by John Brunner
Taking an uncertain step into the room, Clark said, “What—ah—what happened?”
“Glass. Use that soap, the dark red one. It’s antiseptic.”
“I don’t quite—”
“I said glass!” Michael soothed the little girl with a pat on the cheek. She was so terrified she had wet herself, but that could be cleaned up in a moment. Continuing as he drove the needle of the syringe through the rubber seal of a phial: “She was playing up by the Donovan farm, where for years they used to dump rubbish. She trod on a broken bottle, and ...”
With sudden perfectly-controlled strength he grasped the child’s leg and held it still by force while he sank the needle home. Almost at once her eyelids closed.
“And she’s likely to lose her great toe. Blood-poisoning too, unless we’re quick. Is that your car outside, a government car?”
“Well—yes.”
“Then maybe we shan’t have to wait on an ambulance. My own car is in to be mended. Now come and help me. Do as I tell you, that’s all.”
Clark came: too young to be a father, perhaps, and live day and night with fear of what might happen to his or any child. The great toe had been wholly severed. Michael gave it to him to hold while he staunched the blood.
He was valiant, and at least managed to set the toe on a table before running from the room, and in a moment was heard vomiting on the lawn.
Yet he came back, which also was valiant, and held the toe while Michael secured it with rough rapid stitches—all according to principles enunciated in a medical journal from China (make sure you maintain the blood supply at all costs until there’s time to match the nerves and muscles)—and then an ambulance arrived and Michael didn’t need to requisition the government car after all.
“When a child can’t even play safely in a field ...” Michael said. He had called Clark into the sitting-room and the offer of a tot had been approved. Two fingers for each of them. It was sometimes necessary to give the healers medicine too. “Slainte!”
“Slainte!”
“Now, what was it you came for?” Michael inquired, dropping into his favorite chair. “Did they send you to apologize for that scandal at Murphy’s farm?”
The government man had the grace to look uncomfortable. “No. But I was told that you were right all along.”
“Kind of them to admit it!” Michael snorted. “I’m not even a vet, just a boy raised on a farm, but I recognize dicoumarin poisoning from spoiled hay when I see it. But you didn’t believe me, did you? No more did they—probably never heard of dicoumarin! Oh, they’re such fools, they make me see red. You know if they’d had their way I might not have saved young Eileen’s toe?”
Clark blinked at him. He found this aggressive redhead with the green eyes too close together curiously disturbing.
“It’s a fact. I learned the right way of it out of a Chinese medical journal, that they tried to stop me subscribing to because it would mean giving the Chinese Western currency!” Scowling, he drained his glass.
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” the other said, reaching to the inside pocket of his smart blue suit, likely English. “I was told to give you this.” He proffered an envelope bearing a green wax official seal.
“Ah, perhaps they sent the apology in writing!” Michael grunted, tearing it open. A long pause. Eventually he looked up with a bitter smile.
“Well, that’ll teach me not to try and beat the government. Even if you win they find a way of doing you down. Did you know I spent five years as a medical officer in the army? No? Well, I did. So now they’re recalling me from the reserve to go with a UN team to investigate the matter of this poisoned food at Noshri. Well, I suppose it’s one means of putting me out of the way!”
He threw the letter angrily to the floor.
“But who’s going to tend the next child like Eileen Murphy?”
MARCH
LONG MULTIPLICATION
Behold! th’ industrious Hind, who daily walks
His narrow fields, and with a miser’s care
(Tho’ with a nobler motive, for to spare
Foul waste, and weeds) inspects the sep’rate stalks,
Who roots out all that are infect with blight
(For plants, like men, fall ill) and, mouthing ire,
Sets the sere stalks upon a smoky fire,
Then chooses from the seed that grew aright
Such as will, after golden harvest-time,
Repeat their kind, but bettered, sweet and sound,
Their chaff stript off by thrashers as of yore:
Him do I sing, as worthy of my rime,
Him whose devotion to the pregnant ground
Makes two ears grow where one ear grew before.
—“The Agricultural Muse,” 1710
A GIFT OF INSECTS
This high up there was still a lot of snow. Peg drove cautiously along the steep and winding road. She had seen scarcely any other cars for several miles. Still, there was always the chance of encountering some idiot who believed he had the road to himself.
Idiot ...
Am I one?
She hadn’t intended to utter the rhetorical question aloud; however, Felice—shivering because the driver’s window was open despite being wrapped to the ears in fur, and real fur at that, Peg suspected, though she’d not been so impolite as to ask outright—said wryly, “I’ve been wondering the same about myself. But I should have taken over from Bill Chalmers when he was killed, and finding that bastard Halkin slotted in over my head ...”
Peg gave a nod. She knew exactly how Felice felt. She herself was sorry to have lost her job, but underlying her decision had been a fierce pride which was still sustaining her.
“I wasn’t thinking about that,” she said. “I mean, here we are, going to arrive after dark, without even having phoned ahead ...”
“You can phone the wat?” Felice sounded surprised.
“Sure. They even have a listed number, just the one for the whole fifty-sixty of them.” In the name of Jones. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t called ahead. She was trying not to think too much about Decimus being dead, even though his sister was right here in the car with her, even though they were retracing his last journey the opposite way.
As though at the end of the trip I expect to find him alive and well.
“Somehow I didn’t think of them as having a phone at all,” Felice said.
Well, that was natural, knowing their distrust of modern technology. Moreover, they didn’t have too much truck with the outside world. And the outside world disapproved of them, which was a reason. A brief moment of approbation had followed the Towerhill avalanche, when even the governor had commended their rescue work. But that was over.
It being so late, she’d suggested to Felice when they came to the turning signposted for Towerhill that they spend the night there. Since the avalanche it was no secret that the tourists had vanished, phfft. There would be plenty of vacant rooms. No one but ghouls now cared to make for the town.
But Felice had said she preferred not to be a ghoul.
Suddenly, at the very edge of her headlight beams, Peg spotted another car drawn up by the roadside: a little Stephenson electric not meant for long distances, with only a hundred-mile range between rechargings. A young man was inspecting its works. Hearing the soft cat-hiss of the Hailey, he turned and waved.
“Think I should stop?” she muttered to Felice. Normally the idea wouldn’t have occurred to her; she’d have carried straight on, and the hell with whether the guy was found frozen in the morning. But since reaching the thousand-foot line, ’way back, she’d been able to drive with the ventilator off and the window down, and crisp fresh mountain air had made her lightheaded. Even the cold was refreshing; she hadn’t been this cold in years, living in LA where the only chance of staving off her sinusitis lay in wearing a filtermask and changing the air-purifier on the car every thousand miles and spending as much time as possible indoors.
Apparently Fe
lice had been affected the same way. Instead of uttering sensible warnings about being mugged and left in the snow while thieves drove off in the car, she said, “Oh, he looks pretty harmless. And I wouldn’t like to be stuck here in this cold.”
So Peg pulled up alongside him.
“Say, are you going to the Trainite wat?” he demanded, leaning to her window and brushing back lank hair.
“Yes.”
“Me too. Only my car quit on me—the stinking charge-level gauge stuck at high. Can I ride in with you?”
Peg gave a doubtful glance at the tiny back seat of the Hailey, a mere shelf intended to save a couple with a kid from having to change to a bigger car. It was already almost covered with Felice’s traveling-bag and a big canister with a label in bold red and black saying LIVE WITH CARE.
“I just have the one small bag,” the young man pleaded.
“Oh ... Okay.”
“Great, thanks!”
So she got out—the Hailey had only two doors—and watched him closely and noted that he locked the electric car. Then it was presumably his own; she’d half imagined it might be stolen. She relaxed and held the door for him as he returned, carrying an airline-size bag.
“You’ll have to move that canister,” she said. “Mind, it’s heavy.”
He complied. “What is it?” he asked as he read the label.
“Gallon of imported worms,” Felice told him. “Thought it would make a useful present for the wat.”
“Yeah, good idea.” He settled himself awkwardly, his long legs folded almost double. “By the way, I’m Hugh, Hugh Pettingill.”
The name sounded as though it ought to mean something. It declined to.
“I’m Peg. This is Felice.” She slammed the door and drove off.
“You live at the wat?”
“No. You?”
“Thinking maybe I ought to.” In the windshield, by the faint glow of the instruments, she caught a glimpse of his face set in a frown, like a Pepper’s ghost against the black road and white-grey soiled snow-banks. “I just been drifting around the past few weeks. Trying to figure things out.”
Me too.
Peg thought of the long hours she’d wasted in her apartment, staring at the TV as though it were some kind of crystal ball and would suggest a right course of action, until that unexpected phone-call from Felice, who wanted to meet her for dinner, wanted to talk about the way she had regarded her late brother, wanted to find out if she’d been wrong in quarreling with him when he committed himself to Trainite ideals.
She said she’d been wondering ever since the day she was told that life expectancy in the United States was going down.
The calmly spoken statement had shaken Peg to the core; the dinner had lasted past midnight, conversation turning to argument and back again, until eventually this plan had come from it: to visit the Denver wat, talk to Decimus’s widow Zena, forget the official view of Trainites (“their founder went crazy and his chief disciple died stoned!”) and try to make up their own minds for a change.
Peg had fallen in with the proposal with a sense of fatalism. The prospect of seeing the wat again, Zena and Rick and the other kids, without Decimus—that frightened her. But it had to be done, she recognized that. After all the world hadn’t ended with that one man’s death.
Not quite.
She grew aware that the boy in the back—youth, young man, whatever—was talking as though he’d spoken to no one for days and desperately needed the chance to disburden his mind.
“I mean, I couldn’t go on taking things from him after that, could I? I mean could I?”
She fished back into memory, and abruptly recognized the name. Pettingill. Click. One of Jacob Bamberley’s adopted sons vanishing from college. But apparently Felice had been listening with more attention, because she said now, “Seen any of this food of his, this stuff they claimed was poisoned and killed all those people at Noshri?”
“Seen, sure, but not on his table.” There was venom in Hugh’s tone. “Oh no. Prime beef for him! Smug self-important do-gooding bastard. Expects you to lick his boots for every favor he does, whether you asked for it or not. Wants to be surrounded by billions of people all saying, ‘Yes, Mr. Bamberley! No, Mr. Bamberley! Anything you say, Mr. Bamberley!’ Makes me sick to my stomach.”
He fished inside his heavy parka and produced something in a limp plastic envelope. “Say, I got some khat. Either of you want a chaw?”
“Sure,” Felice said, reaching back. Peg repressed a shudder. Putting something in your mouth that had been soaked in a stranger’s saliva ... Even if they did say the stuff contained a natural bactericide and the risk of infection was less than from kissing.
She didn’t go too much for the kissing bit, either.
She said in a harsh voice, “Better make the most of it. Those must be the lights of the wat, across the valley there. And you know how they feel about drugs.”
“Peg, baby! Oh, Peg, how wonderful! And this must be Felice, yes?” Tall, very dark, with a stately presence Peg had always envied because it might have helped to put down pestiferous men, Zena embraced her and hurried them all away from the cold, into the curious abstract cave that was her home: marvelously warm from only a few light-bulbs because it was so efficiently insulated, full of a delicious aroma of beans and herbs.
“How’s Rick? How are the girls?”
“Oh, they’re fine. Just gone to bed a minute ago. I won’t disturb them right now, but they’ll be so pleased to see you in the morning. Felice dear, I’m so glad to meet you at last—Decimus talked about you a lot, you know, and he was always so sorry you’d fallen out.” And kissed her too.
Meantime Hugh waited by the door with a look on his face that struck Peg as somehow hungry. As though there were no place on earth he could go and find a welcome this effusive. She did her best to make amends by presenting him to other members of the wat community as they appeared: burly Harry Molton, bearded Paul Prince and his pretty wife Sue, Ralph Henderson who had gone bald since she last met him, and half a dozen more who were new. Yes, of course they’d offer hospitality. It was part of the thing. They made it literal and brought bread and salt.
Later, showing her to a bed that was going spare tonight, Zena mentioned how badly they were being plagued with people who claimed to be Trainites and weren’t: wanted to wreck and burn and kill and went away in a week or two when they didn’t find any support here for their violent plans.
A STRAW TO A DROWNING MAN
... positively identified as Uruguayan. Following this disclosure the Honduran government called on one million dollars of standby credit which will be applied to the purchase of arms and other urgently-needed supplies, and appealed to Washington for assistance in combating the Tupamaro threat. The Pentagon announced an hour ago that the aircraft carrier Wounded Knee has been diverted from routine patrols in the Atlantic and is already flying survey missions over the rebel-held area. Commenting just prior to leaving for a vacation in Honolulu, Prexy said, quote, They can pull just so many feathers out of the eagle’s tail before it pecks. End quote. Contacted at his West Virginia home, the president of the Audubon Society, Dr. Ike Mostyn, stated that the last reported sighting of a nesting pair of bald-headed eagles three years ago had proved to be a hoax. New York: Professor Lucas Quarrey of Columbia University, under attack for his allegedly anti-American statements recently in the press and on TV, said at a press conference this morning that his contract to research into improved airplane ventilators had been terminated without warning. Asked whether political motivations underlay the decision, the professor said ...
RIPOSTE
About forty miles out of Medano, almost exactly due west of the border between California and Baja California, the boat hove to, drifting very slowly on the vast circulation of the Pacific.
Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting by the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet
plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking surface. There were no fish.
The boat’s skipper was blind in one eye and had been so from birth. He was the illegitimate son of a woman who had gone to California to pick grapes and inhaled something they sprayed on the vines to kill insects, and died. Befriended by a helpful priest, he had survived and gone to school and won a government scholarship. Now he knew about physics and chemistry and meteorology and combustion and the action of poisons.
He was also a Tupa but that went without saying.
The calendar said there should be a full moon tonight. Perhaps there was. One couldn’t see it; one almost never could—or the sun, either. On the afterdeck twenty-four big balloons were laid out like the empty skins of fish, slightly glistening as a flashlight played across them. There were cylinders of compressed hydrogen. And twenty-four precisely calculated payloads. Carrying them, the balloons could be relied on to rise to about two hundred meters and float shorewards at nine or ten kilometers an hour. They would cross the coast above or near the city of San Diego.
Roger Halkin was exhausted. Strain, like that of the past few days, always aggravated his diabetes. Still, everything was ready for the morning now; all the fragile stuff had been packed, all the records and books, and the house was littered with full cardboard cartons waiting for the moving men.
“Brandy, darling?” asked his wife Belinda.
“I guess I could risk a small one,” he muttered. “I surely need it.”