Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said Read Online Free PDF Page A

remember when I was ten and I had a black boy to play with…not far from here as a matter of fact. He’s undoubtedly sterilized by now.”
    “But then he’s had one child,” Jason pointed out. “His wife had to surrender their birth coupon when their first and only child came…but they’ve got that child. The law lets them have it. And there’re a million statutes protecting their safety.”
    “Two adults, one child,” the clerk said. “So the black population is halved every generation. Ingenious. You have to hand it to Tidman; he solved the race problem, all right.”
    “Something had to be done,” Jason said; he sat rigidly in his seat, studying the street ahead, searching for a sign of a pol-nat checkpoint or barricade. He saw neither, but how long were they going to have to continue driving?
    “We’re almost there,” the clerk said calmly. He turned his head momentarily to face Jason. “I don’t like your racist views,” he said. “Even if you are paying me five hundred dollars.”
    “There’re enough blacks alive to suit me,” Jason said.
    “And when the last one dies?”
    Jason said, “You can read my mind; I don’t have to tell you.”
    “Christ,” the clerk said, and returned his attention to the street traffic ahead.
    They made a sharp right turn, down a narrow alley, at both sides of which closed, locked wooden doors could be seen. No signs here. Just shut-up silence. And piles of ancient debris.
    “What’s behind the doors?” Jason asked.
    “People like you. People who can’t come out into the open. But they’re different from you in one way: they don’t have five hundred dollars…and a lot more besides, if I read you correctly.”
    “It’s going to cost me plenty,” Jason said acidly, “to get my ID cards. Probably all I’ve got.”
    “She won’t overcharge you,” the clerk said as he brought his quibble to a halt half on the sidewalk of the alley. Jason peered out, saw an abandoned restaurant, boarded up, with broken windows. Entirely dark inside. It repelled him, but apparently this was the place. He’d have to go along with it, his need being what it was: he could not be choosy.
    And—they had avoided every checkpoint and barricade along the way; the clerk had picked a good route. So he had damn little to complain about, all things considered.
    Together, he and the clerk approached the open-hanging broken front door of the restaurant. Neither spoke; they concentrated on avoiding the rusted nails protruding from the sheets of plywood hammered into place, presumably to protect the windows.
    “Hang on to my hand,” the clerk said, extending it in the shadowy dimness that surrounded them. “I know the way and it’s dark. The electricity was turned off on this block three years ago. To try to get the people to vacate the buildings here so that they could be burned down.” He added, “But most of them stayed on.”
    The moist, cold hand of the hotel clerk led him past what appeared to be chairs and tables, heaped up into irregular tumbles of legs and surfaces, interwoven with cobwebs and grainy patterns of dirt. They bumped at last against a black, unmoving wall; there the clerk stopped, retrieved his hand, fiddled with something in the gloom.
    “I can’t open it,” he said as he fiddled. “It can only be opened from the other side,
her
side. What I’m doing is signaling that we’re here.”
    A section of the wall groaningly slid aside. Jason, peering, saw into nothing more than additional darkness. And abandonment.
    “Step on through,” the clerk said, and maneuvered him forward. The wall, after a pause, slid shut again behind them.
    Lights winked on. Momentarily blinded, Jason shielded his eyes and then took a good look at her workshop.
    It was small. But he saw a number of what appeared to be complex and highly specialized machines. On the far side a workbench. Tools by the hundreds, all neatly mounted in place on the walls of the room. Below the