John Brunner: The Whole Man

“That depends on you, I’m afraid,” the officer shrugged.

“It’s the kid, you see.” She scuffed at the floor with bare feet. “Do I take him along or try and get someone to mind him for awhile?”

The officer frowned and consulted a paper from his pocket. “Oh, that’s right,” he said after a pause. “Well, you’d better bring him with you, I guess.”

They went to police headquarters. There had been blood on the handsome white stone steps, but that was gone now; there were still shrapnel-scars and bullet-pocks, however, and some smashed windows were still out. The police were no longer in charge. Uniformed or not, they had to show passes on entering, and the armed men guarding the door had shoulder-flashes saying denmark. Sarah Howson looked at them, and not for the first time since Pond’s death wondered how he had convinced himself that he and his companions would win out when the world stood ready to act against them.

In the lobby of the building the officer spotted and called to a uniformed woman whose blouse bore white discs with a red cross instead of the national identification marks. She was pleasant-voiced and smiling, and Sarah Howson let her take the shawl-wrapped bundle of her son.

The smile vanished the instant hands discerned, through the thin cloth, the twisted spine and lopsided shoulders.

“Your baby will be well looked after until you leave,” the officer said. “This way, please.” He pointed down a door-flanked corridor. “It may be necessary to wait a while, I’m afraid.”

They went to an office overlooking the square in front of the building. The evening sun lit it, orange and gold over the pale grey walls and brown and dark-green furniture.

“Sit down, please,” the officer said, and went to the desk to pick up the handset of the internal phone. He dialed a three-digit code, waited.

Then: “Miss Kronstadt, please.”

And after a further pause: “Oh, Miss Kronstadt! We have rather an interesting visitor. One of our bright young sanitary experts was down at the municipal incinerators yesterday, getting them back in regular operation, and he happened to spot a name on a letter when it blew out of the truck being unloaded. The name was Gerald Pond. We had him listed for dead, of course, so we didn’t follow up until this afternoon when we found out he had a mistress still living at the same address—”

He checked, and looked at the phone as though it had bitten him. Rather slowly, he said, “You mean I just send her home? Are you sure she wasn’t — ?… Damn! I’m sorry, I should have checked with you first, but I never thought you’d have reached her so quickly. Okay, I’ll have her taken home… What?”

He listened. Sarah Howson felt a stir of interest disperse the cloud of her apathy, and found that if she paid attention she could just catch the words from the phone.

“No, keep her there a few minutes. I’ll drop in as soon as I can. I would like to have another chance to see her, though I doubt if we can use more information on Pond than we have already — there’s a two-hundred-page dossier here now.”

The officer cradled the phone with a shrug and opened the pocket of his jacket to extract a pack of curious cigarettes with paper striped in pale grey and white. He gave one to Sarah Howson and lit it for her with a zippo lighter made from an expended shell-case.

The door opened and the woman came in briskly: the one with man-short hair and Israeli shoulder-flashes. Sarah Howson crushed out her cigarette and looked at her.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said.

“That’s right.” A quick smile. “I’m Ilse Kronstadt. You were in the city hospital when I called there the other day.” She perched on the edge of the desk, one leg swinging. “How’s the baby?”

Sarah Howson shrugged.

“You’re being looked after all right? I mean — you’re provided with proper rations, proper services for the kid?”

“I guess so. Not that—” She broke off.

“Not that diaper-service and baby-food coupons help much with the real problem,” Ilse Kronstadt murmured. “Isn’t that what you were going to say?”

Sarah How son nodded. Distractedly, she played with the dead butt of her cigarette. Watching her, Ilse Kronstadt began to frown.

“Is it right — about your grandfather, I mean?” she said suddenly.

“What?” Startled, Sarah Howson jerked her head back. “My grandfather — what about him?’

Sympathy had gone from the Israeli woman, as though a light had been turned off behind her eyes. She got to her feet.

“That was bad,” she said. “You weren’t any shy virgin, were you? And you knew you shouldn’t have children, with your family history! To use a pregnancy as blackmail — especially on a man like Pond, who didn’t give a damn about anything except his own dirty little yen for power — Ach!” Her accusing gaze raked the older woman like machine-gun fire, and she stamped her foot. The Pakistani officer looked, bewildered, from one to the other of them.

“No, it’s not true!” stammered Sarah Howson. “I didn’t— I—!”

“Well, it’s done now,” Ilse Kronstadt sighed, and turned away. “I guess all you can do is try and make it up to the kid. His physical heredity may be all to hell, but his intellectual endowment should be okay — there’s first-rate material on the Pond side, and you’re not stupid. Lazy-minded and selfish, but not stupid.”

Sullen, resentful color was creeping into Sarah Howson’s face. She said after a pause, “All right, tell me: what do I do to — ‘make it up to the kid’? I’m not a kid myself any longer, am I? I’ve no money, no special training, no husband! What’s left for me? Sweeping floors! Washing dishes!’

“The only way that matters, to make it up to the kid,” Ilse Kronstadt said, “is to love him.”

“Oh, sure,” Sarah Howson said bitterly. “What’s that bit about ‘flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone’? Don’t preach to me. I had nothing but preaching from Gerald, and it got him a shot in the head and me a crippled boy to nurse. Can I go now? I’ve had enough.”

The piercing blue eyes closed briefly, and the lids squeezed and the lips pressed together and the forehead drew down to furrows at the top of the Sharp nose.

“Yes, you can go. There are too many people like you in the world for us to cure the world’s sickness overnight. But even if you can’t love the kid wholeheartedly, Miss Howson, you can at least remember that there was a time when you wanted a baby, for a reason you aren’t likely to forget.”

“He’ll remind me every time I look at him,” Sarah Howson said curtly, and got up from her chair. The officer reached for the phone again and spoke to a different number.

“Nurse, bring the Howson baby back to the lobby, please!’

When the unwilling mother had gone, he gave Ilse Kronstadt a questioning glance.

“What was that about her grandfather?”

“Never mind,” was the sighing answer. “There are a million problems like hers. I wish I could concern myself with all of them, but I just can’t.”

She briskened. “At least the big problem is soluble. We should be out of here in another month, I guess.”

Things continued badly for a while longer. Stores remained closed; sporadic outbreaks confirmed that the thwarted terrorists were still capable of striking blindly, like children in tantrums. There were some fires, and the main city bridge was closed for two days by a plastic bomb explosion.

Little by little calm oozed back. Sarah Howson made no attempt to chart its progress. There was news on TV when the broadcasting schedule was restored; there was also — had been, throughout the crisis — radio news. Sometimes she caught snatches of information: something about the new; government, something else about advisers and foreign loans and public welfare services… It was beyond her scope. She saw black headlines on discarded newspapers when she went down the street, and read them without understanding. There was no association in her mind between the arrival of technical experts and the fact that water became available at her kitchen sink whenever she wanted it, as in the old days, rather than for two hours morning and evening, as during “the crisis’. There was no connextion that she could see between the new government and the cans of baby-food issued against coupons at the corner store, labeled in six languages and bearing a colored picture as well, for the benefit of illiterates.