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 con-spiracy 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 Regu-lators 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 prob-lem. The gypsy Moderators understood big-top tents and teepees. The people of Buna were very big on their bio-agricultural green-houses. The SO/LIC soldiers, who were trained in environmental disaster response, were experts at sandbags, quonset huts, soup kitch-ens, latrines, and potable water supplies. For their own part, the tech-ies 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: struc-ture 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, mem-branous amoeba.
It would have seemed sensible to weigh the alternatives carefully, hold safety hearings, have competitive bids submitted, and then, fi-nally, 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 splat-tered the glass sky with black muck. The dome’s interior light became dim and scary, the temperature dropped, the plants and animals suf-fered, 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 ev-erything they could all at the same time. They dropped all other ef-forts. 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 sci-ence 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 mil-itary 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. Pen-ninger, 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.’