And right now, the responsibility for those stats was mine. All mine.
I kept Loftus with me, and kept trying to raise McGinty. The chances were he wouldn't answer, of course. But there was nothing else to do until Haliburton and Knight buzzed me that they had everything ready.
"Guess you'd better forget it," Loftus said.
I nodded, tried a final signal pattern, and then quit trying.
I looked into Loftus' young face. It wasn't hard to read.
"Go ahead and say it," I told him.
He looked up, and his mouth twisted into a cynical smile.
"We all fall for happy accordion music and an Irish brogue. All fall for a guy because he appeals to what there is inside people like us that says some guys you can always trust. Maybe, Ken, we deserve to be second-raters."
"Maybe," I said. Only I was thinking about men like Kolomar. About right and wrong, success and failure, always in terms of physical size, physical strength. Whomp me and I'll whomp you back harder. Twenty-first century civilization—still the spoiled brats of a half century ago. "Maybe we do," I said, and wondered if we always would.
"What was it McGinty was always saying?" Loftus asked quietly. "Something about—'the further out y'go, the more th' edge y'got—an' leave all the other dir-rty business behind besides.'"