Ten minutes later, he found Charlie Grainger’s daughter in the pharmacy, a place where he ought not have been surprised to find her, since she was, after all, USIC’s pharmacist. She was seated at a counter, dressed as usual, her hair neat and still a little damp. When he walked in, she was writing in an old-fashioned ring-binder, with a pencil clutched awkwardly in her short fingers. Honeycombs of modular shelving, mostly vacant but punctuated here and there with petite plastic bottles and cardboard boxes, towered over her. She was calm, but her eyelids were raw from crying.
‘Hey, I wasn’t serious about the anti-delusional medication,’ she joked as he approached. Don’t mention what I said in the infirmary, her eyes pleaded.
‘I need your help,’ he said.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘At least not with me.’
It was a moment before he realised she was referring to driving, to chauffeuring him somewhere that wasn’t good for his health.
‘I just tried to send a message to my wife,’ he said, ‘and it’s been blocked. I’ve got to get through. Please.’
She put down the pencil, closed the folder.
‘Don’t worry, Peter, I can fix it,’ she said. ‘Probably. Depends on how bad a boy you’ve been.’
She stood up, and he noted once again that she wasn’t very tall. Yet at this moment, he felt smaller still; he was the little boy who’d let his brand-new bicycle get stolen, he was the pitiful disgrace slumped on a vomit-stained sofa in the Salford Pentecost Powerhouse, he was the fumbling missionary who’d reached the end of his rope — and each of these Peters could only throw himself on the mercy of a long-suffering female, a mother who might reassure him that he was more valuable than any expensive gift, a wife who might reassure him that he could break a sacred promise and still be loved, a friend who might be able to pull him out of his latest crisis. When it came down to it, it was not Jesus but these women on whose mercy he threw himself, and who must decide if he’d finally gone too far.
His room, when they entered it together, was a mess. His knapsack, filthy from its trips to the field, lay in the middle of the floor, surrounded by loose balls of wool that had fallen off the chair. Loose pills were scattered across the table next to the upended medication bottle and Grainger’s note about what to take if needed, which was odd as he couldn’t remember opening the bottle. His bed was in a shameful state: the bedsheets were so tangled it looked as though he’d been wrestling in them.
Grainger ignored the chaos, sat in his chair and read the letter he’d written to Bea. Her face betrayed no emotion, although her lips twitched once or twice. Maybe she wasn’t a strong reader, and was tempted to mouth the words? He stood at her side, and waited.
‘I’ll need your permission to change this,’ she said when she’d finished.
‘Change it?’
‘Remove a few… problematic statements. To get it past Springer.’
‘Springer?’ Peter had assumed that whatever had blocked his message was automated, some sort of computer program which sifted language brainlessly. ‘You mean Springer has been reading all my letters?’
‘It’s his job,’ said Grainger. ‘One of his jobs. We multi-task here, as you may have noticed. There are several personnel who check the Shoots. I’m pretty sure right now it’s Springer.’
He stared down at her. There was no shame or guilt or defensiveness on her weary face. She was merely informing him of a detail from the USIC duty roster.
‘You take it in turns to read my private letters?’
Only now did it appear to register on her that there might, in some people’s universe, be anything odd about this arrangement. ‘Is that such a big deal?’ she brazened. ‘Doesn’t God read your thoughts?’
He opened his mouth to protest, but couldn’t speak.
‘Anyway,’ she continued, in a down-to-business tone. ‘You want this message sent. So let’s do it.’ She scrolled through his words. ‘The stuff about USIC censoring the magazines has to go,’ she said, pecking at the keyboard with her stubby nails. Letter by letter, the words ‘And even those are censored’, and the twenty after that, disappeared from the screen. ‘Ditto the stuff about the world ending.’ More pecks. She stared at the glowing text, evaluating her amendments. One or two more words caught her eye and she eliminated them. Her eyes were bloodshot and she seemed sad beyond her years. ‘No end of the world,’ she murmured, in a gently scolding tone. ‘Uh-uh.’
Satisfied with what she’d done, she pressed the transmission button. The text trembled on the screen while, elsewhere in the compound, another pair of tired eyes examined it. Then it vanished.
‘Another five thousand bucks down the hatch,’ said Grainger, with a shrug.
‘Sorry?’
‘Each of your Shoots costs about five thousand dollars to send,’ she said. ‘And each of your wife’s also, of course, to receive.’ She wiped her face with her hands, breathing deeply, trying to suck much-needed energy from her own palms. ‘Another reason why the personnel here aren’t communicating daily with a bunch of pals back home.’
Peter tried to do a mental calculation. Maths wasn’t his strong suit, but he knew the number was appallingly big. ‘Nobody told me,’ he said.
‘We were told not to tell you,’ she said. ‘No expense spared for the missionary man.’
‘But why?’
‘USIC wanted you real bad,’ said Grainger. ‘You were, like, our first VIP.’
‘I never asked… ’
‘You didn’t need to ask. My… guidelines were to give you anything you wanted. Within reason. Because, you know, before you came, things were getting kinda… strained.’
‘Things?’ He couldn’t imagine what things. A spiritual crisis amongst the USIC personnel?
‘Our food supply got cut off for a while. No more whiteflower from our little friends.’ Grainger smirked sourly. ‘They come across so meek and mild, don’t they? But they can be very determined when they want to be. We promised them a replacement for Kurtzberg, but they thought it was too slow in coming. I guess Ella Reinman was ploughing through a million priests and pastors, poking them to see what was inside, then flunking them. Next pastor please! What’s your favourite fruit? How much would you miss Philadelphia? Frying ducklings alive — OK or not OK? What would it take to make you lose patience with my stupid questions and wring my scrawny neck?’ Grainger’s hands mimed the action, her thumbs crushing her interrogator’s windpipe. ‘Meanwhile in Freaktown, our little friends couldn’t wait. They flexed the only muscle they could flex, to make USIC hurry up and find you.’ Observing the bemusement on his face, she nodded, to signal that he must stop wasting energy on incredulity and just believe.
‘How bad did it get?’ said Peter. ‘I mean, did you starve?’
Grainger was annoyed by the question. ‘Of course we didn’t starve. It just got… expensive for a while. More expensive than you wanna think about.’
He tried to think about it and discovered she was right.
‘The stand-off wouldn’t have been such a big deal,’ she went on, ‘if only we could grow stuff ourselves. God knows we’ve tried. Wheat. Corn. Maize. Hemp. Every seed known to man has gone into this soil. But what comes up is not impressive. Vanity farming, you could call it. And of course we tried growing whiteflower too, but it was the same story. A few bulbs here, a few bulbs there. Like cultivating orchids. We just can’t figure out how those guys get it to grow in large amounts. What the hell do they fertilise it with? Fairy dust, I guess.’