In any case, the thing he knew most about was the genetic selection and manipulation of strains of marijuana; it was his most salable skill. And Hitrip of California could easily slap a ten-year injunction on him under the Industrial Secrets Act to prevent him working for anyone else in a competing line of business.
Trapped.
The elevator door slid open, and he led Penlope, protesting as always, along the corridor towards the block school. He quelled his compunction about leaving her to the tender mercies of her peers with the usual glib reflection that she had to learn to sink or swim, and marched off towards the rapitrans terminal.
At least the four yonderboys who’d been haunting him recently hadn’t put in an appearance yesterday or the day before. Perhaps they’d grown bored; perhaps it hadn’t been him personally they’d been interested in.
He had his ticket checked by the auto gate-control and passed on to the platform to await the humming monorail car.
And there they were, all four of them, lounging against a pillar.
This morning the platform was even more jampacked with people than usual. That meant the trains weren’t keeping their schedule—probably there had been sabotage on the track again. The rapitrans system was a prime target for pro-Peking “partisans”; no amount of patrolling was proof against such tactics as dropping a bottle that appeared to contain an innocent soft drink but actually had been spiked with a colony of tailored bacteria capable of reducing steel or concrete to a fragile sponge. Normally this would have made Eric furious, like everyone else, but today the throng of impatient passengers held out the hope of evading the yonderboys’ notice.
He moved, sidling, towards the rear of the platform, keeping as many bodies as possible between himself and the four gaudily dressed youths. He thought at first he had made it. Then, as the car finally rolled in, he sensed a shoving behind him and glanced back to discover that they had worked their way over to where he stood and now flanked him in pairs.
With an insincere grin the leader motioned him to enter first, and he did so, quaking.
The car was crowded, of course. It was necessary to stand. Only those lucky people who got on at the first station were able to enjoy a seat for their journey. But the noise made it possible to talk privately if one spoke very close to the listener’s ear, and that the yonderboys proceeded to do.
“You’re Eric Ellerman,” one of them said, and a tiny spray of spittle landed on his cheek with the words.
“You work at Hitrip.”
“You live at Apartment 2704 in that block there.”
“You’re married to a woman called Ariadne.”
“And you have too damned many prodgies, right?”
Prodgies? Eric’s terror-bemused mind wrestled with the term, and finally sorted it out. From “progeny”. Means “children”.
“I’m Stal Lucas.”
“A lot of people can tell you about Stal. People who’ve learned to do as he asks, and been—safe.”
“And that’s my sparewheel Zink. He’s a mean codder. He’s evil.”
“So listen carefully, Eric darling. You’re going to get us something.”
“If you don’t, we’ll make sure that everyone knows the facts about you.”
“Such as that you have other cubs back where you came from in Pacific Palisades, by another shiggy.”
“And what you’re up to now is not three, but five—or six.”
“They’ll love you for that, darling. Just love you!”
“And they’ll be pleased to hear you go to Right Catholic services in secret, won’t they?”
“And you have a special dispensation from Pope Eglantine in Madrid to buy the Populimit Bulletin—”
“And anyway you don’t have a clean genotype like you say but an undercover Right Catholic in the Eugenics office was bribed to alter your charts—”
“And when they grow up your cubs will almost certainly be schizophrenic—”
“Or their cubs will be—”
“What do you want?” Eric forced out. “Leave me alone, leave me alone!”
“Sure, sure,” Stal said soothingly. “You follow our programme and we’ll leave you alone, promise promise. But—ah—you work at Hitrip, and Hitrip’s got something we want.”
“It’s got Too Much,” Zink said from the other side.
“One little pack of seeds,” Stal said. “Like a dime bag. That’s all.”
“But—but that’s ridiculous!”
“Oh, it can’t be ridiculous.”
“But it doesn’t grow direct from seed! And it needs special chemicals all the time, and—and you can’t plant it in a window-box, for God’s sake!”
“Friend of yours, isn’t he—God? You keep Him supplied with new recruits to the heavenly choir. You breed like He wanted us to, Right—Catholic?”
“Fasten it, Zink. What do you grow it from, then—cuttings?”
“Y-yes.”
“Cuttings will do. Too Much is too much at three bucks fifty a pack of ten reefers. But it’s good pot, I’ll grant that. So that’s the programme, darling: a dime bag of good fertile cuttings—and you’d better let us have a table of the kind of treatment it needs to grow up. And we’ll be generous and keep your secret for you, about those cubs in Pacific Palisades.”
The monorail car was slowing for its next station. Eric said frantically, “But it’s impossible! The security—the guards they have on it!”
“If they don’t let the geneticists who evolved it get a close squinch, who gets one?” Stal said, and the four yonderboys moved towards the door, the other passengers, nervously eying their identifying clothes, making way for them.
“Wait! I can’t possibly—!”
But the doors were open and they were gone on the crowded platform.
context (8)
ISOLATION
“At bottom the human species finds idealism an uncomfortable posture. Prime evidence of this can be found in the way neither of the two groups locked in irresoluble conflict around the Pacific has been able to achieve its stated goal—even though, given the lucid, simple, obviously attractive statement of either of their ideals, an impartial observer might wonder why commitment had not ensued like sunrise after night.
“‘Give the wealth back to the people who created it!’ Here’s an ideal capable of generating crusades among people who interpret it as expropriating greedy landlords, sharing out land so that every family may enjoy reasonable nutrition and repudiating debts to moneylenders at usurious rates of interest. Having hit on this, the Chinese charged ahead—until they overreached themselves. They became unable to distinguish between the evils they were preaching against and those traditional influences which literally constituted the way of life of people they hoped to recruit to their cause. In short order they fell into the same pit as their rivals, who had for decades ignored the plain and simple fact that to a starving man ‘freedom’ implies a full rice-bowl—or, if he has an exceptional imagination, a healthy ox to pull his plough. It has nothing to do with voting for a political delegate.
“Analogously with the way the Tsarist army deserted en masse during the First World War, not because of Bolshevik impact on the soldiers but because they were sick of fighting and wanted to go tend their farms, the eager early recruits to the red flag discovered that while they were dying abroad the things they wanted to guard were being undermined at home. So they quit. China, like Russia before her, found she was surrounded by a gaggle of heirs to the mantle of the late Marshal Tito, not a few of whom were themselves within China’s boundary.
“However, by that time, thanks to ineptitude, racial prejudice against them, fighting the right wars with the wrong weapons, and general mismanagement of their affairs, the opposition (or if you prefer, which I don’t because I’d rather not identify with such a bunch of incompetents, ‘our side’) was so far in arrears that the greatest single territorial gain to date in a contest which bids fair to outdo the Hundred Years’ War both for duration and for inconclusiveness only restored a rough balance and didn’t tip the scales the other way.