“See you a minute?” Chris asks.
Leaving the chastened girl to lick the blood from the corner of her mouth, Janis steps into the hall and shuts the door behind her.
Chris says, “I just got a call from Egon. They don’t have the in-laws yet, but they’re still in the chase.”
“Damn, Chris, we can’t hold all these people indefinitely.”
“Won’t have to. A support team of six is already on the road from Austin, be here in maybe half an hour. They’ll do sharp-elbow one-on-one interviews with all the employees being held in Stable Two, threaten them with prosecution for aiding and abetting Jane Hawk, scare the spunk out of them, and then send them home.”
“What about the Longrins?”
“Injections.”
“Shit, yeah!” Janis high-fives Chris. “Maybe we’ll get Ancel and Clare before Egon does. Chase and Nick were best friends in high school. If the sonofabitch doesn’t know where the in-laws went, if he hasn’t been the contact between Jane and them, I’ll tongue-kiss a rattlesnake.”
Chris grins. “Probably wouldn’t be your first.”
“The quality of men these days, I’m either giving tongue to a rattlesnake or a gerbil. How many injection sets are we gonna have?”
“Egon didn’t say what they’re bringing. All we need is two.”
“If there’s extra, I have a use for one.”
He looks at the closed door to Laurie’s room. “But she’s only twelve, brain still growing. Inject before they’re sixteen … you know what’ll happen.”
“I know what happened to a few. The sample was too small. It doesn’t mean anything. Besides, after we convert the parents, the kids will know. Kids always know. They detect the difference. We’ll have to do something with all three of the kids, anyway.”
Chris is uneasy, but after the work they’ve done together, he wants to be a good partner. “All right, but I won’t be there when you do it … or through the wait.”
Earlier generations of the nanomechanism took eight to twelve hours from the time of injection to the moment when control of the subject was established and he—or she—became an adjusted person. The newest generation of control mechanism requires only four hours.
Janis says, “If they bring just two injection sets, we could do Chase first, squeeze him for what he knows. If he gives us Ancel and Clare, we don’t want wifey. I’ll use the second set”—she gestures toward the bedroom door—“with the smart-mouth tomboy in there.”
She doesn’t need a translator to know the meaning of the look Chris gives her, but he’s forthright about his desire. “Nobody can get a hate-on faster or harder than you. You’re so damn intense, I’d give just about anything to know what you’re like in bed.”
“More than you could ever handle, sweet thing. We’ve been here before, and you know how it is. Partners don’t do each other. Not if they want to stay sharp on the job.”
He sighs. “When the revolution’s over, I’m going to want to be totally in you.”
She likes Chris, she really does, but his vision is limited to the short term, while she takes the long view. “A good revolution,” she says, “is never over. It’s a way of life.”
55
IN THE LIBRARY OF MANY CHAIRS, there were also two deep, long, comfortable sofas facing each other from opposite ends of a gold-blue-maroon Persian carpet. Cornell often slept in one or the other. When he spent the night in the library instead of in the bunker, he was more likely to have pleasant sleep, as if his favorite authors were writing his dreams.
This night, he put plump pillows and a blanket on each sofa. He placed small, chilled bottles of water on coasters, on the tables that served the sofas. Beside each coaster, in a small plastic bag, he set a lemon cookie with chocolate chips in case either of them should wake in the night and want a convenient snack before going back to sleep.
Travis used the bathroom first and brushed his teeth and put on white-and-black pajamas like a karate costume. Both sofas were big, but he took the smaller of the two.
When Cornell entered the bathroom and saw what the boy had left there, his heart raced and his stomach turned over, and he needed to leave the room at once.
The boy was lying on the sofa, arranging the blanket around himself, one dog up there with him, the other dog on the floor next to its master’s slippers.
Cornell said, “Umm. Umm. Umm. You left a thing in there so I can’t use the sink.”
“I flushed,” the boy assured him.
“Yes, yes, yes. You did flush, please and thank you. But beside the sink you left a little plastic glass. Umm. Umm. Umm. And in the glass you left a little tube of toothpaste and … and … and your toothbrush, left it in the little glass, in the little glass. In the little glass.”
“Where should I leave it?”
“Not in the bathroom. Leave it with your things. On the table there with your water and your cookie would be okay. That would be okay. That would be good.”
The boy folded back the blanket and sat up. “Okay, sure. Sorry I left it there. But why?”
Cornell stood fidgeting, shifting from foot to foot, wondering if the dogs would decide to attack him, after all. “Umm. Umm. Well, it’s a toothbrush, and a toothbrush is a very personal thing, very, and when there’s a toothbrush not mine standing by the sink where I’m going to brush my own teeth … it’s like being gouged, no, I mean like being touched, and I can never be touched.”
“Uncle Gavin explained how that is.” The boy stepped into his slippers. “But I guess I didn’t know about the toothbrush thing.”
“Neither did I.” Cornell shuddered. “Umm. It’s a surprise.”
The boy got the plastic glass with the toothbrush and brought it back to his sofa and put it on the table beside his cookie. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jasperson.”
“No need to be sorry, no need, no need. You didn’t know, I didn’t know, nobody knew.”
Cornell went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth and changed into his pajamas, which were soft and blue like the sky. He could sleep well only in soft and blue.
In the library once more, he turned out all the lights except for a blown-glass lamp at the end of the sofa farthest from his head. A soft peach-color glow issued from it.
“I always leave on one lamp,” Cornell said. “Is that okay?”
“Sure. Even though there aren’t boogeymen or nothing, it’s still nice not to sleep in the dark.”
Cornell settled on his sofa. Pulled the blanket over himself. He turned on his side and looked across the Persian carpet to the boy with his dogs. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I guess. Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. Umm. Umm. Umm.”
“What do you want to say?” the boy asked.
Cornell pointed behind his head to the table that stood beside the sofa. “Do you see the iPod there?”
“Yeah. I see it.”
“Sometimes at night if I wake up and I’m scared, I play music that makes me feel better. Is that okay? I’ll play it low.”
“It won’t bother me. My mom’s a musician. She plays the piano. She’s really good.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting your mother.”
“You’ll like her. Everyone likes her. Except all the bad guys she puts in prison. She’s the best.”
Cornell says, “She’ll be here soon.”
“She promised,” the boy said. “She always keeps promises.”
Both dogs yawned extravagantly, as if the conversation bored them. Cornell didn’t want to offend the dogs, so he said no more.
Soon the boy was softly snoring.
Cornell lay watching the boy and the big dogs, amazed that they were here, that his guest had liked the lunch sandwiches, also the different sandwiches for dinner. He was amazed that he had read most of the Bradbury novel aloud to the boy.
Always before, Cornell had liked everything to be just the same today as it had been yesterday, and he had hoped tomorrow would be the same as today.
Now everything was different, and he wanted tomorrow to be the same kind of different as today.
On the other hand, if things could get so different from one day to the next, they could get different all over again and maybe the next time in not such a nice way.
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