Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick Read Free Book Online Page B

“If I don’t even know. I mean, that means I’m just dumb. Doesn’t it?”
    “You’re not dumb,” Jason said. “Just inexperienced.” He calculated, roughly, their age difference. “I’ve lived over twice as long as you,” he pointed out. “And I’ve been in the position, in the last ten years, to rub elbows with some of the most famous people on earth. And—”
    “And,” Kathy said, “you’re a six.”
    She had not forgotten his slip. Of course not. He could tell her a million things, and all would be forgotten ten minutes later, except the one real slip. Well, such was the way of the world. He had become used to it in his time; that was part of being his age and not hers.
    “What does Domenico mean to you?” Jason said, changing the subject. Crudely, he realized, but he went ahead. “What do you get from him that you don’t get from human beings?”
    She frowned, looked thoughtful. “He’s always busy. He always has some project going. Like following a bug. He’s very good with flies; he’s learned how to eat them without their flying away.” She smiled engagingly. “And I don’t have to ask myself about him, Should I turn him in to Mr. McNulty? Mr. McNulty is my pol contact. I give him the analog receivers for the microtransmitters, the dots I showed you—”
    “And he pays you.”
    She nodded.
    “And yet you live like this.”
    “I—” she struggled to answer—“I don’t get many customers.”
    “Nonsense. You’re good; I watched you work. You’re experienced.”
    “A talent.”
    “But a trained talent.”
    “Okay; it all goes into the apartment uptown. My Major Apartment.” She gritted her teeth, not enjoying being badgered.
    “No.” He didn’t believe it.
    Kathy said, after a pause, “My husband’s alive. He’s in a forced-labor camp in Alaska. I’m trying to buy his way out by giving information to Mr. McNulty. In another year”—she shrugged, her expression moody now, introverted—“he
says
Jack can come out. And come back here.”
    So you send other people into the camps, he thought, to get your husband out. It sounds like a typical police deal. It’s probably the truth.
    “It’s a terrific deal for the police,” he said. “They lose one man and get—how many would you say you’ve bugged for them? Scores? Hundreds?”
    Pondering, she said at last, “Maybe a hundred and fifty.”
    “It’s evil,” he said.
    “Is it?” She glanced at him nervously, clutching Domenico to her flat chest. Then, by degrees, she became angry; it showed on her face and in the way she crushed the cat against her rib cage. “The hell it is,” she said fiercely, shaking her head no. “I love Jack and he loves me. He writes to me all the time.”
    Cruelly, he said, “Forged. By some pol employee.”
    Tears spilled from her eyes in an amazing quantity; they dimmed her gaze. “You think so? Sometimes I think they are, too. Do you want to look at them? Could you tell?”
    “They’re probably not forged. It’s cheaper and simpler to keep him alive and let him write his own letters.” He hoped that would make her feel better, and evidently it did; the tears stopped coming.
    “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said, nodding, but still not smiling; she gazed off into the distance, reflexively still rocking the small black and white cat.
    “If your husband’s alive,” he said, cautiously this time, “do you believe it to be all right for you to go to bed with other men, such as me?”
    “Oh, sure. Jack never objected to that. Even before they got him. And I’m sure he doesn’t object now. As a matter of fact, he wrote me about that. Let’s see; it was maybe six months ago. I think I could find the letter; I have them all on microfilm. Over in the shop.”
    “Why?”
    Kathy said, “I sometimes lens-screen them for customers. So that later on they’ll understand why I do what I did.”
    At this point he frankly did not know what emotion he felt toward her, nor what