"Where is Mills?"
"Praying for forgiveness," he murmured, "and holding your hand."
She jerked back, made an open-palmed gesture, then dropped both hands to her ample hips. "Shit oh dear," said the rosebud mouth, fighting a smile. "I suppose you think I haven't been charmed by experts."
"You deserve nothing less," he said, meaning it. Now buxom to the point of pudginess, Eve no longer provoked dry mouths and itchy fingers in most young men — except on video, where NBN's image enhancement magic made her appear merely a bit plumpish. To Boren Mills, she was a classic by Titian, a haughty nymph with the mouth of a cruel Cupid; intelligence to match her arrogance; perfection itself.
Eve did not have to trust a man to enjoy him. This cool natty customer with the widow's peak and the smooth line just might be susceptible to her young-old charm if not to her threats. Besides, she thought with a tingly rush, he swung a heavy stick around NBN for such a young guy. Probably a pal of Brucie's. But oh, well, whatthehell… "What I really deserve," she said musically, "is freedom of the press."
Mills poured her a Cointreau, sat with her on a well-lighted couch, listened to her argument. Her interview with an English-speaking Chinese refugee in Mexico, she insisted, was just what the American public wanted: a dirge for a dying China. "That stuff about the little matter synthesizer was pure dynamite," she added, "even if it was just rumor."
"And could blow up in our faces," Mills replied. "If you weren't who you are, I wouldn't be discussing it. But obviously you have the need to know. Forget about what Americans believe, for the moment. What if the RUS believed — and I happen to know it couldn't be true — that the chromium and platinum they trade us might not be key minerals if someone could synthesize them? Even a rumor like that could damage relations with them."
Eve fumed, invoked a name in White House Deseret. Mills, undaunted, countered with optimal control theory and the awe in which it was held by the Secretary of State — not to mention the White House Press Secretary. The message optimization program, he said, had shown that no rumor about matter synthesizers should be offered to credulous Americans. Mills did not add that he controlled the numerical biases of that computer program.
"Anyhow," said Eve, her formidable curiosity abubble, "what makes you so sure matter synthesis isn't possible?"
"It is possible," he said; "it's been done. But at incredible cost, using big experimental facilities. The clincher lies in the idea that any government as rigidly controlled as China would mass-produce a small gadget like that, even if it could. Give a few million Chinese their own personal synthesizers, and the government's control would vanish overnight. Think about it."
While she sipped and thought, Mills wondered whether any girl Eve's age could possibly juggle the subtleties of the problem. It had never occurred to him that her intellect might rival his own.
"Seems to me that would be true everywhere. Chinese, us, the RUS, the Canadians, — any government that thrives on central control," she reflected.
He said, "Uh — to some degree you may be right." She was precisely, preternaturally right, he thought, elevating his opinion of this morsel — no, this banquet!
But Mills was a patient man, and managed to avoid figuratively licking his chops. He had already been tempted by dizzying offers for his civilian services; knew the day would come soon when he could pick his banquets, even without the synthesizer. But with it? He could rule a country as Rothschilds and Rockefellers never had. As Eve dallied with the scenario he had suggested, Mills was wondering if the Chinese had scaled up the device, and whether copies still existed other than his own. He must set up a research team and somehow compel their loyalties — but all in good time. Sooner or later, scaled up or merely mass-produced as it was, the synthesizer could make an economy dependent on Mills.
Because, of course, Boren Mills did not intend ever to sell, lease, or license it. He would only sell its products, and grow rich beyond imagining. His eyes refocused on the face of Eve Simpson.
"So the rumor is a problem in domestic policy as well as foreign policy," she was saying as though he were not there. "The Chinese would've been crazy to produce such a thing; and whether it exists or not, Americans would be howling for one in every garage."
Mills, startled: "Not in the kitchen?"
"I was thinking of fuel," she said.
"Might as well think of beef or heroin," he said, to channel her thinking toward the bizarre.
Judiciously: "Very complex molecules."
"Jesus Christ; what don't you know?"
Titillated by the power she sensed in him, Eve gazed at him through lowered lashes. "I don't know if you fool around."
It was one way to deflect this brilliant wanton from pursuing a secret that Mills had thus far protected. It was also the exact question he had been pondering about Eve Simpson; and her question was his answer. “I should probably play coy," he said, seeking cues to her appetites.
"I didn't know men with clout knew how," she lied, watching the advance of his manicured forefinger on her thigh.
"Men with clout are kinky," he purred, his tongue showing through the smile, deliberate in his choice of feminine nuance.
"It's a small world," she said huskily, undressing him, " — but I see that some things are larger than others."
He laughed, letting her set the pace. Later he could study the holotape of this first encounter, the better to consolidate this essential alliance. But it was to be weeks before he focused on something she said while nodding, nodding, nodding above him. "Even with," she said dreamily, "free synthesis, — there should be — ways to — make them — sweat."
There were: superstition, media, implanted fears both emotional and physical. Mills was expert with emotional implants, and had learned a few things about the physical kind. There was that bunch of brutes attached to Army Intelligence, for instance…
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Once she had tooled up to produce the oral vaccine for keratophagic staph, Canada knew she had won her war. The vaccine was processed from polysaccharide components of the dried S. rosacea organism in factories isolated by permafrost and wilderness. While firmly denying her breakthrough, Canada managed to distribute the vaccine in her antiradiation chelate doses to virtually her entire population.
Soon, more of the vaccine was secretly dispensed in military rations to Canadian and US troops in Asia. An infantry man who traded every chocolate bar away was trading his immunity, though he could not know it; a confirmed chocoholic who ate too much of it suffered from something similar to influenza. Some Canadian chocolate was distributed to RUS troops, too — but if the wrapper said shukulaht in Cyrillic, it provided no immunity.
Sooner or later, there would be enough oral vaccine to eradicate Chinese Plague throughout Asia, but Canada took the long view. The RUS would get it later, rather than sooner.
By the second week in August, 1997, Allied forces in Asia celebrated the war's anniversary in defensive consolidations — their weasel-phrase for a brisk retreat. ANZUS forces in India no longer sought the spearhead that would have met our Fifth Army on the western edge of SinoInd territory; for one thing, the US First and Fifth Armies had largely completed their redeployment north of Manchuria, into Siberia. RUS strategists growled as the Americans moved ever eastward, ever farther from defense of Russian population centers and nearer to the Bering Strait. The RUS were pulling their own armies back, intending to wall off European Russia using the Urals as a buffer, and still had the US Third Army to help.