Jordan kept at it, gently and persistently, but Joey didn’t know. Not where he was born, not what had happened to his parents, not how old he was. All he seemed to remember, repeated over and over, was that Mrs. Cheever told him never to tell anyone he was a Sleepless or people would hurt him. At night he should go away by himself and lie down. This Joey did faithfully, because Mrs. Cheever had told him to. He couldn’t remember who Mrs. Cheever was, or why she’d been kind to him, or what had happened to her.
“Joey,” Jordan said, “did you—”
“Don’t tell Mr. Hawke!”
Mayleen’s face appeared on the comlink. “Jordan, Mr. Hawke is coming in now. Holly Newman told me what happened.” Her image peered curiously at Joey. “He’s a Sleepless?”
“Don’t you start, Mayleen!”
“Shit, all I said was—”
Hawke rolled into the room on a tide of sound. Immediately the office was his. He filled it with his presence, nearly as large as Joey’s but so much more compelling that Jordan, who thought he was used to Hawke, felt himself dwindle once more into insignificance.
“Campbell told me what happened. Joey’s a Sleepless?”
“Uuuunnnhhh,” Joey moaned. He put his hands over his face. The fingers were like bloody bananas.
Jordan expected that Hawke would immediately grasp his mistake and remedy it. Hawke was good with people. But instead Hawke went on gazing silently at Joey, smiling faintly, not amused but oddly pleased, as if something about Joey made him feel good and there was no reason to hide that.
“Mr. Hawke, d-d-do I—” in his anguish, the giant started to stutter “—h-h-have t-to g-g-g-go…”
“Why no, of course not, Joey,” Hawke said. “You can stay here if you want.”
Hope struggled grotesquely on Joey’s face. “Even if I n-n-n-never s-sleep?”
“Even if you’re a Sleepless,” Hawke agreed smoothly. He still smiled. “We can use you here.”
Joey staggered to Hawke and fell to his knees. He threw his arms around Hawke’s waist, buried his head against Hawke’s hard belly, and sobbed. Hawke didn’t shrink from the smell, the dirt, the blood. He went on staring down at Joey, smiling faintly.
Jordan went sick inside.
“Hawke, he can’t stay here. You know that. He can’t.”
Hawke stroked Joey’s filthy hair.
Jordan said harshly, “Joey, leave my office. This is still my office. Leave it now. Go—” He couldn’t send Joey onto the plant floor, word would be all over the factory by now. Hawke’s office was locked, the outbuildings were worse yet, there was no place at We-Sleep that Joey would be safe from his coworkers…
“Send him to my security shack,” Mayleen’s image said. Jordan had forgotten the comlink was still open. “Ain’t nobody going to bother him here.”
Startled, Jordan considered rapidly. Mayleen controlled weapons—but, no. She wouldn’t. He heard that, somehow, in her voice.
“Go to Mayleen’s guard shack, Joey,” Jordan said, with as much authority as he could. “Go now.”
Joey didn’t move.
“Go on, Joey,” Hawke said in his amused voice, and Joey went.
Jordan faced his boss. “They’ll kill him if he stays here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do, and so do you. You’ve encouraged so much hate for Sleepless…” He stopped. This was what We-Sleep meant, then. Not just hatred for Kevin Baker and Leisha Camden and Jennifer Sharifi, powerful smart people who could take care of themselves, who were economic opponents with all the best economic weapons on their side. But also hatred for Joey No-Name, who wouldn’t recognize an economic weapon if he tripped over it. Which he probably would.
“Don’t think like that, Jordan,” Hawke said quietly. “Joey is an anomaly. A blip in the Sleepless statistics. He’s insignificant in the real war for justice.”
“Not insignificant enough for you to ignore. If you really thought he was insignificant you’d send him away, to safety. They’ll kill him here, and you’ll let them, because that’s one more way to gain the thrill of a triumph over the Sleepless, isn’t it?”
Hawke sat down on Jordan’s desk, with the expansive, easy movement Jordan had seen him make a hundred times before. A hundred, a thousand, counting all the times Hawke had haunted him in dreams. Hawke was settling in with his easy movements for a pleasant picking at Jordan’s reasoning, a pleasant demolishment of Jordan’s naive beliefs, an easy triumph over a mind that couldn’t begin to match Hawke’s.
Not this time.
Hawke said easily, “You’re overlooking a crucial point, Jordy. The basis for any individual dignity must be individual choice. Joey chooses to stay here. Every proponent of human dignity, from Kenzo Yagai back through Abraham Lincoln clear back to Euripides, has argued that individual choice must supersede community pressure. Why, Lincoln himself said—I know your wonderful Aunt Leisha could supply the whole quotation—on the subject of the danger to emancipated slaves—”
Jordan said, “I quit.”
Hawke smiled. “Now, Jordy, haven’t we been through this before? And with what results?”
Jordan walked out. Hawke would let him, Jordan, be killed, too, in a different way. He had been doing just that, in fact, all along, and Jordan had never seen it. Or was this, too—this goading of Jordan through poor Jordy—was this, too, deliberate on Hawke’s part? Did Hawke want him to quit?
There was no way to be sure.
The noise of the plant rushed over him. On the north superscreen was framed an aerial shot of Sanctuary, wilderness surrounding the high-tech domes of Salamanca. “Military Buffs Have Long Enjoyed Devising Feasible Hypothetical Assaults on This Supposedly Impregnable—” Rat a-tat-tat. “Halooo-ooogin with My Baa-by—” Jordan walked out the side door. Joey outweighed him by 175 pounds; there was no way Jordan could get him away from the factory by force. Joey wasn’t persuadable, not by anyone but Hawke. Jordan couldn’t leave him here. How?
In the security kiosk, Joey’s huge body slumped against the one wall not made of transparent plastic. Mayleen cut off the comlink to Hawke’s office; she must have heard the entire discussion between Jordan and Hawke. She avoided Jordan’s eyes, gazing down at the unconscious Joey.
“I give him some of my great-gramama’s tea.”
“Tea…”
“We river rats know a lot you California boys don’t never guess,” Mayleen said wearily. “Git him out of here, Jordan. I done called Campbell. He’ll help you load Joey into your car, if Mr. Hawke don’t tell him different first. Move fast.”
“Why, Mayleen? Why help a Sleepless?”
Mayleen shrugged. Then her voice turned passionate. “Shit, look at him! Even my baby’s dirty diaper don’t smell like that. You think I need to fight that to get somewhere in this here world? He ain’t in my way, no matter if he don’t need to sleep or eat or even breathe.” Her tone changed yet again. “Poor beggar.”
Jordan brought his car to the front gate. He, Mayleen, and the unsuspecting Campbell heaved Joey into it. Just before he drove away, Jordan stuck his head out the car window. “Mayleen?”
“What?” She had turned prickly again. Her colorless hair straggled into her face, disordered by the effort of hauling Joey.
“Come with me. You don’t believe any more that this is right.”
Mayleen’s face closed. Heat into ice. “No.”
“But you see that—”
“This is all I got for hope, Jordan. This. Here.”
She went into the security kiosk and bent over her surveillance equipment. Jordan drove off, his captive, rescued Sleepless filling the back seat. Jordan didn’t look back at the We-Sleep factory. Not this time. This time, he wasn’t going back.