The photos were of an African village, with dozens of children sprawled on the ground, by women weeping. The totos looked strangely reposed.
‘They used a low-flying crop dusting plane. Pachyderm works fast. Twelve hours or less. Norman claims there wasn’t much evidence of agony, more the discomfiture of a tummy cramp. Some high fevers and delirium. And he was right, dying is never a bowl of cherries.’
‘How many people did he kill?’
‘The sample was about 400; of those, 137 were cropped. He’s watching the village for longer-term attrition, but this organism can’t live exposed to air for more than twenty-four hours, so secondary mortality shouldn’t be significant.’
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Eleanor let go of the photos; they stuck to her fingers. ‘This is horrible.’
‘The pathogen is cheap to manufacture. Norman claims we could organize within months.’
‘What about 1999?’
‘The Nostradamus angle always was a bit hokey.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Basengi’s work was nearly complete. Your research, you admitted last week, suggested HIV is no more than a modest assist, and Pachyderm functions doubly as a vaccine. The labour force calculations are in; the parameters are met. Except,’ he noted sadly, ‘the Jews.’
‘What about wildlife?’
‘Norman’s tested an array of species and so far the only animals sensitive are roaches and rats, but not to an extent that will disturb the food chain. Norman thought a few less pests was swell.’
‘Norman says. Norman thought. What do you think?’
‘He wants to do more trials. But with Threadgill on our tail, haste is warranted; and the sooner we crop, the fewer we need to cull.’
Calvin spoke with detached curiosity. Only a slight lilt, an upward tilt of his sentences, gave his monotone any topography at all.
‘Why don’t you kill Wallace?’ asked Eleanor.
Calvin didn’t look enthusiastic. ‘I suppose we could. What a bother.’ Calvin noticed the way she was looking at him and explained, ‘Norman opened a bottle of champagne. I’m afraid it went rather to my head.’
‘Champagne’s not all that’s gone to your head. Is this the only vial?’
‘I don’t know. He thought it would give me a kick to take it home with me. After seven years’ research.’
‘Calvin, bury it. Find a toxic waste barrel. Throw it in the sea.’
‘That would be profligate. This is an expensive aperitif.’ His tone was whimsical. ‘Besides, Norman could make more.’
Eleanor threw up her hands. ‘Shoot Norman!’
‘Now,’ he chided. ‘You sound like Threadgill.’
‘Or like you. What’s the difference?’
Calvin asserted mechanically, ‘I’m right.’
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It was an old circle: so you say; so everyone says; wasn’t the alternative to have no conviction. Eleanor skipped it.
‘Can we go to bed?’ he proposed. ‘I know it’s early, but I’m tired.
Perhaps it was the flight.’
He stood, stretched and yawned, then nodded to Pachyderm.
‘Take care of that. It’s not coffee creamer.’
Calvin had worried that he’d roped himself with a single slip (under duress; hadn’t she forced him?) into performing as a dutiful lover on a regular basis and had meant, if the future of the planet had not inconveniently intervened, to have a chat. (He hated chats. He hated relationships.) However, once next to her, his body had other ideas.
So he wanted her, but he did not want to want her, and consequently the act was savage because he was fighting himself. This time his visions were not oceanic, but thick and opaque. He saw pig’s knuckles. When it was over he was hyperventilating. Eleanor held him lightly away from her, telling him to slow down, which he did only gradually, out of exhaustion.
Sleep, when it came, was more of the same. He dreamt of Lake Magadi. He had decided to go for a swim. Below the scabby pink crust, the water was crimson, like freshly cut meat, and though he knew that the soda would peel his skin he waded in. The lake stung his legs and clung to the hairs as he slogged on. Up to his neck, the red water filled his horizon. Insects swept the stagnant surface in black waves. The flamingos were ratty, their feathers matted, and they could not fly. His body was on fire and he could feel his skin moulting. If he kept walking he would sink, and he kept walking.
When Eleanor woke, Calvin was not in bed. She found him seated in the living room, and talked to the back of his chair. ‘Don’t you ever have sex like that with me again.’
‘I won’t.’
‘It’s better just to hold you, if the alternative is violence. I’m sore.’
Calvin sighed. ‘I’ve always reviled animal lovers.’
‘You revile anyone who loves anything.’
‘Except demography.’
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‘Except demography.’
‘You cannot always choose your passions.’
‘You can choose to have more than one.’
‘I am grateful for even one.’ He let his head tip back over the chair.
‘You’re crying!’
‘More,’ he said, ‘ sentimentality.’
She stepped into the room to discover he had Malthus on his lap.
The monkey was limp.
‘Clever bugger, wasn’t he?’ said Calvin.
The canister on the table was open. It exposed a thermosful of something like black bean soup. Calvin stayed her with a hand out.
‘Don’t go near it. Don’t touch it or breathe it. You should leave the house.’
‘Malthus got into that?’
‘He was dextrous, if you’ll remember.’
‘You didn’t even cry when Basengi died.’
‘Please, Eleanor, go.’
‘Then you should leave, too.’
‘I will lock the creature back in its closet, but I don’t want to upset it with you here.’
Eleanor dressed quickly and returned. ‘Come with me. Call the WHO. Get someone in a suit to dispose of it.’
‘No,’ he said simply. ‘Get out.’
There was no arguing. ‘You won’t—’
‘What?’
‘Take any yourself?’
He laughed drily. ‘My dear, I wouldn’t go to this much effort to concoct my own personal hemlock, I’m not that eccentric. Now please go.’
About an hour later, there was a knock on the door. It was not the postman.
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19
Sprinkled with Vim And Garnished with
Doom
Calvin had always idealized prisons. To think in small, concrete terms, he had to be shackled in a small, concrete place. He required a world he could not escape. Behind bars there was no danger of intergalactic travel. He pictured days of horrid food you still looked forward to and work of uncreative drudgery at number plates as a kind of bliss. He revered a life where you were sufficiently uncomfortable that you thought of nothing but slop-outs and an extra blanket. He eagerly anticipated press-ups in exercise yards, crude male camaraderie, pin-ups over the bunk, wild fantasies about bustouts that he would never attempt. So many people wished to burst their bonds; Calvin wanted to be locked up. He craved an orderly, mindless life run by someone else, where the universe never went funny on you and you could have discussions of the merits of this or that but never on whether there was such a thing as good and bad in the first place. He would love to feel passionately about Wednesday’s cauliflower cheese. He had lived in a world without limits and it was frightful. Surely the answer was to get a strong-arm to build a wall around you and then you no longer had to worry about what you should and should not do because you could not.
Besides, what was the difference between prison and the world?
You get up, eat breakfast, clean the wing, exercise, read, have problems with the neighbours, get raped, look for love…Sound familiar?
Weren’t you sentenced to life on
both sides of the bars?
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Of course, these fancies were all more abstracted waffle.
The holding cells in Nyayo House were themselves a study in over-population—there was no getting away. Detainees slept on the floor, and when all sixty were sandwiched side by side at night the whole row had to turn from their left to right sides at the same time.
There were no toilets or even bedpans, and the place reeked of human effluence, the kind of smell so rank and constant you were supposed to get used to it; Calvin was waiting. Their only ration was posho, cooked into a stiff, lumpy ugali unseasoned with so much as salt, cold, and served in dog bowls. Calvin wouldn’t touch it, though after two days passed into three he submitted to the diet of bathtub caulking.
Nyayo House was one of those edifying experiences only in the humblest sense, for it did not teach him fortitude, endurance, courage, his astonishing capacities of forbearance: Papillon. Instead Calvin realized within ten minutes of his stay that he was a panty-waist; that he’d led a pampered life and pampered was precisely the way he would like it to stay. Only the comfortable revere discomfort; only whisky-sippers in overstuffed armchairs can exalt suffering; only the free can construct elaborate and patently silly metaphors about prison life and its endearing capacity to keep your feet on the ground with chains. In short, like any normal person, as soon as he got in he wanted out, and though perhaps feeling like a normal person was this misadventure’s only compensation, it wasn’t sufficient by a long shot.
Calvin was the one mzungu in the cell, and hence something of a novelty. In keeping with this country’s ambivalent relation to his colour, he drew both admiration and disdain; certainly dismay, since a European could bribe his way from jail. The white man’s presence polarized the prisoners, since one lot were inclined to defecate on his feet and filch his watch, the other eager to shift him an extra handful of that terrifying ugali or lend him their wind-cheaters to cushion his head. In all, he was more mascot than kicked cat. He gave their cell distinction, especially once they asked, as all prisoners do, why he’d been lifted.
‘Genocidal conspiracy,’ he tried unsuccessfully with a 263
bloodied boy who’d been set upon by vigilante wananchi for stealing a pineapple.
‘I was going to kill mingi watu,’ he attempted next. ‘As many as in China and India together.’
No one knew where, or what, China was, and Calvin was determined to communicate. ‘I am a mzungu witchdoctor. I made a dawa, very strong. I was going to destroy my enemies by sprinkling them with dark dust.’
This version went down well. It was the best story in the cell by a yard. They laughed and retold it in their own fashion—better, Calvin thought. Some of these chaps would prove useful for a poetic touch in his posthumous biography.
He had prepared himself for standing achingly in waisthigh cold water, but whether from superstition over his complexion or the
‘Doctor’ before his name, he was not tortured. Originally, Calvin might have been disappointed, but now he knew enough to be grateful.
It was five days before Calvin was dragged into a bleak room, whose guard sloped an automatic over one shoulder and wielded an electrified cattle prod. The warder’s face was heavy and stupid, always petrifying in a man with a gun, and his helmet was too big, mushrooming to below his eyebrows; the guard kept his chin in the air to see. After ten minutes of his brutish silence, Eleanor Merritt was led to the opposite chair. It must have cost her pots of chai to arrange the meeting.
She looked terrible—thin, pale and haggard, and she’d gone back to her earlier schoolteacher clothes, with a high neck, sloped shoulders and a bow.
She said in a hoarse whisper, ‘I was afraid you might be dead.’
‘Oh, no,’ he assured her. ‘I’ve made my bed, now I’m lying in it.
The mattress is concrete and shared with sixty other stinking Africans. Too perfect, don’t you think?’
Eleanor drew back. ‘I’m sorry, but you do smell.’
He chuckled. ‘I expect something about QUIETUS has smelled from the beginning.’
‘I’ve been trying to get you a lawyer. Imanyara won’t touch it.
There’s a question about which country should try you. I’m negotiating with the embassy to get you extradited to the States. At least in Washington you’d get a bed, and there’s no
264
caning. With the stature of this case, you might even get yourself into one of those minimum security Howard Johnsons with a golf course.’
‘I don’t play golf. And don’t go to any trouble. I want lots of publicity. That’s all I care about.’
‘Speaking of which, I brought you the papers.’
He had made the front page of the Independent, though he was insulted to note that because of another Eastern European country doing something cheerful he had not made the lead.
Former USAID Division Head
Arrested in Bizarre Depopulation Scandal
NAIROBI. Calvin Piper, until 1983 the controversial director of USAID’s Population Division, was arrested by Kenya’s Special Branch yesterday as the leader of an underground conspiracy to exterminate a third of the world’s population in 1999. According to police reports, Dr Piper was discovered with a substance in his possession purported to be highly toxic, with which he planned to ‘cull’
humanity much as he once cropped elephants in Uganda in 1963.
Experts from the World Health Organization have volunteered to analyse the suspicious liquid, and expect to report on their findings by the end of the week.
Dr Piper is being held in police custody in Nairobi.
The State Department has issued no comment, pending investigation. However, the current head of AID’s population arm and Piper’s successor, Dr Aaron Spring, was forthcoming. Asked if he found the charge incredible, Spring responded, ‘Not in the least. Calvin Piper is a strange and dangerous man, perfectly capable of going off the deep end. He is obsessed with population, to the exclusion of every other issue. Population growth is a complex and culturally delicate issue in the Third World. At USAID, Piper was insensitive and simplistic. He was one step from a homicidal maniac in 1983.’
In his tenure at USAID, Piper was a successful lobbyist for population issues, and multiplied US funding for the field by several times.
Caught shipping birth control pills, IUDs and vacuum aspirators to countries where they were illegal, he was replaced by the organization for violating USAID guidelines.
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‘ Despite his crusading for population activities,’ Spring noted,
‘Piper turned back the contraceptive clock in developing countries.
Our ground has been hard won, and the Dirty Harry of Demography only alienated local governments. It won’t come as any surprise in Africa that Piper wants to march them all into gas chambers.’
Active public support for family planning in Kenya, for example, has only come about in the last ten years. Spring fears this new turn of events will reflect badly on legitimate population programmes, and urged the Third World to regard Dr Piper as ‘a renegade lunatic. Effectively, the man’s insane’. Spring emphasized Piper’s connections with USAID had been severed since his departure.
Kenyan officials have expressed their anger, condemning the plot as ‘colonialist’ and ‘the devious scheming of foreign masters’. Distrust for the West’s enthusiasm for family planning runs deep in African cultures.
Whether Piper will be tried in the US or in Kenya, where he has lived off and on for thirty years, is now being negotiated between the two governments. According to Dr Spring, ‘Africa does odd things to white men. Ask Conrad. Piper’s been there too long.’—UPI
‘Aaron Spring is a tit,’ Calvin commented, reading the article with a wide grin. ‘Since he took over, Congress has cut his funding to the quick. He’s a sad, tubby bureaucrat who’s losing his hair, and he’s jealous.’
‘He has one point,’ said Eleanor wearily. ‘I’m not s
ure the publicity on your arrest is going to do the population lobby a world of good.’
‘Publicity is publicity,’ said Calvin merrily. ‘Often, the worse the better. Scandal! This is cake. Let me see the rest.’
The tabloids were having a field day: ‘Pop Expert Plans Baby Massacre; Deadly African Potion Could Destroy All Human Life…’
However, these articles had a cry-wolf quality. QUIETUS was a real tabloid story, and if your papers always made mountains out of molehills, how did you write about real mountains? Calvin’s story was impossible to sensationalize, and as a consequence the Star, the Sunday World and the Daily Mail were disappointingly staid.
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‘How are you?’ asked Eleanor.
‘Filthy, tired, hungry and pleased with myself.’
‘I can’t see why.’
‘This press is unparalleled. Though I didn’t get very far. I don’t suppose they’ll hang me,’ he mourned. ‘But how are you?’
‘Not great.’ Her eyes were twitching. ‘Someone turned you in, didn’t they?’
‘You should know.’
‘Why should I know?’
He shrugged.
‘Well, it was obviously Wallace,’ she said hurriedly.
‘I disagree.’ He eyed her. ‘It was more likely an inside job. I doubt if Threadgill’s intelligence was so good that he knew Pachyderm was already on the table. Only a handful of people knew we’d cracked the pathogen.’
Eleanor glanced at the guard. ‘Shouldn’t you watch what you say?’
‘Why? I’m guilty. I intend to plead guilty. There’s nothing to hide.’
‘So who was the turncoat?’
‘Eleanor, my poppet. Let’s give each other a little more credit. I think we both know perfectly well.’
Calvin had been in Nyayo House three more days and had started to stomach the ugali. His spirits were high. He enjoyed his notoriety among his cell-mates. He lived for another instalment of newspapers.
His greatest fear had been that the story would get hushed up, and those front pages reassured him.
Calvin spent much of his time fantasizing about his trial. He would contest nothing. They could bring in Norman, Bunny and Threadgill to testify. Maybe poor Eleanor could be left out on humanitarian grounds—too bad they weren’t married. Calvin pictured himself with his hands clasped beside his useless lawyer, with a beatific smile and cool, photogenic eyes. The case would be followed closely by the press, day by day, and once the prosecution discovered the lab the evidence would be damning. Climactically, Calvin would at last take the stand himself. He would accost the world with the proliferation of its own demise. He organized his statistics during the long nights on cement. The illustration about the 267
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