End of the Dream

by Wylie, Philip;

  The power interests, again, are using their influence to try to keep the matter quiet. So far it involves, largely, a small number of slum kids, mostly Negro and Puerto Rican. That accounts for the fact that the story has received no public attention. Thus far radiation burn cases and fatalities have been confined to three hospitals. All persons aware of the actual cause of the illness and death have been sworn to silence, and have been fed by AEC representatives with an ingenious cover story to ensure secrecy.

  The official recommendation here is that the policy of silence continue. It is suggested that if you, Mr. President, agree to make an all-networks broadcast about the situation in the New York and Pennsylvania area, code name “Hot Water,” you might also refer to this second matter, “Pickle.” By telling the AEC cover story it is thought you would divert suspicion, if any, of the radioactive cause of “Hot Water.”

  Having offered the majority-sustained advice, and having to the best of my ability presented in lay terms the basic facts of both very complex situations, and having offered my resignation, always open to your decision in any event, I wish to repeat my personal counsel as a scientist, an American citizen and a dutiful, conscientious servant of your Administration.

  The American public is under severe and constant stress owing to known disasters and odd ecological reports. With the rapid increase of nuclear reactors under the rush program presumably demanded by electric power demands, there is bound to be an increase in planning, design, construction and operating faults. To date, the many and increasing numbers of minor nuclear accidents have been effectively belittled or even hushed up. The two now under consideration involve a far larger number of victims and a much wider area than any past mishaps. Others of far greater magnitude are probable, not open to concealment by whatever “cover yarns” or policing may be used.

  Sooner or later these nuclear hazards will be known.

  In such an event the Administration will be open to a fitting accusation as unreliable, even dishonest. This would insure political death. A detailed and true admission of both events would be welcomed by an already atom-alarmed public and also would doubtless serve to save lives of otherwise still endangered people in the contaminated areas.

  8. Editorial Addendum: the Results

  What happened? Did the President follow the majority counsel? His aides arranged for a half hour on the networks two evenings later so he could have time to study the problem. But the decision was taken from the Chief Executive’s hands before air time. A group of leading nuclear physicists had been quietly organized some months earlier to keep a watch for just such radioactive accidents as these two, with a view to reporting them if any were kept secret. The day after the Ovoth memo reached the White House for a second time these scientists released to all media the major facts of both the Great Valley and the Harlem spills.

  The story created a national uproar, of course. Every nuclear reactor was compelled to shut down for restudy. Unfortunately, the mood of mass outrage did not last. Brownouts, blackouts and electric rationing reversed the “safety above all” response, and in a few weeks the reactors were started up with a government-industry pledge that “the study would continue and the safety measures would be taken while the plants were operational,” an actual impossibility.

  That sort of reversal in behavior typified a dominant form of reaction by the people at risk—one of countless self-destructive acts which seem incomprehensible now. It must be remembered, however, that not one adult in a thousand in America or any other modern nation had the knowledge and the intellectual capacity to assess those disasters and their causes in a realistic manner. The people could not even tell whom to believe. They weren’t able to know for sure that their demands were mistaken. They had been told as much and in scores of categories, from 1970 onward. But a housewife denied current for her washer-drier and forced to do her laundry by hand was ready to accept the sleaziest promise that her electricity could be safely restored, even when the experts said the opposite, because the politicians and power company spokesmen offered her lies. And a broker, a banker, a clergyman or a city mayor would be as readily persuaded that existing facilities, sewer and treatment plants, say, would suffice for some years, when the epidemic passed over and when they found taxes would be raised heavily if future epidemics were to be forestalled by new installations.

  Thus the air became fouler, the dust it bore loaded with more dire particles, the water on the land grew more putrid and poisoned like the waters beneath it, and the sea drank in an ever less assimilable load of lethal garbage while the dry land accumulated an ever heavier burden of biocidal agents. The people in great majorities prevailed and the industries serving them stimulated their senseless choices as did their elected leaders, in the main. A technological society cannot persist as a democracy unless the people in their majority understand both technology and ecology well enough to know what they are doing.

  9. Three Perplexing Occurrences

  Mrs. Edith Greetlan looked in the hall mirror and saw, without her broken glasses, and the more dimly owing to the mirror’s failing function, that her hair would do. She never went down to the mailbox without that assurance. It was brown hair and abundant, long, and to the old woman important because she thought of it as her “best feature.” Perhaps it was, though it was duller than she imagined, dirty, and smelled like the dirty hair of an old person. Still, she’d managed to coil and heap it in a form not truly the one of youth and middle age but near enough; it is difficult to do such things when arthritis makes it painful to raise one’s good arm head-high. But the turret hairdo didn’t cant and wouldn’t if she kept standing as straight as possible.

  “Ready for our walk, Tumsie?”

  A medium-sized mongrel, Tumsie was such a pooch as old ladies in small towns on welfare can obtain from the pound at no cost. A brownish, blackish, gray-streaked long-short-haired animal, a once friendly puppy, a long-time resigned adult and now a sad but not unclever senior citizen, Tumsie would have stuck to his mistress through thick and thin if there’d been any thick.

  “Maybe,” Edith said with what she felt was brightness, “we’ll get more than the regular check. Maybe we’ll hear from Verna. She usually writes to her poor old mother every month, doesn’t she? And remind me. I must find the Scotch tape and fix those specs. Otherwise, how’ll I read Verna’s letter?”

  On the porch in the bright morning Edith looked up Locust Street and down, shading her eyes with a cranky hand, and noting with pleasure the tall hollyhocks growing near the old fence.

  “Look at those beauties! Pink and white and red and them raspberry-splotched ones must of been a mix from last year. Mighty pretty, eh, Tumsie?”

  Tumsie grinned, panted faintly as if to get a lead on the warm morning and its sure, present demand for panting. So Tumsie apparently thought. He thought, in fact, that he had things pretty well arranged, now that the Conover family with all those kids had moved into widow Leesen’s place, two doors down Locust, sloppy people with lots of garbage and loose lids on the cans, so even an old, medium-sized dog could get to the contents. And that was important for Tumsie since Mrs. Greetlan was given, lately, to thinking she’d fed him today when it had been yesterday. The Conovers were disposable-dinner folks and partial to the new Master Mix-frozen Foods which were said to contain all the rare elements and vitamins human beings required as well as the necessary proteins, starches and fats.

  “Defrost, heat, serve, eat and chuck the leftovers, tray and all, in the garbage,” every package said. Tumsie had had nearly a month of Conover supplement and, though Mrs. Greetlan hadn’t noticed, he was getting fat, or bloated, or both, and was doing much more panting for much less cause than ever before.

  Tumsie waited while the hollyhock inspection went on and then followed as the widow tettered down the five wooden front steps, using the handrail on the left because the right-hand one had fallen into the ferns. Once on the front walk, Edith moved steadily from the wild hedge of privet and we
eds, where the fence had fallen and pickets still protruded, to the rusting, once galvanized mailbox.

  She creaked it open and saw one envelope, Verna’s. Not another. No welfare check.

  “Lordy, lordy,” she muttered. “Must be the mail is worse’n ever.” She turned to Tumsie. “Plenty of leftovers to tide us through tonight, dear.”

  Still hopeful, she opened Verna’s letter, but there was nothing in that either. It said, though she couldn’t read it then:

  “Sorry, Mom, about this one. I’m broke. Leo has been on a toot for ten days. I can’t locate him but I’m scared to call the cops. I wish I could send the usual bill but—there it is.”

  Crying tears that felt dry, the widow moved slowly back up the walk.

  She realized the sun was hot.

  It took time to get up on the veranda and there Tumsie stopped.

  “Want to stay out and make your numbers?” she asked.

  The dog panted an affirmative, so Edith went in and sat down in the one comfortable front-room chair. It was cool and quiet there.

  Tumsie’s plan was delayed when he spotted a man coming by on foot. He sauntered to the place where no gate was and looked at him with a murky doubt, too hot to bark, too old to back up any barking. The man had a cigar in his mouth and as he drew near he struck a match on his pants to relight it. A motorcycle passed, bellowing, with boy and girl locked together.

  The man, a renegade priest yet soured on life, didn’t wave out the match because he spotted Tumsie. A dog-hater, he tossed the match at the mongrel, not with any expectation of effect, just to be mean. And at that moment Tumsie’s recent feeling of flatulence became a promise of potential easement. He broke wind, the match fell behind him and he blew up.

  The debauched ex-priest stared a second and then ran, till he was well up Locust.

  Edith, of course, heard the odd sound, not a bang, more a wet ploop! She wondered and, later, when she thought Tumsie would be ready, and when she felt sufficiently rested to be able, she went out, wearing mended bifocals, and called. Then she saw the bloody mess on the walk where the gate had been, and all around. She remembered the motorcycle and was sure some kid, demon and fiend, had tossed a cherry bomb. Or a bigger firecracker of some sort. Tumsie must have grabbed it.

  She got a shovel and buried what she could of Tumsie in the ferns where the ground was fairly soft. Then she went back to the front room and the chair and sat down. All alone now.

  Time passed and she didn’t feel hungry or sleepy.

  Then she went to sleep.

  In the night, something gave inside her skull. For several seconds of half-awareness she knew that a “ploop!” had happened to her.

  They found her eight days later when the new Baptist minister reluctantly tried to call. Before he even rapped on the door he caught the odor that eddied through the place where there had been screening and where there was only a frame now. He went right in then. He found his “worst fear” was correct—and so the reluctant call turned out to be a really exciting adventure for Reverend Moselett.

  The second episode concerned Father Trentchel, pastor emeritus of the Elk Hill Episcopal church, St. Anson’s, a self-important man who, like Tumsie, had recently been aware of abdominal discomfort—gas, he called it. He did not associate these unpleasant symptoms with the diet that Emily, his daughter and housekeeper, had recently been giving him. For at the supermarket Emily had discovered the new Master Mixfrozen Foods, so cheap, so tasty, so easy. It was a pity Father Trentchel didn’t put two and two together, for one day he eased his flatulence by breaking wind as he was standing with his back to a blazing fire and, again like Tumsie, he blew up. When Emily, alarmed by the noise, ran into the room, his entrails were running down the walls.

  As any sophisticated person could guess, the peculiar death of a dog and a rector led to no official interest. But the exploding of a sow brought in the experts. The sow was a beauty. Her owner had a name as a pig breeder. He was also a penurious man, so when he found that the local Mighty-Mart would sell him over-aged products for a small price he fed this particular animal on the goods, mostly Master Mixfrozen Foods, which had a comparatively short life even in deep freezers, and tended to brown around the edges. His meanness was shortsighted, for on his way back from the Idaho Center Counties Fair, where Nellie had won the blue ribbon, he went too close to a fair booth where two luau lights were burning just as Nellie, like Tumsie and Father Trentchel before her, broke wind.

  Nellie’s flying head smashed her owner’s skull. Both deaths were instant. Three people were injured by whizzing porker parts, and a man from Boise had a fatal heart attack as he raced to see what had exploded—and then saw, more or less.

  Two veterinaries on the scene investigated Nellie’s residue, for pigs were important in the region and a blue-ribbon winner was valuable. And here, at last, the laws of chance brought some results. The dead breeder’s other hogs were taken temporarily by neighbors and relatives. Three sows went to a cousin, whose son, Ripler Cleeby, a chemistry major at Idaho State, was at home at the time with a broken leg. The young man heard all about the exploding porker, of course, since it was regional wonder number one for weeks. He also noted the bloated condition of the sows given temporary care by his dad.

  Young Ripler, bored and restless, found something to do when he decided that whatever caused the bulge in the boarding hogs must also have caused the strange explosion. Clandestinely, he managed to syphon off from a doped sow a glass jug of the gas and found, with a first small-sample test, that it did indeed explode when ignited. From that discovery, tracking down the cause provided the youth with exciting weeks while his leg mended.

  He found and verified the fact that Master Mixfrozen Foods, when allowed to defrost and stand for some considerable time, produced by a complex fermentation process and other chemical reactions a constant intestinal bubbling, and that the bubbles largely consisted of free oxygen and methane, in about equal parts. Some free hydrogen was also a byproduct of the foodstuff when processed in the mammalian intestine. In short, the stale product, when consumed, brewed a very explosive mixture.

  Under pledge of secrecy, Ripler confided in the local vet, who, when he found that the situation was just what the younger man claimed, in his turn swore Ripler to secrecy and got off a letter to the president of Master Mixfrozen Foods. With the letter he sent a copy of their long, chemical equations. Three days passed before the president phoned. . . .

  Master Mixfrozen Foods took advertising space in the press as well as TV network commercials to announce the withdrawal of its frozen dinners and their immediate removal from retail shelves. The reason—that is, the one given so clearly, conscientiously and with such apologetic fanfare—was that one person in every five thousand “reacted” (to a federally approved flavoring material in the dinners) with a light rash and a low-grade, one-day fever. MMF wasn’t going to risk even that tiny incidence of minor discomfort, not that reliable, economical, tasty, popular company, old MMF, no sireee! A new line would be available everywhere as soon as company experts, dieticians, food testers and other scientists had changed the formula, and the new product would be even tastier, even more nourishing and only one or two cents more expensive while remaining the best bargain of its kind. When the new product was ready a second advertising campaign told the world, and the demand for it was three times the original figure.

  Thus the truth was never widely known, even inside the corporation. And the fact that Ripler Cleeby and a wily country vet later divided a million dollars was believed to be owing to a drug they’d worked out together, patented and sold to a large manufacturer of animal medicaments.

  This relation of the truth in The Manhattanite’s “Annals of Ecology” will not cause any unease. Both the gentlemen who so gently blackmailed the food company have passed away. And it was by pure happenstance that the author of this trilogy came upon the first two accounts, that of the ill-fated Tumsie and the sudden, sad expansion of Father Trentchel. Master
Mixfrozen Foods have not been marketed since their main factories were destroyed two years ago in the Wilmington disaster. The corporate records were kept, however, in a warehouse in Philadelphia and these records were carefully examined by clerks at the behest of stockholders after the loss of the plant. In a “confidential” file maintained under lock and key by the then president, two yellowed local newspaper clippings were found. They reported the widow’s demise and the delayed finding of her body, along with a note about the witnessing of her dog’s odd death from swallowing gunpowder anonymously reported by a letter to the editor. A second clipping from a suburban gossip weekly described Father Trentchel’s end owing to “fall lightning” that came down his chimney and exploded, as such rare form of lightning often does.

  The clerk showed the clippings to several persons and ultimately this writer heard of them. After lengthy investigation he was able to piece together the foregoing. While it may not seem to fit into the “Annals of Ecology,” it nevertheless is germane in the sense that other, not dissimilar accidents, on vast scales, have marked the widespread consumption of insufficiently tested additives in the modern foodstuff of man and beast. Instances of long-delayed and widespread illness, and even mass death, from such causes have often made headlines which will be recalled by all readers.

  The American public, nowadays, continues to consume, and to feed pets and livestock, victuals containing hundreds upon hundreds of exotic materials, none present in natural foods, and all added for exclusively commercial ends, so we are still, in spite of the many federal claims of “tightening up” food and drug scrutiny, liable to some unexpected, private, family or mass surprise such as exploding, under certain circumstances. Here, then, a still timely word to the wise, of which there are none, for who has his puddings chemically analyzed and who can say what yesterday’s biscuits will bring on, twenty years hence?