"The Whole Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brunner John)

2

After three days they sent Sarah Howson home from the hospital with the child, and also with papers: a nursing mother’s emergency ration card, a medical supply voucher, a medical inspection voucher, a booklet of baby-food coupons and a diaper-service voucher.

She came back to the narrow, long street with its double row of identical three-storey houses, facades covered in cracked yellow plaster, garbage piled up in the gutters because “the crisis” had stopped municipal clearance services. The day after her return, a pair of huge trucks painted the same drab green as the soldiers” battledress came growling down the street: one ate the garbage with a maw above which a roller-brush turned like a dirty moustache; the other hosed the pavement with a smelly germicide. Water was still being sold from carts; it would take months to repair the reservoir Gerald Pond and his companions had so efficiently dynamited, and there was little rain at this time of year.

She spent the first evening back at home clearing her two rooms of everything that might remind her of Gerald Pond—old clothes, shoes, letters, books on political subjects. She kept the novels, not to read but because they might be saleable. If the baby hadn’t been quiet, she would cheerfully have thrown him out with the rest, and Gerald Howson would unknowing have left the unknowing world.

But he was a passive child, then and always. Hunger might bring a thin crying; the noise didn’t last, and he accepted discomfort as a fact of existence, because his distorted body was uncomfortable simply to live in.

The evening little Gerald achieved his first week of individual existence the soldiers came down the street in an open truck: four of them, and an officer, and a driver. The driver stopped alongside the entrance of the house where Sarah Howson lodged, pulling into a gap between two parked cars but not making any serious attempt to get to the kerb. “The crisis” had also interrupted gasoline distribution; the cars here had mostly not moved for a fortnight, and already kids had begun to treat them as abandoned wrecks, slashing the tires, opening the filler caps, scratching names and obscene words on the paintwork with knives or nails.

The people on the street, the people looking from their cautiously curtained windows, saw the soldiers arrive and felt a stir of nameless alarm. A few of them knew for sure they had done something illegal; a black market had followed the crisis with blurring speed. Many more, adrift on the unfamiliar sea of circumstance, were afraid that they might have infringed some regulation imposed by the pacifying forces, or unwittingly have aided the terrorists. The fact of pacification was scarcely new, but it had been an elsewhere thing — it was reported in the papers and on TV, and it affected people with dark skins in distant countries with jungles and deserts.

Two of the soldiers waited, lounging, by the house door. Their shoulder-flashes said pakistan and they were tall, good-looking, swarthy, with bright wide smiles as they exchanged casual comments. But they also carried slung guns.

The other two soldiers and the officer banged on the door until they were admitted. With the frightened landlord they went upstairs, to the top, to Sarah Howson’s two rooms. They knocked again there.

When she opened to them, the deflated woman with her big rayon house-dress belted to a wide overlap around her waist, the officer was polite, and saluted parade-stiffly. He said, “Miss Sarah Howson?”

“Yes. What is it?” The dark dull eyes searched the military exterior, seeming to plead for clues to an inward humanity.

“I believe you were formerly an — ah — an intimate friend of Gerald Pond. Is that correct?”

“Yes.” She seemed to sag still more, but there was no protestation in the tone with which she uttered the rest of what she had to say. “But he’s dead now. And anyway I never mixed in these political things.”

The officer made no comment. He said only, “Well, I must ask you to come with us, please. It is necessary to ask you some questions.”

“All right.” She stood back apathetically from the door. “Come in and wait while I get changed. Is it going to take long?”

“That depends on you, I’m afraid,” the officer shrugged.

“It’s the kid, you see.” She scuffed at the floor with bare feet. “Do I take him along or try and get someone to mind him for awhile?”

The officer frowned and consulted a paper from his pocket. “Oh, that’s right,” he said after a pause. “Well, you’d better bring him with you, I guess.”

They went to police headquarters. There had been blood on the handsome white stone steps, but that was gone now; there were still shrapnel-scars and bullet-pocks, however, and some smashed windows were still out. The police were no longer in charge. Uniformed or not, they had to show passes on entering, and the armed men guarding the door had shoulder-flashes saying denmark. Sarah Howson looked at them, and not for the first time since Pond’s death wondered how he had convinced himself that he and his companions would win out when the world stood ready to act against them.

In the lobby of the building the officer spotted and called to a uniformed woman whose blouse bore white discs with a red cross instead of the national identification marks. She was pleasant-voiced and smiling, and Sarah Howson let her take the shawl-wrapped bundle of her son.

The smile vanished the instant hands discerned, through the thin cloth, the twisted spine and lopsided shoulders.

“Your baby will be well looked after until you leave,” the officer said. “This way, please.” He pointed down a door-flanked corridor. “It may be necessary to wait a while, I’m afraid.”

They went to an office overlooking the square in front of the building. The evening sun lit it, orange and gold over the pale grey walls and brown and dark-green furniture.

“Sit down, please,” the officer said, and went to the desk to pick up the handset of the internal phone. He dialed a three-digit code, waited.

Then: “Miss Kronstadt, please.”

And after a further pause: “Oh, Miss Kronstadt! We have rather an interesting visitor. One of our bright young sanitary experts was down at the municipal incinerators yesterday, getting them back in regular operation, and he happened to spot a name on a letter when it blew out of the truck being unloaded. The name was Gerald Pond. We had him listed for dead, of course, so we didn’t follow up until this afternoon when we found out he had a mistress still living at the same address—”

He checked, and looked at the phone as though it had bitten him. Rather slowly, he said, “You mean I just send her home? Are you sure she wasn’t — ?… Damn! I’m sorry, I should have checked with you first, but I never thought you’d have reached her so quickly. Okay, I’ll have her taken home… What?”

He listened. Sarah Howson felt a stir of interest disperse the cloud of her apathy, and found that if she paid attention she could just catch the words from the phone.

“No, keep her there a few minutes. I’ll drop in as soon as I can. I would like to have another chance to see her, though I doubt if we can use more information on Pond than we have already — there’s a two-hundred-page dossier here now.”

The officer cradled the phone with a shrug and opened the pocket of his jacket to extract a pack of curious cigarettes with paper striped in pale grey and white. He gave one to Sarah Howson and lit it for her with a zippo lighter made from an expended shell-case.

The door opened and the woman came in briskly: the one with man-short hair and Israeli shoulder-flashes. Sarah Howson crushed out her cigarette and looked at her.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said.

“That’s right.” A quick smile. “I’m Ilse Kronstadt. You were in the city hospital when I called there the other day.” She perched on the edge of the desk, one leg swinging. “How’s the baby?”

Sarah Howson shrugged.

“You’re being looked after all right? I mean — you’re provided with proper rations, proper services for the kid?”

“I guess so. Not that—” She broke off.

“Not that diaper-service and baby-food coupons help much with the real problem,” Ilse Kronstadt murmured. “Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

Sarah How son nodded. Distractedly, she played with the dead butt of her cigarette. Watching her, Ilse Kronstadt began to frown.

“Is it right — about your grandfather, I mean?” she said suddenly.

“What?” Startled, Sarah Howson jerked her head back. “My grandfather — what about him?’

Sympathy had gone from the Israeli woman, as though a light had been turned off behind her eyes. She got to her feet.

“That was bad,” she said. “You weren’t any shy virgin, were you? And you knew you shouldn’t have children, with your family history! To use a pregnancy as blackmail — especially on a man like Pond, who didn’t give a damn about anything except his own dirty little yen for power — Ach!” Her accusing gaze raked the older woman like machine-gun fire, and she stamped her foot. The Pakistani officer looked, bewildered, from one to the other of them.

“No, it’s not true!” stammered Sarah Howson. “I didn’t— I—!”

“Well, it’s done now,” Ilse Kronstadt sighed, and turned away. “I guess all you can do is try and make it up to the kid. His physical heredity may be all to hell, but his intellectual endowment should be okay — there’s first-rate material on the Pond side, and you’re not stupid. Lazy-minded and selfish, but not stupid.”

Sullen, resentful color was creeping into Sarah Howson’s face. She said after a pause, “All right, tell me: what do I do to — ‘make it up to the kid’? I’m not a kid myself any longer, am I? I’ve no money, no special training, no husband! What’s left for me? Sweeping floors! Washing dishes!’

“The only way that matters, to make it up to the kid,” Ilse Kronstadt said, “is to love him.”

“Oh, sure,” Sarah Howson said bitterly. “What’s that bit about ‘flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone’? Don’t preach to me. I had nothing but preaching from Gerald, and it got him a shot in the head and me a crippled boy to nurse. Can I go now? I’ve had enough.”

The piercing blue eyes closed briefly, and the lids squeezed and the lips pressed together and the forehead drew down to furrows at the top of the Sharp nose.

“Yes, you can go. There are too many people like you in the world for us to cure the world’s sickness overnight. But even if you can’t love the kid wholeheartedly, Miss Howson, you can at least remember that there was a time when you wanted a baby, for a reason you aren’t likely to forget.”

“He’ll remind me every time I look at him,” Sarah Howson said curtly, and got up from her chair. The officer reached for the phone again and spoke to a different number.

“Nurse, bring the Howson baby back to the lobby, please!’

When the unwilling mother had gone, he gave Ilse Kronstadt a questioning glance.

“What was that about her grandfather?”

“Never mind,” was the sighing answer. “There are a million problems like hers. I wish I could concern myself with all of them, but I just can’t.”

She briskened. “At least the big problem is soluble. We should be out of here in another month, I guess.”