A matter of time

'I just want you shouldn't forget what happened when Pandora opened that box.'

'Sure. There's going to be a stink. Bleeding hearts up the yang-yang. The inspector's office on us like a snake on shit. Well, I'll give them something to sink their teeth into. I just hope those guys who make careers out of handcuffing us get an idea how hard they make it for us to protect them.'

'They won't even see it.'

'Yeah. I know.'

Poor Hank, Cash thought. His city, his empire, is under siege. He's just like poor old Belisarius, rushing hither and yon in a frenetic, foredoomed effort to beat off the barbarians. And he doesn't doubt for a minute that his Justinian, the public, will reward him as kindly for his faithful service.

The Emperor had had Belisarius's eyes put out and had left him to beg at Constantinople's gates.

And John and I, his centurions, have been wasting ourselves for months, chasing Miss Groloch. What harm could one little old lady have done the general welfare? If we had left her alone, John would be here now…

We just had to keep on till it caught up with us, didn't we?

'What do you think really happened to the Kid, Pop?'

'The truth? I think he's dead.'

'Why?'

'Because he wasn't the first. Otherwise, I'd put my chips on the girl friend.'

The phone rang. A moment later Beth announced, 'Sergeant Kurland says there's a man from the government on his way up here.'

'What kind? 'Hank asked.

'He didn't say. Except he wants to talk about Dr. Smiley. And he doesn't look like he's from the FBI.'

'Shit, what're we into now?'

'No imagination, that man,' Harald had said of his boss. But he had been wrong. Dead wrong.

Henry Railsback's problem, in Cash's opinion, was a surfeit, not a paucity, of imagination. Norm had been acquainted with the man since high school, when Hank had come in with one of the police public relations teams. Norm had expressed an interest in getting into police work. Hank had taken him around on a few of his patrols.

Cash knew things he had never told John.

Hank's hadn't been a happy youth. His mother had been a violent alcoholic. His father, so much like the man he himself had become, had been too timid to spend much time in the bitter trenches of the home front.

It had taken the death of Abigail Railsback, in a wrong-way auto crash, to bring father and son together, watering a grave with tears, raising a late-blooming relationship.

The boy Henry, even as a young officer, had hidden in the worlds of comic books, pulp magazines, serial movies, and daydreams. He had gone adventuring across landscapes of illusion because, for him, reality was a colorless desert. By taking to wife the first woman willing he had firmly established a marriage that soon had become a Sahara of misery.

He had dreamed great dreams then, had Henry Railsback, and within his mind he still conquered nations and continents, pitched no-hitters, outdrew the fastest guns… Though now he now longer possessed a shred of hope that such things could come to be. Time pulled down hopes and optimisms like wolves coursing round the flanks of the herd.

And in real life he seldom risked his precious self by testing the limits of his competence. He feared it would not measure up even to his low expectations.

Cash knew, and understood. Because Hank's story was not much different from his own. Just longer and a little more up and down.

In externals Hank had learned to cope by becoming an arch-conservative, a champion of null-change, a messiah of don't-rock-the-boat.

He didn't want challenges. He was afraid he couldn't handle them.

But he could face them when he had to, or when he became angry enough.

He was angry enough now. Harald's disappearance had set him to flailing out in every conceivable direction, to calling in favors due, to pursuing every theory, no matter how much it might pain his prejudices and preconceptions.

It was, in great part, an overresponse to years of frustration.

The 'government man' arrived, after having wandered half the station in search of the Homicide office.

XXIV. On the X Axis;

1975

Dr. Smiley fit his name that chill March evening. He hummed as he pottered around his basement, hunting that last overlooked detail. It was the little thing that always proved critical.

So many years of work finally coming to culmination. So much patient investigation. So much money. He admitted it: he had had a lot of luck: the discovery of the woman's letter when he was a boy; the chance encounter with Fian in Prague, and the equally unexpected discovery of Dunajcik. And now, despite the crudity of his equipment, his first clone had come to term perfectly. It had been out of the amniotic bath only a week, yet was taking baby food already. It was a strong, healthy beast.