by John Brunner
“Hugh!”
He looked up and here came Carl, and Carl wasn’t alone. For an instant he was transfixed by jealousy. He’d never imagined he might drift into this kind of scene. But it had happened, and Carl was a good cat, and ... Well, at least Kitty being around allowed him to keep his—uh—hand in.
“Hey, you should meet this guy!” Carl said, beaming as he handed over the straw-stuck Coke bottle he’d brought. “Hugh Pettingill, Austin Train!”
Austin Train?
Hugh was so shaken he dropped the paper and nearly let go of the Coke as well, but recovered and took the hand proffered by the thick-set stranger in shabby red shirt and faded blue pants, who grinned and exposed a row of teeth browned by khat.
“Carl says you met at the Denver wat.”
“Ah... Yeah, we did.”
“What do you think of them up there?”
“Full of gas,” Carl chimed in. “Right, Hugh baby?”
It didn’t seem right to put down a bunch of Trainites to Train himself, but after a moment Hugh nodded. It was true, and what was the good of pretending it wasn’t?
“Damned right,” Train said. “All gab and contemplation. No action. Now down here in Cal the scene isn’t the same. You’re shacking in Berkeley, right? So you seen Telegraph.”
Hugh nodded again. From end to end, and down most of the cross streets, it was marked with the relics of Trainite demonstrations. Skulls and crossbones stared from every vacant wall.
Like the one on this guy’s chest. Not a tattoo but a decal, exposed when he reached up to scratch among the coarse hair inside his shirt.
“Now Carl says you quit the wat because you wanted action,” Train pursued, moving to perch on the sea wall at Hugh’s side. Overhead there was a loud droning noise, and they all glanced up, but the plane wasn’t visible through the haze.
“Well, something’s got to be done,” Hugh muttered. “And demonstrations aren’t enough. They haven’t stopped the world getting deeper in shit every day.”
“Too damned true,” the heavy-set man nodded. For the first time Hugh noticed that there was a bulge—not muscle—under the sleeve of his shirt, and without thinking he touched it. The man withdrew with a grimace.
“Easy there! It’s still tender.”
“What happened?” He had recognized the softness: an absorbent cotton pad and a bandage.
“Got burned.” With a shrug. “Making up some napalm out of Vaseline and stuff. Thought we’d take a leaf out of the Tupas’ book. You heard they caught that Mexican who staged the raids on San Diego, by the way?”
Hugh felt a stir of excitement. This was the kind of talk he’d been yearning for: practical talk, with a definite end in view. He said, “Yeah. Some stinking fishery patrol, wasn’t it?”
“Right. Claimed he was fishing in illegal waters. Found these balloons all laid out on the foredeck, ready to go.”
“But like I was just saying to Austin,” Carl cut in, “we’re right here in the same country with the mothers. We don’t have to strike at random from a distance. We can pick out and identify guilty individuals, right?”
“Only we don’t,” Train snapped. “I mean, like this cat Bamberley.”
“Shit, he’s got as much trouble as he deserves,” Hugh said with a shrug. “They closed his hydroponics factory, and—”
“Not Jacob! Roland!” Train pointed with his toe at the paper Hugh had dropped. “Going to make a fucking fortune out of these Mitsuyama filters, isn’t he? When back before he and his breed got to work on the world, when you felt thirsty you helped yourself at the nearest creek!”
“Right,” Hugh agreed. “Now they’ve used the creeks for sewers, and what happens? Millions of people lie around groaning with the runs.”
“That’s it,” Train approved. “We got to stop them. Hell, d’you hear this one? Some pest got at the crops in Idaho—worm of some kind—so they’re demanding to be allowed to turn loose all the old poisons, like DDT!”
“Shit, no!” Hugh said, and felt his cheeks pale.
“It’s a fact. Aren’t there better ways of handling the problem? Sure there are. Like in China they don’t have trouble with flies. You see a fly, you swat it, and pretty soon—no more flies.”
“I like the trick they use in Cuba,” Carl said. “To keep pests off the sugar cane. Plant something between the rows that the bugs make for first, cut it down and turn it into compost.”
“Right! Right! ’Stead of which, over here, they shit in the water until it’s dangerous to drink, then make a fucking fortune out of selling us gadgets to purify it again. Why can’t they be made to strain out their own shit?”
“Know what I’d like to do?” Carl exclaimed. “Like to soak those mothers right in their own shit until they turn brown!”
“We’re all in this together now,” Train said somberly. “Black, white, red, yellow, we all been screwed up until we got to stick together or go under.”
“Sure, but you know these bastards! Darker you are, more they screw you! Like the atom-bomb. Did they drop it on the Germans? Shit, no—Germans are white same as them. So they dropped it on the little yellow man. And then when they found there were black men who were standing up on their hind legs and talking back, they joined forces with the yellow ones because they were kind of pale and pretty damned near as good at messing up the environment. Truth or lies?”
“Trying to make me ashamed of being white, baby?” Hugh snapped.
“Shit, of course not.” Carl put his arm around Hugh’s waist. “But did they send that poisoned food to a white country, baby? Hell, no—they sent it to Africa, and when they found it worked they gave it to the Indians in Honduras, got the excuse they were after to march in with their guns and bombs and napalm and all that shit.”
There was a long pause full of confirmatory nods.
At length Train stirred, feeling in his pocket for a pen. “Well, right now I got to split—this chica I’m shacked with promised to fix a meal tonight. I get the impression we talk the same language, though, and I’m working on a kind of plan you might like. Let me leave you a number where you can reach me.”
Hugh dived for the abandoned newspaper and tore a strip off its margin for Train to write on.
JUNE
A VIEW STILL EXTREMELY WIDELY ADHERED TO
There’s an ’eathen bint out in Malacca
With an ’orrible ’eathenish name.
As for black, they don’t come any blacker—
But she answered to “Jill” just the same!
Well, a man ’oo’s abroad can get lonely,
Missin’ friends an’ relations an’ such.
She wasn’t “me sweet one-an’-only”—
But there’s others as done just as much!
I’m not blushin’ or makin’ excuses,
An’ I don’t think she’d want that, because
When she stopped blubbin’ over ’er bruises
The long an’ the short of it was
That I’d bust up ’er ’orrible idol
An’ I’d taught ’er respect for a gun—
Yus, I broke ’er to saddle an’ bridle
An’ I left ’er an Englishman’s son!
—“Lays of the Long Haul,” 1905
STEAM ENGINE TIME
Although the sun showed only as a bright patch on pale gray, it was a sunny day in the life of Philip Mason. Against all the odds everything was turning out okay. Talk about blessings in disguise!
They had their franchise. They had the first consignment of a thousand units. Their first spot commercial on the local TV stations—featuring Pete Goddard, who’d done an excellent job considering he had no training as an actor—had brought six hundred inquiries by Monday morning’s mail.
Pausing in the task of sorting the inquiries into serious and frivolous—most of the latter abusive, of course, from anonymous Trainites—he glanced at the clothing store catty-corner from Prosser Enterprises. A man in overalls was scrubbing off a slog
an which had been painted on its main window over the weekend; it now read ROTTING IS NATU. The accompanying skull and crossbones had gone.
They were having a man-made fiber week. Trainites objected to orlon, nylon, dacron, anything that didn’t come from a plant or an animal.
Hah! They don’t mind if a sheep catches cold, he thought cynically, so long as they don’t—and speaking of colds ... He dabbed his watering eyes with a tissue and soaked it with a thorough blast from his nose.
The door of his office opened. It was Alan.
“Hey!” Philip exclaimed. “I thought you had to stay home today. Dorothy said you—”
Alan grimaced. “Yeah, I have the runs again okay. But I heard the good news and decided I couldn’t miss out.” He stared at the heap of correspondence on Philip’s desk.
“Christ, there really are six hundred!”
“And five,” Philip said with a smirk.
“I’d never have believed it.” Shaking his head, Alan dropped into a chair. “Well, I guess Doug was right, hm?”
“About the enteritis being on our side? I thought that was in kind of bad taste.”
“Don’t let that stop you getting the point,” Alan said. “Know what I like about my job, Phil? They talk all the time about the businessman, the entrepreneur, being an ‘enemy of mankind’ and all that shit, and it is shit! I mean, if anyone has a reason to hate society and want to screw it up, it ought to be me, right?” He held up his bullet-scarred hand. “But I don’t. I got my chance to grow fat—least, it looks like that’s what’s happening—and do I have to be ashamed of how I do it? I do not. Here I am offering a product people really want, really need, and into the bargain creating jobs for people who’d otherwise be on relief. True or false?”
“Well, sure,” Philip said, blinking. Especially the point about new jobs. Unemployment throughout the nation was at an all-time high this summer, and on this side of Denver it was particularly bad and would remain so until they finished the modifications to the hydroponics plant and hired back their former six hundred workers.
That too was naturally redounding to the benefit of Prosser Enterprises. Anyone with an ounce of wit could be taught to fit these purifiers in an hour.
“Well, then!” Alan said gruffly, and swiveled his chair to face the window overlooking the street. “Say, there’s another bunch of kids. City’s alive with them today. Where they all coming from?”
Across the street a group of about eight or ten youngsters—more boys than girls—had paused to jeer at the man washing the slogan off the clothing store.
“Yes, I saw a whole lot of them getting off a bus at the Trailways terminal,” Philip agreed. “Must have been—oh—nearly thirty. They asked me the way to the Tower-hill road.”
“Looks like this lot is heading the same way,” Alan muttered. “Wonder what the big attraction is.”
“You could run over and ask them.”
“Thanks, I don’t care that much. Say, by the way: how come you’re sorting these letters yourself? What became of that girl we hired for you?”
Philip sighed. “Called in to apologize. Sore throat. She could barely talk on the phone.”
“Ah, hell. Remind me, will you? Top priority on filters for the homes of our staff. See if we can cut the sickness rate a bit, hm? Charity begins at home and all that shit.” He leafed curiously through a few of the letters. “How many of these are genuine orders and how many are junk?”
“I guess we’re running ten to one in favor of genuine ones.”
That’s great. That’s terrific!”
The door opened again and Dorothy entered, a sheaf of pages from a memo pad in one hand, a handkerchief in the other with which she was wiping her nose. “More inquiries all the time,” she said. “Another thirty this morning already.”
“This is fantastic!” Alan said, taking the papers from her. From outside there came a rumble of heavy traffic, and Dorothy exclaimed.
“What in the world are those things?”
They glanced up. Pausing at the corner before making a left toward Towerhill, a string of big olive-drab Army trucks, each trailing something on fat deep-cleated tires from which protruded a snub and deadly-looking muzzle. But not guns.
“Hell, I saw those on TV!” Alan said. “They’re the new things they’re trying out in Honduras—they’re battle-lasers!”
“Christ, I guess they must be!” Philip jumped up and went to the window for a closer look. “But why are they bringing them up here? Maneuvers or something?”
“I didn’t hear they were planning any,” Alan said. “But of course nowadays you don’t. Say! Do you think all these kids coming into town might have got wind of maneuvers and decided to screw them up?”
“Well, it’s the kind of damn-fool thing they might do,” Philip agreed.
“Right. In which case they deserve what’s coming to them.” Absently Alan rubbed the back of his scarred hand. “Wicked-looking, aren’t they? Wouldn’t care to be in the way when they let loose. And speaking of letting loose—excuse me!”
He rushed from the room.
IF IT MOVES, SHOOT IT
... that the Army is using defoliants in Honduras to create free-fire zones. This charge has been strongly denied by the Pentagon. Asked to comment just prior to leaving for Hawaii, where he will convalesce for the next two or three weeks, Prexy said, quote, Well, if you can’t see them you can’t shoot them. End quote. Support has been growing for a bill which Senator Richard Howell will introduce at the earliest opportunity, forbidding the issue of a passport to any male between sixteen and sixty not in possession of a valid discharge certificate or medical exemption. Welcoming the proposal, a Pentagon spokesman today admitted that of the last class called for the draft more than one in three failed to report. Your steaks are going to cost you more. This warning was today issued by the Department of Agriculture. The price of animal fodder has quote taken off like a rocket unquote, following the mysterious ...
A PLACE TO STAND
“A lady and a gentleman to see you, Miss Mankiewicz,” said the hotel reception-clerk. He was Puerto Rican and adhered to the old-fashioned formalities. “I don’t know if you’re expecting them?”
“Who are they?” Peg said. She sounded nervous, knew it, and wasn’t surprised. During the previous few weeks she had initiated a very tricky venture, and she was sure that for the past ten days at least someone had been following her. It wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that she had broken one of the increasingly complex disloyalty laws. The situation was beginning to resemble that in Britain during the eighteenth century: any new law involving a harsher punishment for a vaguer crime was certain of passage through Congress and instant presidential approval.
Granted, Canada wasn’t yet a proscribed country. But at this rate it wouldn’t be long ...
“A Mr. Lopez,” the clerk said. “And a Miss Ramage. Uh—Ra-maige?”
Peg’s heart seemed to stop in mid-beat. When she recovered she said, “Tell them I’ll be right down.”
“They say they’d prefer to come up.”
“Whatever they want.”
When she put down the phone her hand was trembling. She’d pulled all kinds of strings recently, but she hadn’t expected one of them to draw Lucy Ramage to her. Incredible!
Hastily she gathered up some soiled clothing scattered on her bed and thrust it out of sight. The ashtrays needed emptying, and ... Well, it was a ropy hotel anyhow. But she couldn’t afford a better one. Thirty bucks a day was her limit.
She’d come to New York because she had a project on her mind. As she’d told Zena, she had only one talent, and right now the logical use to put it to seemed to be muckraking. So she’d asked herself a key question: what was the most important muck? (Actually she had phrased it, subconsciously, in terms of what Decimus had hated most. But it came to the same in the end.)
It almost answered itself: “Do unto others ...”
Very well, the starting point would be t
hat claim of Professor Quarrey’s, which had been in the news at the beginning of the year, that the country’s greatest export was noxious gas. And who would like to stir up the fuss again? Obviously, the Canadians, cramped into a narrow band to the north of their more powerful neighbors, growing daily angrier about the dirt that drifted to them on the wind, spoiling crops, causing chest diseases and soiling laundry hung out to dry. So she’d called the magazine Hemisphere in Toronto, and the editor had immediately offered ten thousand dollars for three articles.
Very conscious that all calls out of the country were apt to be monitored, she’d put the proposition to him in highly general terms: the risk of the Baltic going the same way as the Mediterranean, the danger of further dust-bowls like the Mekong Desert, the effects of bringing about climatic change. That was back in the news—the Russians had revived their plan to reverse the Yenisei and Ob. Moreover, there was the Danube problem, worse than the Rhine had ever been, and Welsh nationalists were sabotaging pipelines meant to carry “their” water into England, and the border war in West Pakistan had been dragging on so long most people seemed to have forgotten that it concerned a river.
And so on.
Almost as soon as she started digging, though, she thought she might never be able to stop. It was out of the question to cover the entire planet. Her pledged total of twelve thousand words would be exhausted by North American material alone.
Among her most useful contacts was Felice, née Jones. Having spent more than two months after her return from the wat in hunting for a new job, she had finally resigned herself to being unemployable and married some guy she’d known for years. He had an unexciting but safe job and she was now able to devote much of her time to acting as Peg’s unpaid West Coast correspondent. Despite her former dismissal of her brother’s ideals, she was obviously very worried now. What seemed to have revised her opinions was the fact that her new husband was going to insist on children.
