They passed an interchange. A neon sign on the feeder road below them glided out of the darkness and then faded behind them. HARRY'S ALL NIGHT HAMBURGERS. She felt a sudden passion for cheeseburger and fries.
He licked the pencil tip with his tongue, tucked the receiver more firmly against his ear, and held his hand poised over the order pad. "All right, go ahead. You want what? Cornish hens. Fine, ma'am. Yes, we do. All sorts of barnyard animals. A half-dozen? And what? I see. Is there some reason why they should be pregnant? How about a nice rooster, instead? Fine. Yes, you can pay when you pick them up."
The clapboard building was falling apart. The porch roof sagged, and the windows were boarded up. Shutters and sidings loose and brittle with time ratted in the prairie wind. Behind the building, black and rotted husks dotted a weed grown field. Mike Glider gingerly got out of the truck and looked around. "Harry?"
"Here." Harry and Jenny came down from the decaying porch.
"I thought this was the place," Mike said. "Now I'm not so sure."
"This is it," Harry said. He held up a piece of broken board. IOWA STATE COLLEGE AGRICULTURAL RESEA--The end of the sign was charred black.
"Sure is run down," Bruce said.
Mike nodded. "Yeah, but it was once the pride of the Agricultural Service. They did a lot of good work here."
"Closed by court order," Harry said.
"Worse than that," Mike said. "They didn't even wait. A Green flying squad burned the main building out. Killed four of the research staff--and got off as justifiable manslaughter."
"Wasn't the only place that happened," Harry said. "The big pogrom--lot of scientists killed that year. Okay, what's next?"
"We get shovels," Mike said. "They buried the bacterial cultures out in the cornfield when they heard the mob was coming."
"I better watch the bike," Harry said.
"It's all right, I can see it," Jenny said.
Harry shrugged. "Okay." He looked around at the wasted fields. "Shovels. Dig where?"
"They faxed me a map," Mike said. He grabbed the doorknob and shook it. The door would not budge. "They used student labor during the school year; then used volunteers so they could continue working the land"--again, he tried the door--" into summer sessions. There are probably all sorts of tools--" He kicked the door. "If we can just get inside."
The doorknob was pulled from his grasp. "I came in through the back," Harry said.
Mike looked at Bruce and Bruce looked at Mike. "I would have tried that next," Mike said. He stepped inside the building to the musty smell of cobwebs and rotted wood. A thick layer of dust coated the floor, broken by the tracks of rodents.
The building was a warren of rooms and closets. Abandoned offices. Desks with empty drawers hanging open. File cabinets overturned. Papers scattered about the floor, stained with rodent droppings and the leak of rain through the roof.
"God damn them," Mike said reverently. "They did good work here. Milk. We had a way to synthesize hormones. Natural hormones, what cows make themselves. Give the cows more and get half again as much milk. Only they wouldn't let us use it."
"With people starving?" Jenny demanded. "How long has that been going on."
"They discovered how to do it back before the turn of the century," Mike said. "In 1987."
"But--why--"
"They're still testing to see if it's safe. That's what the Greens said. The dairy corporations didn't fight very hard. The last thing they need is cheap milk. Oversupply, they called it."
He found Bruce at the back door of the building. The door was hanging loose on its hinges, and the jamb around the latch was broken and splintered. Bruce pointed to the shattered door. "When Harry said he came trough the back door--"
"He's got a helluva knock, doesn't he?"
Harry approached them from the farther hallway carrying two shovels over his shoulder. " I found a store room," he announced. He gave one shovel to Bruce; the other, to Mike. "And there were just enough shovels."
«logon»
«SMOF-One: Bull semen!!!??? The Ghost»
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The plant manager spoke in such a broad Texan accent that you would never guess he was not originally from Texas. Just as some people were "more Catholic than the Pope," Ron Ellick reflected, others were more Texan than the Texans. Johns even kept a stuffed rattlesnake in his office. It all seemed very strange, because they were in the Pennsylvania coal country, nowhere near Texas. Ellick felt right at home.
The plant manager led him past the beds of enormous NC machines jigged to shape different parts from the base material. All but one were silent and shrouded. The plant was weirdly quiet with only a handful of people at work. The echo of hammer, saw and drill sounded small in its cavernous spaces. "Not very busy, Mr. Johns," Ellick ventured.
"Call me Johnny," the manager said. "And you're right. We aren't very busy, 't all. Because of the all."
"All?"
"Right. Pollution laws won't let anyone drill for all anymore. So, less fuel for the airlines. And they cut back on the number of flights because it might damage the ozone layer. So fewer planes are being built." Johns shrugged. "Bunch of guano, if you ask me. But I'm an interested party. The aerospace people were our biggest customers. Now all we get are maintenance and spares orders. There's an example, on that pallet. See where Mitch is gluing the details in place? Now, what does that remind you of?"
"A bee's honeycomb."
Johns nodded. "Right. We call it structural honeycomb. That there is part of the nose assembly for a 737b."
Ron Ellick studied the part dutifully. He had flown from Minneapolis to Philadelphia, courtesy of 3MJ, on an old 737b. He wasn't sure he wanted to know how much of it was held together with glue. "You work on some mighty big parts, Johnny. Awkward shapes. Must be a problem handling the stuff."
"Oh, not the raw material you were asking about. That comes in blocks. Come on, let me show you."
Johns led him to an area of the plant filled with shelving. Each shelf held a stack of what looked like solid oblong blocks. "The way the industry's been ruined, we have enough honeycomb in stock here to last a generation." Johns shook his head sadly. "Anyhow, the stuff was shipped collapsed into blocks like this. Easier to handle. We set the blocks on an extender, put hooks in each end, and stretch 'em open like an accordion." He pointed to another machine which to Ellick looked like a rack from a medieval torture chamber. His mind toyed with the notion: a modern day horror story.…
"So the original honeycomb block," Johns went on, "takes up hardly any room at all. Ginny, show Ed here what happens when you put a block in water." He nudged Ron Ellick with his elbow. "Watch this."
The worker pulled on a pair of metal reinforced gloves. Glaives, thought Ron Ellick. Chain mail. It seemed appropriate for someone who worked on a rack. She pulled a block from the shelves and began to lower it end-first into a barrel filled with water.
"This one is aluminum," Johns told him. "But we have honeycomb, in all sorts of metallic and non-metallic composites."
The block was completely immersed in the water now and the level in the barrel had hardly risen at all. "Ninety percent air," Johns assured him. I doubt there's any structural material on the face of the earth that combines the structural strength with the lightness of honeycomb."