“A little—as part of my business. And I decided that if you haven’t got any lungs to rot, or heart to run down, or stomach to erode, just a titanium bellows to pump the nicotine into what remains of your bloodstream, then what’s wrong with smoking as long as you don’t do it around non-smokers? Smoke as much as you like—it has absolutely no adverse physical effects on the brain itself.”
I stared out at the legendary plants that had been banned everywhere in the Solar System since long before my birth. “So you’re growing it here legally.”
“It’s Liberty City, remember?”
“And there’s a company that makes legal cigarettes?”
“Three of them, actually. There’re two other fields.”
“And places throughout the city where you can legally smoke them.”
“Now you’ve got it: smoking clubs. High-powered air filters and scrubbers. Absolutely no one else gets contaminated.”
“And nicotine is just about the most addictive substance in the pharmacopeia.”
“The most addictive. Because the brain’s limbic section is constantly telling your body to send it more nicotine. That’s the other reason it was banned. Even if you’re a boxie or a newbie, once you start smoking it’s almost impossible to stop—the hardwiring in your brain doesn’t want you to stop.”
“And someone’s making money on this every step of the way?”
“Absolutely. If you’re a boxie, or even a newbie, what other vices can you indulge in that make you feel so good? There’re about seven different stocks that I think look extremely good for long-term growth. Let’s go back to my office and I’ll—”
That’s when sirens began to scream, the sprinkler system came on and had us drenched almost instantly—and the opaqueness of the overhead dome began to fade. Seconds later, even before Van Bastolaer and I had had the sense to begin looking for shelter, we were simultaneously trying to keep from being drowned and from being blinded by the rays of the unshielded Sun.
“Over there!” shouted Van Bastolaer above the banshee wail of the sirens, pointing at a large red shed. “That’s where they cure the tobacco!”
We never made it.
Three box people emerged from the artificial rain and came to a halt just above our heads. “There’s an emergency!” cried the black male with thick white tufts of hair over his ears. “Everyone’s being directed to gather back in the artichoke field!”
Completely mystified, and hoping that none of the domes of Liberty City had been pierced by a meteorite, we let ourselves be led along with what looked like two other ganics through the deluge that was inundating the tobacco farm and back into the cabbage fields. Here, at least, it wasn’t raining, and the sirens were mercifully silent. But the Sun blazed down from a jet-black sky through a completely transparent dome. The only thing I could see, except for endless rows of cabbages and the dazzle in front of my eyes, was the distant figure of Miss Liberty rising high above the long, flat dome of Liberty City.
“What do you think is hap—” I was saying to Tom Van Bastolaer when his hand tightened painfully around my arm.
“Look,” he muttered in a strangled voice.
Tiny white and yellow flashes seemed to sparkle across the shoulder of Miss Liberty. Then, so slowly that it was hard to believe it was actually happening, the upraised arm that held the torch of liberty began to fall away from the body, followed by the majestic head. Even as they drifted slowly downward in the Moon’s light gravity, we saw the entire body tremble, then slowly, slowly topple backward.
It was only when about a hundred and fifty of us, twenty-five ganics, a hundred and twenty-five newbies, and one convalescent Cerean in a GEM chair, had been brought together from all the farming domes around Liberty City that we learned what the so-called “emergency” was.
We—and everyone else on the Moon—were now the guests, hostages, or prisoners of the box people.
Take your pick.
“Whatever we are,” murmured Tom Van Bastolaer toward the end of our second standard Earth day of captivity, “if we don’t get out of here soon we’re goners.”
I nodded lackadaisically. We were sitting in a makeshift shelter in the middle of the Palermo Family Artichoke Farm and hoping that Van Bastolaer’s facetious words two days earlier about being steamed like lobsters were not going to prove prophetic. Half a dozen boxies circled us slowly, construction lasers held menacingly in their mechanical hands.
Our box people captors, of course, at any time at all could have zoomed over to the controls that regulated the opacity of the overhead dome and quickly restored our twelve-hectare sauna bath to its normal temperature and humidity, but they apparently had no intention of doing so.
Instead, they had grudgingly allowed us to use whatever leftover bits of cartons, wrapping paper, and plastic sheeting we could scrounge from the various buildings scattered about the farm to construct a ramshackle roof whose only purpose was to keep the overhead Sun from A.) blinding us, and B.) roasting us.
Now, thanks to the generous amount of water vapor in the air, combined with the fact that the Lunar day still had six standard days to go before the Sun finally set on the far side of the Sea of Serenity, it was getting hotter and hotter.
And still hotter.
By now, all twenty-five ganics, men and women alike, had shucked their clothing and lay nude and corpselike in the shade of Our shelter, too weary to move or even complain. All my hospital clothing had been cut away by a helpful newbie and I lay slumped in my GEM chair, naked except for those bandages, casts, pressure molds, and therapeutic devices that were more or less an integral part of me.
As for all the poor newbies who shared our plight, their artificial bodies had their own built-in cooling system and the clothes they wore were purely for decorative purposes. When their systems overheated that would be the end of them—and of their hundred and some-odd-year life spans.
Wearily cursing J. Davis Alexander and his twisted ambitions for all they had done to Jin Tshei and me, I flicked at the continuous stream of sweat rolling off my forehead into my eyes. The one thing you could say for the boxies was that they were giving us plenty of water. That way they were keeping us alive and sweating dramatically for the video cameras that were transmitting our miserable images to the far comers of the Solar System.
We were, apparently, worth more to the boxies as live testimony to the humanitarianism of their demands than as dead proof of their unrelenting determination.
For the moment.
In the meantime, it kept getting hotter.
“Cheer up,” I croaked to Tom Van Bastolaer, “only 139 hours to sunset—at which point we’ll freeze to death.”
“I’ll never again eat a lobster.”
“I thought you newbies didn’t eat at all.”
“I’ll never again think about eating a lobster.”
A boxgirl drifted closer, a gray-haired woman whose high cheekbones might have been of Slavic origin. “Some more water?”
I nodded resignedly. “I’m running out of nutros,” muttered Van Bastolaer. “All of us are. We re going to start having irreparable brain damage pretty soon if you don’t give us any.”
“Sorry, I don’t have any. The orders are to give you only water.”
“But you box—you people are crazy!” protested Van Bastolaer. “I was a boxie myself for three years! I know what it’s like. All of us newbies do. Were on your side!”
“Really? Once you’re in your fine new bodies, I don’t see any of you newbies standing up in the Peep’s Assembly demanding civil rights for us boxies! Or helping us get our own bodies like all you rich bastards got yours.”