The Collaboratory’s War Committee met in full to hear Menlo out. Thre were fifteen people listening, including Greta, Oscar, Kevin, Albert Gazzaniga, all the Collaboratory’s various department heads, along with six Moderator sachems. The Moderators were de-lighted at this news. At last, and with federal government backing, they were going to give the Regulators the sound, bloody stomping they deserved! Everyone else, of course, was appalled.
Oscar spoke up. “Field Marshal while I can appreciate the mer-its of a raid on Louisiana — a lightning raid… a limited, surgical raid — I really can’t see that a military attack on our fellow Americans gains us anything. Huey still has a grip on the levers of power in his state, but he’s weakening. His credibility is in tatters. It’s just a matter of time before internal dissent drives him out.”
“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, informa-tion 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, sur-face-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 intelli-gence that suggests that those missiles have been loaded with aerosol warheads. ”
“Gas warheads?” Gazzaniga said.
“They were designed for deploying gas,” Menlo said. “Non-lethal, 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 mis-siles, mostly plastic, and they vaporize in midair in a silent burst dis-persion. 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 Mar-shal 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 micro spheres?” Greta said.
“Well, psycho tropics 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 lim-itd, surgical raid… not by U.S. troops officially, but let’s say, by some competent combat veterans disguised as irregular Modera-tors…”
“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 Washing-ton, 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, imme-diately 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 con-sciousness, 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 be-lieve 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 coun-try, sold to the gullible in little plastic-topped vials. Hundreds of peo-ple 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.