They waited. They didn't relax. They sat in the reeking little room, and the noise from the front drifted back to them, tinny and unreal. There was laughter, and footfalls on the stairs beyond their wall. Then there was a clink of broken glass, and more laughter over their heads somewhere. The girl watched Griffin, and paced the room, her hands so jittery she could hardly hold them still to light a cigarette. Finally she said, "I'm going up front for a drink."
"You're staying here."
"Who do you think you are, you damn—"
"You leave, I leave," Griffin snapped. "In the opposite direction. Think it over."
She picked up a dusty whiskey bottle and slammed it against the far wall with a snarl. It bounced off, without even breaking. "Go to hell!" she spat. Then she sat down. "You'd think they were robbing the Treasury or something."
He closed his eyes, trying to get his breath in the dead air. His mind screamed with impatience. Why was it taking so long? But then, what good would it do him when he had his information? Whatever the plan had been, he had already upset it. Whoever was pushing the button, manipulating the strings, must be in a fine state by now. The thought gave him a certain degree of sour pleasure. The button had been pushed, and he had not responded quite properly. And here, he knew he was beyond manipulation, beyond the grasp of whatever agency was making the plans for him. But whoever was directing the show would know now that he knew—
And he didn't doubt for a minute that something was planned for him. A man who was legally dead, a man whose wife would be resigned to his being dead, to her, and never expect to see him again, a man whose family had received the death insurance money that was due them upon his signature on the death certificate—whether he ever returned to his old life or not, that insurance would be paid—and now, a man who was wandering and frightened, a ghostly nonentity, existing in a society where he could not fit in, seeking something that he did not know. Personalities change, they had said. Perhaps.
But there were other changes, carefully controlled changes, he was certain of that now, changes that were made for a purpose, concealed from public inspection and public wrath by a careful groundwork of legal nonsense and humanitarianism. If anything about prosthesis went wrong, the public would fall upon it in an instant. Prosthesis was too touchy a thing, life was too fearful and mysterious and sacred, for halfway measures. The prosthesis had to be perfect. It could not have a price-tag....
But now he knew that the sixty years' extension of life did have a price-tag, somehow. And very soon he would know the price.