by Hugh Howey
The noise and ache in his head was such that he almost lost his sight as they opened the tent flap and escorted him inside. But he had to see this. He knew that it was impossible, alien, and that it was the source of all his terrible pain. A triangle hovered in the air, three feet from the dirt, its surface not metal but liquid silver. It radiated cold light, humming with what sounded like the far off laughter of children. Or maybe a creek. Or maybe rain on a tin roof.
“What is that thing?” Simon whispered.
The old woman patted his hand. “It brought us here. Ah, there is your sister. Katie Spencer.”
Katie was standing near the triangle, grinning. She had never looked more beautiful or more content. Frank pushed his escort away and raced toward her, and Katie gave him a hug, but Simon could tell it was anemic. Reluctant.
“Hi, Dad,” Katie said. “I love you, I see you, and now you need to go.”
“Katie—”
He was on the verge of screaming at her, but Katie put her forefinger on his lips. “You need to go, Dad, before something bad happens. I’m fine. I’m safe. I’m just here.” Simon knew what her next word would be before she said it. “Being.”
“Bullshit. Katie, I want you to forget this, now, whatever this stupid notion is you get it out of your head right now!” Frank tried to hug her again, but the other women fell on him. They poured into the tent, the women and girls, and they snarled as they fell on Frank, pulling him away from his daughter.
It seemed to Simon that the triangle laughed.
“What does it say to you?” Simon said, louder, breaking away from the old woman. He kept his distance, watching as the women wrestled Frank to the ground. “Katie, what does that thing say to you?”
“You will never hear it, Si,” she said with a pout. Her tank top and denim shorts were ripped and muddy, as if she had been rolling around in the grass. “I wish you could hear it. It tells me I’m all right. It tells me I don’t need to change anything, that this, being this, is all I need.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Simon wanted to cry. Everything hurt. His teeth felt like they had become razors in his mouth. “Please, Katie … Just come home. Come home with us. We miss you.”
“You can miss me, that’s okay, but I’m fine. I want to be here. I want to just be.” Katie glanced nervously at the writhing mass of women on top of Frank. Not much of him could be seen, just the dirty old hat. “You need to go now, Simon, before something bad happens. You don’t belong here.”
“Wait!” The old woman had come after him, but she was gentle, taking his hand and pulling him toward the outside world. Simon glanced from his father to his brothers to the terrible and beautiful triangle. It was so bright, so cold … He wanted it to speak to him. He wanted to know what it had to say. Why wouldn’t it speak to him?
Davis and Johnny weren’t going peacefully. They broke free of their escorts too, screaming, shoving their way toward the women restraining Frank. More women came rushing into the tent, past Simon, flowing over Davis and Johnny like a river of retribution. They were swallowed, overtaken. Overpowered.
Simon blinked. What was happening? He stumbled away with the old woman, further and further from his family and from Katie. This alien thing had turned them against each other, poisoned all these people, and for what? To just be? He didn’t understand …
He heard a horrible sound then, just as he reached the fresh night air outside the tent. His father wailed, and it sounded like a hundred mouths biting into a hundred fleshy peaches. A smell like old wet coins filled the air. Davis and Johnny screamed and then were silenced. Simon couldn’t see any of them under the mass of snarling and tearing women, the women covering his brothers and father.
Once, Davis had shot a wild dog in the pasture and let it fester out in the summer sun. Frank was furious about the smell. Simon had been young, but he remembered it; he remembered the almost sweet reek of curdling flesh and the maggots, thick as a carpet, blanketing the dead dog’s carcass.
His head pounded from the screams and the close, overwhelming thud-thud-thud of a military helicopter dipping lower. Simon moaned and shielded his eyes from a flood of light off the chopper, staring up, watching as a door slid open and a rope ladder dropped down toward him. A man inside, a soldier, was shouting at him.
Of course it was a man, he thought, groping blindly for the ladder. All the women were here now, just being.
THREE SPEECHES ABOUT BILLY GRAINGER
JAKE KERR
Billy Grainger, posthumous induction into the Humor Hall of Fame
Induction speech by Eugene “Mean Gene” Crawford
THANK YOU.
Now shut the fuck up.
I know you’re comedians, but we’re here to honor our own, so I swear to God if I hear one more tinkling glass I’ll shove it so far up your ass you’ll be able to toast after you finish your drink.
That’s better. Now where was I? Oh yeah, we’re a classy fucking group, and this is our distinguished fucking hall.
So, what can I say about Billy Grainger? Not a whole lot. He’s a fucking chemist. Ted called me and was like, “We’d like you to give an induction speech at the Hall of Fame ceremony, but it’s a posthumous award. You good with that?”
My first thought was, “It’s about fucking time.” My second thought was, “Sure, stick Mean Gene with the dead guy.” But the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. Maybe I’d be the one to finally induct Jeff Cargo or some dude from 100 years ago who was overlooked. I’d be inducting some icon. Better yet, they’d be dead long enough that I could steal some of their material and you dumb fucks would think of it as an homage if I got caught. So it sounded like a good deal.
But, no, I didn’t get someone like that. I didn’t even get a pity induction for Carrot Top or Gallagher. So who do I get to induct? Billy Grainger. Billy fucking Grainger. A goddam chemistry nerd.
The Centenary Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry,
posthumously awarded to Billy Grainger
Speech by Doctor Mary Evans, Cambridge University
THANK YOU, LADIES and gentlemen of the Society and our honored guests. I am humbled and excited to present this award to the late Billy Grainger for his extraordinary work using chemistry for social change. I recognize that this was both an inspired and controversial choice, but it was a necessary and important one.
For the many new guests we have in attendance, I should note that the Centenary Prize was established 95 years ago with the goal of highlighting exceptional communicators from overseas. Its specific purpose was to bring these communicators to the United Kingdom to share their deep and nuanced knowledge of chemistry by way of their skills as speakers and teachers. Yet here we are awarding the prize to someone who not only can’t share his knowledge with us, but whose knowledge was distinctly practical.
So, some of you ask: Why present Billy Grainger with the Centenary Prize?
Well, before we honor today’s recipient, let me answer the critics seated in this room. No, Mister Grainger was not a theoretical chemist. He provided no new knowledge or understanding to our field. Nor was he an experimental chemist, who blazed trails of new study. Nor was Mister Grainger a scholar, who used his broad knowledge of our field to further the understanding of chemistry or to provide context to assist current theory. Mister Grainger was none of those things. Mister Grainger—Billy Grainger—was that most simple and yet practical of us—an applied chemist. He took our current knowledge and applied it to a problem.
And, with all due respect, the problem he solved and the methods he used, are the absolute definition of what this prize honors. I ask you all: Who in the entire history of this esteemed Society used chemistry and communication to change the world as much as Billy Grainger?
Heroes of the Resistance: Billy Grainger statue unveiling
Speech by Professor Terrence Jefferson, University of Pennsylvania
I’M A HISTORIAN, and I’m proud of that fact. I don’t hide from
the sins of our past. I’m not afraid to applaud the progress we have made. I shine the light of truth on the past, so that we can learn from it. So I cannot discuss the vital role that Billy Grainger played in reversing the Quiet Revolution without first providing you with the proper historical context—the truth.
So friends and fellow citizens, let me start with a simple proverb, condensed to a single sentence.
For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.
This proverb tells us that small events can have great consequences. Nothing describes Billy Grainger better than this single line. He was not a great general. He did not give inspiring speeches or write revolutionary blog posts. He wasn’t a spy, a journalist, or a warrior. He did one thing. One small thing. One small, extraordinary, amazing thing to bring down a tyrant—he used humor.
Humor Hall of Fame speech, continued
YOU’RE BOOING ME for calling him a chemistry nerd? I can’t believe this. You’re fucking booing me.
The dude’s corpse is cold, and you’re telling me this is too soon? We’re fucking comedians. It’s never too soon, you cowardly fucks. Do you think Grainger was a coward? He was shot on live TV for doing what we do—making people laugh.
Oh, you got me going now. See this? This was my really funny and somewhat inappropriate speech. This is me ripping it up. You now get the really inappropriate speech.
So let me tell you about Billy.
He was a fucking chemistry nerd. Sure, he was more than a chemist, but it was his chemical paint that defined him, so if we’re going to celebrate how funny and important his humor was, we still need to mock him for being a chemistry nerd. It’s what he would have done, and if you don’t get that, you’re idiots.
Am I pissing you off? Well, Grainger had this amazing talent for pissing people off so badly that they did stupid things. Sound familiar? Yeah, it’s not an accident that Ted asked me to give this fucking speech, you dickwads.
Do you remember his first piece? Of course you do. It pissed off everyone. He spray painted Kellen doing Andrews doggy-style on the side of the Washington Monument. I mean, you have this fucking phallic symbol centered between the White House and the Capitol, and Grainger paints the President literally fucking Congress on it.
That’s pretty damn funny.
Centenary Prize speech, continued
WE ARE ALL familiar with how Mister Grainger communicated his messages—graffiti. The messages were powerful in that they stabbed into the heart of the tyranny in America. Yet I daresay that it wasn’t the message that was important, but the chemistry.
There can be no doubt that Mister Grainger was a genius. He took nanotechnology and applied it broadly to both organic and inorganic compounds to create what we all now take for granted—nanopaint. Could someone else have done this? Certainly. Was there a market for a paint that binds with the underlying structures so strongly that it is effectively permanent? Maybe. All progress seems obvious in hindsight, but someone must take that first, critical, step. That someone was Billy Grainger.
Today we know that others had the same idea, but they abandoned it due to the many perceived problems. Truly permanent paint was deemed too dangerous and impractical. Something as minor as a spill would be impossible to clean. Paint on clothing or your skin would never come out. And, yet, where others saw nothing but problems, Mister Grainger saw a unique opportunity to create change.
This is the essence of applied chemistry and something this honored society has overlooked for far too many years. It took Mister Grainger’s sacrifice and the societal change in America for us to recognize it. Many claim that it was Grainger’s words and images that sparked the resistance, but us chemists know better—it started with Mister Grainger’s understanding of both nanotechnology and chemistry. Without that understanding of binding two unrelated chemicals together, we wouldn’t have permanent paints and dyes. And without permanent paint, America wouldn’t have its freedom.
Heroes of the Resistance speech, continued
HISTORY IS CONSTANTLY being re-examined. Historians in the nineteenth century saw the enslavement of my ancestors in financial terms. Today we view slavery differently. This is healthy and part of getting to the truth—understanding how things were and how they change.
It is clear today that the United States was founded not by ideologues but by practical men. They knew that rule by popularity was a different kind of tyranny, but one nonetheless. They saw the tyranny of the masses and built systems in place to protect the minority—empowering states, creating a senate not based on population but territory, and many other things that held the potential power of the masses in check.
That structure helped my people and many other minorities as we battled for our rights. So this was a good thing.
Yet history has taught us again and again that a small and rabid group of people can tyrannize a splintered larger group. And that’s what we all failed to see until we looked back as historians—that a small group of citizens had twisted the practical and good intentions of this country’s founders into the Quiet Revolution. One moment we were dumbfounded over the election of President Kellen, and the next we were watching as he systematically dismantled our freedom for his own purposes.
Which brings me to Billy Grainger. Billy saw something that none of us could see—the fragility of a tyrant fueling the flames of anger in that minority. He saw that when you rule from a position of weakness, nothing is worse than being mocked. Yet Grainger wasn’t just a pamphleteer or an editorial cartoonist or an artist. Grainger was a chemist.
And thanks to his application of chemistry, he did one thing that none of us could have predicted. One small thing that made all the difference in the world—his nanopaint gave his mockery permanence.
Humor Hall of Fame speech, continued
IT’S REALLY CONVENIENT to forget today, but that move pissed off everyone. He fucking defaced a national monument. Even people who hated Kellen and Andrews were pissed off at Grainger. Let me tell you, that takes talent.
It takes talent because for attack comedians like Grainger and myself, it’s not about the joke; it’s about the response. That’s right, I’m calling him a comedian. Did he ever do stand-up? No. Can I mock him for being a chemistry nerd and honor him for being a comedian? Yes. I’m fat. I contain multitudes.
So what do I mean by the response? Well, we’ve all crossed the line and said something that made others uncomfortable on stage. Hell, I’ve built a career around it. When it works, the response of that uncomfortable person is itself so over-the-top and funny that your bit of cruelty is overshadowed by the ridiculousness of your target. You provoke, and the response is the punchline.
Is it nice? No. Is it cruel? Maybe. Is it funny? Fuck yeah.
So while I thought Grainger’s graffiti was funny, Kellen’s response by tearing down the entire Washington Monument was absolutely hilarious. Who the fuck does that? Some insane fascist dictator, that’s who. And you know who knew how to destabilize the fragile ego of a dictator better than anyone?
Billy fucking Grainger and his nano fucking paint.
Centenary Prize speech, continued
THIS AWARD IS about communication, and it is about chemistry. Before I talk about Mister Grainger’s talent for communication, let us discuss his chemistry. Science and technology have progressed so fast that it’s easy to forget that nanobot-assisted chemical reactions were new when Mister Grainger was in graduate school. Like many men before him, he dropped out of school not because he was bored with his studies, but because he was excited by this technology. He didn’t want to study it—he wanted to use it.
At the time, many people were doing the same in important disciplines—medicine and pharmacology, industrial engineering, transportation. Some of them have been lauded on this stage. Yet while many scientists followed the money flowing into businesses embracing this new technology, Mister Grainger did not. He took a used 3D printer, a credit card, and lots and lots of time and focused on one simple thing�
�paint.
Here is the moment where I shall wax philosophical as I speak proudly of chemistry’s contribution to art. Simply put, chemists have changed art throughout the ages in fundamental ways. Dyes, oils, acrylics—this was not the first time that we had created a new paint for our artist brothers and sisters. Even new colors were brought to life thanks to chemistry.
So Mister Grainger is the latest in a long and honored lineage of chemists who have fundamentally changed art. And that is one of the reasons we honor him today. When the world saw dollar signs, he saw chemistry at its most fundamental level—a creative expression.
Heroes of the Resistance speech, continued
IT IS AN iconic moment, one that my fellow historians point to as the moment that galvanized the resistance—when President Kellen ordered the Washington Monument torn down. It shocked the nation. Many blamed Grainger for defacing the monument, but few could understand why it needed to be torn down. Sure, Kellen restricted access. He covered Grainger’s political statement with tarp. He tried to use chisels and jackhammers to remove the statement, but in the end we are told that he felt everything was taking too long.
Kellen’s impatience and his ego led to his biggest mistake—tearing down a monument to one of the country’s most revered founders. He had his propaganda machines explain it the best they could, but in the end a flawed monument that defined the nation was still a monument, a symbol of everything that Kellen claimed to be. It is easy to forget, but at that moment in time he could have recovered. The country was teetering between sentiments that Kellen did what he had to do and that he had betrayed our country’s founders.