CHAPTER TEN

  "Anyone who has begun to think places some part of the world in jeopardy."

  —John Dewey

  "The machine gun on the corner is the symbol of the twentieth century."

  —Richard Wright

  Russell's head throbbed. He had gotten just enough sleep for his whole body to stiffen up and for the inside of his mouth to grow rank hair, and then his brain had woken him.

  He had come to consciousness to find his mind revving wildly at speeds close to overload. He sat now in the lounge with his wife, making no attempt to slow his thoughts.

  He knew that he would be lucky to get even five minutes of Michael's attention today, and so he tried desperately to put his thoughts in order, to condense and compress and formulate and priorize the things he wanted to say and the questions he wanted to ask, if and when he got the chance.

  He was filled with an emotional turmoil so vast that it threatened to burst him, and he could conceive of nothing to do with it except spill it onto the man who had generated it.

  He had been assured that Michael was good at this. But he felt it could take several hours to simply articulate his pain, and of the few minutes he was likely to get he wanted most of those to be occupied by Michael talking and him listening.

  So he ignored his physical hurts and Dena and Homemade and the occasional flutter of furious activity that passed through the lounge, and tried to draft successively shorter versions of what he wanted to say. The first step was to just let it spill:

  Michael, all my life I've tried to like black people, to get along with black people, to treat black people as I would want them to treat me. I was raised in the '50s and '60s when all right-thinking northern liberal whites raised their children to believe that racism was a kind of deadly sickness, doubtless spread by a virus or bacterium but inexplicable in any case, and confined to the southern U.S.

  Then as I grew up, I learned about racism.

  And I learned at least as much—and as thoroughly—from blacks as I did from whites. Because of the cocoon my parents tried to raise me in, the first racism I became aware of was directed at me, by black kids.

  No, that's not true. Long before I got the shit kicked out of me that time, I heard my father tell nigger jokes to friends on the phone, and heard my school friends pass on the ones they'd heard their fathers tell. But then again there were Italian jokes, and Polack jokes, and even WASP jokes....

  Am I a racist, Michael? I have tried not to be, all my life, and I don't know if there is any way to be that is not racist.

  If you hate blacks and treat them badly, you're a racist. If you ignore their blackness, you're a racist because you are not addressing the issue of their continuing oppression. If you show compensatory favoritism, you're a reverse racist, held in contempt by both sides. But if you don't try to treat blacks just a little better than you do others, you run up against the unpleasant fact that all people treat each other a little shabbily at best, and many blacks interpret that as racism.

  If you repudiate any guilt and shame for what your ancestors did to theirs, You are morally irresponsible, like a city that repudiates its long term bonds once the bridge is built. If you accept that guilt and shame, you're immediately recognized as a patsy and fastened upon by opportunistic blacks. Who are after all only behaving as they've been taught: exploit those who display any weakness. If you don't agree that the appallingly bad record of socialization of blacks into American society (compared to other despised immigrant groups) is entirely the fault of the white man, blacks call you racist. If you don't agree that it's entirely the fault of the black man (or woman), whites call you racist. If you suggest that it might be a mixture of the two (no matter what ratio you assign) both sides call you racist. If you even attempt to bring up the question, to examine any data, as Professor Sowell did, as Professor Shockley did, you're a racist. If you ignore the question, you're a racist by default.

  Am I a racist, Michael? I think of my music collection, such an important part of my life. The majority of the music I own, and the overwhelming majority of the music I treasure, is the work of black artists. If you destroyed every disc, tape and chip I own by white artists—well, I'd really miss Zappa and The Beatles, but I guess I'd survive the loss. But how could I live without Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Miles, Bird, Lady Day, Mingus, Jon Hendricks, Carmen Lundy, the Duke? The best dancers in the world are blacks, from Bojangles right through Debbie Allen and Judith Jamison and Gene Ray to my own wife. The best athletes in the world are black, from Jack Johnson to Bikila to Willie Mays to Abdul Jabbar to Muhammad Ali to Dr. J to Bobby Friday. The best comedians, Pryor, Cosby, Gardner. Am I a racist if I treasure these people, support them and black writers, actors, poets, playwrights? If I cherish Ntozake Shange and Fred Ward and Cicely Tyson Danny Glover and Alfre Woodard and Charlie Saunders and Samuel Delany? Do I thereby somehow "condemn" them to be "nothing more than" superb writers, artists, athletes, and entertainers, and thus somehow perpetuate their enslavement?

  Leroi Jones once said: "All the hip white boys scream for Bird. And Bird saying, 'Up your ass, feeble-minded ofay!

  Up your ass,' And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker! Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East 67th Street and killed the first ten white people he saw." Is that true, Michael?

  (And does that mean that you have aborted the careers of several Charlie Parkers today?)

  American black people excel in all of the professions that are rooted in or built around pain: is it immoral for me to take aesthetic pleasure from the results, however much I offer for the privilege in money, respect or acclaim?

  Richard Matheson wrote a poem I've remembered all my life, about a white scientist who invented a machine that could translate a black sax-man's solos back into the pain that had produced them. The sax-man killed him and smashed the machine. The last lines were something like: "Take all the rest, white daddy/You will because you have/But don't come scufflin' for our souls." I've remembered that all these years, at least in part because a white man wrote it.

  Michael, if a racist is anyone who does not fight against racism, then I guess I am a racist, because I am damned if I know how to fight racism. It's been years since I thought I had a clue as to where or how to fight so that it could accomplish anything more significant than expiation of my personal sense of guilt. I was too young for the first Freedom Marches, but I cheered them with my mother. In the '60s I marched, and as a matter of fact I marched more for blacks than I did to end the war—and not only did it accomplish nothing, I was victimized by many of the blacks I came in contact with.

  College really began my education. The black students' quadrangle, through which no white student walked. The absurd demands to which the university acquiesced. My first-ever mugging, by a black man, on campus—he took my money and then cut my new jacket anyway. The three black rapists who worked the campus as a team throughout the winter of 1969 with total impunity, because neither the administration nor the campus police nor indeed the white student community dared publicly acknowledge that the situation existed.

  Then again, I remember the time SDS took over the Library, and "Easy Company," the campus's right-wing extremist group, announced their intention of going in there and kicking ass. I thought the SDS were custard-heads, but I hated Easy Company, born thugs whose idea of fun was to hospitalize long-hairs on sight. The campus cops all suddenly found someplace more pressing to be, and the Easy Company goons approached the Library entrance with their ball bats and pipes...and suddenly a phalanx of black students blocked their way, just as heavily armed, saying, "No you don't either." I admired the Black Students' Alliance that day....

  After I graduated, Michael, while I was still working for other people, my girlfriend's sister Susan finally made a serious enough attempt at suicide to get herself locked away in a hospital on Long Island. I used to visit her, design little toys and games she could make with available materials and so forth. She introduced me to Eartha from down the hall. Eartha was small and quiet and funny, and Michael, yours is the only smile I've ever seen sadder than hers. She'd been attempting suicide for five years, getting closer each time. Her inpatient status allowed her people on the outside to sign her out for a few hours every other week. One day I showed up to visit Susan, and she told me that Eartha's people had screwed up at the last minute for the third time running, and Eartha was really down about it, and why didn't I sign for her and take her for a drive?

  I drove us around for hours. She'd been in that hospital a long time: it was a big deal for her to walk into a Burger King and order a Coke, with strangers and lights. I gave her the money so she could do it herself. She came back with the Coke so proud and scared and happy I wanted to cry. We drove, and she talked. She'd been part of a girl singing group on the rise, dating one of the Temptations, tasting fame just around the corner. One night she took a chance, left her two babies home alone for just an hour while she slipped out. The building must have started burning just as she turned the corner, for there was nothing left but smoking rubble when she got back.

  Ah, Michael, we parked by the shore of Long Island Sound and we talked away the hours, and then she was telling me how grateful she was and all of a sudden she was all over me. She'd been locked up with other women for a long time, and she was as horny as a tabby in heat.

  She was hurting and lonely and grateful. Perhaps I am an immortal fool. I had never had a black lover, and in retrospect it would have cost me nothing to give her what she asked. But I was young, and it had for me an inescapable flavor of shooting ducks in a barrel, of taking unfair advantage of vulnerability. God help me, I was not sure then, and do not know to this day, whether the prospect had been in my subconscious when I'd agreed to sign her out. As gently as I could I refused her, tried to keep her from taking it personally. I told her I already had a girlfriend, Susan's sister—but that once Eartha had been out of the hospital for a while and gotten her life back in balance, all she had to do was call and I'd come running to her bedside, and meanwhile I wanted to be her very good friend. And I gave her my phone number and drove her back to the hospital.

  Some months later, Michael, Eartha was released. A few weeks after that she called, gave me her address, asked me to come see her because she was terribly lonely. I broke a date with Susan's sister and drove over that night. She was living in a commune of blacks in Wyandanch, in a one-room flat built into the garage of a large house owned by a minister. She greeted me warmly, but when I started to close the door of her cubicle behind me, she leaped up and stopped me. "It's your life if that door closes," she told me.

  Okay. We began to talk, she started telling me about how she was trying to rebuild her life, how many things there

  were to relearn about living in the world. Suddenly there were two large angry men in the doorway. "You will come with us. Now." Upstairs to the dining room. Eartha wasn't allowed to come. A dozen men, including the minister. No women.

  First they talked and I listened. It was obvious and inarguable that I was here for only one possible purpose.

  For the thought alone I deserved to die, let alone the attempt. I was to leave this place, praising God for the chance, and if I ever attempted to return or to lure the sister to another place or to contact the sister in any manner I would die. The minister spoke the longest, describing the way in which I would die and estimating how long it would take me.

  Then, to give them credit, they let me talk. I remember everything I said. To this day I believe I spoke eloquently and honestly and with unmistakable sincerity. I even acquired the courage somehow to point out that in this houseful of loyal protectors, sister Eartha said she was lonely. I might just as well have been speaking Mandarin.

  They didn't interrupt, but when I was done they nodded and repeated everything they'd said before. They showed me the door and I left, and I never tried to contact Eartha again and I never heard from her again.

  But I heard of her. Two months later when she finally got it right. I happened to see the obit. Eartha was twenty-eight when she died. To this day I'm sorry I didn't have the guts to go to the funeral, and I wonder how many of her brothers did.

  On the other hand, the people here in your tunnel have not shown any of that implacable, intransigent hatred of anything wrapped in pink skin. And they all know that I sleep with my ebony lady.... It occurs to me to wonder whether you had anything to do, behind the scenes, with the downfall of the fanatic Mau Mau Party, Michael....

  Am I a racist, Michael?

  I know that I am a most self-centered man. I want most for the world to go away and leave me alone. I have few friends and none I would die for. I want me and my family to be well and safe and healthy, and while I'd prefer not to have to hurt anyone else to accomplish that, if it is necessary I will. My brain wants no part of your crusade, tells me that it is not my fight. But what of my heart?

  You are fighting the United States of America. I beat the Viet Nam draft, but once I was in India, working on a hydraulic systems project in association with the UN, and I found myself increasingly involved with the CIA. I learned a lot about the way the world works, and the way America works, and the way a gun works. I learned things a lot of my contemporaries had learned in Viet Nam. And then there was trouble and a good friend was murdered, and when I got back to the States I moved to Canada for good.

  It was the only way out of an irresolvable conflict, and it has worked out very well, over the years. But I have never been able to completely lose that bone-deep love of the United States of America and everything it claims to stand for; I've never been able to stop myself from mildly defending it to my kneejerk anti-Yank neighbours. No nation ever has lived up to its ideals, but no nation in history has ever had such magnificent ideals as those of the United States. I don't want to live here—but I love the place. Will your racewar hasten, or forestall, the inevitable day when the country is torn apart and destroyed by its own racism, by the anger and shame of whites and blacks? I know that you have no use for the People's Republic or for Marxism or fascism in any form, you've convinced me of that—but will the dislocation your racewar creates give the Chinese a crucial edge? Or is that question just a refried attempt to use the Commie Menace as an excuse to perpetuate repression at home?

  And what are you fighting for, Michael?

  You are fighting for Equity—for equity. What if you've miscalculated, what if America cannot give what you demand? The American black might be annihilated within the year. And what if you succeed, and you are assassinated, and your brave new nation falls into the hands of the radical and ruthless?

  And what about the horrors that will surely ensue when masses of black Americans begin to try and cross the country to get here?

  And if you pass all these hurdles and found your nation: what kind of nation will your crippled, hobbled, damaged people be able to build? I talked with General Worthing while he was eating, and he said you had been able to get tentative backing from the International Monetary Fund by promising them that the nation of Equity would make technological education and research its top priority, that you intend to make Equity the high-tech industrial center of this hemisphere. I applaud the idea and the strategy— but can you pull it off? What will you do with the muggers and junkies and crackheads and drunks and rapists, and with the honest citizens who are just too stupid or too old to learn, while you're raising up your new generation of streetsmart techies?

  But then, is there any such thing as a person who is too old or too stupid to learn—given enough motivation?

  Am I, for instance, that old? And/or stupid?

  I know that I cannot fight against you, Michael. Oh, intellectually I can think of two or three lines of approach, but I know I'm not going to do anything about them. They all involve killing you, directly or indirectly, and I would not see a brain like yours destroyed for any reason. (Is it true, as Tom Worthing told me, that you were a brilliant young financial analyst before you went to Viet Nam?) Only a supernaturally good judge of character could have assembled an army in secret over twenty-five years, and I am developing the sneaking suspicion that it 's Motormouth who's your secret litmus-test for character—and right from the moment we met he has never been wary of me for an instant. He knows I cannot intend you harm.

  So my two choices are to work for you or to remain neutral. I have been neutral about everything under the sun for an uncommonly long time, and it just now comes to me that perhaps that, multiplied by most of the white population of North America, is how the world got this screwed up. In any case, I think I've finally had enough of being uninvolved, exempt, immune.

  I know I could be of help to you. I've never taught anyone but Jennifer before, but I know I'd be good at it and I'm certain an emerging nation with high-tech aspirations could use a designer as good as I am. I retired because I had all the money I needed for myself and my family, and could think of no other rationally defensible reason to work.

  People don't want you to make their lives easier, I learned that in India and here in the States a long time ago. Would it be any different in Equity?

  One thing I know, Michael. If I decide not to join you I lose my wife. She's determined to stay here. For one thing, it solves her problem of what to do with her life when she can't dance any more; for another it makes up for the free ride she got by being born into the middle class in Halifax.

  If I leave, sure as God made little green parking tickets she is going to stay, and likely she'll end up having Jerome's babies instead of mine.

  But that's not a reason to join a revolution, Michael. At least, not one that I can accept. Neither is the rationalization that your way is the least of several evils. I agree that the U.S. has been poised for a long time on the verge of a nationwide firecracker-string of riots, rebellions, and insurrections leading ultimately to national pogrom. Your surgical intervention cannot hasten it by all that much, and may just head it off—but what is that to me?

  In my life, black people and white people have both treated me badly, robbed me, assaulted me, cheated me, threatened me, criticized me, mistrusted me, and rejected my friendship. A plague on both their houses. Why does the outcome of their dogfight concern me if I can get clear?

  I've never tried to harm a man because of his race, and I've never allowed racism to go down in my presence without denouncing it—even in my father's home!—and I've never wavered in my conviction that mixing races combines the best features of both—I've never met or seen a mulatto or Eurasian or person of any mixed racial background who wasn't both beautiful and intelligent— and I know that I'll never understand the black experience but I've tried my very best, honest to God I have. Teacher, I've written "I am not a racist" on the blackboard five thousand times, and now I feel I've done enough and I want to go home. Why do I have to stay?

  Wait...

  In the background I hear the radio, which has been playing songs by black artists all day, and it comes to my attention now because it's playing one of my favorite tracks in the world. Billie Holiday (born Eleanora Fagan, of mixed parentage) singing "You Don't Know What Love Is," from Lady In Satin. I've taken hours of pleasure from that album, I think it is one of her finest. It is also her last—recorded just before trying to live in the nonexistent country between black America and white America finally killed her. Her pipes are shot, her throat is raw—but her control is perfect and her heart is full and her technique is as good as it's ever going to get, and the results are something you hear with your spine. It's all in there, pain and anger and a wry awareness of futility—and simple persistence.

  If I have taken aesthetic pleasure from what she did with all her pain, and have not devoted my life to doing something about it, am I a racist, Michael? Is that why Dena and I should stay here and raise our babies in a war zone?

  Michael, I lost a wife once. Another designer killed her.

  He took a dive on a design for a nose gear assembly on an airliner, specified some substandard components he had a financial interest in. My first wife died in the first crash resultant. By the fourth, a year later, industry rumours reached me. I spent three months discreetly confirming the story. Then I spent four months in planning and preparation.

  Then I killed him with my hands and got away clean. I don't regret it even a little, but it was enormously less satisfying than I'd expected it to be. It didn't change anything. That was my last crusade, almost a decade ago, and I swore I'd never go on another. I decided I'd been a damned fool to risk Jennifer's future that way.

  I still feel the same way, Michael. Why must I join this crusade, place my only child in jeopardy, my only reminder of Janice? If I stay here there's nowhere I can send Jennifer, no one in Halifax I could give her to. I won't send her to live with Regina no matter how far away she makes Dad move them. (Jesus, my father keeps all his money in a New York bank—I think he's broke!) Do I risk my daughter to keep my wife? In a few more years she'll be a woman; is this the time of her life to pitch her into a revolution?

  And as Russell reached this point in his thoughts, he looked up and Michael was standing before him. He felt his lips start to open like floodgates, and before the first words could spill forth, Michael spoke first.

  "Jennifer is on her way, Russell. She'll be here in fifteen minutes."

  The words meant nothing. Sounds in some unfamiliar language. Beside him, Dena cried out, and he spun to her thinking that she must have cut herself on something. Then it hit him. His ears roared so loudly that for a mad instant he thought the tunnel was flooding somehow. Dena's face disintegrated as his vision began to grey out. He was vaguely aware of Michael taking him by the shoulders.

  For over fifteen hours, asleep and awake, he had been refusing to permit himself to feel the extent of his terror for his only child. The relief was like being struck under the heart with a baseball bat.

  "She's alive," Michael was saying in his ear. "She claims to be unharmed. I've got armoured escort fetching her now, and I'll send Motormouth topside to get her."

  Russell got his legs under him and threw himself into Dena's arms. Her head was almost as scratchy as his unshaven chin; the pain made them both smile.

  "By the way," Michael said, "a call came through on the 333 line from out on Long Island. Your father has applied to claim Equitan citizenship, for himself and his wife."

  Russell and Dena burst out laughing.

  Over the last few minutes Russell anticipated the reunion.

  He would swing his little girl up in his arms and whirl her around and around in the ultimate Battle of the Kisses. He would apologize profusely for leaving her alone and promise never to do it again. He would thank José as best he knew how for protecting her, find out whatever it was the boy wanted most and try to get it for himself when he could. And he would find some way to break him and Jennifer out of this tubular coffin, and find some way off this fucking island, and get her back to a sane country, where people only killed each other over sensible things like what language they spoke.

  Then Motormouth came out of the elevator followed by Jennifer and José, and at the first sight of them he knew, somehow, that he was going to have to think again. As he rushed forward for the sweeping and whirling and kissing, he stopped in his tracks, derailed. So did Dena.

  This was a stranger patterned after his daughter. She seemed inches taller than he remembered. Surely her breasts had not been that big, her hips that rounded the last time he'd seen her. Surely her eyes had not been...it came to him that he must not have been seeing his daughter for some time, for she could not have grown so much older overnight. She was dirty and wild-haired and haggard. Her sweater was torn at the right shoulder. She was supporting at least half the weight of José, his arm around her shoulder, her arm around his waist. There was a ragged hole in the leg of his jeans, and his boot was overflowing with blood.

  "Hello, Dad; hi, Mom. They said there'd be a doctor here."

  "I know where the infirmary is," Russell said, starting forward. "I'll take you there, José."

  Jennifer and José did not separate, did not move, and so when he got there all he could do was say, "This way," and turn around again. They followed him through the busy operations room and uptunnel to the infirmary, where a doctor was waiting. She helped José up onto the operating table, held his hand and stroked his hair while the doctor began cutting away his trouser leg. "Hello, Russell," the boy said thickly. "Hello, Dena. Quite a day, fuckin' A."

  "Hello, José," Dena said softly. She came up behind Jennifer and began kneading her shoulders, working the kinks out. Jennifer accepted it gratefully but did not take her attention off José. The doctor finally looked up and said, "You were lucky. You'll be walking again in a week; the limp will be gone in a few months." Only then did Jennifer relax and start to talk. Even then she spoke slowly, quietly, in the measured tones of an adult. Russell was thunderstruck—where was his chatterbox little girl inside this somber stranger? He and Dena exchanged a glance, let her speak uninterrupted.

  "We turned on the TV just before noon. We had to wait an hour or so for the streets to clear and the gunfire to stop.

  We needed sanctuary and a safe telephone, and the nearest place that might have both was Bellevue Hospital. We had this limo we stole uptown last night, it was bulletproof so we drove the few blocks up there. We told the guards in the Emergency Room that we were the people Michael mentioned on TV, and they brought Jerome to us. There were a lot of wounded there. We were going to call in, but just then the heavy shooting started. It was a three-way war. The Mafia and the Black Smack Pack from the Lower East Side were fighting each other and Michael's hospital garrison. Bellevue must be the last source of narcotics in the city. There were reinforcements supposed to be on the way, but we decided to split in the limo." She winced once or twice while speaking, but only when something hurt José. "Jerome called the UN garrison uptown and told them to look out for us. Then he was killed covering our escape.

  I saw a black boy about my age shoot him in the head."

  Dena's hands stopped working. Russell felt a surprising amount of sorrow; he learned that he had been looking forward to knowing Jerome better someday. "The same boy shot José, so I took Jerome's gun and killed him and got José in the car and figured out how to drive and the UN guys brought us here in an armoured truck. This is a really spacey hideout, is Michael here? Mom, do they have any minipads here? I didn't bring any spares and I got my period, uh, last night."

  She was holding José's hands, now; before Russell or Dena could conceive of anything to say, José bucked on the table and their joined hands whitened. The doctor had located the slug. Neither José nor Jennifer uttered a sound; the rest kept silent in respect of José's courage until the slug was out. Then Russell and Dena and Homemade and Jennifer all sighed at once, and José began speaking hoarsely and rapidly:

  "Russell, listen to me, I'm gettin' pretty sleepy, okay? A lot o' things happened last night, I take full responsibility, but your daughter ain't fourteen no more, you understand me? I mean, she's still got her cherry, she's gonna have that for a couple more years, but she's a grownup now. She's been in a war—can you dig that? She killed three guys, two white and one black; you know Shaw Nuff, she cut his fuckin' throat; she saved my life about six times; her and me, we got engaged an hour ago; she got her period last night like she said. It was a long night. While I'm under you get her a shower and food and them minipads, and you get her some sleep, you dig?"

  It was the doctor who spoke first, saying kindly, "She'll be all right. You let that shot take—" And then his thoughts stepped outside of medicine for the first time and the implications struck him. He looked at Russell, at Dena, at Russell.

  Russell felt everyone's eyes on him. He had time to think, she is only fourteen, and then to remember all the fourteen-year-old mothers he had seen in the war zone in East Pakistan. Looking him in the eye, Dena said to the doctor, "I think she'll be fine, Doctor."

  The doctor nodded.

  Well, Russell thought, he can see who wears the pants in this family. He unstuck his feet from the floor, approached José, saw Jennifer tense out of the corner of his eye, met the boy's anguished gaze. "Sleep now, son. We'll take care of her for you."

  José's eyes closed and Dena was hugging Russell from behind and Jennifer was looking down at José with perfect serenity.

  And from the doorway of the infirmary, Michael said softly, "I'm glad you're all right, Jennifer."

  "Hi, Michael," she said just as softly.

  "I see you've grown up."

  "Yes."

  "I hope it didn't hurt too bad."

  "No. No, it wasn't too bad. Michael?"

  "Yes, Jennifer."

  "How did my parents get involved with you?"

  He explained briefly. "You can all stay here, and you'll be safe even if they bomb Manhattan."

  "Okay. I guess we were awful lucky the day we met you, Michael. I still don't get it. Ten days before you were going to start a war against white people, you went out of your way to help a few. Why? Because Mom was there too?"

  Michael smiled. "Partly. I think highly of anyone with the guts to intermarry. But I didn't see your mother until I got close. What drew my attention were your Nova Scotia license plates."

  "Why?"

  "Some of my ancestors lived there, in a place called Horton Bluff."

  "Really? I don't know that place."

  "'Michael Hall'—" Dena said. "Michael! Was William Edward Hall your ancestor?"

  "That's right."

  Russell was as startled as Dena. Everyone who knew anything about Canadian blacks or Canadian military history knew about William Edward Hall. Son of an escaped slave from the States, the first Canadian to be awarded the Victoria Cross! Yes, by God, Michael looked like pictures he had seen of Hall, without the beard....

  Even Jennifer got the reference. "Wow. You Halls fight pretty good."

  "He took a city singlehanded, with no time to plan. I needed twenty-five years and a lot of help." He looked at all three Grants. "Jennifer—do you remember the last thing I told you, the day we met?"

  "Yes. Oh." She seemed to come out of a trance. She gently disengaged the sleeping José's hands, came round the table and embraced both her parents.

  Russell too remembered Michael's words: "You three have a strong connection going. Don't let it go, no matter what. Don't let it go, and happen you'll be all right. Don't you let it go!" He swam in that hug.

  "I missed you at first, Daddy," she said, and "I missed you, Mom," and "I hope you weren't too scared," to both of them. Shortly all three were smiling and pouring tears, and Russell felt strength flowing into him. Through his happy tears he could see Michael watching them all with that slight, mournful smile, and all at once he felt that the long speech he had wanted to make to Michael could be edited down to no more than a few minutes, a few paragraphs. He caught Michael's eye, left Jennifer to Dena, and said in a low voice, "Can I talk with you, MichaeI?''

  "Only for a minute, son. Come out in the hall."

  All right, dammit, a few sentences then. "I—"

  A beeper on Michael's wrist went off. "Sorry, son, wait a bit—" He stepped back into the infirmary and activated the vidphone on the wall. General Worthing's face swam into view. "Bad news from Bellevue, Tom?"

  "No, that's under control now; this is worse. National Guard units coming across the Harlem River, Michael.

  Some local commander acting without orders. Maybe eight hundred men."

  Michael's face fell. "The fool. Throwing away lives..." He closed his eyes.

  "I hoped they'd be smarter than this," Worthing agreed.

  "There's no good reason for all those boys to die." His voice became slightly louder. "Your orders, sir?"

  Michael reopened his eyes. "Repel invasion to plan, Thomas. Annihilate them. Damn it. I'll be there as soon as I can, and I'll want lines open to the President and the Secretary General." He cut the connection, turned to Russell. "I'm sorry, son—you see how it is."

  All right, then: one sentence.

  "Michael—can you use me?"

  Behind him Russell heard the sudden intakes of breath from his wife and daughter, felt the back of his neck grow hot.

  Michael paused in midstride. He looked at Russell for a long moment.

  His smile flashed then. "I've been hoping you'd ask. Hell, yes—come on!"

  Russell turned back to his family—but the two who were awake were waving him to go ahead, and Michael was already leaving.

  As he cleared the door he heard the radio playing the Ray Charles/Cleo Laine Porgy & Bess. Brother Ray was singing: "There's a Boat That's Leavin' Soon for New York"...