Authors: John Brunner
Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting by the layer of oily residue surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic. A mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish.
The boat's skipper was blind in one eye and had been so from birth.
He was the illegitimate son of a woman who had gone to California to pick grapes and inhaled something they sprayed on the vines to kill insects, and died. Befriended by a helpful priest, he had survived and gone to school and won a government scholarship. Now he knew about physics and chemistry and meteorology and combustion and the action of poisons.
He was also a Tupa, but that went without saying.
The calendar said there should of a full moon tonight. Perhaps there was. One couldn't see it; one almost never could-or the sun, either. On the afterdeck twenty-four big balloons were laid out like the empty skins of fish, slightly glistening as a flashlight played across them. There were cylinders of compressed hydrogen. And twenty-four precisely calculated payloads. Carrying them, the balloons could be relied on to rise to about two hundred meters and float shorewards at nine or ten kilometers an hour. They would cross the coast above or near the city of San Diego.
Roger Halkin was exhausted. Strain, like that of the past few days, always aggravated his diabetes. Still, everything was ready for the morning now; all the fragile stuff had been packed all the records and books, and the house was littered with full cardboard cartons waiting for the moving men.
"Brandy, darling?" asked his wife Belinda.
"I guess I could risk a small one," he muttered. "I surely need it."
He didn't look or sound like a man who had just been promoted vice-president of his company. There were good reasons. As he'd said with gallows humor to Belinda, he was going to vice-preside over a wake. Today had brought bad news, worse than anyone had expected.
Except, presumably, for Tom Grey; that cold fish with his almost symbiotic comprehension of computed trends would have known or at least suspected long ago.
It had never been a secret that Angel City had been hit hard by the Towerhill affair, but the load, one assumed, must have been spread-they regularly reinsured as far afield as Lloyd's of London-and in any event there was a clear case for a claim against the airline whose SST had triggered the avalanche.
Only this morning he'd heard that the airline was going to fight, maintaining that it hadn't been the boom which caused the disasater, but an earthquake; they'd started occurring around Denver in 1962 and were now common. And the suit might take a year and cost a million.
So when he stepped into Bill Chalmers's shoes his first task would be to shed half the section he was supposed to be in charge of, Angel City's out-of-state operations.
"If I could get my hands on that stinking idiot from Denver, that Philip Mason," he said between clenched teeth, "I'd tear him limb from limb. And I'm not the only one. I-"
He was interrupted by a cry from the back of the house where their boy Teddy was supposed to be asleep. He was eight, and among the lucky ones; he had nothing worse than occasional asthma. Ever since news of their impending move to LA broke, it had been touch and go whether he'd collapse with another bout, but so far they'd escaped that.
"Dad! Mom! Hey, look-there's fireworks!"
"Christ, isn't that lad asleep yet?" Halkin jumped to his feet. "I'll give him fireworks!"
"Rodge, don't be angry with him!" Belinda cried, and came running after him.
And the kid wasn't in his bed, or even in his room. He was out on the back patio, staring at the sky. Over the city there was nothing to be seen except the usual yellowish reflection of its lights on the low haze that had blotted out the stars since last October.
"Now you come right back indoors!" Belinda snapped, diving past her husband and sweeping the boy off his feet. "How often do I have to tell you? You
never
go outside without your mask!"
"But I saw fireworks!" the boy howled. "Right from my window! I wanna watch the rest of the show!"
"I don't see any fireworks," Halkin muttered, gazing around.
"Maybe you dreamed it. Let's get back inside." Already the night air was making his eyelids tingle. He could foresee another stint of watching by Teddy's bed with the oxygen mask poised, and that was the last thing he wanted right now. Tomorrow he'd have to have all his wits about him.
"Right up there!" Teddy shouted, and began to gasp and wheeze and choke as well as cry.
They looked up automatically. Yes, overhead! Something very bright, a flower of flame!
And, on the slant roof of the house, a crash, and a wave of fire that splashed, and soaked their clothes, and clung to their skins, and killed them screaming. It was very good napalm, the best American brand, made by Bamberley Oil.
Twice in the past week a man had followed him home.
It was the same one who, for the first time about ten days ago, had shown up at the garbage terminal of the SCRR where the wagons were loaded for disposal inland. He was there ostensibly because he was curious about this notion of reclaiming desert by using metal-free and plastic-free household refuse to impregnate the dusty ground with humus, but he'd shown more interest in the men themselves than in the job they were doing.
If he wasn't a policeman, he was probably a reporter. He tried to reach Peg Mankiewicz, but at the office of her former paper all they could tell him was that she had quit the city. Before the third time could arrive, therefore, Austin Train left his rent for the balance of the month where the landlord would find it first and took a bus north to San Francisco. There was plenty of garbage there too.
And there was something going on inside his head he didn't want screwed up by a glare of renewed publicity.
PICK YOURSELF UP AND START OVER
Weary, Philip Mason let himself into the apartment and hung up his coat and filter-mask. As soon as she heard the door Denise appeared to kiss him hello, and instead of making it a casual embrace threw her arms tight around him and drove her tongue violently into his mouth.
"How can you bear to after what I've done to you?" he muttered when their lips finally separated.
"You silly fool!" She sounded as though she was crying, but her face was against his cheek where he couldn't see it.
"But it's definite now. I've been fired, and they're selling the office complete to some other company-"
"Idiot! I married you because I love you, not to put a ball and chain on you, and I married
you
and not your job! 'In sickness, in health'-and all that shit."
"I don't deserve you," he said. "I swear I don't…Say!" Struck by a sudden thought. "Did you remember to call Douglas?" They had taken to calling Dr. McNeil by his first name.
Her face clouded. "Yes."
"What did he say?"
"Improving, but still not fixed. Another month. Still, that's better news than we've had before…" She took his arm. "Come in the living-room, honey. Alan's here, and I was just fixing him a drink."
"Alan Prosser? What does he want?"
"To talk to you, he said. Come on."
"Where are the kids? Aren't they here?"
"No, down with the Henlowes. It's Lydia's birthday. They'll be back in about an hour."
And after greetings Alan leaned back in the big chair he'd been allotted and accepted the drink Denise poured. "You lucky devil," he said to Philip.
"Am I?" Philip said sourly, dropping into his own chair.
"Sure! Having a beautiful wife"-Denise was within arm's reach so he patted her bottom and provoked a wan smile-"a beautiful home that's properly looked after…Christ, my place is a shambles!"
"Don't you have-well, a housekeeper or something?" Denise asked.
She had only met Alan a couple of times, and on neither occasion had he talked much about himself.
"I tried that." Alan looked lugubrious. "Got me one of those girls from Dominica."
"Oh, the island where they cut down all those trees?" Philip said, more to make polite chitchat than because he was interested.
"That's the one. Now dust storms blow off it all the time, reach as far away as Trinidad, so I was told. Sounds like hell. But anyway, this chick: she didn't work out. Pretty, sure, and likable enough, but-well, I practically had to show her how to use the can, you dig? So when she had to go home, nurse her mother who'd taken sick, I wasn't sorry…Still, I guess you aren't thinking so much about your luck as your troubles right now. You are in trouble, aren't you?"
"Did Denise tell you or did you guess?"
"Neither. I just have good financial contacts coast to coast. And the rumors about Angel City are so loud now you can't ignore them. I had stock in your firm-like insurance companies, they cut the meat close to the bone-but I shed my holding weeks ago. Are they going bankrupt, or are they just going to sell their out-of-state operations and retrench on California?"
"Sell off the fringes, of course." But Philip was looking at Alan with new respect. The company had sweated blood to conceal the fact that their total loss was in a fair way to breaking them, and their shares had fallen by only twenty or thirty per cent instead of the probable ninety.
"Which includes me," he continued. "I've been given the copper handshake and the business here is being traded as a going concern to a New York company who'll put their own people in. So as of now I'm unemployed."
"No, you're not."
"What?"
"Got any money? Or can you raise some?"
"Ah…I don't think I'm with you."
"Plain English, isn't it?" Alan waved his glass in the air. "Do you have any money? A life policy you can borrow against? Second mortgage?
Bank loan? Savings?"
"Well, we've never touched what Dennie's father left her-Say!
What's all this about?"
"I'm telling you you're not out of work. Not unless you insist.
Remember I told you my partner quit me, Bud Burkhardt that you said you'd met?"
"Sure. What about him?"
"Well, I think he was a damned fool to start with, taking that post at Puritan, so I wasn't sorry to be shut of him-"
"He's with Puritan now?" Denise interrupted. "The man we met when we had the plumbing done over at our last home?"
"That's right." Alan nodded. "He's managing their Towerhill branch."
"Oh, I see what you mean," she said, and bit her lip. "The place is-well, not quite a ghost town now, but…" A wave of her elegantly manicured hand.
"I didn't mean that," Alan said. "The profits Puritan take on everything they sell-hell, he's probably already made twice what he could have made if he'd stayed with me. But the Trainites are gunning for Puritan. Didn't you know?"
"No, I didn't!" Philip sat forward in his chair. "I got some Puritan stock. Always understood it was rock-solid. They do say it's a Syndicate company, don't they?"
"Well, it is. But the Trainites are a force to be reckoned with now, and quite pigheaded enough to take on anybody. Besides, what the hell could the Syndicate do against them?"
"So tell me the rest of it!" Philip said impatiently. "I'm far enough down on my luck not to want to lose what I have left."
"Well, I got a lot of Trainites working for me, you know-it's the kind of job they approve of, like providing clean water and getting sewage where it can be useful, and all that stuff. Me, I don't hold with their alarmist ideas, but they're conscientious, reliable, turn up for work on time…" His glass was empty; when he tilted it against his mouth Denise rose to refill it. "Thanks. Well, most of the ones work for me come from this wat over by Towerhill, and I heard the other day they're involved in this countrywide project, buying stuff at Puritan and analyzing it."
"Can they?" Denise said.
"I guess so. They're not ignorant, you know-half of them are college dropouts, but they learned plenty before they quit formal study, and apparently every wat has at least one chemist who keeps a check on their food, makes sure it's safe."
"That sounds sensible," Philip approved. "Especially for the sake of the children."
"Oh, don't think I'm putting down all their ideas. Thanks"-as Denise handed his glass back. "Just the extremist ones. Must admit, if I had kids, I'd like routine food analysis for them."
"So would we!" Denise said forcefully. "Only we made inquiries-and the cost!"
"You don't have to tell
me
." Alan scowled terribly. "You know I bought that house when Belle and I got married, and sold it off when she-uh-when she got shot." Absently curling his fingers around to touch the scar on his palm. "Well, the other day I got this letter from the guy who bought it, saying he's had the dirt in the garden analyzed and it's full of poison because it was laid out on a heap of old mine tailings, and he's going to sue me."
"That's not fair," Denise exclaimed.
"I guess I might have done the same if…But the hell!" Gulping at his fresh drink. "The lawyers tell me it's caveat emptor stuff, so it's no skin off my nose. But when I think what could have become of
my
kids…I…" He shuddered.
"You were talking about your ex-partner," Philip ventured. The prospect of becoming not just unemployed but unemployable, like so many thousands of others, had been haunting him; that tempting half-promise of Alan's was intriguing, and he wanted to hear more.
"Ah, yes! I was going to say, you know I'm having hell's own job since he quit, coping with the business on my own. I'm not a salesman!
I'm the practical type. It's my boast that I never hired anyone to do anything I couldn't do myself. I started off laying pipe and digging drains, and I can still drive some of those lazy, bastards on my payroll into the ground. But-well, my head's ringing with projects I don't have time for! Come to that, one day I'd like to get married again, and I can't find time to go look for a girl!"
"Yes, you should remarry," Denise said. "You'd make a good husband."