never is, because living a rigidly orthodox family life is part of the effort towards respectability. He's backing them to 'pay his debt to society'—in other words, they're talismans to keep him out of jail."

"It doesn't seem like a very satisfactory substitute."

"Of course it isn't," Joan had said. "The next thing he'll do is go in for direct public service—giving money to hospitals or something like that. You watch."

She had been right; within the year, Braun had announced the founding of an association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had been born—the plainest kind of symbolic suicide: Let's not have any more Abner Longmans Brauns born down here. It depressed me to see it happen, for next on Joan's agenda for Braun was an entry into politics as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer twenty years too late. Since I'm mildly liberal myself when I'm off duty, I hated to think what Braun's career might tell me about my own motives, if I'd let it.

All of which had nothing to do with why I was prowling around the Ludmilla—or did it? I kept remembering Anderton's challenge: "You can't take such a gamble. There are eight and a half million lives riding on it—" That put it up into Braun's normal operating area, all right. The connection was still hazy, but on the grounds that any link might be useful, I phoned him.

He remembered me instantly; like most uneducated, power-driven men, he had a memory as good as any machine's.

"You never did send me that paper you was going to write," he said. His voice seemed absolutely unchanged, although he was in his seventies now. "You promised you would."

"Kids don't keep their promises as well as they should," I said. "But I've still got copies and I'll see to it that you get one, this time. Right now I need another favor—something right up your alley."

"CIA business?"

"Yes. I didn't know you knew I was with CIA."

Braun chuckled. "I still know a thing or two," he said. "What's the angle?"

"That I can't tell you over the phone. But it's the biggest gamble there ever was, and I think we need an expert. Can you come down to CIA's central headquarters right away?"

 Prev. P 6/12 next