Authors: John Brunner
"Stay where you are!" Lucy ordered, jerking the gun. "Fernando, grab hold of her. Well have to force the rest down her throat."
Peg tried to say that wouldn't be any use, but the world tilted and she slid to meet the ground. With a distant corner of her mind she assured herself that this wasn't due to a drug in the food. This stemmed from pure terror.
There was a vast rushing noise in her ears.
But her eyes were open, and she could see everything with a weirdly distorted perspective, as though she were a wide-angle lens with very sharp curvature at the sides. What she saw was the door slamming open and someone man-striding in. He was horribly out of proportion, his legs as thin as matches, his torso grotesquely bulging toward a head the size of a pumpkin. She didn't want to look at anyone so ugly. She shut her eyes. In the same instant there were two plopping noises and a heavy weight slumped across her legs. Infuriated, she thrust at it with her hands, trying to push it away.
Wet?
She forced her eyes open again and saw this time through a swimming blur like a wind-blown veil. Bright red surrounded by pale gold. Yes, of course. The back of a head. Lucy Ramage's head. With a hole clear through. A shot perfectly targeted. She had dropped sideways across Peg's thighs. Also there was Arriegas, doubled up and spewing pink froth and red trickles. It was on her now, on her clothes.
Less gold, more red. All the time more red. It flooded out to the limits of her already hazy vision. There was darkness.
"Well, honey, how does it grab you?" Jeannie said proudly as she helped Pete into the living-room. He wouldn't be able to drive himself for a long time, of course, so she had to take him to and from work.
But he was getting very clever with his crutches, and this apartment was on the entrance floor, so there weren't too many steps, which he did find hard.
It had been filthy, because it had stood vacant for months-few people wanted ground-floor apartments, they being the easiest for burglars-and as they'd been warned it had been full of fleas. But the exterminator said they were in the best families nowadays, heh-heh!, and they were dealt with, and there was new paint everywhere and today Jeannie must have worked like fury because she had new curtains up and new slipcovers on the old furniture.
"Looks great, baby. Just great." And blew her a kiss.
"Like a beer?"
"I could use one."
"Sit down, I'll bring it." And off to the kitchen. It was still equipped with their old stuff from Towerhill, except they'd had to get a new icebox; the old one had died and the only firm in Denver still making repairs had a two-month waiting list. Through the door she called,
"How was your first day at work?"
"Pretty good. Matter of fact I don't hardly feel tired."
"What does a stock supervisor do?"
"Kind of like a dispatcher, I guess. Make sure we record everything we send out for installation, keep a check on what's used and what comes back. Easy bread."
Coming back, she found he wasn't in his chair but heading for the other door.
"Where you going?"
"Bathroom. Back in a minute."
And, returning, took the beer. In a glass, yet. Moving up the scale!
"I got news for you," Jeannie said. "Did you hear they're going to open up the plant again? All the modifications are done, and as soon as they-"
"Baby, you're not going back to the plant."
"Well, not straight away, honey, of course not. I mean until you can drive again, and like that. But here in Denver it's…" A vague gesture.
"Paying so much rent, and all."
"No," Pete said again, and fished with two fingers in the breast pocket of his shirt. The little plastic dispenser of contraceptive pills.
New, untouched. The monthly cycle began today.
"And you can forget about these, too," he said.
"Pete!"
"Cool it, baby. You know what they're going to pay me."
She gave a hesitant nod.
"Add on what I get for these TV commercials, then."
Another nod.
"Well, isn't that enough to raise a kid on?"
She didn't say anything.
"Ah, hell, baby, come on!" he exclaimed. "Now while we got the chance, now's the time! Shit, you know how they're going to lay out the next commercial I make? In the middle like Santa Claus surrounded by kids, telling the mothers all over the state that this here big hero who saved those kids' lives wants them to buy water-filters and save their lads from bellyache!" His tone was abruptly bitter, and just as abruptly reverted to normal.
"Well, it's a good thing to be selling if you have to sell something for a living. I talked to Doc McNeil and he said so. Said it could have helped a lot of babies that died of that enteritis."
"Yes, honey," Jeannie said. "But suppose-ours…"
"Baby, I said I talked to Doc McNeil. That's one of the things I talked about. And he says shoot. He says…"
"What?" She leaned forward on her chair.
"He says if I like fall down stairs, or do something else bad to myself, there may not-uh-be another chance."
There was a long cold silence. At length Jeannie set her glass aside.
"I get you, honey," she whispered. "Sorry, I never thought of that.
What about right now?"
"Yeah, and right here. Doc says it's better if I lie on my back on a hard floor."
A DC-10 coming in to land at Tegucigalpa was hit by
Tupamaro tracer and crashed on the control tower, which
confirmed the decision to pull out. The previous record for the
duration of a don't-drink notice was broken in New Orleans (that's
a long river and a lot of people use it). The Bamberleys' family
doctor called to treat the latest of Cornelius's fits-which was going
to earn him a good old-fashioned beating when he recovered,
because he knew he was forbidden to eat candy. The enteritis
epidemic was declared officially over for the fourth time. And they
completed the autopsy on Dr. Stanway, conducted at his own
morgue: verdict, the extremely common one of degenerative
nephritis.
He was, admittedly, only thirty-one. But he had after all spent
his whole life in Los Angeles and Orange County.
Not surprising.
"Delighted to meet you, Mr. Thorne," Professor Quarrey said. His clothes hung loose on him, as though he had lost ten pounds in the past few weeks. "Do sit down. Would you like some sherry?"
An aptly academic drink. Thorne smiled and took the nearest chair as the professor's wife-looking even more exhausted than her husband, with large dark rings under her eyes-filled glasses and offered a dish of nuts. She had a plaster on her nape; the shape of the lump underneath suggested a boil.
"Here's to a fellow-sufferer," Quarrey said. Thorne gave a humorless laugh and drank.
"Congratulations on your acquittal, by the way," he said. "I confess I was expecting you to be pilloried."
"There was some-ah-horse-trading behind the scenes," Quarrey said. "You're aware that they plan to resume production at Bamberley Hydroponics?"
"Yes, I saw Moses Greenbriar recently and he told me."
"Well, they want someone who can't be accused of being a government yes-man to approve their new filtration system. As you know, that's my field, and I was approached, very discreetly, and asked whether I'd cooperate in exchange for a dismissal of that ridiculous charge." A sigh. "It may not have been very courageous of me, but I said yes."
"But they haven't stopped persecuting us!" his wife chimed in, joining her husband on the shabby davenport facing Thorne. "I'm sure our telephone is being tapped."
"And they definitely open my mail," Quarrey grunted.
"Which I wouldn't mind if they had the courtesy to screen out the abusive letters…You get any of those? I imagine you do."
Thorne nodded.
"There's our prize exhibit," Quarrey said, pointing to the wall behind his guest. "I had it framed to remind me just how important it is to keep trying."
Thorne twisted around. In a smart new frame, a sheet torn from a cheap yellow memo block. He read the semi-literate capitals that almost covered it: "TO MISTER COMMIE ASS LICKING
QUAREY YOU SAY ONE MORE WORD AGANST AMRICA
WELL HANG YOU BY YOUR PRICK ON A FAGPOLE GET
OUT OR WELL BURN DOWN YOUR HOME AND YOUR
NIGGERFUCKING WIFE TOO OUHT TO HAVE A GUN
STUFF UP HER CUNT NOW YOU NOW WHAT LOYAL
AMRICANS THINK OF TRATORS."
"The fagpole is an original touch," Quarrey said with a tired smile, and sipped his sherry.
There was a long silence. Thorne wanted it to end, but he couldn't think of the best words. He had been growing daily more ashamed since Nancy died-ashamed of not having understood before, in the guts where it counts, what suffering really meant. It was a tough job managing the vast sums that the guilty conscience of the Western world siphoned into Globe Relief, and no one denied that, including him; he was dealing with sums that exceeded the turnover of all but the largest European and American corporations. That alone, though, wasn't justification for the income he'd been drawing, even if it did average out to less than half a cent per person helped. So he'd taken refuge behind the additional defense that he had a wife to provide for and might well one day adopt a kid. (By a twenty-two-to-one chance he and Nancy had both been carrying the recessive gene for cystic fibrosis, and a child of their own would be mentally retarded.) Without Nancy, it was as though cataracts had been taken from his eyes. It had become suddenly clear: there are madmen in charge, and they must be stopped!
He had read feverishly, beginning with Austin Train's famous source-books that had taken one, two, even three years apiece to compile, soberly documenting the course of organochlorides in the biosphere, factory-smoke on the wind, pinning down some-not all, because often the information was denied to the public-of the places where dangerous substances had been dumped. Among the first things he'd come across was a description of the gas-disposal program in 1919. And on top of that radioactive waste, nerve gas, fluorine compounds, cyanide solutions…
It was as though you tore up the floorboards of an apartment you'd just bought and found a corpse grinning at you.
But even more educational were the things he couldn't find out. In the New York Public Library Train's works were on open shelves-there would have been riots if they hadn't been-but of the total of 1130 other books cited in the various bibliographies, 167 were withdrawn or restricted.
He'd asked why, and the answers came back pat-"Oh, there was a libel case over that. Something about General Motors, I believe."
And-"Well, someone defaced our only copy, it says here, and it was out of print by then, I'm afraid."
One book in particular he remembered, a text on accidents with nuclear weapons, which was duly brought to him by a smiling librarian.
But when he opened the front cover he found a hole had been carefully cut from first page to last.
"Do you know what's become of Austin Train?" Mrs. Quarrey said suddenly.
Thorne blinked. "As a matter of fact that was one of the questions I came to ask your husband. I understand the Trainites contacted you some while ago and asked for help in a nationwide survey they're doing on Puritan products-is that true?"
Quarrey nodded.
"And I've been hunting high and low in the hope of locating Train, but so far all my leads have taken me to one of these-these Doppelgangers of his." Thorne hesitated. "Do you think he's dead?"
"One does keep hearing rumors," Quarrey sighed. "He never had any direct connection with the Trainites, of course, but the latest story I've heard did come from a Trainite, for what that's worth. Claimed that he was burned to death in that slum apartment in San Diego."
"I've heard that too," Thorne agreed. "But I think its another of these mistaken identity cases. Incidentally, do you know where that crazy fisherman got his napalm?"
"I don't think so."
"It was part of a consignment we supplied to the Mexicans to burn off marijuana fields."
"Well, that's the chickens coming home to roost with a vengeance,"
Quarrey said with a sour chuckle. "Why have you been hunting so hard for Train, by the way? More sherry?"
"Please, it's very good…Well, I guess because he seems to be about the only person who might lead us out of this mess. I mean so many people respect him and at least give lip-service to his principles.
Do you agree?"
"In a way," the professor said thoughtfully. "We need something to break us out of this-this isolationism we've drifted into. I don't mean that in the standard sense; I mean more isolationism in
time,
as it were.
We're divorced from reality, in the same way as the Romans went on thinking of themselves as invulnerable and unchallengeable long after it ceased to be true. The most awful warnings are staring us in the face-the stagnant Mediterranean above all, dead like the Great Lakes-yet we're so proud of being the richest, the most powerful, the whatever, that we won't face facts. We won't admit that we're short of water, we're short of timber, we're short of-"
"Food," Thorne said positively. "Or we shall be next winter. That's why they're so eager to resume production of Nutripon. I met a very interesting guy the other day, used to work for Angel City, an actuary called Tom Grey. He's based in New York now, and I met him through Moses Greenbriar, at the Bamberley Trust. He's been compiling masses of social data for years, for some obsessive project of his own, and Moses asked him to extrapolate the question of this year's crop failures. You know crops are bad everywhere."
"Bad? Disastrous!" Quarrey snorted. "Idaho, the Dakotas, Colorado, Wisconsin…Yes, you mentioned this survey the Trainites asked me to coordinate; frankly, I'm of two minds about going through with it."
"Not surprising!" his wife said with asperity. "He's had his life threatened, Mr. Thorne-no, dear, I will not keep quiet about that! It's disgraceful! We've had at least half a dozen anonymous phone calls threatening to kill Lucas if he carries on, and since as I said I'm sure the police are tapping the phone they must know we're telling the truth, but they won't do anything about it."