Authors: John Brunner
"But that's serious!" Thorne exclaimed. "They must know-everybody knows-Puritan is a Syndicate operation, and if you're trying to drive their prices down-"
"It's not quite like that," Quarrey cut in.
Thorne stared at him for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair. "I'm sorry. I seem to have been jumping to conclusions. I assumed that you were looking for food being sold by Puritan which doesn't match their claims, so as to-uh-pressurize them into cutting their extravagant profit margins."
"There's no question of having to look for food which isn't up to their advertised standards," Quarrey said. "You stand about an even chance of finding it at random."
There was dead silence. Eventually Thorne shook his head. "I don't think I quite understand."
"It's very simple. It must have struck you that in spite of their exorbitant prices Puritan sells a colossal volume of food?"
"Yes, fantastic. It's an index of how frightened people really are.
Especially parents of young children."
"Well, what some Trainite has discovered-I don't know who, this is all being conducted on an anonymous footing-what he's worked out is this. If you divide the amount of home-grown produce Puritan sells per year into the amount of ground you'd need to grow it on, there literally isn't enough uncontaminated land left in North America. Not after the watershed defoliation program of the sixties. And he's analyzed their stuff, and as I say about half of it is no better than you can get in a regular supermarket I'm still checking out his calculations, but I'm fairly sure he's proved his point."
"I'm wondering," Mrs. Quarrey said, "whether it could be Austin Train himself."
Thorne glanced at her and back at her husband. "Well, I don't see why you don't publish straight away!" he exclaimed. "If you've been threatened, wouldn't publicity be the best protection?"
"I told him that," Mrs. Quarrey said firmly.
"And I was going to," the professor said. "Until the Trainites told me what's happening to those crops that are failing. Do you know what we've let into the country?"
"Well, some sort of insect pest, I gather. Or pests, at least, seeing they ruin so many different plants."
"It's the worm that caused the famine in Honduras, and indirectly led to the war."
"Oh, no!" Thorne's mouth was suddenly dry. "But
how
?"
"Imported under Federal license," Quarrey said with gloomy relish, as of a preacher at the graveside of an unreformed drunkard. "They were discovered at the Trainite wat in Colorado, and someone with Tupamaro contacts managed to identify them. Apparently one of the big insect importers sub-contracted his worm business to a guy who was supposed to supply Argentine worms, but he didn't give a hoot, cheated them right and left, palmed off thousands of gallons of these damned pests, and skipped to Australia with the proceeds."
"Incredible!" Thorne breathed. "But didn't they realize they weren't getting regular worms?
"Oh, they were mixed in with ordinary worms. And apart from being slightly bluish and a bit differently shaped, these
jigras,
as they call them, do look pretty much like real worms."
"But the experts at the importing company!" Thorne clenched his fists. "Or the customs! Didn't they worry about them being blue?"
"Of course not. He dyed them pink."
"Of course," Thorne said bitterly.
"The Trainites take it for granted that the customs officers and the firm's inspectors were bribed, but I find that hard to believe." Quarrey shrugged. "However it happened, though, the damage is done. And the damned things are resistant to just about every known insecticide, banned or legal."
"So you're afraid of the consequences if you frighten people off Puritan," Thorne said slowly.
"Yes, precisely. We're headed for a hungry winter. My Trainite contacts feel the same way, because even if half the Puritan food isn't as good as it's claimed to be, we're going to need every scrap that's even remotely edible."
"Half a loaf," Mrs. Quarrey said.
There was another silence. Eventually Thorne drained his glass. "I'd better be on my way," he muttered. "I'm dining with my lawyer. I guess he'll have another shot at making me drop my suit against the Defense Department. What the hell can you do when even your lawyer doesn't think you can get justice?"
"I understood you were enlisting the support of-well, other support," Quarrey put in.
"Angel City, you mean? Yes, I had high hopes of them. I mean, it's no secret I had a half-million dollar policy on Nancy's life. But they've paid up and kept their mouths shut. As for the nine cases of Lewisite in Florida-"
"
Nine
?"
"I'm morally certain, plus maybe one more. But everyone I've tackled so far has been well paid not to make a fuss." Thorne gave a bitter smile. "They can't reach me, though; I was rich already, and now Angel City has made me richer." He checked his watch.
"Might I have my umbrella, Mrs. Quarrey? And I think you took my mask as well."
But when she opened the apartment door to let him out, there were three men in dark clothes lounging against the opposite wall. His heart lurched into his shoes.
And stopped.
Like the professor's, and his wife's.
"Fish in a barrel," said one of the killers scornfully, and led his companions away.
Doug and Angela McNeil saw the troops encamped near the Towerhill road on their way to dinner at a favorite restaurant in the mountains. They had decided to go out on the spur of the moment.
They could do that sort of thing because they had no kids. A lot of doctors nowadays didn't have kids.
All along the way they kept passing groups of the strange young people who had been drifting into Denver during the previous few days.
By this time hundreds must have arrived. Most had come by bus, and a few among these had brought folding cycles that fitted in a bus's baggage compartment, but the majority were on foot. They obviously hailed from big cities. They had filter-masks around their necks, like the winter tourists who couldn't accept that Colorado air was safe.
"What are they all doing here?" Angela said as they passed one bunch of a dozen or so who had sat down to rest against a big billboard showing the monstrous silhouette of a worm, captioned: HAVE YOU SEEN ANY OF THESE INSECTS? IF YOU DO
INFORM THE POLICE RIGHT AWAY!
"I thought at first they must be some kind of Trainite reunion, on their way to the wat. But they're not. Notice they're wearing synthetics?
Trainites won't."
Angela nodded. Right: all the way from nylon shirts to plastic boots.
"So I guess they're just the mountain counterpart of beach bums."
Unconsciously, Doug had slowed the car to look more closely at them; realizing they wouldn't take kindly to being stared at, he accelerated again. "They can hardly go to California this year, can they?"
"I guess not." Angela shuddered.
"And they can't or won't go to Florida because of the poison-gas scare. So that leaves the mountains. Probably the same is happening back east, in the Poconos for example."
"I can't see them being very warmly welcomed." Angela sounded troubled. "Can you?"
"Well, no. And the forces of lawnorder seem to agree." Doug pointed ahead. Two patrol cars were drawn up on the hard shoulder at a curve, and a group of stem-faced officers were photographing the kids with a Polaroid. Behind one of the cars others were searching a pale youth of about twenty. They had him down to under-shorts. One of the police held his arms, though he was offering no resistance; another was feeling in his crotch with evident enjoyment; a third was searching the knapsack he'd been carrying.
A short distance further on was where they saw the troops: on a fairly level stretch of ground they'd erected tents like orange fungi. Five olive-green trucks were parked by the road.
Doug started. "Say, those are battle-lasers, aren't they?"
"What are?"
"Those trailer things! Christ, are they expecting a civil war? They can't mean to use them against those kids!"
"I should hope not," Angela agreed.
And then, around the next bend, a heavy iron gate was set in a concrete wall with spikes around the top. Alongside it was a big illuminated sign, which read:
BA
MB
ER
LEY
HY
DR
OP
ONI
CS
INC.
SE
RVI
NG
TH
E
NE
ED
S
OF
TH
E
NE
ED
Y.
There was another sign hung on the gate itself which stated that parties of visitors were welcome daily at 1000 and 1500, but that was covered with a piece of sodden sacking.
Well at least you could breathe up here. Even if you couldn't see the stars. Michael Advowson drew what consolation he could from that.
Relishing freedom from the tyranny of a filtermask-though still irritated by a faint burning on the back of his tongue, which had haunted him since his arrival from Europe-he strolled uphill away from the hydroponics plant. It was good to go on grass, although it was dry and brittle, and brush between bushes, although their leaves were gray.
Above all he was on his own, and that was a relief.
Christ. What wouldn't he give to be home right now?
What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported-and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores-these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.
Down in Honduras, for example. Heaven's name! Cromwell had done that sort of thing in Ireland-but that was centuries ago, another and more barbaric age!
He wore his uniform most of the time now. It indicated that he was more than just a foreigner, that he possessed rank in a hierarchy, and these people worshipped power. Recognizing his status, they behaved to him with frigid politeness. No.
Correctness.
But that wasn't what he'd expected. He had kinfolk, going back to the brother of his great-grandfather, who had come here to escape the oppression of the British. He had expected somehow to be-well, greeted as a cousin. Not as a fellow-conspirator.
Loneliness in New York had driven him more and more into the company of the drunken girl who'd picked him up at that diplomatic cocktail party. Sylvia Young, that was her name. He had found something waif-like and wistful behind her facade of sophistication, as though she were in search of a dream from which she could recall only a mood, no details.
The latest meeting had been the night before last, and she was cured, she said, and wanted him to come to bed. But his subconscious was so disturbed he couldn't do anything, and when she snapped at him in frustration he snapped back, saying he'd never known a girl before who'd been infected, at which she gave a bitter laugh and swore she didn't know one who had not and
the laughing dissolved into tears, and she fell against his shoulder and clung there like a frightened child, and from her moans emerged the shreds of that unspeakably pathetic dream: wanting to live somewhere clean, wanting to raise a son with a chance of being healthy.
"Everybody's kids I know have something wrong! Everybody has something wrong with one of their kids!"
As a doctor Michael knew that wasn't true; the incidence of congenital abnormality, even in the States, was still only three or four per cent. But everyone did insure against it as a matter of course, and talked as though the least fit of ill-temper, the least bout of any childish ailment, were the end of the world.
"There must be something that can be done! There must, there must!"
It had crossed his mind: I could offer you-well, not
entirely
a clean place to live, because near Balpenny, when the wind blows from the direction of the industrial estate around Shannon Airport, you go out for a deep first-thing-in-the-moming breath and find yourself choking. But they've promised to do something about that.
Also animals are sometimes born deformed. Still, you can kill animals with more or less a clear conscience.
But I could say: let me show you lakes that are not foul with the leavings of man. Let me reap you crops grown on animal dung and pure clean rain. Let me feed you apples from trees that were never sprayed with arsenic. Let me cut you bread from a cob loaf, that greets your hands with the affectionate warmth of the oven. Let me give you children that need fear nothing worse than a bottle dropped by a drunk, straight-limbed, smiling, clear of speech. And would you care if that speech were full of the echoes of a tongue that spoke civilization a thousand years ago?
But he hadn't said it, only thought it. And probably now he never would. After tomorrow's burning of the suspect food he intended to go straight home on an Aer Lingus flight from Chicago.
On the crest of a rise he paused and looked around. There was the hydroponics plant sprawling like a colossal caterpillar along the side of a hill. He could just make out by uncurtained lighted windows the home of the plant's manager, an agreeable man named Steinitz. More than one could say of his host, Jacob Bamberley…Staying in that great mansion, the enlarged ranch-house of the estate his grandfather had bought, was somehow
wrong,
even though it was surrounded by what were reputed to be marvelous botanical gardens. He had only glimpsed them; they appeared to be drab and ill-doing.
He must drive back there shortly. He had been engaged in a final review of preparations with the American officers in charge, Colonel Saddler, Captain Aarons and Lieutenant Wassermann, and the other UN observer, a Venezuelan called Captain Robles. Michael didn't like any of them, and following the meeting had needed to unwind. Which was why he was out here at midnight under the sky.
Not the stars. Apparently they hadn't been seen here this summer.