Chapter 48: The Word Was Procure
There was a level of money a man needed to have before he got the authority to spout nonsense, Nischov believed.
Now, Theo was someone he had known for a while. A long time, if he dared say it.
And even though Theo had, overnight, become a different person, Nischov was sure that there was no way Theo was that rich.
The only explanation that he had been able to find in his head as to why Theo had a black identity status was that he was a high-rank Hero. They were treated as priority, after all. It was the sort of thing that carried a man up to the top floor without anyone at the desk asking him twice, and it cost nothing but the right badge.
He didn’t see how it was possible for Theo to have as much money as the people who funded the hospital and the city. It was logically not possible. If it were, Theo would not have lost his father.
So even though he loved and respected Theo a great deal, he sat behind his desk and measured the boy small. It was not unkindness. It was arithmetic, and the arithmetic had never once come out in Theo’s favour. He capped his pen while he said it, and squared the file on the blotter, because a man delivering a no likes to have his hands busy with something orderly.
"Listen, Theolyne, these matters are not as simple as you’d think them to be. You can’t just buy this equipment, even if you have money and status, it’s not something you can just afford to get. Especially with how scarce and costly their production is. You know with the growth of Mana-tech, these things are entering a new age, and so new costs. I’m sorry, Theo, but it may not be as easy and possible as you’d think."
Theo’s countenance fell.
He had expected much coming here, most especially when he had an inkling he could afford it. The inkling had a number attached to it, and the number had been sitting warm in his chest since the elevator, and now there was nowhere left to put it down.
He stood up and bowed to Doctor Nischov, deep from the waist, holding it a second longer than the room asked for.
"Thank you, Doctor."
Then he left his office. The door shut behind him without a click, the way hospital doors do, sealing rather than closing. He did not look back at it.
There was a bench in the corridor outside the consulting rooms, bolted to the wall for families waiting on news they did not want. Theo sat on it and did the arithmetic. A trolley went past with one bad wheel. Somewhere down the hall a lift announced a floor to nobody.
Ten thousand a day was not the problem. Ten thousand a day was a number, and numbers he could stand in front of. He had three million dollars, a house with a bunker under it, and a system that paid him for caring about people he was going to care about anyway.
The problem was where the machine sat.
It sat in a building that was public, that was not his, and that could not promise him a hundred percent of anything. And he was making preparations to enter the Tower. Leaving her in a room that any man with a visitor’s pass could walk to while he did that felt like a reckless thing to do.
He tried to count the days he would be gone and could not. That was the whole trouble with that number. It was the one number in his life that would not hold still long enough to be paid.
He turned the billing statement over in his hands until the crease went soft, and then he stopped turning it.
Frank was at the end of the corridor, where he had been for three days, standing the way agents stand when they have decided to look like furniture. Weight on one hip. Hands folded at the belt. Eyes on a point some three tiles ahead of his own shoes, where nothing was happening and nothing ever had.
Theo got up and walked over.
"Frank."
"Sir."
"Do you know anything about buying hospital equipment?"
Frank blinked at him. Of all the questions he had prepared for over three days, and he had prepared for a great many, including one where the client turned out to be an S-class fugitive and one where the client turned out to be nobody at all, this was not on the sheet. The sheet was folded in his inside pocket. It had columns, and a margin ruled for notes.
"Sir?"
"The suppression rig. The one keeping my wife under."
Theo held up the billing statement like it explained anything, columns outward, the paper gone soft where his thumb had been.
"I want to buy one. Not rent the room it’s in. Buy the machine, put it in my house, hire whoever has to come with it. Doctor Nischov says it can’t be done. He says the production is scarce and the Mana-tech people have moved the whole industry into a new price bracket, and that even with money and status it isn’t a thing a person can simply purchase."
He paused.
"But he also says his historical dramas were preserved by a man called Movie-man, so I thought I’d get a second opinion."
Frank did not laugh. Frank had gone very still, in the specific way of a man who has just heard a door open somewhere behind him. His hands came apart at the belt and stayed apart. Three days of standing in a corridor writing nothing, and here was a line that would have to be read all the way to the end by the man who read everything all the way to the end.
"Sir. Say the first part again."
"I want to buy the equipment."
"You want to procure it," Frank said slowly. "That’s a different word, sir, and it’s a very different word."
He smiled heartily, however.
"Do not worry. I will speak with the President’s Aide on your behalf, I’m sure he’ll figure something out."
Theo, who did not know that it was a different word, waited politely.