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Patricia half listened.
"It now seems apparent that a resettlement committee handled applications for
corridor migration and coordinated transportations"
patricia glanced at Lanier again. His eyes met hers.
It was all crazy, no way to run a railroad, much less a huge research effort.
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In its most crucial hour, the human race was represented by a team of blindly
searching, hog-tied and gagged intellectuals.
Thinking of Takahashi, and how useless all the security had been, Lanier's
stomach went sour again.
The plan, of course, had been to allow researchers on the lower levels of
security clearance and badge status to do their work as best they could,
watched over by a senior member with almost full clearance.
Their findings would then be filtered and collated and assembled into final
statements, checked with corresponding documents in the libraries. It had to
be that way. With so few people cleared to do research in the libraries, and
with lifetimes of information stored away, decades would have passed before
substantial overviews emerged.
That had been the reasoning, at any rate. Lanier had gone along because he
was still, after all, a military man at heart, obeying if not implicitly
trusting those beyond Hoffman in the chain of command.
Not that it mattered.
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Not that it mattered one goddamn bit, because it was all being shut down
anyway. They were going to pack up and go home and Takahashi would (if all
went well) report that a good-faith effort was being made to placate the
worried Soviets.
But the Soviets would still not be allowed into the libraries.
Unless the President was totally mad. Only one hand in Pandora's box at a
time.
He had seen some of the material on the Stoners' technological advances. He
had experienced the education system used in the library.
He had touched on the ways the Stoners had tampered with biology and
psychology. (Tampered did that betray a prejudice? Yes. Some of it had
shaken him to his core and contributed to his bouts of being
Stoned.) He was uncertain what his own beloved country would do with such
power, much less the Soviets.
Patricia sat in on the charade a few more minutes, then left.
He stood to follow after her and caught up near the corner of the women's
bungalow.
"Just a minute," he said. She halted and half turned, not looking at him but
at a potted lime tree growing in a wide space between two buildings. "I don't
intend for you to stop your work. Not at all."
"I won't," she said.
"I just wanted to make that clear."
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"It's clear." Now she faced him directly, hands slipping into her pockets.
"You can't be happy with the way things are going."
His eyes widened, and he drew his head back, feeling a sudden anger at her
presumption, obtuseness, whatever it was she rolled up into one short
sentence.
"You can't be a happy man, keeping us here, knowing all that."
"I'm not keeping you here."
"You've never talked to me, to any of us that I've seen. You say things but
you don't talk with us."
The anger evaporated and left behind an equally sudden pit of lostness,
aloneness. "Rank hath its privileges," he said softly.
"I don't think so." Squinting at him. She wanted to challenge, to provoke.
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"Bat kind of person are you? You seem kind of . . .
solid. Frozen. Are you really, or is that just a privilege?"
Lanier lifted a pointed finger and waggled it at her, his face creasing with a
grim smile. "You do your job," he said. "I'll do mine."
"You still aren't talking."
"What the hell do you want?" he said in a harsh undertone, stepping closer to
her, shoulders hunched forward and chin drawn back almost into his neck, an
incredibly tense and uncomfortable posture, Patricia thought. She was
startled by the sudden breakthrough.
"I want somebody else to tell me what to feel," she said.
"Well, I can't do that." Lanier's shoulders corrected themselves and he
extended his jaw. "If we start thinking about anything--" "But the work, the
work," Patricia completed, on the edge of mockery.
"Jesus, I'm doing the work, (laity. I'm working all the time." There were
tears in her eyes, and to her further shock, she saw tears in his.
Lanier's hand moved to his face but he held them back and one tear fell to his
cheek, then down the furrow at the side of his mouth.
"Okay," he said. He wanted to leave but he couldn't. "So we're both human.
Is that what you wanted to know?"
"I'm working," Patricia said, "but inside I'm just bloody.
Maybe that's it."
Quickly, he wiped his eyes. "I'm not a snowball," he said defensively.
"And it isn't fair to expect anything more from me, right now, than what I'm
giving. Do you see that?"
"This is really peculiar," Patricia said, lifting her hands to her face, as if
to mimic him. Her fingers went no higher than her cheeks, which we, re hot.
"I'm sorry. But you followed me."
"'I followed you. Shall we leave it at this?"
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Patricia nodded, ashamed. "I never thought you were cold."
"Fine," Lanier said. He turned and walked quickly toward the cafeteria.
In her room, she pressed her fists into her eyes, now dry, and tried to mouth
the words to a song she had dearly loved as a child.
She couldn't quite remember theraor wasn't certain she remembered them
correctly. But wherever you go, she ventured to accompany the tune, whatever
you do, I'll be watching you ....
Chapter Nineteen Patricia sat in a director's chair on the roof of the women's
barracks. She glanced at the date on her watch as those attending the dance
gathered in the science team compound.
The war was scheduled to begin in seven days.
Everything was coming down on her too quickly. She could render opinions but
she could not convince herself of their accuracy. She could, for example, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]