Distraction

by Bruce Sterling

  “So you’re telling me that you’ve achieved a tremendous scientific R&D success, but as a collateral effect, it will eliminate your industry.”

  “Yeah. That’s it. Exactly. And I’m sorry, but we just can’t face that. We have stockholders to worry about, we have a labor force. We don’t want to end up like the computer people did. Jesus, there’s no sense to that. It’s total madness, it’s demented. We’d be cutting our own throats.”

  “Ron, take it easy, okay? I’m with you here, I’m following your argument. Thanks for leveling with me. I comprehend your situation now. It fits into the big picture.”

  Oscar drew a breath. “You see, Ron, the true core issue here is the basic interplay of commerce and science. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this problem recently, and now I realize that the old-style big-science game is just no longer tenable. Only savages and Congressmen could believe that science is a natural friend of commerce. Science has never been the friend of commerce. The truth doesn’t have any friends. Sometimes the interests of science and commerce can coincide for a little while, but that’s not a marriage. It’s a dangerous liaison. If you’re a working businessman, R&D can turn on you with sudden, vicious speed.”

  “You got that right,” Griego said fervently.

  “Ron, it saddens me to see you jerked around in this way. If you don’t want to finance R&D, that ought to be a decision properly left to the industry. You shouldn’t be compelled to take action by distant, uncaring federal bureaucrats who don’t understand the real dynamics of private enterprise. And most of all, you certainly shouldn’t have to waste your time, and mine, running sabotage mind games against a federal laboratory. That’s just a big, counterproductive distraction that puts you and me at unnecessary loggerheads. We’re serious players, Ron. People like us ought to be talking this over as mature individuals and arriving at a modus vivendi.”

  Griego sighed into the phone. “Okay, Oscar. You can stop sweet-talking me now. What are you planning to do to me?”

  “Well, I could out this whole ugly thing. Then we’d have investigations, and Senate hearings, and possible indictments, and the whole tiresome, unfortunate business. But suppose that never happened. Suppose that I could personally guarantee you that this guy’s miracle battery drops right off the edge of the earth. And all that costs you is a mere fifty percent of your current R&D investment.”

  “I’d say that’s much too good to be true.”

  “No, Ron. It’s the new order, here at the Collaboratory. You just don’t need major scientific advances in the American car industry. You’ve already had more of that than you can stand. You guys are a national historic treasure, like a buffalo herd or Valley Forge. You need protection from the menace of basic research. Instead of paying federal scientists to march your industry right off the cliff, you should be paying scientists protection money not to research your business. That’ll ensure that your industry doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “That sounds so beautiful,” Griego said wistfully. “Is it legal?”

  “Why not? Your sabotage routine can’t be legal, but you’ve been getting away with that for years. My proposal is a major improvement on the status quo, because now we’re being honest about it. As a gesture of goodwill, I’ll not only overlook your sad little corporate espionage, I’ll cut your R&D expenditure in half!”

  “What’s the catch?”

  “The catch is—the Collaboratory is in a small financial bind at the moment, so you’ll have to ship us an entire year’s corporate R&D funding, up front. Given our understanding, can you clear that financial move with your people in Detroit?”

  “Well, I’ll have to talk to Dad about it.”

  “You have a word with the higher-ups, Ron. Tell Dad and the other board members that if they don’t accept my offer pronto, I’ll turn this entire lab’s brainpower onto that project. And we’ll be shipping sugar engines out the doors by next June. In a giant blaze of publicity.” He hung up.

  “Did you really mean all that?” Kevin said. He’d been eavesdropping with great interest.

  “I don’t know,” Oscar said. “I just came into some luck there. I happened to know the buttons that work on good old Ronnie, and the whole scheme just came to me in a blaze of inspiration. It’s a very weird, lateral move, but it gets us off three or four hooks at once. It wins us a nice financial breathing space. Ron’s happy, we’re happy, everyone but Chander is happy, and Chander was finished anyway. Because Chander got in my face by stealing my moves.”

  “You can’t really protect the car industry from a basic scientific discovery like a new power source.”

  “Kevin, wake up. You need to stop thinking like a technician. Where did that habit ever get you? Don’t you see what I just pulled here? For the first time ever, we’re getting people to pay us not to do research. That is a genuine new power source. For the first time, federal scientists have a real economic weapon—they can carry the war right to their enemy. Who cares about another damned battery? It’s probably a crock anyway. Did you ever see an atomic-powered car? Just because it’s technically possible doesn’t mean it’s practically doable.”

  “People will do something with it anyway. You politicians can’t control the flow of technical knowledge. They’ll exploit it no matter what the government says.”

  “Kevin, I know that. I am living proof of that phenomenon. It’s what made me what I am today.”

  __________

  At two in the morning on January 20, there came a tap on Oscar’s hotel room door. It was Fred Dillen, the krewe’s janitor and launderer. Fred was drunk—the krewe had been celebrating the official and long-awaited swearing-in of Senator Bambakias, while drinking many patriotic toasts to the new Administration of President Two Feathers. Fred was accompanied by a chunky Anglo woman in her thirties, who was wearing bright orange medical-emergency gear.

  “Party getting out of hand?” Oscar said.

  “Oscar, this lady needs to talk to you,” Fred said.

  “I didn’t know what room you were in,” the paramedic said sullenly. “Had to bust in on a whole bunch of drunks downstairs.”

  “I’m glad you’re here. Is there a problem?” Oscar said.

  “Yeah. We have an injured female, mid-thirties. She broke her ankle. But she says she doesn’t want to go to our clinic. She won’t even give us her name and ID. She says she wants to talk with you first.”

  “What clinic are you taking her to?” Oscar said.

  “Well, we want to take her to the ER in Buna. She wanted to go into the Collaboratory, but we can’t take her in there. They got all these giant airlocks and all this security crap and besides, we’re not legally cleared to do ER services inside a federal facility.”

  “What happened to her? How did she have the accident?”

  “Well, she says she just happened to be walkin’ over here in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, and she tripped on something,” The paramedic looked at Oscar with distaste. “Listen, all this is way against regulations. Most people who break a leg are plenty happy to see an ambulance. But she wouldn’t shut up about it. She begged me to find some guy named Valparaiso, so now I found you. You wanna do something about it? Because if you don’t, adiós, muchacho.”

  “No, please don’t be hasty, I’ll go with you. I very much want to talk to your patient.” Oscar looked at the paramedic’s nametag. “Thank you very much for taking the trouble to find me, Ms. Willis. I know this isn’t orthodox procedure, but I can make it well worth your while.”

  Willis settled back onto the worn heels of her white athletic shoes. “Well then,” she said, and smiled. “Then maybe it ain’t so bad after all.”

  Oscar found a jacket, his wallet, and a pair of shoes. He glanced at the slumbering Kevin. To observe strict security, he ought to wake his bodyguard and drag him along in the wheelchair—but it was two in the morning, and the hardworking Kevin had been drinking like a pig. Oscar tucked a telephone in his pocket and stepped in
to the hall. He closed the door silently, then handed Willis a twenty-ecu European bill.

  Willis tucked the cash into a velcro-tabbed orange pocket. “Muchas gracias, amigo.”

  “I hope Greta’s all right,” Fred said anxiously.

  “Try not to worry,” Oscar told him. Fred was not the brightest light in the krewe. But Fred was a very loyal and good-hearted sort, a man who repaid a kind word with dogged loyalty. “You can go back to the party now. We really want to keep this little business quiet. Don’t tell anyone. Okay?”

  “Oh,” Fred said. “Right. No problem, Oscar.”

  Oscar and Ms. Willis went downstairs and through the lobby. Dutch party music echoed down the entrance loggia. “Sure is a nice hotel,” Willis remarked.

  “Thanks. Maybe you’d like to check in for the weekend.”

  “On my salary? I can’t afford a classy place like this.”

  “If you’re discreet about this little incident, ma’am, I’ll treat you and any guest of your choice to a three-day stay with full room service.”

  “Gee, that’s a mighty generous offer. This Gretel person must really mean a lot to you.” Willis led him down the paved walkway and into the street. A limo-sized white ambulance waited under the pines, with its lights on and the driver’s door open. Willis waved cheerily at the driver, who waved back in evident relief.

  “She’s lyin’ in the back, on a stretcher,” Willis said. “It’s a pretty bad break. You want some good advice, compadre? From now on, don’t make your dang girlfriends sneak around in the dark.”

  “I’m sure that’s good advice,” Oscar said. He stood up on the bumper and gazed into the ambulance. Greta was lying on a canvas stretcher in a metal rack, with her hands behind her head.

  Willis slapped her hands against Oscar’s rump and gave him a hefty shove. Oscar stumbled into the ambulance, and Willis immediately slammed the double doors. The vehicle went as black as a tomb.

  “Hey!” Oscar blurted.

  The vehicle left the curb and racketed away with a jounce of hydraulics.

  “Greta,” he said. No response. He crawled in darkness to her side, reached out. His questing hand landed somewhere on her rib cage. She was unconscious. But she was alive; she was breathing.

  Oscar quickly produced his telephone. He was grimly unsurprised to see it fail to register a signal. But there was enough feeble glow from the dial face for him to painstakingly scope out his surroundings. He brought the faint glow of the phone to her face. She was out cold—and for good measure, they’d glued a membrane strip of adhesive over her mouth. Her hands were cuffed with thin plastic police straps. There was, of course, nothing wrong with her ankle.

  The back of the vehicle resembled an ambulance, but only at first glance. It had some battered secondhand stretcher gear, but there was no life-support equipment. It was windowless. To judge by the way it took corners, the phony ambulance was sheathed in solid metal like a bank vault. They’d lured him into an armored thermos bottle, corked him up, and driven away.

  By phone light, with his fingernails, he slowly peeled the gag from her mouth. He gave her silent lips a healing kiss. There was no heating inside the evil little vault. Greta felt chilled. He climbed onto the stretcher with her and embraced her. He held her tightly, pressing warmth into her body. He was appalled to discover how much he cared for her. She was so human. So far beyond his help.

  They’d been disappeared. It was as simple as that. They had made a little too much trouble for someone, and they had exhausted the patience of some deeply evil player. Now they were heading for an assassin’s graveyard. They were going to be tortured, humiliated, and buried with bullets in the backs of their heads. They would be gassed, rendered, and cremated. Vile and hideous people would replay the videotapes of their secret and lingering deaths.

  Oscar rose from the stretcher. He lay on his back on the floor, and began stamping on the forward bulkhead. He industriously kicked his way through paint, a layer of porous plastic, and hit a wall of solid iron. The perambulating coffin now began producing a series of drumlike booms. This was progress. Oscar continued to kick, and with more enthusiasm.

  A speaker crackled to life somewhere in the rear of the compartment. “Would you knock it off with the noise, please?”

  “What’s in it for me?” Oscar said.

  “You really don’t want us to get tough, compadre,” the speaker said. It was Willis. “You know, just ’cause you can’t see us, doesn’t mean we can’t see you. We can see every dang move you make back there. And frankly, I wish you wouldn’t feel up the merchandise while she’s unconscious. It’s kinda disgusting.”

  “You think that I’m helpless back here—but I still have options. I could choke her to death. I could say you’d done it.”

  Willis laughed. “Jesus, would you listen to this character? Listen, vato—you try anything stupid, and we’ll just turn on the knockout gas. Would you take it easy back there, please? We’re not your problem. We’re not gonna do anything to you. We’re just your delivery service.”

  “I’ve got a lot of money,” Oscar said. “I bet you’d like some.”

  There was no response.

  He returned his attention to Greta. He searched her pockets, finding nothing useful for chiseling through solid metal. He tried to ease her position. He put her feet up, chafed her bound wrists, massaged her temples.

  After half an hour, she emitted a series of groans and woke up.

  “I feel so dizzy,” she said hoarsely.

  “I know.”

  She stirred. Her wrists drew up short with a hiss of plastic strap. “Oscar?”

  “We’ve been kidnapped. It’s an abduction.”

  “Oh. All right. I remember now.” Greta gathered her wits. “They told me you’d been hurt. That you needed to see me at your hotel. So when I left the dome, they just…grabbed me.”

  “That’s my story too,” Oscar said. “They used us as bait for each other. I should have been more suspicious, I guess. But why? How on earth could we live like that? There’s no way to outguess something like this. An abduction is completely stupid. It’s such a weird gambit.”

  “What are they going to do to us?” Greta said.

  Oscar was briskly cheerful. He’d already worked himself through a black pit of terrified despondency, and was properly anxious that she not share this experience with him. “I can’t really tell you, because I don’t know who they are yet. But they haven’t really hurt us, so they must want something from us. They took a lot of trouble, with the disguise and the ambulance and so forth. This isn’t my usual crowd of assassin lunatics.” He lifted his voice. “Hey! Hello! Would you people care to tell us what you want from us?” There was no answer. This was much as he had expected.

  “They can hear everything we say,” he told her. “We’re bugged, of course.”

  “Well, can they see everything we do? It’s pitch-black in here.”

  “Actually, they can. I think they have infrared cameras.”

  Greta thought this over for some time. “I’m really thirsty,” she said finally.

  “Sorry.”

  “This is craziness,” she said. “They’re going to kill us, aren’t they? This is such a mess.”

  “Greta, that’s just a speculation.”

  “They’re taking us for a gangster ride. They’re going to bump us off. I’m going to die pretty soon.” She sighed. “I always wondered what I’d do, if I knew I was going to die.”

  “Really?” Oscar said. “I never gave that issue much thought.”

  “You didn’t?” She stirred. “How could you not think about that? It’s such an interesting question. I used to think I’d react like Evariste Galois. You know, the mathematician. I’d write down all my deepest speculations in my math notebook, and hope that somebody understood someday…See, if you think that problem through, there’s an obvious deduction. Death is universal, but knowing when you’ll die is a rare statistical privilege. So since you’ll probably n
ever know, you should take a few hours out of some random day, and prepare your final testament beforehand. Right? That’s the rational conclusion, given the facts. I actually did that once—when I was eleven.” She drew a breath. “Unfortunately, I’ve never done it since.”

  “That’s too bad.” He realized that Greta was utterly terrified. She was babbling. His own fear had vanished completely. He was overwhelmed with protective instinct. He felt elated with it, half-drunk. He would do absolutely anything for the slightest chance to save her.

  “But I’m not eleven anymore. Now I know what grown-ups do in this situation. It has nothing to do with big ideas. It really, really makes you want to have sex.”

  This was a completely unexpected observation, but it landed on Oscar like a match on oil-soaked rags. It was so utterly and compellingly true that he couldn’t think of a thing to say. He felt dual rushes of fear and arousal strong enough to split his brain. His ears rang and his hands began itching.

  “So,” she whispered hotly, “if I weren’t all tied up right now…”

  “Actually,” he breathed, “I don’t mind that very much…”

  The speaker crackled into life. “Okay. Just stop that right now. Knock it off with that. That’s really disgusting.”

  “Hey!” a second, male voice objected. “Give ’em a break.”

  “Are you crazy?” Willis objected.

  “Girl, you never been a combat veteran. On the last night before you go out to get killed—hell yeah, you wanna get laid! You’ll hump anything in a skirt.”

  “Ha!” Oscar shouted. “So you don’t like it? Come back here and stop us.”

  “Don’t try me.”

  “What can you do to us? We have nothing left to lose now. You know that we’re lovers. Sure, that’s our big dark secret, but we’ve got nothing to hide from you. You’re just voyeurs. You mean nothing to us. To hell with you. We can do whatever we want.”

  Greta laughed. “I never thought of it that way,” she said giddily. “But it’s so true. We’re not making them watch us. They have to watch us.”