“Mmm-hmmm,” said the Field Marshal.
Gazzaniga winced. “I hate to think what the global media would make of American soldiers shedding American blood. That’s ghastly. Why, it’s civil war, basically.”
“It would make us look like barbarians,” Greta said.
“Economic embargo. Moral pressure. Net subversion, information warfare. That’s how you handle a problem like this,” Gazzaniga said with finality.
“I see,” said the Field Marshal. “Well, let me bring up one small, additional matter. The President is very concerned about the missing armaments from that Air Force base.”
They nodded. “They’ve been missing quite a while,” Oscar said. “That scarcely seems like an urgent issue.”
“It’s not widely known—and of course, this news isn’t to leave this room—but there was a battery of specialized, short-range, surface-to-surface missiles in that Air Force base.”
“Missiles,” Greta repeated thoughtfully.
“Aerial reconnaissance indicates that the missile battery is hidden in the Sabine River valley. We have some very good human intelligence that suggests that those missiles have been loaded with aerosol warheads.”
“Gas warheads?” Gazzaniga said.
“They were designed for deploying gas,” Menlo said. “Nonlethal, crowd-control aerosols. Luckily, their range is quite short. Only fifty miles.”
“I see,” said Oscar.
“Well,” said Gazzaniga, “they’re nonlethal missiles and they have a short range, right? So what’s the big deal?”
“You people here in Buna are the only federal facility within fifty miles of those missiles.”
No one said anything.
“Tell me how those missiles work,” Greta said at last.
“Well, it’s a nice design,” Menlo offered. “They’re stealth missiles, mostly plastic, and they vaporize in midair in a silent burst dispersion. Their payload is a fog: gelatin-coated microspheres. The psychotropic agent is inside the spheres, and the spheres will only melt in the environment of human lungs. After a few hours in the open air, all the microdust cooks down, and the payload becomes inert. But any human being who’s been breathing in that area will absorb the payload.”
“So they’re like a short-term, airborne vaccination,” Oscar said.
“Yes. Pretty much. That’s well put. I think you’ve got the picture there.”
“What kind of insane person builds things like that?” Greta said in annoyance.
“Well, U.S. military biowar engineers. Quite a few of them used to work at this facility, before we lost the economic war.” Field Marshal Menlo sighed. “As far as I know, that technology has never been used.”
“He’s going to bomb us with those things,” Oscar announced.
“How do you know that?”
“Because he’s hired those biowar technicians. He must have picked ’em all up for a song, years ago. He’s stuffed ’em down a salt mine somewhere. Psychotropic gas—that’s just what he used against the Air Force base. And airborne vaccinations, he used that to kill mosquitoes. It all fits in. It’s his modus operandi.”
“We agree with that assessment,” Menlo said. “The President asked him to give those gas weapons back. No go. So, he must mean to use them.”
“What’s the nature of this substance in the microspheres?” Greta said.
“Well, psychotropics seem likeliest. If they hit a place the size of Buna, you could have the whole town basically insane for forty-eight hours. But those microbeads could hold a lot of different airborne agents. Pretty much anything, really.”
“And there’s a battery of these missiles pointed at us, right now?”
Menlo nodded. “Just one battery. Twenty warheads.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Gazzaniga announced, “if there was a limited, surgical raid…not by U.S. troops officially, but let’s say, by some competent combat veterans disguised as irregular Moderators…”
“Completely different matter,” said a department head.
“Exactly.”
“Actually defuses the crisis. Increases the general security.”
“Just what I was thinking.”
“How long before you can attack, Marshal Menlo?”
“Seventy-two hours,” the Field Marshal said.
But Huey had bombed them within forty-eight.
__________
The first missile overshot the Collaboratory dome and landed in the western edge of Buna. A section of the city the size of four football fields was soaked with caustic black goo. The arrival of the bio-missile and its explosion were completely silent. It took until three in the morning for a partying German film crew in a local bed-and-breakfast to notice that the town’s streets, roofs, and windows were covered with a finely powdered black tar.
The reaction was mass hysteria. The captive Haitians in Washington, DC, had been getting a lot of press lately. The attack of gas psychosis in the Air Force base had not been forgotten, either. The news from the Collaboratory’s War Committee had, of course, immediately leaked to the public—not officially, but as rumor. Confronted with this black manifestation of their darkest fears, the people of Buna lost their minds. Fits of itching, burning, fainting, and convulsions were reported. Many of the afflicted claimed to have bicameral consciousness, or second sight, or even telepathy.
A courageous Collaboratory krewe donned emergency respirator gear and rushed to the site of the gas attack. They gathered samples and returned—barely able to make it through the panicked crowds at the Collaboratory’s airlocks, townsfolk desperate for the safety of the airtight lab. There were ugly incidents at the gates, where families found themselves separated in the crowds, where women held their children up in the air and begged for safety and mercy.
By ten AM, a lab study of the black tar had revealed that it was paint. It was a black, nontoxic, nonremovable caustic polymer, in a fog of gelatin beads. There was no psychotropic agent at all. The insanity of the townsfolk had been entirely a case of mass suggestion. The missile was just a silent paint balloon, a darkly humorous warning shot.
The CDIA’s raid across Louisiana’s border was canceled, because the missile battery had been moved. Worse yet, twenty new dummy missile batteries had suddenly appeared in its place: on farms, in towns, roaming on shrimp trucks, all over Louisiana.
Despite the fact that scientific analysis had proved that the missile was paint, a large proportion of the population simply refused to believe it. The state and federal governments officially announced that it was paint; so did the city council, but people simply refused to accept this. People were paranoid and terrified—but many seemed weirdly elated by the incident.
In the days that followed, a thriving gray market sprang up for samples of the paint, which were swiftly distributed all over the country, sold to the gullible in little plastic-topped vials. Hundreds of people spontaneously arrived in Buna, anxious to scrape up paint and sniff it. A large number of miracle cures were attributed to use of this substance. People wrote open letters to the Governor of Louisiana, begging him to bomb their own cities with the “liberation gas.”
Huey denied all knowledge of any missiles in Louisiana. He stoutly denied that he had anything to do with black paint. He made fun of the ridiculous antics of the war-crazed populace—which didn’t require much effort—and suggested that it proved that the federal government had lost its grip. Huey’s two Senators had both been purged from the Senate, which was behaving with more purpose than it had managed to show for years; but this allowed Huey to wash his hands of Washington entirely.
Huey’s mood darkened drastically after his own bomb attack. One of Huey’s trusted henchmen had planted an explosive briefcase inside the statehouse. Huey’s left arm was broken in the explosion, and two of his state senators were killed. This was not the first conspiracy against Huey’s life; it was far from the first attempt to kill him. But it was the closest to success.
Naturally the President was
suspected. Oscar very much doubted that the President would have stooped to a tactic so archaic and crude. The failed assassination actually strengthened Huey’s hand—and his hand came down hard on Louisianans, and on the Regulator hierarchy in particular. It was of course Louisianans who had the greatest reason to kill their leader, who in pursuit of his own ambitions had placed their state in a hopeless struggle against the entire Union. The Regulators in particular—Huey’s favorite fall guys—had a grim future ahead of them, if and when they faced federal vengeance. Regulators from outside Louisiana—and there were many such—were sensing which way the wind blew, and were signing up in droves for the quasi-legitimacy of the President’s CDIA. Huey had been good to the proles, he had made them a force to be reckoned with—but even proles understood power politics. Why go down in flames with a Governor, when you could rise to the heights with a President?
The missile attack had one profound and lasting consequence. It jarred the Collaboratory from its sense of helplessness. It was now quite obvious to everyone that the War was truly on. The black paint had been the first shot, and the likelihood was quite strong that the city of Buna would in fact be gassed. The prospect of choking in a silent black fog while surrounded by neighbors turned into maniacs—this prospect had clarified people’s minds quite wonderfully.
The Collaboratory was airtight. It was safe from gas; but it couldn’t hold everyone.
The obvious answer was to launch an architectural sortie. The fortress should be extended over the entire city.
Construction plans were immediately dusted off. Money and rights-of-way were suddenly no problem. Locals, wanderers, soldiers, scientists, Moderators, men, women, and children, they were one and all simply drafted into the effort.
All these factions had different ideas of how to tackle the problem. The gypsy Moderators understood big-top tents and teepees. The people of Buna were very big on their bio-agricultural greenhouses. The SO/LIC soldiers, who were trained in environmental disaster response, were experts at sandbags, quonset huts, soup kitchens, latrines, and potable water supplies. For their own part, the techies of the Collaboratory flew into a strange furor over the plans of Alcott Bambakias. The scientists were long-used to the security of their armored dome, but it had never occurred to them that the rigid substance of their shelter might become cheap, smart, and infinitely distensible networks. This was architecture as airtight ephemera: structure like a dewy spiderweb: smart, hypersensitive, always calculating, always on the move. There seemed to be no limit to the scale of it. The dome could become a living fluid, a kind of decentered, membranous amoeba.
It would have seemed sensible to weigh the alternatives carefully, hold safety hearings, have competitive bids submitted, and then, finally, engage in a major building project. The mayor of Buna, a well-meaning middle-aged woman who had made a bundle in the greenhouse-flower industry, made a genuine effort to “assert control.”
Then two more paint bombs arrived. These were better-aimed. They hit the Collaboratory dead on—it was a large target—and splattered the glass sky with black muck. The dome’s interior light became dim and scary, the temperature dropped, the plants and animals suffered, and the people were grim and enraged. Confronted with this direct insult, their will to resist stiffened drastically. It was personal now—they could see the evil slur against them, hovering above their heads.
All debate stopped. There was no longer time for talk, and the decision was a fait accompli. Everyone simply began contributing everything they could all at the same time. They dropped all other efforts. When projects overlapped or interfered, they simply tore the little one down and built the more ambitious one. The town of Buna as people had previously known it simply ceased to exist. The dome metastasized; it sent out giant filmy buttresses on Daliesque walking stilts. The greenhouses of Buna linked together spontaneously into endless ramparts and tunnels. City blocks transmuted overnight into gleaming fields of plastic soap bubbles. Airtight brick crypts and bomb shelters sprang up everywhere, like measles.
Huey chose this moment to launch a well-documented outing attack on Oscar and Greta. There was no denying it this time. It was sordid and painful, but Huey’s timing could not have been worse. In a time of peace, it would have been politically disastrous to learn that a Machiavellian campaign adviser (of dubious genetic heritage) had fiendishly installed his girlfriend as the quasi-dictator of a federal science facility, while she paid him off with sexual favors in a Louisiana beach house.
In Washington, the news caused some alarm; pundits issued some obligatory tut-tutting; elderly male scientists were interviewed, who declared that it was truly a shame to see a woman sleep her way to the top. But in Buna, the War was on. The revelation, which was no revelation to anyone in Buna, was a war romance. All was instantly forgiven. Oscar and Greta were practically pitched into each other’s arms by the sheer pressure of public goodwill.
Ancient social boundaries snapped under the strain of war. Wartime affairs broke out like chicken pox: scientists, Moderator women, dashing European journalists, chicken-fried Buna locals, even the military was having sex. It was just too much to ask of human beings that they work shoulder to shoulder and cheek by jowl under the constant expectation of a mind-crushing gas attack while, somehow, avoiding sex with strangers.
Besides, their leaders were doing it. It was happening. It was a suddenly public declaration of their society’s unsuspected potency. Of course they were breaking the rules; that was what every sane person was doing, that was what the effort was all about. Of course the lab’s Director was having hot sex with the genetically warped politician. She was their painted Joan of Arc, the armored bride of the science wars.
People even made jokes about it. The jokes were loyally relayed to Oscar by Fred Dillen, one of his last remaining krewe members, who had been trained to understand that political jokes were valuable.
Fred presented him with a Greta-and-Oscar political joke.
“See, Greta and Oscar have sneaked off to Louisiana to have sex in the middle of a swamp. So they hire a bass boat and they paddle way out in the middle of nowhere where there aren’t any spies or bugs. So they’re getting it on inside the boat, but Oscar gets overexcited, and he falls in the water. And he doesn’t come back up.
“So Greta paddles back alone, and tries to get some help from some swamp Cajuns, but there’s just no sign of Oscar. So she waits for a whole week, and finally the Cajuns come over to see her again. ‘Well, Dr. Penninger, we got some good news and we got some bad news.’
“‘Give me the bad news first.’
“‘Well, we found your boyfriend the genetic freak, but we’re afraid he drowned.’
“‘Oh, that’s bad news. That’s terribly bad news. It’s awful. It’s the very worst.’
“‘Well, it’s not all bad; when we dredged him up outta the mud, we came up with two big gunnysacks of big blue crabs!’
“‘Well, at least you found his poor body…Where have you put my boyfriend?’
“‘Well, beggin’ your pardon, ma’am, but we never done so good on the crabs before, so we figured we’d leave him down there just one more day!’”
That was a pretty good political joke for such a small community—especially when its subtext was analyzed. Like most political jokes, it was all about displaced aggression, and it was the aggression against him that was being fed to the crabs here. The joke was popular, and it was a signifier. And the punch line was very clear: he was going to get away with it. People didn’t fear or hate him the way they feared and hated Huey. He was both a politician and a monster, and yet people, in an odd and marginal way, had come to sympathize with him.
Oscar had reached the peak of his public reputation. Proof of this came when the President was asked about the sex scandal—and about Oscar’s role within the NSC. Here was the President’s main chance to drop him overboard and silently feed him to the swamp crabs; but the President chose otherwise. The President pointed out—properly enough—
that a man couldn’t be expected to do anything about the fact that he was the illegal product of a South American mafia genetics lab. The President said that it smelled of hypocrisy to hold such a man to persnickety standards of sexual correctness—especially when other public figures had deliberately chosen to warp their own brain tissue. The President further declared that he himself was “a human being.” And that, “as a human being,” when he saw lovers persecuted, the spectacle “stuck in my craw.”
The press conference then returned to the hotter issue of the Dutch War, but the President’s aside went over very well. Certain demographic segments were becoming alarmed with the President’s relentless strong-arm tactics and his feral pursuit of domestic opponents. This sudden revelation of a sentimental softer side was an excellent tactical play.
Oscar had reached a great career moment. The President had publicly played the Oscar card. In thinking the matter over, Oscar knew what this meant. It meant that he was burned. He had had his moment in this poker round, he had thumped down like a minor trump on the green baize. If played again, he would be dog-eared. Time to shuffle back into the pack.
So: thus high, but no higher. The lethal subtext of the President’s statement had made that clear to him. He was useful, he was even cute; but on some profound level, he was not trusted. He would never become a pillar of the American state.
Within Buna, Oscar had less and less of a role. He had been an agitator, and instigator, and a gray eminence, but he could never be king. Greta could leverage her own fame now. She had issued a public appeal for aid and assistance, and like a boozy cry to “come to Montmartre,” the cry brought a tidal wave of national response. Bombs or no bombs, Huey or no Huey, President or no President, Buna was going to become a Greenhouse metropolis. The place was an intellectual magnet for every species of dreamer, faker, failed grad student, techie washout, downsized burnout; every guru, costumed geek, ditzy theorist, and bug collector; every microscope peerer, model-rocket builder, and gnarly simulationist; every code-dazed hacker, architectural designer; everyone, in short, who had ever been downgraded, denied, and excluded by their society’s sick demand that their wondrous ideas should make commercial sense.
Distraction Page 46
