there’d be more housing here… and better pay. I thought it was a road-to-riches thing, like the Comstock Mine… They talked like…” He bit his lip.
She nodded, shifted in her chair, and made a note. She’d heard a similar story from a number of workers she’d interviewed as part of her project for Ryan. “You feel you were… misled about what would happen here?”
“Yeah, I—” Glidden broke off, stopping in the center of the room, staring at her suspiciously. “You… you work for Ryan, right?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking—”
“So
“It’s all right; you can say what you really think,” Sofia said reassuringly. “It’s true that these therapeutic sessions will be summed up in a report—but I’m not naming specific people in my report. It’ll be about the trends…”
“Yeah? How come this ‘therapy’ thing here is free? I wouldn’t-a come except my wife says I’m all tense and like that… but…
“Really—you can trust me, Mr. Glidden.”
“So you say. But supposin’ I get fired because of this? Maybe they blackball me! So I got no work! And then what?
“Oh, well I…” Her voice trailed off. She hadn’t given much thought to leaving Rapture. There seemed so many possibilities here. But what if she
He crossed his arms in front of him and shook his head. He wasn’t going to say anything else.
She wrote
She watched Glidden rush from the room, and then she went to her desk, unlocked a drawer, and took out her journal. She usually preferred it to the audio diaries. She sat down and wrote,
If the Rapture experiment fails—as I suspect it will—another social experiment could be carried out in this strange, undersea hothouse. The very conditions that make Rapture explosive—its sequestering from the outside world, its inequities—could be the source for a radical social transformation. It’s something to consider… the danger of even contemplating such a social experiment is enormous, however… I must not let this journal fall into Sullivan’s hands…
Sofia put the pen down and wondered if what she was contemplating was too risky. Politics. Power… An idea that was becoming an idee fixe. Possibly it was sheer madness…
But madness or not—it had been growing like a child within her all the time she’d been in Rapture. She’d been quietly gestating the notion that what Rapture could destroy—men like Glidden—it could also save, if it were guided by a new leader.
She could turn Rapture sharply to the left—from within.
Dangerous thinking. But the idea would not go away. It had a life of its own…
Bill McDonagh was switching on drainage pump 71, to pump out the insulation and ventilation spaces in the walls of the Mermaid Lounge, when Andrew Ryan walked into station 5. Rapture’s visionary genius was smiling but seemed a bit distant, distracted.
“Bill! How about taking a quick inspection walk with me, as we’re both near Little Eden. Or are you handling an emergency?”
“No emergency, Mr. Ryan. Just a bit of an adjustment. There, that’s done it.”
Soon they were strolling along the concourse of Little Eden Plaza, walking past the gracious facade of the Pearl Hotel. People ambled by, couples arm in arm, shoppers with bags. Ryan seemed pleased by this evidence of thriving commerce. Some of the shoppers nodded shyly to Mr. Ryan. One rather matronly woman asked for his autograph, which he patiently provided before he and Bill hurried on.
“Anything you’re particularly concerned with, ’round here, Mr. Ryan?” Bill asked as they walked past the Plaza Hedone apartments.
“There’s talk of chemical leakage, and we had some kind of complaints at a shop in the area, so I thought I’d look into both at once. I don’t care much for complaints, but I like to know what’s going on and had some free time…”
They came to a corner that was covered with what appeared to be a thick green-black chemical leaking from a seam in a bulkhead. It smelled of petroleum and solvents. “There it is, Bill—were you aware of it?”
“I am, sir. That’s why I was adjusting the valves in station five. Trying to cut back on flushing so I could reduce this ’ere toxic overflow. There’s a factory upstream, you might say, or anyway upstairs from ’ere, turns out new signs and the like. Augustus Sinclair owns the place, what I remember. They use a lot of chemicals, dump them in the outpipes—but they corrode the pipes, and the solvents work their way out to the sidewalk. What might be worse, the rest of it gets dumped outta Rapture, Mr. Ryan—I checked on it. These chemicals, they go out into the ocean and down current—could be they’ll get all mixed up with the fish down there. We could end up eatin’ these chemicals when we eat those fish.”
Ryan was looking at him with arched eyebrows. “Really, Bill—how ridiculously alarmist! Why, the ocean is vast. We couldn’t possibly pollute it! It would all be diluted.”
“Right enough, sir, but some of it accumulates, what with currents and eddies, and if we create enough of a mess—”
“Bill—forget it. We’ve got sufficient concerns right here inside Rapture. We’ll have to replace those pipes with something stronger, and we’ll charge Augustus for it…”
Bill gave it one more try. “Just thought it’d be better if he’d use chemicals that wasn’t so corrosive, guv. Could be done, I reckon, if—”
Ryan laughed softly. “Bill! Listen to yourself! You’ll ask me to
They’d come to a shop in Little Eden Plaza called Gravenstein’s Green Groceries. Across the “street”—more of a wide passageway—and a little ways down was another, larger business called Shep’s ShopMart.
Reeking garbage of all sorts was piled up high in the gutter around Gravenstein’s. Bill shook his head, seeing every kind of garbage imaginable, most of it decaying. The fish heads were especially pungent. Shep’s, by contrast, looked immaculate. A small man in a grocer’s apron rushed out of Gravenstein’s as they approached; he had a hatchet face and flaplike ears, intense brown eyes, curly brown hair. “Mr. Ryan!” he shouted, wringing his hands as he ran up to them. “You came! I must’ve sent a hundred requests, and here you are at last!”
Ryan frowned. He didn’t respond well to implied criticism. “Well? Why have you let all this trash pile up here? That’s hardly in the spirit of the Great Chain…”
“Me letting it pile up? I didn’t!
