Flux by Orson Scott Card Page B

I have clean greens in my hand,” says he. Because Dogwalker is careful. What happened was not because he was not careful.
    Every day we walked to the ten places where the envelopes were supposed to come. We knew they wouldn’t be there for a week—the wheels of government grind exceeding slow, for good or ill. Every day we checked with Inside Man, whose name and face I have already given you, much good it will do, since both are no doubt different by now. He told us every time that all was the same, nothing was changed, and he was telling the truth, for the fed was most lugubrious and palatial and gave no leaks that anything was wrong. Even Mr. Hunt himself did not know that aught was amiss in his little kingdom.
    Yet even with no sign that I could name, I was jumpy every morning and sleepless every night. “You walk like you got to use the toilet,” says Walker to me, and it is verily so. Something is wrong, I say to myself, something is most deeply wrong, but I cannot find the name for it even though I know, and so I say nothing, or I lie to myself and try to invent a reason for my fear. “It’s my big chance,” says I. “To be twenty percent of rich.”
    â€œRich,” says he, “not just a fifth.”
    â€œThen you’ll be double rich.”
    And he just grins at me, being the strong and silent type.
    â€œBut then why don’t you sell nine,” says I, “and keep the other green? Then you’ll have the money to pay for it, and the green to go where you want in all the world.”
    But he just laughs at me and says, “Silly boy, my dear sweet pinheaded lightbrained little friend. If someone sees a pimp like me passing a green, he’ll tell a fed, because he’ll know there’s been a mistake. Greens don’t go to boys like me.”
    â€œBut you won’t be dressed like a pimp,” says I, “and you won’t stay in pimp hotels.”
    â€œI’m a low-class pimp,” he says again, “and so however I dress that day, that’s just the way pimps dress. And whatever hotel I go to, that’s a low-class pimp hotel until I leave.”
    â€œPimping isn’t some disease,” says I. “It isn’t in your gonads and it isn’t in your genes. If your daddy was a Kroc and your mama was an Iacocca, you wouldn’t be a pimp.”
    â€œThe hell I wouldn’t,” says he. “I’d just be a high-class pimp, like my mama and my daddy. Who do you think gets green cards? You can’t sell no virgins on the street.”
    I thought that he was wrong and I still do. If anybody could go from low to high in a week, it’s Dogwalker. He could be anything and do anything, and that’s the truth. Or almost anything. If he could do anything then his story would have a different ending. But it was not his fault. Unless you blame pigs because they can’t fly. I was the vertical one, wasn’t I? I should have named my suspicions and we wouldn’t have passed those greens.
    I held them in my hands, there in his little room, all ten of them when he spilled them on the bed. To celebrate he jumped up so high he smacked his head on the ceiling again and again, which made them ceiling tiles dance and flip over and spill dust all over the room. “I flashed just one, a single one,” says he, “and a cool million was what he said, and then I said what if ten? And he laughs and says fill in the check yourself.”
    â€œWe should test them,” says I.
    â€œWe can’t test them,” he says. “The only way to test it is to use it, and if you use it then your print and face are in its memory forever and so we could never sell it.”
    â€œThen sell one, and make sure it’s clean.”
    â€œA package deal,” he says. “If I sell one, and they think I got more by I’m holding out to raise the price, then I may not live to collect for the other nine,