Authors: John Brunner
Very conscious that all calls out of the country were apt to be monitored, she'd put the proposition to him in highly general terms: the risk of the Baltic going the same way as the Mediterranean, the danger of further dust-bowls like the Mekong Desert, the effects of bringing about climatic change. That was back in the news-the Russians had revived their plan to reverse the Yenisei and Ob. Moreover, there was the Danube problem, worse than the Rhine had ever been, and Welsh nationalists were sabotaging pipelines meant to carry "their" water into England, and the border war in West Pakistan had been dragging on so long most people seemed to have forgotten that it concerned a river.
And so on.
Almost as soon as she started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone.
Among her most useful contacts was Felice, nee Jones. Having spent more than two months after her return from the wat in hunting for a new job, she had finally resigned herself to being unemployable and married some guy she'd known for years. He had an unexciting but safe job and she was now able to devote much of her time to acting as Peg's unpaid West Coast correspondent. Despite her former dismissal of her brother's ideals, she was obviously very worried now. What seemed to have revised her opinions was the fact that her new husband was going to insist on children.
Among the questions she had drawn Peg's attention to…
Why had there been a sharp fall in the value of shares in Plant Fertility? In the spring there had been such a demand for their bees and earthworms, they'd been booming; they'd even initiated a market survey to determine if they should add ants and ladybugs. (Felice said there was a Texas firm which had cornered the market in ichneumon wasps, but Peg hadn't got around to finding what they were wanted for.) There had been no official comment about the company's decline, but undoubtedly someone on the inside was selling his stock in huge quantities.
Was there a connection between Plant Fertility's problems and the fact that potatoes were up a dime a pound over spring prices and still rising?
And could animal feed really have been so severely affected as to account for the rise of meat prices from exorbitant to prohibitive? (It had been years since cattle could be grazed on open land anywhere in the country.) Or was there-as rumor claimed-a wave of contagious abortion decimating the herds, which no antibiotic would touch?
Peg thought: likely both.
Another question. Was it true that Angel City had decided to give up life insurance and realize the value of their out-of-state property because the decline in life expectancy was so sharp it threatened to cut through the profit line?
Similarly: Stephenson Electric Transport was the only car maker in the States whose product met with complete approval from the Trainites. They had been due for a colossal takeover bid from Ford.
The negotiations were hanging fire; was that really due to a threat from Chrysler that they'd have them hit with an injunction under the Environment Acts for generating excessive ozone? (Which would leave the pure-exhaust field wide open for foreign companies: Hailey, Peugeot who had just unwrapped their first steamer, and the Japanese Freon-vapor cars.)
Was it true that the Trainites had turned sour on Puritan and dug up some land of dirt about their operations?
She didn't know. And she was becoming daily more frightened at her inability to find out.
Of course, there were good reasons why companies in trouble with the Trainites should fight tooth and nail to keep their dirty secrets from the public. The government couldn't go on forever bailing out mismanaged giant corporations, even though it was their own supporters, people who ranted against "UN meddling" and "creeping socialism," who yelled the loudest for Federal aid when they got into a mess. With an eye to her next series of articles, she'd compiled a list of companies which were state-owned in all but name and would go broke overnight if the government ever called in its loans. So far it included a chemical company caught by the ban on "strong"
insecticides; an oil company ruined by public revulsion against defoliants; a pharmaceutical company that had nearly become a subsidiary of Maya Pura, the enormously successful Mexican producers of herbal remedies and cosmetics (to be bought out by Dagoes! Oh, the shame!); six major computer manufacturers who had glutted the market for their costly products; and, inevitably, several airlines.
And every day senators and Congressmen who in public were inclined to turn purple at the mere mention of state control wheeled and dealed behind the scenes to secure for their home states the fattest government-financed contracts they could nab, or pleaded that if such-and-such a firm which had been run into the ground by its incompetent directors wasn't helped, the unemployment index would rise another point.
It was as though the entire country had been turned into a pork-barrel, with two hundred million people squabbling over the contents. Talk about taking in each other's laundry-this was more like termites, each eating its predecessor's excrement!
On top of which, in some sense at least, the most crucial point of all was not what had happened but what people were afraid might happen. Consider the calamitous drop in air passengers, down 60 per cent in ten years. Consider that one man, Gerry Thorne of Globe Relief, had ruined the summer tourist trade from Maine to Trinidad, just by securing publicity for the death of his wife.
One man with a bomb could break an airline. One man with a cause could break ten thousand hotel proprietors. One man with enough leverage…
Or one woman. Peg was after leverage of her own. That was why she wanted to talk to Lucy Ramage.
At which point there came a knock at her door. She checked the spyhole before opening; it was a favorite mugger's trick in New York hotels to hang around the desk until someone was invited up to a room, then club the visitor in the elevator and come calling in his place.
But she recognized Lucy Ramage from seeing her on TV.
She admitted her and her companion, a swarthy man with recently healed cuts on his face, lacking teeth from both top and bottom jaws.
She took their filtermasks, asked if they'd like a drink-both refused-and got down to business right away, sensing they were impatient.
"I'm glad I finally managed to reach you," she said. "It's been a hassle. Like plodding through a swamp."
"It must have seemed harder than it really was," the man said with a faint smile. "I apologize. The delay was on our side. We work under-ah-difficulties here, and we wanted to investigate your credentials before reacting."
A blinding light broke on Peg. "Your name isn't Lopez! It's-" She snapped her fingers in frustration. "You're the Uruguayan who got beaten up and claimed it was by off-duty policemen!"
"Fernando Arriegas," the man said, nodding.
"Are you-are you recovered?" Peg felt herself flushing, as though from shame for her country.
"I was lucky." Arriegas curled his lip. "They destroyed only one of my testicles. I am told I may still hope to be a father-if it is ever safe again to bring a child into this sick world. However, let us not talk about me. You have been trying to contact Lucy. Trying very hard."
Peg nodded.
"Why?" Lucy said, leaning forward. She was wearing a plastic coat despite the warmth of the weather, and her hands were in its deep pockets out of sight. But there was nothing particularly surprising in that; plastic was the best armor against New York rain. Rubber just rotted.
"I-well." Peg cleared her throat; she was dreadfully catarrhal at the moment "I'm working on a series of articles for
Hemisphere,
in Toronto. The general theme is what the rich countries are doing to the poor ones even without intending to harm them, and of course the tragedy at Noshri…" She spread her hands.
"Not to mention the tragedy in Honduras," Arriegas murmured. He glanced at Lucy, and from the big pockets of her coat she handed him a transparent bag full of objects like soft macaroni.
"You recognize?" he asked, showing it to Peg.
"Is that Nutripon?"
"Yes, of course. What is more, it is Nutripon from San Pablo, a sample of the supplies that drove its people mad and caused them to kill an Englishman and an American, believing them to be devils. For which involuntary crime some ten or twelve thousand Hondurans have now been killed." His voice was as flat as a machine's. "We recaptured-that is to say, the Honduran Tupas did, but their cause is our cause-recaptured San Pablo and went over it with a fine-toothed comb. Part of the original delivery of this food was found in the ruins of the church, where apparently the people took it in the hope of exorcising the evil from it. They must have been dreadfully hungry. We have sent some for analysis in Havana, but the rest we have reserved for other important applications, such as insuring that any American who writes about the
tragedy
"-he leaned on the word with heavy irony-"should know what he or she is talking about."
Peg felt her jaw drop. She forced out, "You mean you want
me
to eat some?"
"Exactly. Most of your brainwashed reporters have repeated the lie that our accusations are untrue. We wish at least one to be able to say the contrary."
He tore a strip of cellulose tape from the bag with a tiny crying noise. "Here! It says on the carton it can be eaten raw-and you need not worry about it being stale. The carton we took this from was completely intact when we found it."
"Hurry up!" snapped Lucy. Peg glanced at her, and suddenly realized that those big pockets were big enough to conceal a gun. They had concealed one. It was in Lucy's hand now, and the muzzle seemed as wide as a subway tunnel.
It was silenced.
"You're insane!" Peg whispered. "They must know you're here-they'll catch you in minutes if you use that thing!"
"But we shan't have to," Arriegas said with a thin sneer. "You are not so stupid as to resist. We have studied this poison very carefully.
We know that this much"-hefting the bag-"produces the effect of a little trip on acid, no more. Or perhaps I should better say STP, because I'm afraid the trip has not been known to be a good one. Maybe you'll be the lucky first, if your conscience is clear."
"And you'd rather live until tomorrow than die now," Lucy said.
"Besides, you won't die. I've eaten more than that. Much more."
"Wh-when?" Peg stammered, unable to tear her fascinated gaze from the bag.
"I found some in a ruined house," Lucy said. "Next to the body of a child. I don't know if it was a boy or a girl, it was so crushed. And I suddenly realized I had to share this thing. It was like a vision. Like licking the sores of a leper. I thought I'd stopped believing in God.
Maybe I have. Maybe I did it because now I only believe in Satan."
She leaned forward with sudden fearful earnestness.
"Look, take some and eat it-
please
! Because you've
got
to! We'll make you eat it if we must, but it would be so much better if you realized what you have to understand! You've got to see, feel,
grasp
what was done to those poor helpless people-coming to my table where I was doling out the relief supplies, thinking they were being given wholesome nourishment after so long without any food but a few poisoned leaves and roots. You can't write about it, you can't even
talk
about it, unless you know what a horrible loathsome disgusting trick was played on them!"
Almost as though they were acting of their own accord, Peg's fingers took hold of a piece of the food. A sense of doom engulfed her.
She looked beseechingly at Arriegas, but could read no mercy in his stone-chill eyes.
"Lucy is right," he said. "Think to yourself: I am so weak from hunger I can barely stand. Think: they have sent help for me, tonight for the first time in months I will sleep soundly with my belly full, and tomorrow there will be more to eat, and the day after. This living hell has come to an end at last. Think about that while you eat. Then later perhaps you will comprehend the magnitude of this cruelty."
But why me? It's not my fault! I'm on their side!
And realized in the same instant as the thought was formulated that it was wrong. It had been shaped, over and over, more times than could conceivably be counted, by millions of others before her…and what impact had it had on the world? Had she not spent these past weeks in continual horror at the misjudgment, the incompetence, the outright lunacy of mankind?
These two must be crazy. No doubt about it. But it was even crazier to think that the world as it stood could be called "sane."
Perhaps if she ate just one or two bits, enough to satisfy them…Convulsively Peg thrust the piece she held between her lips and started to chew. But her mouth was so dry, her teeth merely balled it into a lump she couldn't swallow.
"Try harder," Arriegas said clinically. "I assure you not to worry.
Here is only two ounces, what I myself have eaten. Those who went mad at Noshri ate more than half a kilo."
"Give her water," Lucy said. Cautiously, so as not to block her aim, Arriegas reached for a pitcher and glass that stood on the bedside table. Peg obediently gulped a mouthful, and the food went down.
"More."
She took more.
"More!"
She took more. Was it illusion, or was something happening to her already? She felt giddy, careless of the consequences of what she was doing. The food tasted pretty good, savory on the tongue, and her saliva was back so she could get it down very fast. She took half a dozen bits and thrust them all in together.
And the room seemed to rock from side to side, in rhythm with the chomping of her jaw.
"I-" she said in surprise, and they looked at her with eyes like laser-beams.
"I think I'm going to faint," she said after a pause. She reached for the table to set down the water-glass, and missed. It dropped on the carpet and didn't break, but lashed out a crystalline tongue, the last of its contents. She made to stand up.