Authors: John Brunner
"I'll call the doctor," Mr. Bamberley said at length. "Clearly you haven't recovered from your-uh-recent indisposition."
He turned to the door.
"After this incredible outburst I no longer have an appetite. If anyone wants me, I shall be in the den."
He was shaking from head to foot when he reached it and almost fell back against the door as it swung to.
Dear God! What had taken possession of the woman? Never in all their years of marriage had she uttered such-such foulness!
He groped on his desk-handsome, English, antique, roll-topped-for his bottle of tranquilizers, and took another dose: two capsules.
Obviously the ones he'd taken already today weren't enough. He was after all a trifle heavier than average.
Facing the desk, a velvet chair. He lapsed into it, panting a little. To think of Maud saying that in front of the boys! What poison might she not have poured into their innocent ears? Even granting that she was-uh-disturbed, on this day of all days…!
Oh, it was all too much. He abandoned the struggle to think. And was thereupon reminded by his body that he'd told a white lie at the table. He did indeed have an appetite. His belly was growling.
What to do? One could hardly phone to the kitchen, since Christy had heard what he said about not being hungry, and in any case she was probably helping to attend to Cornelius-Cornelius. Of course. That secret store of candy he'd confiscated from the boy, the stuff that had triggered his last attack. Well, a chocolate bar would at least stave off the worst pangs. Perhaps when Dr. Halpern had called, Maud would calm down or be confined to her room and they could eat lunch after all, pretending things were back to normal.
He bit savagely down on slightly stale chocolate.
Giddy?
Air!
Window!
Eighteen feet to the polished stone flags of the terrace.
"But he said he never ate candy," Dr. Halpern muttered, his mind full of visions of malpractice suits. "I warned him about cheese, but he said he never ate…Didn't he mention that?"
Knuckles locked around a tear-wet handkerchief, Maud whimpered, "Yes, he said you asked about that. He thought it was because he was-uh-overweight."
That was all right, then. Thank God. Dr. Halpern rose.
"I guess we'd better carry him indoors. Is there someone?"
"Just the maids and the cook."
"They'll have to do."
"We've duplicated it," the Cuban chemist said tiredly. It had been a terribly long job, and exhausting. But it was done. "Here. It's exact, down to the last side chain. There isn't much-we don't have facilities to manufacture nerve gas. So be sure you put it to good use."
"Thank you. We shall."
Fifteen minutes out of Mexico City for Tokyo a passenger
aboard a 747 screamed that he was being eaten by red-hot ants,
and managed to open the emergency door at 23,000 feet. He had
been to the washroom and drunk from the faucet there before
takeoff.
It was, after all, labeled DRINKING WATER.
"What the hell?" the ex-soldier said. "She's American, isn't she?
And you know what those mothers did at Noshri!"
They found her by the washy light of dawn. According to the
forensic experts she had been raped by at least three men and
possibly as many as twelve. They couldn't say whether it was
before or after she was strangled.
It had taken three days to locate her. Her dark skin was hard
to spot among the underbrush.
A car pulled into a filling station in Tucson. Two black men got out and headed for the men's room. But when they reached its door they broke into a run.
The gas station burned for two hours.
Dynamite.
Also in Peoria, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, San Bernardino,
Jacksonville, Albany, Evanston, Dallas and Baton Rouge.
The first day.
Under construction, a cloverleaf intersection near Huntsville, Alabama. The concrete was just starting to harden when it was hit. It turned out to be cheaper to scrap the lot than attempt repairs.
Also at eight other places where the roads happened to have
arrived, not famous for anything in their own right.
At the big Georgia paper mill the saboteur was obviously a chemist.
Some kind of catalyst was substituted for a drum of regular sizing solution and vast billowing waves of corrosive fumes ruined the plant.
Anonymous calls to a local TV station claimed it had been done to preserve trees.
The same day, in northern California, signs were posted on a stand of redwoods that the governor had authorized for lumbering: about two hundred of the last six hundred in the state. The signs said: FOR
EVERY TREE YOU KILL ONE OF YOU WILL DIE TOO.
The promise was carried out with Schmiesser machine-pistols. The actual score was eighteen people for seventeen trees.
Close enough.
In Little Rock Mrs. Mercy Cable, who had found a skull and
crossbones painted on her car when she came out of the doctor's
office with her sick son, died protesting that she had meant to
wash it off.
Well, she was black anyway. The mob went home to lunch.
But the most ingenious single
coup
was later laid at the door of a Chicano working for the California State Board of Education.
(Prudently he wasn't behind the door at the time; he'd emigrated via Mexico to Uruguay.) He'd used the computerized student records to organize a free mailing of literally thousands of identical envelopes, every one addressed to somebody receiving public education in the state. They never did find out exactly how many there had been, because although they were all postmarked July 1st, the mails were so lousy nowadays they arrived over a period of a week, and by the end of that time parents alert to protect their kids from commie propaganda had been warned to destroy the envelopes before the intended recipients could open them. But they guessed that fifty thousand did get through.
On each envelope was printed: A FREE GIFT FOR YOU ON
INDEPENDENCE DAY, COURTESY OF THE "BE A BETTER
AMERICAN LEAGUE." Inside there was a handsome print, in copperplate engraving style, showing a tall man at a table with several companions handing pieces of cloth to a group of nearly naked Indians of both sexes.
Underneath was the caption:
First in a Series Commemorating
Traditional American Values. The Governor of Massachusetts
Distributes Smallpox-Infected Blankets to the Indians.
OUT IN THE OPEN, SHUT UP
It was kind of a fraught scene around the Bay right now-there was this big drive on to catch dodgers. Anyone out on the street (though who'd want to be, when the wind was blowing off the miles-wide garbage pile that blocked the Bay?) who was young and male or a reasonable facsimile thereof, was apt to be dragged into a squad car and left to cool in a cell until he produced a discharge certificate or a valid excuse for not serving. Everyone went around sweating and wishing they'd made it to Canada, or to Mexico before that crazy spic mounted his fire-balloon raids on San Diego. Following that the border had become tighter than a khathead's asshole.
Must have something to do with Honduras, they figured, though there hadn't been much news from down there since the Tupas took Tegucigalpa and drove the legal government to San Pedro Sula. The Pentagon was doing the tar-baby bit.
It eased the problem when Hugh and Carl, together with their friends-or rather Kitty's-Chuck and Tab got in a fight one night with a pair of ex-Marines and acquired their discharge certificates after knocking them out. The man they were still calling Ossie even though they had long ago realized he wasn't the original Austin Train knew where he could get them copied and altered. So now they all had documents to prove they'd done their stint…at least to the local pigs.
Trying them on at a state border post would have been dicey, which was why they hadn't headed inland.
Train-as-was hadn't mentioned his real name, but they had discussed the idea of his giving up the alias. He was disgusted with his former idol. Why in hell, he kept asking, didn't the mother come out of hiding and assume leadership of the revolutionary forces awaiting centralized command? It was a fair question. This summer the nation was aboil. People drifted in from out of state occasionally, and they all told the same story, though you wouldn't have known the truth from the regular news. You couldn't walk the streets of any major city without seeing the skull and crossbones. People had taken to painting signs on their own front doors; they were being marketed as skin decals like the one Ossie had been wearing when Hugh and Carl met him, and illuminated plastic models were offered to hang on gateposts. The whole agricultural section of the country was seething because of this pest that was killing crops, and that was new-normally the rural communities were blind-loyal. Moreover, the acts of sabotage tabulated in the underground papers came from literally every state, from sugar in a gas tank to caltraps on a freeway.
Also bombs-though they weren't in the Trainite tradition, strictly speaking.
But for Ossie's fair question Carl had a fair answer, and it sounded only too likely to be true.
"My guess is the guy's been liquidated. Making too much trouble for the bosses. Look at what happened to Lucas Quarrey and Gerry Thorne!"
Still, things weren't so bad you couldn't hold a party, and on the Fourth of July they decided to hold one. It was kind of swinging ahead of midnight. Eighteen people in the pad and lots of noise. All very high on pot or khat.
Also there was wine but hardly anyone touched it. They put things on the grapes and the pickers died. Kitty hadn't shown, but what the hell? There were other chicks here. So far Hugh had made it with two he hadn't met before, friends of Tab's, and he was reassured and felt great. Making it with Carl so much of the time led to worry, but Tab had scored for L-dopa, and it worked.
There was a phone. Owing to non-payment of a bill it was good for incoming calls only right now, and was going to be removed altogether some time soon. It rang and went on ringing until finally Hugh picked it up to say drop dead. But after he'd listened for a while he yelled for quiet.
"It's about Kitty," he explained.
Several friends of friends asked who Kitty was. He shut them up.
"Been to this fireworks party on the campus." Someone turned down the tape-player until the group on it sounded as though they were on the phone themselves, long-distance. "Well?"
"Busted. Not
just
busted. Beaten up."
"Ah, shit!" Carl frog-hopped toward him. "Her, or the whole bunch? And who's calling?"
"Chuck. He says the lot. Someone's uptight because they been bombing gas stations all over with like Roman candles."
"Shit, man, why din' we think of that?" Tab clapped his forehead with his open palm, smack.
"But why bust the campus?" demanded one of the girls Hugh had made it with earlier. Name of Cindy, Hugh believed. A student there.
Black.
"Someone hoisted the skull and crossbones on that big flagpole near the dean's-"
"Oh,
fantastic
! Cindy went sprawling backwards in a fit of laughter, flinging wide the shirt which was all she wore to show off her so-to-say negative tattoo: a skull whose eyes were her nipples, bared teeth across her midriff, crossed bones intersecting at her pubis, which she shaved. It was done by minor cosmetic surgery and could be reversed. She always assured people it could be reversed.
"Yeah," Hugh muttered. "But they got like clubbed and dragged in the wagon."
There was silence as he put down the phone. Ossie said suddenly,
"We got to get back at them. We
got
to!"
"No use just hitting and running!" Carl snapped. "Got to hurt the man who gives the orders!"
"Well, who gives the orders?" Ossie rounded on him.
"The rich! Shit, baby, who else?"
"Right. And we got a pipeline to the rich-you didn't notice? I've been thinking about this a lot. Hugh, how much is Roland Bamberley worth?"
Some of the listeners went back to what they'd been doing before, mainly screwing, but a few stayed to listen because they sensed this was strong.
"Christ, millions! Thirty? Fifty?
I
don't know!"
"You ever met him?" Ossie pressed.
"Well, just the one time. At Jack Bamberley's."
"And this son of his-what's his name?"
"Oh, Hector!" Hugh began to giggle. He was adrift on pot and khat both and maybe the L-dopa was having impact too; all three were fighting inside his head to keep him floating. "Shit, is that ever a ridiculous scene! He keeps that son of his like wrapped in Saran.
Know he wasn't even allowed to eat with us? Special food checked out by this tame chemist. Travels everywhere with a bodyguard, night and day-armed, too. Hell, I swear I hardly saw his face. Made to keep his filtermask on all the time he's outdoors, even in Colorado!"
"And he's how old-fifteen?"
"I guess. Going on sixteen now, maybe." But Hugh was over his giggles and beginning to be puzzled. "What's this about?"
"One moment. One itty-bitty moment. You read how he got this franchise for the whole state with these Jap water-purifiers?"
"Yeah, they put one in where we go have breakfast sometimes.
Make a thing of it on the wall. Posters."
"Well, don't you think Hector ought to be a little less protected, the rest of us a little more?" Ossie hunkered forward. "Like shouldn't we get next to him and-uh-invite him to see how the other half lives?" He waved at the smoky room and implied the entire filthy city beyond.
There was a confused silence. Carl said at length, "You mean like kidnap him? Hold him for ransom?"
"Ah, shit!" Hugh began, but Ossie cut him short
"Not money, baby. Not a cash ransom. I'm thinking of"-he groped in the air as though seizing a number from a lucky dip-"like twenty thousand water-purifiers installed free of charge if he wants to see his boy again."