watcher. “He just missed me.”
Kaminski started to reach dawn toward the baby, then changed his mind. “He’s healthy-looking,” he said awkwardly. “Looks a lot like you, Doug. He has your forehead. But he’s got Nina’s hair.”
“Yes,” Cussick agreed. “He’s going to have nice hair.”
“What color eyes?”
“Blue. Like Nina. The perfect human being: my powerful intellect and her beauty.” He put his arm around his wife and held her tight.
Chewing his lip, Kaminski said half aloud: “I wonder what the world’s going to be like, when he grows up. I wonder if he’ll be running through ruins with a gun and an armband… chanting a slogan.”
Abruptly, Nina turned and left the bedroom. When they followed they found her standing at the living room door, her coat on, purse under her arm, pulling on her gloves with rapid, jerky motions.