Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  “Almost directly overhead but fading to the southeast. . . . Bloody Mary says it’s a blimp.”

  “Ah, of course. A blimp. Naturally.”

  “Eight turbine engines, low over the water, and also some sort of loudspeaker feedback whine, very high-pitched, almost ultrasonic—like the high-frequency sound used to repel insects . . .”

  “Captain?” Dasher MacAlpine asked. “When can we go back to England?”

  “Not bloody soon enough,” Wendy Mankiller said. “I quit. Ahead two-thirds.”

  “On what course?”

  “Frigging out of this vicinity. Yesterday.”

  “Aye, Captain!”

  21

  He raised a finger and winked at me. “But suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine, a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze. If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle . . . ?”

  “The puddle would freeze?” I guessed.

  “And all the muck around the puddle?”

  “It would freeze?”

  “And all the puddles in the frozen muck?”

  “They would freeze?”

  “And the pools and the streams in the frozen muck?”

  “They would freeze?”

  “You bet they would!” he cried. “And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”

  —Kurt Vonnegut, Cot’s Cradle

  The Rule of Caveat Emptor

  The return train to New York had no smoking compartment. Joan sat at the back of the club car with an untouched cup of coffee, her gun folded in a newspaper on her lap. When a young priest tried to sit with her, she warned him off with a look; when an Automatic Servant entered the car with supplies for the bar, she nearly blew it away. Having only just eluded the police at the Atlantic City terminal, and badly needing a cigarette to steady herself, Joan was not in a tranquil mood.

  Ayn was feeling chatty.

  “You never told me why you divorced Harry Gant,” she suddenly said, ten minutes out from Grand Central.

  Joan sighed. “You pick the weirdest moments to get personal, Ayn.”

  “It’s in my nature to be inquisitive,” Ayn said. She added, not in threat but as a plain statement of fact: “You may not be alive to answer questions much longer.”

  Joan sighed again, but then she shrugged, and said: “Plessy Falls. That’s the short answer—I divorced him over Plessy Falls.”

  “Plessy Falls?”

  “But really that’s not it,” Joan continued, deciding to talk to keep herself occupied. “Plessy Falls was just the excuse, and the last straw. The truth is, after nine years I was worn out. Tired of Harry, tired of the company. Same thing, really.”

  “His business is an extension of his person.” Ayn nodded approval. “As it should be.”

  “Well, as it is, whether it should be or not.”

  “And what about it were you tired of?”

  “Just everything,” Joan said. “The day-to-day bullshit. See, Gant management was organized along the lines of a classic dysfunctional three-parent family. I was the hard-ass mom, the one who was always after the kids to clean their rooms, and play fair, and keep the dog from peeing on the neighbor’s lawn—while at the same time bragging to the rest of the world how wonderful they were, the best kids any mother could ask for. And Clayton Bryce, he was the corrupting father, undercutting my authority at every turn: slipping the kids fifty bucks so they could go see a movie instead of weeding the garden, encouraging them to slide in with their spikes in Little League, telling them they didn’t really have to separate all the bottles for recycling. . . . Of course if you asked Clayton, he’d probably say I was the corrupting influence, too idealistic to accept the facts of life . . .”

  “And in this tortured analogy,” Ayn Rand said, “Gant is the third parent?”

  “The nominal head of the household,” Joan agreed. “But Harry was the absentee dad: he spent most of his time either in the tool shed, puttering away at his latest hobby, or out at the orphanage, picking up more kids for me and Clayton to take care of.

  “None of which was any goddamn surprise: I knew what sort of family I was marrying into, so I couldn’t say I hadn’t been warned . . . and it wasn’t bad, not at the beginning. Despite all my complaints, and all my misgivings, I probably accomplished more good works in my first three years at Gant than at any other time in my entire life. The African environmental compacts alone were worth every bit of aggravation and self-doubt I went through.”

  Ayn feigned astonishment. “Good works? In a capitalist enterprise?”

  “Cheap shot, Ayn,” Joan said. “Just because I won’t agree with you that the system is above criticism—”

  “Oh yes, by all means, let’s criticize capitalism! But it when it comes to statism, and socialism, and the wholesale trampling of the rights of man—”

  “Do you want to hear the rest of this story or not?”

  “Fine!” said Ayn, crossing her arms petulantly.

  “All right. . . . So the job worked out pretty well for the first few years,” Joan continued, “but Gant Industries kept growing and diversifying, acquiring new subsidiaries and new product lines—more kids—and then after a while I noticed I wasn’t getting as many good works accomplished. The change was incremental, but bit by bit I got sidetracked doing damage control, chasing down problems inside the company that never should have cropped up in the first place.”

  “What kinds of problems?”

  “Oh, things like Clayton Bryce deciding he didn’t want to pay to meet full federal safety and pollution-control standards on Lightning Transit. Or the time one of Clayton’s protégés in Labor Relations tried to bribe a union boss into letting us use all-android track-laying crews. It was after we got hauled into court over the bribery flap that the war between Public Opinion and Creative Accounting really heated up.”

  “And what was Plessy Falls?”

  “Do you remember Love Canal?”

  “I’ve heard the name,” Ayn said. “Something to do with state persecution of a chemical company, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, something like that.” Joan smiled ruefully. “Plessy Falls was the Love Canal of the late Nineties. It was, or at least it had been, a twenty-acre swamp in upstate New York.”

  “The Falls was a swamp?”

  “A swamp with a trickle of a river running through it; and at one point on the river bed there was a four-foot drop, hence the name. The swamp was in the backyard of a chemical and plastics manufacturing plant, which in the 1950s began draining pieces of it to use as a dumpsite for waste products. Highly poisonous and carcinogenic waste products, over two hundred flavors, all packed in rustable fifty-five-gallon metal drums.”

  “Carcinogens?” Ayn said. She took a deliberate pull on her cigarette holder. “You mean purported cancer-causing agents?”

  It took Joan a moment to get this. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You’re not going to tell me that you still don’t accept the surgeon general’s report on smoking, are you?”

  “Statistical evidence of the kind that report was based on is unscientific,” Ayn Rand said. “It doesn’t constitute objective proof.”

  “No? Then what does?”

  “Rational observation. Observed cause and effect.”

  “You mean like if a Russian philosopher smokes two packs a day for fifty years, and then you observe her having a cancerous lung cut out? That kind of cause and effect?”

  “A lot of things happened every day during those fifty years,” Ayn countered smugly. “The moon passes overhead every day. If you’re going to rely on unscientific statistical correlations, why not blame my cancer on that?”

  “Because you didn’t inhale the moon,” Joan replied. “Moonlight doesn’t contain known poisons like nicotine and cyanide, and it doesn’t produce a hacking cough the first time you’re exposed to it. If you shave a rat’s back and leave it outside after dark, it won’t
develop skin tumors as a result, but if you paint it with cigarette tar—”

  “Finish your damn story!” Ayn snarled.

  “Glad to,” Joan said, with a longing look at the hologram Marlboro in Ayn’s cigarette holder. “By the mid-Sixties, Plessy Falls had been completely drained and filled with toxic-waste drums. The company put a clay cap seal over the drums, piled lots of dirt on top of the clay, planted grass and shrubbery to make it look nice, and then, in 1975, sold the entire twenty-acre lot to the township of Gate’s Bend for the bargain price of one dollar. The deed of sale included a clause transferring all future liability for the site to the purchasers. There was also a paragraph mentioning that ‘by-products of the industrial process’ had been buried beneath the property but no clear description of their identity or quantity. The Gate’s Bend selectmen didn’t ask questions; they took the bargain and used the land to build a high school and athletic field.

  “For about two decades after that, everything was fine. That’s how long it took for moisture to erode the clay cap and start rusting out the drums. Then all at once the students at the school started getting sick: unexplained headaches, skin rashes, burning eyes, respiratory and nervous disorders, immunodeficiency problems, and a whole list of other symptoms; teen pregnancy rates in the town took a nose dive, not because teens stopped getting pregnant but because the incidence of miscarriage shot way up, which was probably a blessing in disguise. And the teaching staff, who arrived at school earlier in the day and stayed later, were in even worse shape than the kids.

  “Plessy Falls High was shut down, reopened, and shut down again. The chemical company had covered its tracks well enough that it took three years and forty-nine subpoenas for the full story to come out. The first lawsuit got filed in 1998, and the legal battle dragged on into the Oughts. Ultimately the company was bankrupted and driven out of business, which was a Pyrrhic victory for the town, since the local economy depended on the manufacturing plant. So Gate’s Bend ended up going out of business, too.”

  “You see?” Ayn Rand said. “This is why schools should be privately owned. . . . But continue. How does Gant Industries come into it?”

  “Gant Industries comes into it the same way the citizens of Gate’s Bend came into it,” Joan said. “Through epic carelessness. As part of the final legal settlement, the chemical company agreed to take back the Plessy Falls property and clean it up. But then the company ceased to exist, and the cleanup never happened. The toxic high school was simply fenced in and abandoned. Gate’s Bend became a ghost town.

  “Then about twelve years later, after the Plessy Falls story had been out of the media long enough to be forgotten by everyone except the cancer statistics, Harry Gant came around looking for a cheap used factory. Harry had a neat idea for a line of see-through toasters—toasters with transparent side-panels that let you see when the bread was starting to burn—and he’d heard through the grapevine about this manufacturing plant lying derelict upstate. Not really the right kind of manufacturing plant for making appliances, but he couldn’t beat the price, so he bought it.”

  “Didn’t he check to see why it was derelict?”

  “Well, he should have—somebody should have—but on the other hand abandoned real estate is pretty common since the Pandemic, so Harry just drew the obvious conclusion. And again, he couldn’t beat the price: under post-Pandemic reclamation law, all Gant Industries had to do to receive title was pay the back taxes on the property, plus a state processing fee. Which is what we did; and literally the day after we took possession, someone in Gant Legal Services turned up a press clipping on the old Plessy Falls scandal.”

  The train was decelerating into Grand Central; Joan placed a hand on the gun in her lap to keep it from sliding. Then she went on: “So the great deal turned out not to be such a deal after all. Gant Industries had unwittingly assumed ownership of a festering toxic nightmare.”

  “But it wasn’t Gant’s nightmare,” Ayn objected.

  “The title deed said differently,” Joan replied. “Not to mention the rule of caveat emptor.”

  “But it was the chemical company that reneged on its responsibility to clean up Plessy Falls, so—”

  “What chemical company? There was no more chemical company. As a corporate entity it was defunct, its former executives all flown away on golden parachutes to retirement villages in Palm Springs and the Florida Keys. And you can be sure we had every intention of tracking them down, but that would take time and legal fees, and even if we successfully sued them for every cent they had—not likely—it probably wouldn’t be enough to cover the full cost of a cleanup.”

  “Why? How expensive could it be, with modern technology?”

  “Ballpark estimate? Three, maybe four hundred million.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Sure. And that’s if the cleanup commenced immediately; with industrial dumping, the longer you wait, the more the price tag inflates. Which was another factor we had to consider: that toxic waste wasn’t just sitting there while we made up our minds what to do. The metal storage drums were continuing to disintegrate, the clay cap was still eroding, leaching more chemicals into the soil and groundwater, spreading the poison farther . . . and people had started moving back into Gate’s Bend.”

  The train was stopped in the station. Passengers were debarking, but Joan kept her seat, watching the platform through the window. “Not surprisingly,” she said, “a big debate sprang up at Gant about what our proper course of action should be. My feeling was, OK, we got burned, that’s too bad, but now let’s be responsible adults and take care of this problem before it gets any worse—”

  “You wanted Gant to pay for the cleanup?”

  “. . . and try to recoup the cost afterwards, yeah. As I saw it, the only way anything was going to get done quickly, if at all, was if we did it ourselves, and since to delay meant more expense, and maybe more people getting sick, it seemed like the least evil alternative out of a bad lot. It’s not like we couldn’t afford it. Four hundred million is real money, granted, but we could have covered most of it just by diverting part of our advertising budget over several years. With proper management the good publicity from the cleanup would make up for the advertising shortfall, and we could also stick a cleanup fund surcharge on Harry’s toasters and market them as an environmentally conscious product. And once the dumpsite was secure, we could look up those old chemical company executives and play bill collector. We still wouldn’t break even, probably, but that’s life.

  “Well, Clayton Bryce thought I was nuts. His line was ‘not our fault, not our concern.’ He thought we could get our property reclamation annulled on the grounds that the people who’d abandoned Plessy Falls hadn’t died in the Pandemic; that would let us off the hook and throw the ball back to the state. The cleanup and any bill collecting would become the government’s problem.”

  Ayn looked surprised. “And you didn’t agree?”

  “Don’t misunderstand,” Joan said. “It’s not that I objected in principle to getting the government to help out, but doing what Clayton suggested would have caused another huge delay in dealing with the situation, and given the potential threat to public health, I didn’t think that was acceptable. Besides, we didn’t need the government; we weren’t a poor corporation, and though we’d had a bad break we could handle it, maybe even turn it into something good. But Clayton’s response to that was that we weren’t in business to do good, we were in business to turn a profit, and there was no way we were going to pay four hundred million dollars to clean up somebody else’s mess.”

  “And what did Gant say?”

  “Harry said he hoped Clayton and I could get this Plessy Falls thing settled in time to get the toasters on the market by Mother’s Day, since it looked like we were going to miss Christmas.”

  “Is that when you quit?”

  “That’s probably when I started thinking about it. But I went another couple rounds with Creative Accounting first. Clayton and I e
ach hired independent assessment teams to re-examine the dumpsite. Clayton’s scientists came back saying that the actual cleanup cost would be upwards of half a billion, but that the waste had ’stabilized’ so there was no rush to get started; my scientists said we could probably hold the price to three hundred million and change, but there were clear signs that toxic chemicals were spreading beyond the original twenty acres, so time was of the essence.

  “After that we decided we’d better go check out Plessy Falls ourselves. Or anyway I decided, and Clayton figured he’d better come along to keep me honest. We dragged Harry with us too, hoping he’d act as a tie-breaker when the inevitable happened. And we brought two more scientists—one from Union Carbide, one from a company that did contract work for the EPA. I’ll let you guess who hired who.”

  “And what did you find at the high school?” Ayn asked.

  “We never got there,” Joan said. “It wasn’t necessary. We drove up on a weekend; it was right around this time of year, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, but the winter weather had come early, and there was new snow on the ground. So we were driving through this Christmas card scene, pristine white snow covering everything, really beautiful, except that it was too quiet. Most of the houses were dark, and a lot of the windows were boarded over. And then about a half mile from the high school we saw these trees by the side of the road . . .”

  “Dead trees?”

  “No, healthy trees. That’s what was strange: these trees were so healthy that they were budding, putting out new leaves. In November. In thirty-degree weather.” Without thinking about it, Joan lit a cigarette in the now empty club car. “Trees sense temperature through their roots, did you know that? It’s how they tell what season it is; when the ground warms up in March or April, that’s their signal that it’s springtime.

  “Well, these trees had gotten fooled. There were three of them in a little park on the corner of a residential block, in the middle of this big patch of ground where all the snow had melted; there was green grass growing up where the snow should have been. Our scientists got out of the car to check, and it turned out the ground temperature in that one spot was a hundred and fifteen degrees. The grass and the trees thought it was summer. But of course only the ground was that hot; the tree branches still had snow on them, and the leaves were freezing even as they unfolded.