Alternating Currents Read Online Free PDF

sense in this. I admit the kids are sad cases, and who can resist kids in trouble? But they don’t have one solitary damned thing to do with whether or not the Arcturans should have a telemetry and tracking station on the lake.’
     
    Candace said, ‘Weren’t you the man who told me that logic didn’t have anything to do with public relations?’ She came to the window beside me, turned and half-sat on the ledge and read from her notes: ‘Survey index off another half-point... Haber says, be sure to tell you that’s a victory, would have been off two points at least without the Arcats. Supplier letters out. Chicago approves budget overdraft. And that’s all that matters.’
     
    ‘Thanks.’ The door chimed, and she left me to let the bellmen in with our lunch. I watched her without much appetite, except maybe for one thing that I knew wasn’t on the menu, Candace herself. But I tried to eat.
     
    Candace did not seem to be trying to help me eat. In fact, she did something that was quite out of character for her. All the way through lunch she kept talking, and the one subject she kept talking about was the kids. I heard about Nina, who was fifteen when she came to Donnegan General and had been through the occupation all the way - who wouldn’t talk to anybody, and weighed fifty-one pounds, and screamed unless she was allowed to hide under the bed. ‘And after six months,’ said Candace, ‘they gave her a hand-puppet, and she finally talked through that.’
     
    ‘How’d you find all this out?’ I asked.
     
    ‘From Tom. And then there were the germ-free kids ...’ She told me about them, and about the series of injections and marrow transplants that they had needed to restore the body’s immune reaction without killing the patient. And the ones with auditory and vocal nerves destroyed, apparently because the Arcturans were investigating the question of whether humans could think rationally in the absence of articulate words. The ones raised on chemically pure glucose for dietary studies. The induced bleeders. The kids with no sense of touch, and the kids with no developed musculature.
     
    ‘Tom told you all this?’
     
    ‘And lots more, Gunner. And remember, these are the survivors. Some of the kids who were deliberately—’
     
    ‘How long have you known Tom?’
     
    She put down her fork, sugared her coffee and took a sip, looking at me over the cup. ‘Oh, since I’ve been here. Two years. Since before the kids came, of course.’
     
    ‘Pretty well, I judge.’
     
    ‘Oh, yes.’
     
    ‘He really likes those kids, I could see that. And so do you.’ I swallowed some more of my own coffee, which tasted like diluted pig swill, and reached for a cigarette and said, ‘I think maybe I waited too long about the situation here, wouldn’t you say?’
     
    ‘Why, yes, Gunner,’ she said carefully, ‘I think you maybe missed the boat.’
     
    ‘I tell you what else I think, honey. I think you’re trying to tell me something, and it isn’t all about Proposition Four on the ballot next week.’
     
    And she said, not irrelevantly, ‘As a matter of fact, Gunner, I’m going to marry Tom Whitling on Christmas day.’
     
    ~ * ~
     
    I sent her back to the office and stretched out on my bed, smoking and watching the smoke being sucked into the wall-vents. It was rather peaceful and quiet because I’d told the desk to hold all calls until further notice, and I wasn’t feeling a thing.
     
    Perfection is so rare, it is interesting to find a case in which one has been perfectly wrong all the way.
     
    If I had taken out my little list then I could have checked off all the points. One way or another. I hadn’t fired Haber, and in fact I really didn’t want to any more, because he wasn’t much worse than I was at this particular job; the record showed it. I had investigated the Children, all right. A little late. I had investigated Connick, the number one opponent to the proposition, and what I had