by John Brunner
Christ. What wouldn’t he give to be home right now?
What hurt him most of all, made him feel like a sick child aware of terrible wrongness and yet incapable of explaining it to anyone who might help, was that in spite of the evidence around them, in spite of what their eyes and ears reported—and sometimes their flesh, from bruises, stab wounds, racking coughs, weeping sores—these people believed their way of life was the best in the world, and were prepared to export it at the point of a gun.
Down in Honduras, for example. Heaven’s name! Cromwell had done that sort of thing in Ireland—but that was centuries ago, another and more barbaric age!
He wore his uniform most of the time now. It indicated that he was more than just a foreigner, that he possessed rank in a hierarchy, and these people worshipped power. Recognizing his status, they behaved to him with frigid politeness. No. Correctness.
But that wasn’t what he’d expected. He had kinfolk, going back to the brother of his great-grandfather, who had come here to escape the oppression of the British. He had expected somehow to be—well, greeted as a cousin. Not as a fellow-conspirator.
Loneliness in New York had driven him more and more into the company of the drunken girl who’d picked him up at that diplomatic cocktail party. Sylvia Young, that was her name. He had found something waif-like and wistful behind her façade of sophistication, as though she were in search of a dream from which she could recall only a mood, no details.
The latest meeting had been the night before last, and she was cured, she said, and wanted him to come to bed. But his subconscious was so disturbed he couldn’t do anything, and when she snapped at him in frustration he snapped back, saying he’d never known a girl before who’d been infected, at which she gave a bitter laugh and swore she didn’t know one who had not.
And the laughing dissolved into tears, and she fell against his shoulder and clung there like a frightened child, and from her moans emerged the shreds of that unspeakably pathetic dream: wanting to live somewhere clean, wanting to raise a son with a chance of being healthy.
“Everybody’s kids I know have something wrong! Everybody has something wrong with one of their kids!”
As a doctor Michael knew that wasn’t true; the incidence of congenital abnormality, even in the States, was still only three or four per cent. But everyone did insure against it as a matter of course, and talked as though the least fit of ill-temper, the least bout of any childish ailment, were the end of the world.
“There must be something that can be done! There must, there must!”
It had crossed his mind: I could offer you—well, not entirely a clean place to live, because near Balpenny, when the wind blows from the direction of the industrial estate around Shannon Airport, you go out for a deep first-thing-in-the-morning breath and find yourself choking. But they’ve promised to do something about that.
Also animals are sometimes born deformed. Still, you can kill animals with more or less a clear conscience.
But I could say: let me show you lakes that are not foul with the leavings of man. Let me reap you crops grown on animal dung and pure clean rain. Let me feed you apples from trees that were never sprayed with arsenic. Let me cut you bread from a cob loaf, that greets your hands with the affectionate warmth of the oven. Let me give you children that need fear nothing worse than a bottle dropped by a drunk, straight-limbed, smiling, clear of speech. And would you care if that speech were full of the echoes of a tongue that spoke civilization a thousand years ago?
But he hadn’t said it, only thought it. And probably now he never would. After tomorrow’s burning of the suspect food he intended to go straight home on an Aer Lingus flight from Chicago.
On the crest of a rise he paused and looked around. There was the hydroponics plant sprawling like a colossal caterpillar along the side of a hill. He could just make out by uncurtained lighted windows the home of the plant’s manager, an agreeable man named Steinitz. More than one could say of his host, Jacob Bamberley ... Staying in that great mansion, the enlarged ranch-house of the estate his grandfather had bought, was somehow wrong, even though it was surrounded by what were reputed to be marvelous botanical gardens. He had only glimpsed them; they appeared to be drab and ill-doing.
He must drive back there shortly. He had been engaged in a final review of preparations with the American officers in charge, Colonel Saddler, Captain Aarons and Lieutenant Wassermann, and the other UN observer, a Venezuelan called Captain Robles. Michael didn’t like any of them, and following the meeting had needed to unwind. Which was why he was out here at midnight under the sky.
Not the stars. Apparently they hadn’t been seen here this summer. Mr. Bamberley had said at dinner, “A bad year.”
But would next year be any better?
He shivered despite the warmth of the light breeze, and an instant later had the fright of his life. A voice spoke to him from nowhere.
“Well, shit. Who’s this nosy son of a bitch?”
He stared frantically around, and only then saw that a shadowy figure stood less than ten paces away: a black man in black clothes, very tall and lean. And in his right hand something lighter, a knife held in the easy fighting poise of someone who understood the proper way to use it, not stupidly raised to shoulder height but low where it could slash open the soft muscles of the belly.
“What the hell—? Who are you?” Michael demanded.
A moment of dead silence. During it other forms materialized from what had seemed bare empty ground.
“You’re not American,” the black man said. Man? Maybe boy; there was a lightness to his voice, all head tones and no chest.
“No, I’m not. I’m Irish!”
A flashlight speared him like a butterfly on a pin. How long before that image would be meaningless? He hadn’t seen a butterfly in this country.
A new voice, a girl’s, said, “Uniform!”
“Cool it,” the black boy said. “He says he’s Irish. So what are you doing here, Paddy?”
Michael felt sweat prickly on his skin. He said, “I’m a United Nations observer.”
“And you’re observing us, hm?” With irony.
“I didn’t realize there was anyone here. I just came out for a walk.”
“Hey, man. You surely are a foreigner.” The black boy sheathed his knife and moved forward into the flashlight beam. “Thought you must be a pig. But they hunt in gangs.”
“He’s a skunk!” the girl snapped. Michael had heard the term; it meant soldier. He felt menaced.
“But he isn’t wearing a gun,” the black boy said.
The girl’s voice changed suddenly. “Shit, that’s right. Hey, Paddy, what kind of army is it where you don’t carry a gun?”
“I’m a medical officer,” Michael forced out of his dry throat. “Want to see my ID?”
The black boy moved closer, looking him over from head to toe. “Yes,” he said after a while. “I guess we do.”
Michael tugged it from his pocket. The boy studied it
“Well, hell. A major, yet. Welcome to this sick shitpile we live in, Mike. How do you like it?”
“I’d give anything to get the hell out,” Michael blurted. “And they won’t let me.”
“They”—heavily stressed—“won’t let you do anything.” He handed the ID back and stepped out of Michael’s way. “I’m Fritz,” he added. “That’s Diana—Hal—Curt—Bernie. Come sit down.”
There seemed to be no alternative. Michael moved forward. The group had camped here, he saw now: sleeping-bags hidden by a ring of bushes, a few dull embers on a hearth of flat rocks.
“Smoke?” Fritz said. “Chaw?”
“Fritz!”—from the girl Diana.
Fritz chuckled. “Ain’t no skin off Mike’s ass how we screw ourselves up. Right, Mike?”
The reference to a chaw had suddenly explained to Michael the light tone—close to shrillness—in Fritz’s voice. He was high on khat, popular among the American blacks because it came fro
m Africa: a stimulating leaf to be chewed or smoked or infused, exported from Kenya in enormous quantities by the Meru people who called it meru-ngi.
“No thanks,” he said after a pause.
“Man, you don’t know what you’re missing.” That was—Bernie? Yes, Bernie. He giggled. “One of the great natural medicines. You get the runs lately?”
“Yes, of course.”
“No ‘of course’ about it. They said thirty-five million people caught them. We didn’t. Where’s the chaw?”
“Here.” Curt, next in line, produced the sodden lump from his mouth and handed it on. Michael repressed a shudder. It was interesting, that point about escaping the universal diarrhea. Because of the constipating effect of the drug, no doubt.
He said, “What brings you here?”
“Tourists, us,” Fritz answered with a high chuckle. “Just tourists. And you?”
“Oh, they’re going to burn all this suspect food tomorrow. I’m here to see the job’s properly carried out.”
Dead pause. Suddenly the one called Hal said, “Well, you won’t.”
The girl Diana gave him a fearful sidelong glance. She was very fair, and pretty with it although plump. “Hal, you watch your mouth!”
“Fact, ain’t it? Nobody going stop us!”
Michael said slowly, incredulously, “You’re here to try and get your hands on that food?”
Hesitation. Then nods. Firm ones.
“But why?” He thought of all the young people he’d seen trudging up from Denver: hundreds! And Steinitz at the factory had said they’d been arriving for days on end.
“Why not?” That was Curt.
“Yeah, why not?” Hal again. “It’d be the first time, the very first time the government of this lousy country turned some of its citizens on.” He made the word “citizens” sound obscene.
Diana licked her lips. She had broad full lips and a broad long tongue. There was a sound like “hlryup.”
“Are you crazy?” Michael gasped before he could stop himself.
“Isn’t crazy the only sane way to be in this fucked-up world?” Fritz retorted.
“But there’s no drug in the food they have stored! I’ve seen the analyses.”
“Sure, that’s what they say.” Shrugging. “But they said the same about that place in Africa, now they’re saying it about Honduras ... Stinking liars!”
“Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been to Noshri! I’ve seen!”
Without warning it took possession of him: the memory of sights and sounds and smells, the clutch of mud underfoot, the sense of despair. He told about the children battered to death by their own parents. He told about the soldiers who fled weeping and screaming into the bush. He told about the women who would never again see such a common household object as a knife and not run away from it in terror. He told about the stench and the sickness and the starvation. He told it all, words flooding from him like water through a breached dam. And it wasn’t until he had talked his throat sore that he realized he had been saying all the time, “The American food did this, did that ...”
Lucy Ramage and her Uruguayan friend would have been pleased. But they were dead.
He broke off abruptly, and for the first time in long minutes looked at his listeners instead of the recollected horrors of Africa. They wore, all of them, identical wistful smiles.
“Ho, man!” Diana sighed at last. “To get that high!”
“Yeah!” Curt said. “Imagine a high that never stops!”
“They want to stop me getting a piece of that,” Hal said, “they going to have to burn me before they burn the shit.”
“But you can’t want to go insane!” Michael exploded. He groped for the right phrase. “You can’t want a—a bum trip that goes on for life!”
“Can’t I, baby? Are you ever wrong!” Fritz, his voice cold, dead serious, dead. “Listen, Mike, because you don’t understand and you ought to. Who’s going to be sane in this country when you know every breath you draw, every glass you fill with water, every swim you take in the river, every meal you eat, is killing you? And you know why, and you know who’s doing it to you, and you can’t get back at the mothers.”
He was on his feet without warning, towering over Michael, even when Michael also rose. He was more than six foot three, maybe six foot five. He looked like a medieval figure of death: merciless, gaunt, hungry.
“I don’t want to die, baby. But I can’t stand having to live. I want to tear those stinking buggers limb from limb. I want to gouge out their eyes. I want to stuff their mouths with their own shit. I want to pull their guts out their ass, inch by inch, and wind ’em around their throats until they choke. I want to be so crazy-mad I can think of the things they deserve to have done to them! Now maybe you understand!”
“Yeah,” Diana said very softly, and spat the chaw of khat into the embers of their fire, where it hissed.
“Go ‘way, Mike.” Fritz sounded suddenly weary. “Far’s you can. Like go home. Leave us take care of the mothers. One day maybe you could come back—or your grandchildren—and find a fit place for people to live, black or white.”
“Or green,” Diana said with a little hysterical giggle. “Irish, green.”
He stared for a long moment into Fritz’s eyes, and what he saw there made him turn and run.
Although the majority of the unskilled and semi-skilled workers from the plant had been sent to swell the crowds of unemployed in Denver, a handful of staff had been kept on standby, and with their assistance he and Robles spent the following morning poring over stock records and making sure that every single carton of the suspect Nutripon was removed from the interior of the factory. Troops with fork-lift trucks carried them out to an empty concrete parking lot and stacked them in a monstrous pile in front of the battle-lasers which had been lined up to calcine them into ash.
The records were good, and exact. The work went quickly. He kept hearing—he was meant to hear—comments from the soldiers: what the hell business have these lousy foreigners telling us what to do? One man in particular, a sergeant named Tatum, thin, gangling, tow-haired, seemed to be encouraging his squad to pass such remarks whenever Michael was around. But he bit back his bitter, angry responses. Soon, soon it would be over, and he could go home.
Every now and then he glanced up at the blank gray-green hillside behind the parking lot, expecting to see it alive with human figures: Fritz and his friends, and all the hundreds of others. But although he fancied he saw movement among the bushes, he never saw a face. Almost he could believe he had dreamed that terrible experience last night.
Wanting to go insane? Hardly more than children!
But finally the echoing dome of the warehouse was empty, and nothing else was left in the rest of the factory where new clean shiny air-purifiers dotted the roof and little certificates from the firm specializing in operating theaters had been pasted under ventilation grilles ... and he agreed with Robles that they could safely go and inform Colonel Saddler. Robles had been chafing to do that for half an hour. Michael took a perverse delight in making him wait a while longer.
He had worked out, on the basis of what Fritz had said, that among the reasons for his instant dislike of Robles was that the Venezuelan wore an automatic all the time.
“You took your time,” Colonel Saddler rasped. “I thought we’d burn this lot before lunch!”
He’d said last night that he was hoping for a posting to Honduras.
Distant on the concrete, gray under the gray sky, reporters waited by their cars and camera trucks, ready to record the act of destruction as proof of good intentions toward the world.
“But now I guess we might as well go to chow first,” the colonel went on ill-temperedly. “Sergeant!”
It was Tatum, the tow-headed man who so resented Michael.
“Sergeant, tell ’em to break for chow, and make sure the fire-hose squad is back here ten minutes ahead of the— What the hell?”
The
y all swung around, and discovered that what Michael had been expecting all morning had occurred. They must have been watching from the hillside with the skill and patience of trained guerrillas. Now, realizing that the job of bringing out the food from the warehouse was over, they had risen into plain sight and were advancing on the chain-link fence that here defined the grounds of the factory. They looked like a medieval army. Two hundred of them? Three? With motorcycle crash-helmets, rock-climbing boots, and on their arms home-made shields that bore like a coat of arms the Trainite symbol of the crossed bones and grinning skull.
“Get those crazy fools out of here!” the colonel roared. “Bring me a bullhorn! Sergeant, don’t let the men go for chow after all! Tell those idiots that if they’re not gone in five minutes—”
“Colonel!” Michael exploded. “You can’t”
“Can’t what?” Saddler rounded on him. “Are you presuming to give me orders—major?”
Michael swallowed hard. “You can’t risk firing the food when those kids are out there!”
“I wouldn’t be risking anything,” Saddler said. “They’d be no loss to this country. I bet half of them are dodgers and the rest lied to the draft board. But I’m going to leave it up to them. Thank you, sergeant”—as he was handed the bullhorn he’d requested. Raising it, he yelled, “You out there! In five minutes ...” He strode towards the fence.
In the background, sensing the unexpected, the reporters were scrambling to their feet, cameras and microphones at the ready.
On the hillside, next to a fair-haired girl, a thin black figure, very tall. In his hand, something gleaming. Knife? No, wire-cutters!
Saddler completed the recital of his warning, and turned, checking his watch. “We’ll play the fire hoses on them first, sergeant,” he muttered. “Don’t want that stinking mick—”