“I wouldn’t like it. In fact, when you put it that way, I don’t like it at all.”
Esther put the top back on the salad bowl and set it on the corner of the desk. “In a way, that’s what we try to deal with. What are the health effects on which parts of the exposed population and how do we set tolerances and allowable residue levels to provide adequate protection?”
Corellian forced the plastic top back on the disposable plastic salad bowl. His eyes strayed toward the covered dish on the desk blotter. “The cheesecake looks better and better.”
“I’ll cut you a piece before I start to make your eyes glaze over with descriptions of dose-response curves.”
Corellian nodded amiably, folding his brown bag and easing it quietly into the industrial gray trash container beside the desk.
“Turned out almost perfect this time. I did promise Keri I’d bring her home at least a piece, and Renee deserves one for putting up with a very cranky boss these past months.”
26
“PLEASE REMAIN IN YOUR SEATS until the aircraft has come to a complete halt at the gate.”
From his aisle seat McDarvid could see the lights of National Airport through the window to his right, across an empty seat and past the thin black man in the leather jacket who had snored most of the way from Savannah. The 737 turned off the taxiway and onto the apron in front of the north terminal.
“Please remain in your seats,” repeated the flight attendant.
The consultant looked at his battered brown leather attaché case, bulging with the materials from JAFFE’s Georgia metals plant, then checked his watch. Six forty-three. With luck, he might be home within an hour. He’d have to take the Metro—no way would a cab get him home more quickly in rush-hour traffic. He would have preferred to drive to the airport, but with the endless reconstruction, there was never anywhere to park.
Not likely he would get home in time for the PTA meeting. Not at all, but then, all they ever did was talk about how the teachers had to be more accountable. That meant more paperwork for the teachers, not more or better teaching. Sometimes he wondered if the whole country had lost its mind.
As the plane eased to a stop, McDarvid flicked off the seat belt. His head ached, and his mouth tasted like aircraft fuel.
“So why do you travel?” he muttered to himself. But there wasn’t a good answer. Even the few trips that he took were too much. It played hell with Allyson’s schedule, Mrs. Hughes, and with the kids.
Mrs. Hughes would glare at him, and David would ignore him until tomorrow. Elizabeth … well, Elizabeth was Elizabeth.
“The Captain has turned off the signs, and you may move about the cabin.” Most of the passengers were already unbelted and rummaging for assorted cases, coats, and luggage.
McDarvid had the attaché case and the overnight bag sitting on the seat, ready for the shuffle that would lead him through the jetway and out into a too-warm October night.
The thin black man in the dark leather jacket yawned and stretched, revealing a series of heavy gold chains around his neck.
McDarvid nodded. Probably drug money. Was his immediate conclusion that prejudiced? Somehow he doubted it. He swung his overnight bag and briefcase into the aisle and walked toward the front of the plane.
“Good night, sir.”
“Good night,” he replied automatically, shifting his grip on the overnight bag as he crossed onto the jetway. Damp warm air, mixed with jet fuel, seeped into his nostrils.
As always, the terminal was crowded, mostly with returning business types, although he dodged around a woman with a stroller and two toddlers hanging on to her raincoat. One wore a harness linked to her wrist.
McDarvid smiled. They could have used a harness for David on more than one occasion.
Outside the north terminal, he glanced upward through the lights. Although it was cloudy and damp, no rain was falling. He turned south, heading toward the Metro.
His forehead was damp by the time he was ready to cross the exit road to the station, and he paused, waiting for the crossing light. He stood alone in the twilight.
“Guess everyone else is taking cabs.”
The light changed, and McDarvid stepped forward.
Whhhssss …
With a lurch, he staggered back, nearly tumbling to the pavement in his escape from the dark car that had not bothered to heed the light.
“Damned diplomats,” he mumbled, straightening up. He hadn’t seen all the plate as the vehicle had rushed past, just the red and white and blue, and the initials—something like FC-021. Or had it been FC-012?
He shook his head and looked again, then stumbled across the road just before the light changed.
At least, a yellow line train was waiting as he marched onto the platform. The blue line train would have taken at least another ten minutes. The trip to Gallery Place was easy enough, the car nearly empty, and he only waited four minutes for the red line train to Friendship Heights.
The hard part was the walk home. While his legs were fine, his forehead was dripping by the time he reached the front steps. He still sweated like a pig with any exercise.
“Good evening, Mr. McDarvid. You had a long trip?” Mrs. Hughes had on the brown coat, handbag in hand, by the time he opened the door and struggled through.
“Too long, Mrs. Hughes. Any trip is too long.” He dropped the hanging bag, set down the case, and fumbled for his wallet. He handed her the extra five dollars for the overtime. “Any problems?”
“No, Mr. McDarvid. I will see you on Thursday.”
“Father, is that you?”
“Yeah, the one and only. Come and give me a hug. It’s been a long couple of days.”
“Father…”
“Elizabeth…”
But she still gave him the hug.
27
“HOW WAS THE BATTERY PLANT?” asked Jonnie.
“It was a battery plant.” McDarvid put the attaché case on his desk and thumbed one lock, then the other, stacking the materials, including the monitoring data, in piles.
“Find anything new?”
“You always find out something new when you visit a plant.” McDarvid slid the empty case into the space between the desk and the wall, then nudged the wastebasket back into place. He looked over the stacks of papers he had left. “Never goes away.”
“You look beat.”
“I am. I don’t like traveling. When I got home, Allyson had already left for the PTA meeting—and wasn’t real thrilled about my not being there. We both hate it. Don’t ask me why we go. I took the Metro home because there’s no parking at National, and I have trouble justifying twenty-dollar cab rides to myself. Nearly got plowed by some damned diplomat—”
“Local hazard. You okay?”
“Fine. Just a pain after a long day. You know where you cross the exit road to get to the Metro station? When the light changed, I started to cross, but this idiot doesn’t even stop.”
“What country was he from?”
“How the hell would I know? The tags said FC something or other.”
“Russia.”
McDarvid glanced up from the stack of papers he was rearranging. “How do you know?”
Jonnie chuckled. “It’s a standing joke. The State Department assigned the letter codes for each country. The idea was to assist FBI surveillance, but the codes were supposed to be a secret so that the local nuts didn’t slash the tires of their favorite targets. The ‘FC’ is Russian because some wit in the State Department basement who assigned the codes decided that the Russians were ‘fuckin’ communists.’ So … FC.”
“You’re shitting me.”
Jonnie shook his head. “Nah. Whether the story’s true or not, FC does mean Soviet or Russian or whatever they’re calling themselves this week.”
McDarvid sighed. “Anyway, after escaping that, and riding the Metro, it was so hot I was sweating like a pig by the time I walked from Friendship Heights home. It was a long night … What about you?”
“Assumptions?”
Jonnie nodded.
“That won’t help much. They’ll just explain that they’re using the most conservative assumptions to protect public health. What about benefits?”
“It’s all there.” Jonnie pointed to the folder on the corner of the desk. “I also drafted a rough piece for the pesticide policy paper. It’s in your pesticide subdirectory on the network.”
“At least we can get that out.” McDarvid dropped into his chair. “Then we can start on the metals papers.” He gestured at Jonnie. “You know, the whole metals initiative doesn’t make any sense.”
“What do you mean—no sense?”
“They rebuilt the whole plant five years ago. Automated it, built separate clean rooms for the cadmium coating, trimming. They use positive pressure systems everywhere. It’s a damned modern facility. It cost almost a hundred million to rebuild.” McDarvid waited.
Jonnie frowned.
“Yeah. A hundred million for a facility that nets maybe five million. When the twenty-microgram standard for cadmium came down six, seven years ago, they had to rebuild. They thought that a really automated facility would take on the Japanese plants in Mexico and Korea and avoid import tariffs and quotas. So they gambled. The control systems let them comply with the OSHA regs and stay in the business. But the Japanese put even more capital into plants that were newer than JAFFE’s to begin with. And they put most of their money into process engineering, not environmental controls. They didn’t have to meet the twenty standard. So JAFFE’s barely hanging in after spending a hundred million. Now there’s a second round of worker protection regulations, and they don’t want to spend another hundred million. Of course, the Japanese are sitting pretty.
“Hell, the JAFFE engineers sweated blood to design for twenty micrograms, and we’re talking something forty times lower.”
“Do you think OSHA really wants that?”
“No. But even if they’ll settle for just one microgram, that’s still a twentyfold reduction for a plant that took nearly a hundred million to get to twenty. And the offshore competition is at forty, or higher.”
“So unless we get a pretty big change, they shut down,” Jonnie concluded.
“I’d say so. Devenant didn’t quite say that, but his treasurer’s books say so. The figures are here.” He touched one of the piles of paper.
“What about the other U.S. companies?”
“They’re in worse shape, from what I can figure.”
“Aren’t they complaining?”
“Sure. To the trade associations and to Congress, and they’ve all hired lawyers—none of which will do them any good.”
“You’re always so positive.”
“Right, just good old cheerful Jack.” He turned in the chair, neither looking at Jonnie nor out the window. “Well, all we can do is what we can.” He paused. “And does that sound stupid.” Then he stood, picking up a sheaf of paper. “Here are the cost numbers on cadmium. The beryllium numbers are coming from California. Do what you can.”
“How soon?”
McDarvid shrugged. “As soon as you can without killing yourself.”
28
“WHAT IS THAT?” asked Allyson, standing behind McDarvid’s shoulder.
“What?”
“That cover. It looks like a satellite with an X through it.”
“Good. That’s what it’s supposed to look like.” McDarvid could tell she was frowning, perhaps because she had breezed through three years of calculus and two years of physics, plus biology, physiology, and everything else required for medical school. All McDarvid had managed had been Amherst’s distributional requirements—two semesters of astronomy and two semesters of college calculus—and flight school, courtesy of the U.S. Navy.
“How much are you stretching things this time? What does a satellite have to do with environmental regulations?”
McDarvid turned. Usually regulatory work bored the hell out of his wife, the good Dr. Newsome. “A whole lot, in this case. It’s all about power. Real power, not the political kind. Satellites need power, and half of their power systems are comprised of batteries.”
“Jack, they use solar cells to get power.”
“And where do they store that power? For when they’re in the earth’s shadow? Or for other uses.”
“Other uses?”
“Burst communications and SDI,” mumbled McDarvid.
“The space lasers … oh.”
“Right. Lasers work on bursts of power.”
“Now you’ve sold out to the weapons lobby?”
McDarvid flushed. “Do you know how many lives the weather satellites have saved? Or why transatlantic telephone calls no longer cost ten bucks a minute?”
“What do satellites have to do with your work?” Allyson’s voice remained calm, nearly clinical.
“The metals involved. Most commercial satellites use nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries. Chrome and beryllium are also used in key fabricated elements. This metals initiative by OSHA and DEP would close down most U.S. battery facilities and shift most beryllium fabrication offshore. Chrome’s bad enough already, since you can only get it from the Russians or about three places in Africa, one of which is South Africa.”
“What about the health side?”
McDarvid shrugged. “That’s the strange thing. They want to set the level at a half microgram per cubic meter or a half part per million.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah. It doesn’t make sense. The current cadmium standard is around twenty micrograms. That’s roughly the same as—”
“Jack, I was using micrograms before you—”
“Sorry. I sometimes forget. I have to explain to so many people.”
“That’s all right.” Her long strong fingers squeezed his shoulder.
He just wanted to lean back and enjoy the sensation.
“If it’s not the defense contractors, who’s the client?” she asked after a moment, her fingers leaving his shoulders.
He could tell she was losing interest. “No one you’ve probably ever heard of. A French outfit called JAFFE.”
“JAFFE? The big pharmaceutical and chemicals firm?”
“You’ve heard of them?”
“Be careful, Jack.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just be careful. They’re the biggest in the world, or close to it. They didn’t like some research one of my professors at Harvard published. So they made his research life cease to exist for a decade.” She half turned from him and looked into the darkness outside the study windows. “At least they hired you.”
McDarvid bit his tongue. Allyson had said what she was going to say. He reached down and turned off the desk light, then stepped up behind her, letting his arms go around her waist, letting his head rest beside hers.
They stood in the dimness for a long time.
29
HE STUDIED THE HORIZON, squinting even through the darkness of the helmet visor. Far beneath his wings glittered the patchwork of white, broken only by an occasional highway and rail line. Always the winter—the ever-present winter. He let his fingers ease back on the throttle and edge the nose down.
Even through the helmet and the tightly fitting ear pads, the engines whined deep into his skull.
His eyes flicked from outside the cockpit to the gauges, part of the long-established scan. He checked the single small radar screen, then swallowed as a blip appeared at two o’clock—a red dot that pulsed intermittently. He squinted again toward the setting sun, trying to make out the bogey. Nothing. He flicked across the U.S. tactical frequencies.
“Klondike, interrogative lock-on. Interrogative lock-on.”
“Negative. That’s negative.”
Behind the face shield, t
he pilot frowned, his fingers straying toward the burner light-offs.
“Satcom link down. Link down,” the words scratched into the pilot’s earphones. Even the reflections off the bare metal and the heavy rivets on the swept wings seemed directed at him, as though designed to blind him.
“Bogey bearing two-ten. Negative lock-on.”
At the bearing information, his eyes flicked back to the instruments as the light above the screen flickered. He ignored the transmission, pulling the gees so hard that his vision flashed red in the turn, the stick now nearly into his gut. But the blinking of the light above the screen increased as the other pilot neared missile lock-on.
Still … he could see nothing to the west, nothing at all. No dark points against the sun, nor against the winter white below. Nothing except the radar beam from the unseen aircraft that indicated he could be dead.
The fuel needle showed the afterburners’ thirst—less than half an hour left.
The red-tinged sun hung on the horizon, and a black dot that resolved into two dots appeared at the edge of the corona.
The red dot pulsed even brighter on the screen, and a host of red sparks showered from it.
“Shit…”
He jammed the stick forward, then into the turn, sucking his guts in at the gee force.
Into the turn back toward the field, he glanced at the radar screen, confirming two bogeys on his tail.
The lock-on light flashed a last time, before blaring red across the panel. The afterburners roared in his ears, but the red sparks on the screen grew larger, larger …
Red … red … red!
McDarvid bolted upright in his bed, feeling the pounding of his heart. Quietly, he eased the covers aside and swung his feet onto the carpet, trying to breathe easily. His forehead was coated in sweat.
The Green Progression Page 11