3rd World Products, Inc., Book 5

by Ed Howdershelt

  Steph continued, "In certain areas where medical services are needed most and are nonexistent we expect to encounter resistance from both rebel and government leaders. While our facilities will be safe enough, our patients won't be."

  Yup. I knew it. Never a damned doubt about it. Tiger sensed a tightening of my demeanor and opened an eye to peer up at me as I scratched his chin and cheeks.

  I said, "You want me to be a floating enforcer, then; someone to make the bad guys stay clear and behave. But they won't. You may as well accept that up front. Would I get to do things my way?"

  When Steph didn't respond instantly, Sue asked, "What way would that be, Ed?"

  Meeting her gaze, I said, "Whatever way seems appropriate, Sue. To me, that is, not necessarily to you or Steph. Nor to the Amarans or anyone else. Just to me."

  Slowly shaking her head, Steph said, "Ed, I don't think..."

  "No," I said, holding up a hand, "I don't want to hear it, Steph. You know the kind of vicious assholes you'll be up against. You've seen what they do to people and you know they'll do it to drive away your patients when they can't destroy the clinics. If you thought you could negotiate with them or pay them off, you wouldn't even think of talking to me about going back to fucking Africa, so get real. If I have to go back there, some of those vicious assholes are going to cease to be a problem and the others are going to learn some caution."

  Sipping my coffee, I said, "I'll turn my five suit on before I land and may not turn it off until I'm five minutes away from the place at full speed. I really hate equatorial Africa."

  Sighing, I rapped my knuckes once on the kitchen table and said, "Anyway, that's the deal, Steph. I'll go if you ask me to, but if I go, I'll do things my way. Feel free to try any other methods you want first, 'cause I'm damned sure not in a hurry to see that nasty hellhole again."

  An almost tangible silence reigned in the kitchen for a time, then Sue said flatly, "You're being unreasonable."

  "Crap. Send a copy of yourself to where she plans to put the clinics. Watch the local warlords behead someone or chop hands and feet off children as example to some village every time a patch of used-up, worthless dirt changes hands. Listen to the screams and smell the blood. Watch them draft little boys as soldiers and take little girls as slaves. See what happens to them when they screw up or can't work. You may have the knowledge of what goes on there, but reading about it or even seeing it on film just doesn't quite convey the same experience as seeing it happen in person."

  My phone rang. I slid Tiger across the table to Steph and got up, then let the machine take the call with, 'Hi, there. I screen all my calls. You know what to do after the beep.'

  As the tape played the message, a fax warble sounded, then the caller disconnected. Got a lot of those lately; junk faxes that were no different from 'special deal' emails, except that they wasted paper and ink instead of merely taking up cyberspace on a Yahoo server until they were trashed.

  Caller ID was no help. The faxers used 'borrowed' phone numbers to send stuff about their scams, most of the latest of which had been that tired old poorly-written bullshit about some deposed prince, princess, prime minister, or whatever from Nigeria, Liberia, Botswana, or wherever who promised to pay big for help bringing 'rescued' money into the US.

  Chairs slid back behind me and I turned to see Steph and Sue on their feet.

  Steph spoke quietly, "I have some things to do, so I'll be on my way. Goodnight, Ed."

  "'Night, Steph."

  She disappeared with a last patting of Tiger. He turned to Sue and sat down. She reached to ruffle his chin and cheeks as she rather impassively looked at me.

  I looked at the clock over the doorway and said, "It's almost nine. I'm gonna see if tonight's 'West Wing' is a rerun."

  "It is," she said, "But you haven't seen it."

  "Is Stockard Channing in this one?"

  "Yes, she is. Later, Ed."

  Nodding, I replied, "Okay. Later, Sue," and she vanished, too. Tiger followed me to the den and settled in my lap as I clicked the remote.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Heavy rain woke me around eight Wednesday morning. I pushed the curtain back and watched rain fall in the flooded street for a few moments, then headed for the coffee pot.

  Once I had my coffee, I put down some treats for Tiger and turned on my computer, then went to the bathroom while it booted, briefly wondering why I still bothered with the computer, since field screens were far more convenient.

  I realized it had something to do with a sense of propriety, largely the fact that I'm used to typing on a real keyboard, feeling the keys depress and hearing the action. Field keyboards were like the flat membrane keyboards on game machines. No sound, no motion. I couldn't quite seem to get used to that.

  After spiffing up, I buzzed through my email and my usual newsgroups, checked headlines at a news website, and considered whether Steph might want my help in Africa badly enough to let me have free rein there.

  Probably not. Or at least not immediately. Maybe never, knowing how I'd deal with things like bloodthirsty warlords. But you never know; when people feel driven to accomplish something, they sometimes change their views or find ways to work around what they don't want to see.

  French had been the base language in Guinea back in the seventies. Not a problem back then; I'd soaked up languages without much trouble. Liberia and Sierra Leone had preferred English, but I'd also had to pick up bits of Krio and Mende to get by out in the countrysides.

  I pulled up info on Sierra Leone just for the hell of it. As far as I could tell, the same groups were still squabbling for essentially the same reasons, even though some of the labels had changed since the mid-seventies.

  Although vastly rich in mineral resources and potentially as rich in human resources, Africa was split into dozens of tiny countries and constantly-warring tribal and religious factions that prevented it from being any more than the biggest "underprivileged neighborhood" in the world.

  With a heartfelt sigh of disgust, I thought, 'Africa. Damn.'

  It was just as well that the Africans stayed at each others' throats. The continent of Africa is almost four times the size of the United States. If the Africans ever stopped fighting with each other long enough to turn their meanness on the rest of the world, they could be one helluva problem for everybody.

  In fact, I'd always sort of wondered -- after encountering Russian-sponsored Cuban Communists in the African bush while I'd been employed by a British outfit representing US, Canadian, and European mining operations -- just how much of the strife in Africa had been secretly engineered or encouraged by the three main world powers of the Cold War era.

  On the other hand, pre-1900 Africa hadn't been much different. Except for a few colonies of Europeans who'd carved out farms and ranches here and there, most of Africa had contained clusters of near-stone-age natives who'd continually killed or enslaved each other in nasty little tribal wars.

  Maybe there was just something special about the African continent that gave the people who'd evolved there a natural mean streak and kept them from cooperating with each other for any length of time?

  I felt that Steph would soon discover -- like everyone else who'd ever tried to bring anything decent to the man-in-the-goatpath African peasant -- that neutralizing the local rats and jackals would have to be the first order of business.

  If she couldn't or wouldn't take that step, she'd only be able to establish her clinics in relatively civilized safe zones, which meant that those who most needed the clinics would go without, as usual, and that little would change any time soon.

  'Whatever. Africa doesn't matter a damn to me now any more than it did back then.'

  Or so I tried to tell myself as I shut down the computer and went to the window, but as I stared out at the pouring rain, I realized that 'it' did matter, at least on some level that wouldn't let me drop the issue and move on.

  In all honesty, it wasn't that I really gave a damn about Afric
a; after all, for thirty years I hadn't even thought about the place other than to crank off now and then about how nasty it had been.

  But Steph had more than just PFM sales in mind. She held Earth patents on a wide array of medical devices that utilized fields; patents that had been issued because nobody thought she'd ever get to use them before they expired.

  If her clinics could be made widely successful in third world countries, they'd also be effective in forcing the western medical industry to allow field technology into common medical practices, which had so far been successfully prevented.

  When Stephanie had demonstrated to a panel of non-3rd World doctors such applications as field generated wound dressings like as the one she'd used to stop bleeding when a Carrington base kitchen worker had cut himself, there had been smiling faces and apparent fascination around the table.

  They'd liked the flying stretchers, too, and the use of fields to immobilize patients and remove tumors and objects with little or no damage to surrounding tissues.

  But then -- in a move I'd thought to be very premature -- Steph had shown them highlights and given them complete copies of the recordings of Elkor's operation to replace the damaged section of Linda's spine.

  After watching Elkor excise the damaged section, precisely trim and shape the new section to fit, install it, and reattach hairlike tendrils of ganglia, two doctors had instantly declared the recordings fakes.

  The others had begun asking in-depth questions and the presentation had become something of an interrogation of Steph and her intentions until Linda stepped in and more or less ordered everyone who wished to stay to sit down and shut up until the original presentation had concluded.

  During the following week, closed-door debates ensued and it took the medical powers-that-be only a bit less than a month to force through legislation that precluded, then banned, the use of Amaran field technology in all medical procedures within medical facilities regulated by the US and Canada.

  Similar legislation had quickly been enacted in western Europe and the more developed countries of Asia; the medical industry had spoken and its word had become law.

  To avoid problems involving its current Earthbound enterprises, 3rd World Products had officially shelved its plans to take part in Steph's robodoc program, but less than a week later, Linda had received the quiet word to assist Stephanie's clinic-establishing efforts in any manner that couldn't be directly, undeniably linked back to 3rd World.

  There were outcries about the ban on field medical devices, of course. Doctors affiliated with 3rd World led the pro-field voices -- and there were thousands of those voices -- but they couldn't seem to undo what had been done, and Steph couldn't legally set up her clinics where the medical industry ruled.

  Linda had been absolutely livid when the legislation passed; she ranted about venal morons in high places for a while before she settled down, then -- as a slap in the face of the very purchasable bureaucracy -- she ordered medical computers to be installed at all 3rd World Products installations worldwide.

  Even the piddly little two-person recruiting offices had the robodocs. They were housed in special cabinets that had been added and labeled 'first aid'.

  Local medical communities had objected, of course, but since no individual human was actively practicing medicine without a license, they had nobody to arrest or sue.

  Under pressure from the local medical bureaucracy, one city immediately invoked local ordinances citing that because aircraft -- flitters, specifically -- landed and took off from the 3rd World Products building's parking lot, 'certified' first aid equipment must be accessible at all times.

  Since the robodoc had all the required items of a first aid kit -- even though they were never used -- the fire marshal who inspected it had no choice but to certify the robodoc as indeed being a complete and acceptable first aid kit.

  Within 3rd World's other offices, the little office under siege became the symbolic equivalent of the Alamo. A hand-made card circulated that depicted Leslie Portell and Stephen Brock standing in front of their building's front door, blocking the door with muskets to keep out a mob of torch-bearing peasants led by doctors. Through the glass doors, you could see the robodoc peeking fearfully around one of the office partitions.

  Copies of the card were signed and faxed or emailed to the 'Alamo' office in rather vast numbers. They were pinned or taped to the walls of the lobby until they completely obscured the wood paneling. Newspapers picked up the story and people started sending clippings, as well.

  People dropped into the office to see the robodoc as if it were a tourist attraction. Some even requested 'first aid' and received treatment in exchange for a waiver and a statement that they weren't employed by -- or acting on behalf of -- any police or government agency.

  When a speeding car almost tore a teenager's right arm off at the end of the block, Steve and Leslie accompanied the robodoc to the scene and performed crowd control as the computer worked on the girl's arm.

  By the time an ambulance arrived through afternoon traffic, the girl was in stable condition and temporary microbots were hard at work repairing her internal damages.

  Several news stories later, public interest and opinion had become a more positive force in the matter. Local efforts to get the robodoc removed stopped. The siege had finally ended.

  I hadn't seen Linda that happy since one of our Dragonfly teams inside East Germany had been discovered and chased for two days and nights, then had managed to get back to the west under heavy fire without any casualties.

  She'd be happier still to see Steph's efforts in Africa work well, and absolutely thrilled to see Europeans and Americans going to Africa for inexpensive treatments unavailable in their home countries.

  In conjunction with general acceptance of PFMs, that sort of medical denial couldn't go on very long before public outcry forced the worldwide acceptance of robodoc clinics, and that's when Steph's patents would suddenly be worth a bundle.

  Tiger bumped my legs without speaking. I picked him up and held him as I watched the rain fall for a time, then treated us both to some ice cream.

  "Tiger, I may have to go far away and help Stephanie with something. It's a place called Africa."

  He looked up from his dish and asked, "I go, too?"

  "I don't think so. It could be very dangerous."

  He replied firmly, "I go, too. I have PFM collar like you."

  "Not good enough. Very dangerous," I insisted. "You can't go without Elkor, and he may be too busy."

  "Friend Elkor never too busy for me."

  "Not now, but might soon be helping Steph... Dammit, now I'm talking like you."

  Tiger ignored me in the manner he'd developed as a kitten when he wanted to investigate something and I'd objected. I decided to test his resolve.

  "Tiger, would you like Sue to show you some of the animals that live in Africa?"

  Looking up again, he said, "Yes," then went back to his ice cream.

  Keying my implant, I said, "Sue."

  She appeared by the kitchen door. "Yes, Ed?"

  "When Tiger's finished with his ice cream, I'd like you to make a lion appear in the living room. Life sized. I'd also like that lion to show what would be typical lion-like interest in a fellow cat such as Tiger."

  That got me a hard look from Sue and a suspicious glance from Tiger. When my ice cream was gone, I took my coffee to the living room and sat on the couch.

  Sue followed me and stood by the coffee table. Through my implant, she asked, "Ed, are you sure you want to subject Tiger to such an event?"

  "Yes. Better here than there. Make it a life-sized projection of a lion eating some other animal. Tiger knows he's about the same size as a big rabbit, so use a rabbit."

  "Africa isn't exactly known for rabbits, Ed."

  I shrugged. "So? Maybe that's because lions got 'em all, which is exactly the kind of point I'd like to make to Tiger. He's just too small to go to Africa with me. Even his five suit wouldn't pro
tect him from a lion or an AK round."

  "Yours wouldn't protect you, either."

  "I can use other tactics. He can't. If he got off the flitter even once at the wrong time and place..."

  Fixing me with a peering look, she asked, "Then you've decided to go?"

  Sighing as Tiger entered the room, I said, "Only on my terms. Here comes Tiger."

  Ambling into the room, Tiger looked at Sue, then at me.

  I asked, "Tiger, would you like to see a lion? That's a kind of cat from Africa that's too big to lie down on that table."

  Looking around himself at the six-foot-long, nearly three-foot-wide table and displaying rather obvious skepticism, Tiger said, "Yes."

  The rest of the room beyond the coffee table turned into a simulated savannah and a male lion lay on a low hillock of sun-baked dirt, surveying its domain as it munched on a big white rabbit. Twenty feet or so away in the artificial world, two female lions dined rather messily on the carcass of a zebra.

  When the lion's roving eyes found and locked on Tiger, it froze in mid-chew with half the rabbit hanging from its jaws. The lion then tensed in the classic, unmistakable fashion of a cat about to pounce on something.

  Tiger instantly turned into a gray striped dandelion as every hair on his body stood out. I felt my PFM implant tingle as Tiger activated his p-field one very thin slice of a second before the lion seemed to move at damned near light speed. Its huge paw appeared to soundlessly lash out and slash downward through the table and Tiger's body.

  As the lion made two more quick swings at him, Tiger yowled and leaped for the lion's eyes. Sue caught him in mid-air and returned the squalling, spitting, slashing Tiger to the coffee table as she made the lion and his scenery disappear.

  Sue fed Tiger theta waves to help him calm down, but it was close to a full minute before his claws completely retracted, his breathing slowed, and his ears stood upright again.

  His collar had trouble translating the stream of cat-sounds that came out of Tiger, but it managed, "Is real?! Is so?! Cat-so-big-so-fast-so-not-like-me?!" as Tiger rather shakenly stared at the spot where the lion had been.