Margo stared up at the ceiling, her hands clasped behind her head. Given that her body was only covered by the sheets from the waist down, Nick found the sight distracting. Which was odd, perhaps, given that he could hardly claim to be sexually frustrated. In fact, he was feeling a little exhausted. Margo made love with the same enthusiastic verve she drove her SUV.
"Do you ever wonder what's happening to those poor people, Nick?"
"Yes, I do. At least three times a day. But I start by reminding myself that they aren't 'poor people' to begin with. They're my kind of people, actually. I grew up in an Ohio town not that much different from the towns that produced the guards and nurses at Alexander."
He reached for a cigarette, and shook one loose from Margo's pack when she extended her hand. Both he and Margo smoked, which was bad for their health and getting less and less socially acceptable as time went by—but was very handy, from a romantic standpoint. No matter how different they were in other ways, they shared the smoker's sense of withstanding a bitter and relentless siege shoulder to shoulder.
After he lit hers, and lit his, he lay down next to her—shoulder to shoulder—and looked up at the ceiling also. "As for the Cherokees, I think they'd resent being called 'those poor people.' I know some Cherokees. Even today, after all that's happened to them, they're a proud people. At least, the ones I know are."
"Well, yeah. But . . . most of them are convicts. Maximum security type convicts at that." She exhaled cigarette smoke and chuckled. "Of course, I guess that just reinforces your point. Not even knee-jerk bleeding heart liberals like me really think felons are hapless waifs."
They smoked in silence, for a while. Then Nick sat up, stubbed out his cigarette, and offered her the ashtray to do the same. Like most things in Margo's quarters in the facility, the ashtray was simple and utilitarian. Aside from her politics and her knuckle-tightening disregard for each and every principle of defensive driving, the only extravagance the woman seemed to have was a devotion to ice cream that bordered on idolatry. She'd had some sort of enormous mostly ice cream dessert after dinner, and had then insisted on stopping at a Dairy Queen on the way back to the mine. How she managed that and kept her slim figure was a mystery. Just one of those people with a furnace for a metabolism, he guessed, rather enviously. Nick gained weight easily, if he didn't watch his diet and slipped on his exercise program. That had been a problem for him even as a young man, much less at the age he was now.
"We just don't know, is the only answer," he said. "And we never will know what happened to them—or is happening to them. Malcolm says it's theoretically possible, with enough data—which we might even have, with this event—that we could someday send a probe of some kind that might find them. But theoretically possible and technologically feasible are two completely different things."
"As any physicist can tell you, especially particle physicists like me. The experiments we could do—if we could generate the energy." She gave him a look he couldn't quite interpret. "Do you pray for them?" she asked abruptly.
"Yes. Every night."
She nodded. "I'm not religious, as I think you know. But if you want to say prayers now, please feel free. Or any time you're with me. I won't join you, but I won't mind, either."
"Thank you. I will, then."
After he finished, she stroked his arm. "This is going pretty well, I think."
"Yeah. So do I."
"But I'm not budging on the driving. Forget that crap about the man taking the wheel."
Nick chuckled. "I can live with that. Or not. But I noticed that Alex included a very nice life insurance policy in that package. So I guess I can't plead mercy for my poor kids left orphaned."
"Poor kids! One of your sons is a lawyer, one of them's a computer technician with his own consulting business, and the third is studying to be doctor. And both your daughters look to be doing well for themselves too."
"Well. True. I did pretty good by them, for a trash-hauler whose father was a steelworker." He lay back down next to her, cupping an arm around her shoulder, and stared at the ceiling again. "It's too bad we'll never know. Because if we could, I'd bet you dollars for donuts those 'poor people' will do just about the same, give 'em three generations. Including a fair number of the inmates."