The Infiltrators Read Online Free PDF Page B

remember?”
    “I won’t take advantage, I hope,” I said. “I won’t boss you around unnecessarily, but if I yell
down
, you flop, even if it’s in the middle of a mud puddle. If I yell
run
, you run like hell. If I tell you to scream, you call in all the rows from here to the Rockies. If I tell you to be quiet, you’re a mouse. Okay?”
    She said wryly, “Oh, dear. If I’m going to have to take all those orders, I might as well have stayed in… in p-prison, hadn’t I?”
    I could see that she’d had to make a big effort to joke about it—I’d already noticed that even the word, prison, was hard for her to speak—but she managed a smile as she said it that was a considerable improvement over her first two smiles of the day. With a little more practice she might learn to be quite good at it.
    The mileage markers warned me when we got close; then I saw the signs for the rest area ahead. I slowed the little bomb, already rolling at a fairly sedate pace in deference to my passenger’s wishes, and turned in. There were tables and Johns, and a couple of big eighteen-wheelers parked in the truck area; but at this time of year there were no tourist vehicles in the passenger-car area. I parked and reached into the open luggage space behind the seats for the paper bag I’d prepared earlier.
    “Coffee break,” I said, and went around to let her out, taking her hand to help her up from the low seat. “I don’t think you’ll want your coat. The sun’s getting almost hot. There’s the rest room if you need it.”
    She gave me a real grin. “I thought you’d never ask.”
    “We’ll use that table over by the trees.”
    I went over there and got out the thermos and cups and doughnuts. Straightening up, I saw her coming from the john. She’d shed not only her coat but her suit jacket, too, and run a comb through her hair. Watching her walk towards me, I decided that she was not really bad-looking if you thought of her as a woman in her forties who hadn’t taken very good care of herself. It was the memory of what a slender, shining rapier of a girl she’d been that had made her present appearance such a shock when I’d first been exposed to it.
    But I was getting used to it now, and realizing that she still had some possibilities. She wasn’t really fat, just a bit heavy and obviously in poor physical condition. A better-tailored and better-fitting skirt and perhaps a girdle, and enough confidence to hold herself erect, would have made a lot of difference, as would some careful makeup and a reasonable hairdo. The short-sleeved pink sweater, although hardly cashmere, was all right; but it did reveal the soft, pasty-white arms and the oddly bent wrist.
    When she came up, I asked, “Do you have to do that? May I look?”
    She started to protest, shrugged, and let me take her hand and turn it over to see the scars of the hesitation marks and of the final deep desperate cut that had done the real damage. I found it painful to think of her being driven to do this to herself. I had to remind myself firmly that her innocence was just a shaky theory of mine. It was quite possible that, with the help of her missing husband and his subversive female companion in exile, wherever that exile might be, she’d brought all these disasters on herself.
    “Dumb,” I said.
    Resentment showed in her eyes, as I hoped it would; the woman was coming back to life. Well, that was fine. Traitor or patriot, she was no use to me as a zombie.
    “Is it dumb to want to die when there’s nothing left to live for?”
    I shook my head. “As far as I’m concerned, copping out is anybody’s privilege. Overpopulation is our big problem. If you want to give up your place on earth to somebody else, be my guest. But that wrist routine is stupid, stupid, stupid, as any doctor will tell you. Oh, people have managed it, but mostly they just make a mess of themselves and keep right on living with crippled arms, which can hardly be considered an