“Ready?” she demanded, in a clipped voice. With her sharp toe she kicked open the hall door. “Then let’s go. Well pick up this girl of Max’s, and get under way.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE GIRL was waiting demurely at the Security annex. Kaminski ordered the taxi to pull up at the darkened runway; he leaped out and strode up the gloomy walk, toward the long concrete building. After a short interval he returned with a small, solemn figure. By now he had managed to get her name.
“Tyler,” he muttered, helping her into the taxi, “this is Doug and Nina Cussick.” Indicating the girl, he finished; “Tyler Fleming.”
“Hello,” Tyler said huskily, tossing her head back and smiling shyly around at them. She had large dark eyes and short-cropped jet-black hair. Her skin was smooth and faintly tanned. She was slender, almost thin, body very young and unformed under her simple evening dress.
Nina examined her critically and said: “I’ve seen you around. Aren’t you a Security employee?”
“I’m in research,” Tyler answered, in an almost inaudible whisper. “I’ve only been with Security a few months.”
“You’ll get along,” Nina observed, signaling the taxi to rise. In a moment they were on their way up. Irritably, Nina stabbed down on the high-velocity stud mounted by her armrest. “Its almost one o’clock,” she explained. “If we don’t hurry, we won’t see anything.”
“See?” Cussick echoed apprehensively.
At Nina’s direction, the taxi let them off in the North-beach section of San Francisco. Cussick satisfied the robot meter with ninety dollars in change, and the taxi shot off. To their right was Columbus Avenue and its notorious rows of bars and dives and Cabarets and black-market restaurants. People were out roaming the streets in great numbers; the sky overhead was choked with inter-city taxis setting down and taking off. Multicolored signs winked; on every side glared chattering, flickering displays.
Seeing where Nina had brought them, Cussick felt a pang of dismay. He knew she had been going to San Francisco; police reports had mentioned her presence in the North Beach surveillance area. But he had assumed it was clandestine, a covert protest; he hadn’t expected her to bring him along. Nina was already heading purposefully toward the descending stairs of a subsurface bar; she seemed to know exactly where she was going.
Catching up with her, he demanded: “You sure you want to do this?”
Nina halted. “Do what?”
“This is one area I wish they had demolished. Too bad the bombs didn’t finish it once and for all.”
“We’ll be all right,” she assured him primly. “I know people here.”
“My God,” Kaminski exclaimed, seeing for the first time where they were. “We’re close to them!”
“To whom?” Cussick asked, puzzled.
Kaminski’s sagging face snapped oblique. He said nothing more; placing his hand on Tyler’s shoulder, he guided her toward the stairs. Nina had already started down; reluctantly, Cussick followed after her. Kaminski came last, in a dark world of his own, thinking and muttering about esoteric matters known only in the gnawing doubt of his own consciousness. Tyler, serious and sedate, descended willingly, without resistance. Young as she was, she seemed totally self possessed, there was no sign of wonder on her face.
The underground level was jammed with people, a densely-packed mass that stirred and undulated like a single organism. A constant blare of tinny noise roared up deafeningly; the air was translucent with a shimmer of smoke, perspiration, and the steady shouting of human beings. Robot servants, suspended from the ceiling, wheeled here and there, serving drinks and collecting glasses.
“Over here,” Nina called, leading the way. Cussick and Kaminski exchanged glances, these places were not strictly illegal, of course, but Security would have preferred to close them. The San Francisco North Beach region was the bete noire of the vice squads, a last remnant of the pre-war red-light stratum.
Nina seated herself at a tiny wooden table crammed against the wall. Overhead, an imitation candle flickered fitfully. Cussick pulled up a packing crate and settled himself uncomfortably; Kaminski went through the mechanical ritual of finding Tyler a chair, and then one for himself. Bending over, he laid his package on the floor, propped against a table leg. The four people sat pressed tightly together, elbows and feet touching, facing one another across the square water-logged surface of the table.
“Well,” Nina said gaily, “here we are.”
Her voice was barely audible above the din. Cussick hunched over and tried to shut out the constant clamor. The close air, the frenetic motion of people, made him vaguely ill. Nina’s good time had a grim, deliberate quality about it; he wondered what Tyler thought. She didn’t seem to think anything; pretty, competent, she sat unfastening her coat, an agreeable expression on her face.
“This is the price we pay,” Kaminski’s voice came in Cussick’s ear. “We have Relativism; everybody to his own tastes.”
Some of his words reached Nina. “Oh yes,” she agreed, with a tight smile. “You have to let people do as they want.”
The robot waiter dropped like a metal spider from the ceiling, and Nina turned her attention to ordering. From the bill-of-fare she selected an oral preparation of heroin, then passed the punch sheet to her husband.
Petrified, Cussick watched the robot bring forth a cellophane packet of white capsules. “You’re taking those?” he demanded.
“Now and then,” Nina answered noncommittally, tearing open the packet with her sharp nails.
Numbly, Cussick ordered marijuana for himself; Kaminski did the same. Tyler examined the bill-of-fare with interest, and finally chose a liqueur built around the drug artemisia. Cussick paid the bill, and the waiter, after delivering the orders, accepted the money and sailed off.
His wife, already under the influence of the heroin, sat glassy-eyed, breathing shallowly, hands clenched together. A faint sheen of perspiration had risen to her throat; drop by drop it trickled down to her collarbone and evaporated in the warmth of the room. The drug, he knew, had been severely cut by police order; but it was still a powerful narcotic. He could sense an almost invisible rhythmic motion to her body; she was swaying back and forth to some auditory disturbance unheard by others.
Reaching out, he touched her hand. Her flesh was cold, hard, as pale as stone. “Darling,” he said gently.
With an effort, she was able to focus on him. “Hi,” she said, a little sadly. “How are you?”
“Do you really hate us this much?”
She smiled. “Not you, us. All of us.”
“Why?”
“Well,” Nina said, in a remote, detached voice, brought down to reality by fantastic concentration of will, “it just seems so goddamn hopeless. Everything… like Max says. There’s nothing. We’re living in deadness.”
Kaminski, pretending not to hear, pretending not to listen, sat frozen, taking in every word, responding with intense pain.
“I mean,” Nina said, “there was the war, and now here we are. And Jackie, too. For what? Where can we go? What can we look for? We’re not even allowed to have romantic illusions, any more. We can’t even tell ourselves lies. If we do—“ she smiled, without rancor. “Then they take us to the forced labor camps.”
It was Kaminski who answered. “We have Jones… The Whirlwind, sweeping us away. That’s the worst thing about our world… it’s permitted the beast to come.”
Tyler sipped her cocktail and said nothing.
“What now?” Nina asked. “You can’t keep your world going… you realize it’s finished. Jones has come. You have to recognize him. He’s the future; it’s all interwoven, tied-up, mixed. You can’t have one without the other… your world has no future of its own.”
“Jones will kill us all,” Kaminski said.
“But at least it’ll have meaning. We’ll be doing something.” Nina’s voice trailed off, moving farther away from them. “It’ll be for something. We’ll be reaching out, like we used to.”
“Empty idealism,” Cussick said unhappily.
Nina didn’t answer. She had disappeared into an inner world; her face was blank, devoid of personality.
On the raised platform at the rear of the room a commotion had begun swinging into life. The floor show of the place; the nightly spectacle. Patrons turned their attention to it; the clog of people at the foot of the stairs craned their necks eagerly. Listlessly, Cussick watched, indifferent to what was happening, his hand still resting on his wife’s.
The floor show involved two figures, a man and a woman. They smiled at the audience, and then removed their clothing. Cussick was reminded of the first day he had seen Jones, that day in early spring, when he had tramped across the slushy black ground to visit the carnival. The bright April day he had witnessed the assorted sports and freaks and mutants collected from the war. Recollection welled up inside him, a mixed nostalgia for his own hopeful youth, his vague ambitions and idealism.
The two figures on the stage, professionally agile and supple-bodied, had begun making love. The action was carried out as a ritual: it had been done so many times that it was a series of dance-motions, without passion or intensity. Presently, as a kind of mounting tempo, the sex of the man began to change. After a time it was the rhythmic motions of two women. Then, toward the conclusion, the figure that had originally presented itself as a woman transformed itself to a man. And the dance ended as it had begun: with a man and a woman quietly making love.