by John Brunner
“Ah, that’s New York rain!” he said with a sort of perverse pride. “Got one myself, wouldn’t be without it!” He pointed at the shelf under the dash. “You know, I’m going to quit this job next month. Sick of them Trainites! Saw the skull and crossbones they painted on this cab?” Grey had not; doubtless it was on the other side from the one where he’d entered. “Had enough, me. Gon’ put my savings into a dry-cleaning business. Coining it in that line. Five minutes in the rain, umbrella or no umbrella, and if you don’t go to the cleaners right away you need a new suit.”
Many street-lights had broken down and not yet been repaired. National Guardsmen, masked and helmeted but armed only with pistols, were controlling traffic. It had been in the news: the mayor had reserved all policemen who were well enough for duty to cope with essential jobs like night crime patrols.
There had been huge State Health Authority posters at the airport, warning all out-of-town arrivals to purchase a recognized brand of prophylactic stomach tablets, and under no circumstances to drink unpurified water.
“I never had so many drunks to take home in my life,” the cab-driver had said. “Like they took this warning not to risk the water as orders to fill up on hard liquor.”
“I don’t drink,” Tom Grey had said.
He was a little nervous, because he set so much store by his world-simulation program now. Since the financial setbacks suffered by Angel City, first with the Towerhill avalanche, and now because of the enteritis epidemic—they had had enormous success in persuading their youngest clients to take out life insurance policies on their babies at birth, and over ten thousand had so far generated claims—they’d been compelled to find every possible means of improving the situation, even down to renting their computers at cut price to evening and weekend users. Grey therefore needed an alternative sponsor.
Having reviewed every major corporation, he’d decided that Bamberley Trust met all his requirements. It had plenty of capital; it had spare computer capacity, since it was primarily an investment firm and used computers solely for market analysis; and it was desperately in need of something to boost its public image. The UN inquiry into the Noshri disaster had not been able to prove how the dangerous drug was introduced into Nutripon, and the lack of a firm exoneration had allowed suspicion to continue.
He’d forwarded a fully detailed prospectus of his project, with appendices describing sample applications of the completed program. Obviously he had made it persuasive, for they had now invited him to New York to discuss the document.
And, within five minutes of entering Greenbriar’s office, he knew—to employ a metaphor that was especially apt on Bamberley territory—he’d struck oil first time.
Of course, with New York in this mess you’d expect people to appreciate the potential advantages.
BURNING YOUR BRIDGES BEFORE YOU COME TO THEM
Chairman: My apologies for the repeated postponements of this meeting, ladies and gentlemen, but—ah—as you know it’s been due to the fact that fate wasn’t obliging enough to make our various indispositions coincide. For the record, I’m Edward Penwarren, and I’m the President’s special representative in this matter. I believe you all know Mr. Bamberley, but I guess I should draw attention to the presence of Captain Advowson—sorry, Major Advowson, special delegate from the UN observation team that went to Noshri. Congratulations on your promotion, by the way, major; I believe it’s recent. Yes, senator?
Sen. Howell (Rep., Col.): I want to go on record as objecting very strongly to the presence of this foreigner. I’ve repeatedly stressed both in public and private that this is a purely internal affair and the UN has no business meddling—
Advowson: Senator, I have been trying to get the hell out of your country for the past month. It stinks, and I mean that literally. I’ve never been so sick in my life. I’ve never had so many sore throats or so much diarrhea. And I’ve never before been blown up in a bomb outrage.
Chairman: Gentlemen, if you please—
Howell: Isn’t that proof enough that everything this man says and does is prejudiced?
Advowson: Prejudice be damned. Based on the experiences of my first and I devoutly hope only visit to—
Chairman: Order! Major, may I remind you that you are here by invitation? And as for you, senator, I must stress that the president personally approved the composition of this committee as best suited to the requirements of the situation. Thank you. Now the proximate reason for this meeting is a report which has not yet been publicly announced, but which I’m afraid will almost certainly be delivered to UN delegates within the next few days, because a copy of it is unaccounted for. I won’t go into the background; the matter is sub judice. But what it is, this report, it’s a confidential US Medical Corps report on the condition of certain of the survivors from the—uh—the village of San Pablo. I’m sorry, major; did you say something?
Advowson: Only “ah-hah!”
Howell: If that’s your idea of a constructive contribution to these proceedings—
Advowson: It’s just that I’ve been hearing rumors about—
Chairman: Order! Order! Thank you. Yes, as I was saying, this report. It—ah—it tends to the conclusion that the survivors from San Pablo do display many of the same symptoms as were reported from Noshri. Now I must stress something at once. It’s been a long time since Dr. Duval in Paris analyzed the Nutripon from Noshri. It is our firm belief that what has happened is this. The Tupas have had a similar substance prepared, to give identical effects, and have deliberately administered it to hapless civilians to discredit the US intervention in Honduras. What was that, major?
Advowson: Never mind. Go on.
Chairman: Supporting this asumption I’d adduce the following point. If—I say if—Nutripon were again at the root of the trouble, the symptoms would have been noticed long ago, back in January maybe at the time when the search was going on for Dr. Williams and Leonard Ross. Yet the first mention of recognizable mental disturbance, according to the Medical Corps investigation, was not until March, and was so—uh—so unremarkable in the circumstances, what with the necessity of interrogating suspected Tupas and so forth, that ... Well, the point is that a very small proportion of the persons detained for interrogation showed any mental abnormality, and it was not until the beginning of April that any symptoms were recognized which were sufficiently serious to lead to close psychiatric examination and eventual—uh—serum analysis and so forth. I’m not an expert on this, I’m afraid, just quoting the report. Yes, Mr. Bamberley?
Bamberley: San Pablo was the first place we were asked to send Nutripon to, I think. Globe Relief asked us before Christmas and we got some off, thanks to my workers putting in a lot of overtime. I never heard that Globe’s people out there noticed anything in the way of bad effects.
Chairman: Well, I’m afraid it wouldn’t follow. Their local agent was Mr. Ross, wasn’t it? And he died. Yes, major?
Advowson: Could I ask Mr. Bamberley how many people the contract was for? I mean, how many people was he supposed to feed for how long?
Bamberley: I believe I have those data ... Yes, here. A hundred adults and eighty children, initially for two days in order to get some kind of relief out on the ground straight away.
Advowson: Well, even at a couple of pounds apiece that doesn’t sound like much!
Bamberley: We were closing down for the holiday, remember. It was what we had left from the previous contract, you see—just, like you say, a couple of hundred pounds or so for the worst-hit village. And we sent much greater quantities directly after New Year’s, tons and tons of it, and there was no complaint about that lot!
Advowson: If I might ask you something, Mr. Chairman? How many survivors have displayed this mental derangement?
Chairman: Only about a dozen or fifteen including children.
Advowson: Is that because only a dozen or fifteen of the villagers are being held for Tupamaro sympathies, or is it because all the rest have been killed?
Howell: Tupa sympathies! Hell, every damn thing he says comes right out of their own lying propaganda! Mr. Chairman, I demand his removal from the committee!
Chairman: Senator, kindly do not presume to give me orders! I welcome that question, although I don’t approve the way it was phrased, because that’s exactly the sort of question we’re going to have to answer in the UN. Major, I’m afraid the report doesn’t specify, but thank you for drawing my attention to the point and I’ll try and find out. Now Mr. Bamberley knows the point I’m going to raise next, I believe.
Bamberley: Yes. We seem to have no alternative. We have a great deal of Nutripon still in store, which was prepared before the new filtration system was installed at our plant. It’s been suggested that we should have it destroyed with maximum publicity, have its destruction testified to by an unimpeachable witness—the Major here, if he’s willing, and a scientist of international reputation as well, Lucas Quarrey for example—
Howell: That anti-American bastard! You must be crazy!
Chairman: Senator, you miss the point. The new installation at the factory must be approved by someone whom no one can conceivably call a—a lackey of the imperialists or whatever the phrase is. Professor Quarrey is not noted for his reluctance to speak his mind, as you correctly observe. His opinion will carry that much more weight abroad. Now, if I may continue—
Howell: I haven’t finished. Jack, that stockpile must be worth money. How much?
Bamberley: About half a million dollars. And modifications to the plant have cost as much again.
Chairman: Naturally there will be compensation.
Howell: Whose pocket is it going to come out of? The taxpayer’s, as usual?
Chairman: Senator, we shall have to think of it as the premium on an insurance policy. Don’t you realize what a desperate situation this country is in right now? We’ve got to get that plant back in operation, and wipe out the prejudice against Nutripon, before the fall, because we’re almost certainly going to have to distribute the stuff here at home. Over the past few weeks thirty-five million people have been sick for a week or longer. Factories, farms, all kinds of public services have been shut down or cut back. And according to HEW we’re going into a second cycle of the epidemic because we’ve run out of water, we’re having to re-release it before it’s been completely sterilized. All the don’t-drink warnings in the world won’t stop people here and there from catching the bug a second time. And you know what it did in Honduras, don’t you?
Advowson: Probably not. I doubt that he reads Uruguayan press releases, and you’ve kept the matter under wraps.
Chairman: Shut up, major. Sorry. In a sense you’re right, much as it galls me to admit it. Publicity wouldn’t have been very good for morale, would it?
Howell: What the hell are you talking about?
Advowson: The Tenth Counter-Insurgency Corps, I imagine.
Chairman: Damn it, yes of course. Senator, they didn’t just fight a rearguard action and withdraw owing to their debilitated condition, which was the story we released to the media. There’s been nothing like it since the First World War. They ran away. They were sick. They had fever over a hundred degrees and most of them were delirious. I guess that’s an excuse. But it meant that the entire equipment of the Corps was captured intact by the Tupas. As a result Tegucigalpa is having to be supplied by air, and we may have to pull the government out any day now. And of course practically every big-city ghetto is alive with pro-Tupa black militants, and you can imagine what will happen if we can’t clear the name of Nutripon before we have to start issuing it as relief allotments. Not content with poisoning innocent Honduran peasants and African blacks, we’re starting genocide operations against black Americans too! That’ll be the line, and we’ve got to prevent it at all costs.
THE UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT
Lem Walbridge had built up his holdings from the five hundred acres his father had left, until now he had over three thousand, all under vegetables: potatoes, beans, salads, beets, plus some corn and sunflowers—for oil—and a few gourmet delicacies like zucchini and scorzonera. The man from the State Board of Agriculture knew him well.
“Never seen anything like it!” Lem said for the tenth time, jumping down from his jeep at the edge of a field of sickly-looking beets. He pulled one up at random and displayed it, alive with horrible writhing worms. “Have you?”
The other nodded. “Yeah. Few days ago. Right the other side of those hills.”
“But what the hell are these things? Christ, if this goes on I’ll be ruined! I’m only going to get half my usual crop to market as it is, and unless I stop these stinking buggers ...!” He hurled the rotten beet away with a snort of fury.
“Buy any earthworms this year?”
Lem blinked. “Well, sure! You have to. Like for soil conditioning.”
“Put any down around here?”
“I guess maybe sixty, seventy quarts, same as usual. But I got a license, they were all approved.”
“You get ’em from Plant Fertility in San Clemente?”
“Sure! Always do! They’ve been in the business longer’n anyone else. Best quality. And bees, too.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that. Their stuff goes all over the country, doesn’t it? Clear to New England!”
“What in hell does that have to do with it?”
“It’s beginning to look as though it has everything to do with it.”
BY THE DEAD SEA
The wind was bad today. Hugh’s filtermask was used up, all clogged, and he didn’t have the seventy-five cents for another from a roadside dispenser, and anyway the quality of those things was lousy, didn’t even last the hour claimed for them.
Lousy...
Absently he scratched his crotch. He’d more or less got used to lice by now, of course; there just didn’t seem to be any way of avoiding them. For every evil under the sun there is a remedy or there’s none. If there is one try and find it, if there isn’t never mind it.
There must be a hell of a lot of evils in the world nowadays that there weren’t any remedies for. Anyway: what sun? He hadn’t seen the sun in fucking weeks.
It was hot, though. Leaning on the wall overlooking the Pacific, he wondered what this beach had been like when he was a kid. Scattered with pretty girls, maybe. Strong young men showing off their muscles to impress. Now...
The water looked more like oil. It was dark gray and barely moved to the breeze. Along the edge of the sand was a rough demarcation line composed of garbage, mainly plastic. Big signs read: THIS BEACH UNSAFE FOR SWIMMING.
Must have been posted last year. This year you wouldn’t have needed to put up signs. One whiff of the stench, and yecch.
Still, it was great to be out and about again. It had been bad since he hit California. The runs. Everybody had them, but everybody. Back in Berkeley, along Telegraph, he’d seen them lying and whimpering, the seats of their jeans stained brown, no one to turn to for help. There had been a free clinic, but it treated VD as well, and the governor had said it encouraged promiscuity and had it closed.
Well, at least you didn’t die of the runs, not over about six months of age. Carl had found a part-time job for a couple of weeks after their arrival, nailing together cheap coffins for babies; the cash had been useful.
Though sometimes the runs made you feel you’d like to die.
Where in hell was Carl, anyway? The air was hot and harsh, so he’d gone to a soft-drink stand for some Cokes. Taking his time. Bastard. Probably picked someone up.
They were shacking with a girl named Kitty, who’d spread half a dozen mattresses on her floor and didn’t really mind who shared them, how many or what sex. She and Carl had been lucky and escaped the runs, and what they brought in, by working, panhandling and hustling, kept the others fed. When Hugh got over the aftereffects, he promised himself, he was going to get a decent job. Garbage clearance, maybe. Beach cleaning. Something constructive, anyhow.
Still no sign of Carl returning
. But, drifting toward him, a wind-blown newspaper, almost intact and too heavy for the breeze to move it more than a few inches at each gust. He trod on it and picked it up. Ah, great! A copy of Tupamaro USA!
Leaning back against the wall, he shook it around to the front page and at once a name leapt out at him: Bamberley. Not Jacob, Roland. Something about Japanese water-purifiers. Hugh glanced over his shoulder at the befouled ocean and laughed.
But other things of more interest. Trainites in Washington rigged a catapult, Roman-style, bombarded the White House with paper sacks of fleas—hey, crazy, wish I’d been in on that. And a piece about Puritan, saying their food isn’t really any better, costs more because of all their advertising ...