“How many of these strawberry things have you got standing in the building?”
“There are 600 planting towers in this greenhouse alone.”
Harland did some quick calculating in his head. He was dumbfounded by the figure he arrived at. “You, er, you’ve got nearly 50,000 plants in here?”
“Yes, that’s about right.”
“That’s a hell of a crop in such a small space.”
“Well, Harland, we usually produce three crops, bringing new plants along all the time to take the place of those that reach the end of their useful life.”
“You get three crops? How is that possible?”
“This building is heated by hot water from our waste sawdust boiler. It’s plenty warm enough in here, even in the winter, to grow strawberries. We need to boost the light available to the plants half of the year in order to get reasonable yields.” Abel pointed to neon tubes glowing from the superstructure above. “The lights run eight hours day in the wintertime off a co-generator on the boiler. When we heat some of the greenhouses, we generate free electrical power thanks to a generator coupled to a little steam turbine on our sawdust boiler. The lights mimic the solar spectrum. Plants can’t tell the difference.”
“How many greenhouses have you got going like this?”
“Eight heated ones, with enough capacity in the boiler for two or three more.”
“All strawberries?”
“No, no. We’ve got tomatoes, cucumbers, melons, peppers, herbs and more growing, most like you see here, on towers or vine supports. We even raise tilapia fish and carp in tanks on the north wall of some of these buildings. A few lemon trees, too.”
The farmer’s skull rocked side to side. “I’ll be jiggered.”
“There’s more, Harland, much more. Let me show you what we can do without heat.”
Inside one of the dozens of unheated greenhouses, Abel removed a poly covering atop a cold frame on the floor. The space beneath the frame was brimming with greenery. As far as Harland could see in the building, there were transparent panels covering an ocean of leafy greens.
“What is this you’ve got growing here?” asked the grain grower.
“This happens to be miner’s lettuce. The Gold Rush 49ers lived on it; it grew wild at the mine sites. It’s as cold-hardy as anything on the planet. It yields all year ‘round inside the cold frames protected by the greenhouse. In winter, the plants think they’re in the Texas Panhandle in here, even though we don’t heat the building. As a matter of fact, we don’t heat the majority of them.”
“The plants will freeze,” Harland scoffed. “What good are they after that?”
“Protected as they are, they don’t suffer frost or wind damage. They go right through the winter perfectly fine.”
“You grow anything else this way?”
“Two dozen cold-tolerant edible plants can be cultivated like this with good success all winter: spinach, chard, kale, bok choi, mache, mizuna, and so on. You ate a bit of most of them in the salad you just had.”
Harland retreated into himself, weighing what he had witnessed since arriving at Independency and what Abel had just revealed to him. He was fascinated but unnerved as well. Ill thoughts crowded his mind. Everything spinning around him seemed to have been very carefully orchestrated. The episode in the brewery didn’t happen by chance. His removal to Independency had to have been planned, he calculated. And the odd choice of meals and the doctor’s diagnosis, they were certainly scripted. He was convinced all of it had been worked out in advance. This was a set-up. There had to be an ultimatum coming. They’d spring it on him soon, he fretted, when crushing fatigue had finally worn him to the nub.
A lance of panic pierced Harland’s sensibilities. “Look, you people, I’ve got to leave,” the farmer coughed. “I’ve got to get to town.”
“Don’t fret,” said Abel waving away the farmer’s concerns. “We’ll get you back to town tomorrow. It’s a long pull down to Sweetly. We all need to rest for a day before we make the journey again.”
Checkmated, Harland grew visibly flustered. He cut to the quick and held up his hands, a gesture clearly signaling back off. “Look, mister, you people brought me up here for a reason. You didn’t bring me here to fill my stomach and send me on my merry way. What’s going on? What do you want with me?”
“Very well, Harland, fair questions each,” remarked Abel. “It comes down to this: In the old Sweet Spring brewery there are now tons of grain. Your people in Sweetly need that grain and we need the grain. Here, as you can see, we grow great quantities of all sorts of things, all protected from the elements. We need this food, of course. But, Harland, you and the citizens of Sweetly need it, too. You need it badly. Are you following me?”
Harland responded slowly, uncommitted. “Go ahead.”
“A good deal of what we grow here we sell into the marketplace. We sell big surpluses and generate a steady stream of dollars. But it’s impossible to get the food out to market because of conditions. Wholesalers can’t get in and the whole food distribution system out there is crumbling. Essentially, Yellowstone shut down our business. For all we know, it may be gone for many years, maybe for good. Tons of what we grow is going to waste, but we don’t want to just pull it up and compost it.”
“What are you going to do with all of it, then?” Harland questioned bluntly.
“It should be altogether clear, Harland.” Abel became animated, his hand gestures and facial expressions increasingly exaggerated. He paced around the farmer. “We need people to consume this food, farmer, local people—your people. If they don’t get it, people are going to die. They’ll die of disease. They’ll die of malnutrition. But they don’t have to die.”
“They’re already dying.”
“All the more reason to act right away.”
From another one of the cold frames, the town founder pulled up a large carrot and wiped dirt from the orange root before Harland’s eyes. Abel held it up for all to see. “You have to understand something, Harland. Before Yellowstone disrupted our planting cycle, this town we’ve shown you was almost entirely self-sufficient. We designed it to be that way on purpose, to control our own destiny to the greatest degree. We didn’t need to run to the grocery store every week. We never had to go to the mall. We weren’t dependent on the broader American culture. We weren’t dependent on anyone.”
“About the only thing we didn’t grow was wheat, so we’d bring that in. We’d also buy some citrus and tropical fruits and a few spices we couldn’t grow on the bluffs. But we grew virtually everything else. We were food independent. We had a perfectly sustainable culture going up here. We didn’t eat processed garbage. We had a rich and wholesome diet. And we still do—as you’ve seen—except the weather induced by Yellowstone killed our corn crop and stunted the potato plantings.”
Abel wheeled about before Harland and squared off directly before the farmer, lifting and holding his hands out beyond his shoulders and tipping them up and down as if balancing a scale. “We want to barter our food for your grain, simple as that. You can’t eat corn alone; your illness is proof of that. We need more calories from carbohydrates to see us through up here. In other words, we want corn and soy—the foods you and your fellow farmers down below grew, the grain we pilfered out from under the Guard’s noses and crammed into the brewery. You? You need everything but corn.”
Harland weighed Abel’s words. He had feared a much darker scenario, something that forced him into a blind corner from which he could not retreat. That was not what he was hearing. Abel was offering some sort of cooperative arrangement, something open-ended.
“You’re talking a simple swap? Is that’s what I hear you saying?”