The Sparrow Read Free Page A

chance, okay? Let me see if there’s a way so everybody wins. Things don’t have to be one way or the other."
    "Sure, Jimmy," she said. He was a nice kid. Dumber than rice but nice. Peggy looked at his earnest, open, homely face and knew that he would find some plausible, contemptible rationale for being a good boy. "Sure, Jim. You do that."

    A LESSER MAN might have been put off his feed by a confrontation with the formidable Peggy Soong. But Jimmy Quinn was used to small, insistent women, and nothing affected his appetite; his mother complained that feeding him in adolescence was like stoking a coal-fired furnace. So he returned to his seat as Peggy stalked out of the cafeteria, and thoughtfully worked his way through the rest of his meal, letting things percolate through his mind.
    Jimmy was no fool but he’d been well loved by good parents and well taught by good teachers, and those two facts accounted for the habit of obedience that mystified and enraged Peggy Soong. Over and over in his life, authority had proven correct and the decisions of his parents and teachers and bosses made sense to him eventually. So he wasn’t happy about losing his job at Arecibo to an AI program but left to himself, he probably wouldn’t have objected. He’d only worked at the telescope site for eight months—not enough time to feel proprietary about a position he’d been dead lucky to get. After all, he hadn’t taken degrees in astronomy expecting a hot job market after graduation. The pay was lousy and the competition for work was savage, but that was true of almost anything these days. His mother—a small, insistent woman—had urged him to study something more practical. But Jimmy stuck with astronomy, arguing that if he was going to be unemployed, which was statistically likely, he might as well be unemployed in the field of his choice.
    For eight months, he’d had the luxury of feeling vindicated. Now, it looked like Eileen Quinn had been right after all.
    He gathered the debris from his lunch, deposited it in the proper bins and made his way back to his cubicle, swerving and ducking, bat-like, to avoid the doorways and low light fixtures and conduits that threatened to knock him cold a hundred times a day. The desk he sat at looked gap-toothed, and for that blessed state of affairs he was indebted to Father Emilio Sandoz, a Puerto Rican Jesuit he’d met through George Edwards. George was a retired engineer who worked as an unpaid, part-time docent at the Arecibo dish, giving tours to schoolchildren and day-trippers. His wife, Anne, was a doctor at the clinic the Jesuits had set up along with a community center in La Perla, a slum just outside Old San Juan. Jimmy liked all three of them and made the trip to San Juan as often as he could tolerate the tedious, traffic-choked forty-mile drive.
    At dinner that first night with Emilio at the Edwardses’ place, Jimmy kept them laughing with a comic threnody, listing the hazards life held for a regular guy in a world built by and for midgets. When he complained about smashing his knees into his desk every time he sat down, the priest leaned over, the handsome unusual face solemn but the eyes alight, and said quietly in a nearly perfect North Dublin accent, "Take d’ middle drawer outta d’ desk, y’ fookin’ tosser." There was only one reply possible and Jimmy supplied it, blue eyes wide with Irish admiration: "Fookin’ deadly." The exchange convulsed Anne and George, and the four of them had been friends ever since.
    Grinning at the memory, Jimmy opened a line and shot a message to Emilio’s system, offering "Beer at Claudio’s, 8 P.M. RSVP by 5," no longer amazed by the idea of having a drink in a bar with a priest, a notion that had initially stunned him almost as much as finding out that girls had pubic hair, too.
    Emilio must have been in the J-Center office because the reply came back almost immediately.