“And speaking of foreign aid: I think we may justly cite the recently announced Beninia project as an undertaking which combines to the highest degree enlightened self-interest with the support of the deserving. I only regret that our present Administration preferred to operate through intermediaries instead of…”
CHAIRMAN YUNG SLAMS U S
DUBS BENINIA PROJECT ‘NAKED ECONOMIC AGGRESSION’
Your board is pleased to report that after certain minor initial difficulties the Beninia project is well under way. The fullest assistance has been forthcoming from the Beninian government, and the latest evaluation from Shalmaneser …
“The hole! I saw where it said on SCANALYZER that they haven’t fought any wars for themselves—not ever. If they don’t have the spunk to stand up for themselves they must be a pretty gutless bunch, and I don’t think we ought to give away…”
GT HOLDINGS BLAST OFF
2005 PRICE CEILING SHATTERED
Just because they put a few of their darker-skinned lackeys out front, don’t think this isn’t a white operation. In Beninia they are spitting on the bodies of our ancestors who died at Sharpeville and Bloemfontein, at Durban and Witwatersrand …
“My parents met in the Peace Corps. Dad says Beninia looks like another of the same sort of thing as what they did. Suppose I volunteered; would you…?”
CAIRO ATTACKS BEN PROJ AS ‘JEWISH PLOT’
GOVT SPONSORS BOYCOTT OF GT MERCHANDISE
Dear President Obomi—I saw on TV where it said your country doesn’t have any muckers. Well my boy Andy was killed by one and I have two other sweet prodgies I don’t want the same to happen to so please tell me how I can …
“What business we have meddling in affairs on another continent I don’t know. When there’s so much amiss over here you’d think we ought to…”
BRITISH PREMIER PRAISES BENINIA PROJECT
OTHER EUROPEAN REACTION GUARDED, HOSTILE
(LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the two following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you mustn’t,” and “I can but you mustn’t.”
—The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan)
tracking with closeups (28)
THE SLOW WAY TO DIE
Eric Ellerman had expected them at least to tell him when they ran out of patience, give him some kind of a warning.
But they didn’t.
After the first encounter, Stal Lucas and his sparewheels allowed three days. They found him on the rapitrans again, predictable as sunrise, heard his excuses, and told him to do better.
How? Industrial security had kept pace with advances in espionage; literally, they counted every leaf of the Too Much strain, by running an automatic camera connected to a computer along the huge hydroponic tanks. He thought of stealing part of a leaf and trying to make it take as a cutting; he dropped the fragment inside his shoe and tried to get past the gate sniffers with it. But they detected the aroma given off by the uncured leaf and although they accepted his excuse that it must have fallen into his shoe by accident it just so happened that on the same day one of the water technicians was fool enough to try and get out with a whole stem of the plant, apparently for his own use. After that, security was unbelievable for a while.
He told Stal and the yonderboy wasn’t interested. He said this time next week, or …
Copy the genetic structure from a cured leaf? Couldn’t be done without the kind of equipment he employed in the lab, and he couldn’t afford to keep a Jeans-Whitman molecular analyser in his kitchen. In any case, every pack of Too Much that left the premises was bombarded with radiation designed to blur the key genes. One would have to buy a thousand joints before one could be sure of establishing the correct pattern.
He quarrelled with Ariadne worse than ever and once he hit Penelope so hard he was frightened of himself. She did not cry over the bruise, but went away in a corner and nursed it. When he came after her to try and apologise and comfort her she fled from him.
He thought of asking a friend for advice, but there wasn’t anyone. People at the plant had never been close to him, and since the word got around that Ariadne was pregnant again they had been keeping their distance—so far away, he could not even nail the lie.
The day before Stal had promised to waylay him again he decided firmly that he must report what had happened to the authorities and ask for help. He put in an application to see the director responsible for the tectogenetic section. The director listened to the story in the morning and nodded thoughtfully over it. In the afternoon he called Eric back and had him sit in on a telephone conversation with a police lieutenant who appeared to be convinced that Eric was marketing his story to attract attention.
“No, of course I didn’t see what kind of shoes they were wearing! They cornered me in a crowded rapitrans car! No, I don’t have any way of getting in touch with them—they said they’d find me again, they know where I live.”
Probably the director had mentioned things like his not getting the expected raise awarded to everyone else after the success of the Too Much strain; probably he’d said something about having three prodgies, and all girls at that—anti-social, work falling off, incipient paranoia …
The police lieutenant told him to string Stal along and see what else he could find out and then maybe there would be some action. Meantime he was busy and couldn’t spare a man to keep watch over an adult citizen.
The next morning’s conversation consisted in two sentences and a quadruple shrug.
“You have what we asked for, darling?”
“Look, if you’d only let me explain you’d see why it’s so difficult!”
Shrug.
* * *
It was so long coming—days on days, and the hints and clues subtle as the dropping temperature before a storm. A resident in their block usually friendly, becoming curt. Penelope coming back from school in tears and refusing to be comforted. Ariadne being deliberately short-changed at the block store and losing the argument because people in the line behind shoved her until she had to grab the groceries and run. Someone unknown spitting in a culture he was working on at the labs. A red cross smeared in lipstick on the door of the apt.
He told Ariadne eventually that he was going to apply to GT for a post in Beninia because it said they wanted people in every possible discipline and that must include competent geneticists. She said she didn’t want her children growing up in some filthy foreign country. He lost the first stage of the argument. It was won for him when she caught the Gadsden boy and some of his sparewheels tormenting Penelope, telling her they were going to make her have lots of babies and she’d die but she would go to heaven because that was what all Right Catholics were supposed to do. They had got as far as taking off her panties.
In his innocence he had assumed that once his letter of application was in the mail it was safe; the slot in the wall of the apt was supposed to feed directly to a mail-canister collected by the Post Office twice a day. He’d forgotten that the address itself told a long, long story.
Saturday evening he went for some liquor and joints to help ease the passage of time. In the store someone jostled him and said loudly, “Crowded around here! And some people I could name don’t help!”
Another voice said, “Don’t worry, he’s leaving us, and not before time.”
“Ah-hah? Where’s he going?”
“Africa. That’s far enough away.”
I didn’t tell anyone—I didn’t even tell Penelope for fear she might …
He paid up and left carrying his purchases. Drunk, the two men followed him. He didn’t know their names. They began calling out to everyone they passed, saying, “Hey look! Don’t you know who he is? He’s Pope Eglantine’s special representative, the daddy of them all!”