'You mean it
'Also many other species that are three, four, even five times bigger than normal.'
Boris took the plastic sheet from her fingers. Its surface caught the reflected glare of lamplight, illuminating his face from below and giving him the appearance of a giant in a fairy tale. He carefully replaced it and silently slid the drawer shut.
The driver kept looking in his mirror to make sure. Skinny little runt of a guy in the funny black robes at the back of the bus hadn't moved a muscle in over two hundred miles. Just sitting there, straight up, stiff as a board, eyes shut tight behind those crummy wire specs.
Couldn't be dead, could he, not in that position? Like that old lady a couple of weeks ago who'd been cold as a side of beef by the time they got to Williamsport? Sweet Jesus, please not another one. He couldn't go through that routine all over again. Cops with questions. Forms to fill in. The depot manager handing him the hard line about how it was 'uncool for the company image.' Fuck the company's image. He was a bus driver, not a fucking heart surgeon. What was he supposed to do?
He sighed and looked at his watch. Another forty-five minutes and that was it, thank Christ. Passengers traveling east into New Jersey and New York State had to transfer to sealed transportation at Williams-port. Here the air was breathable, more or less, whereas on the other side of Allentown you choked your goddamn lungs up.
Come to think of it, hadn't the kid boarded the bus carrying an oxygen cylinder? That's right. He'd been cradling it like a baby, as if it were as delicate and as precious too.
The driver sniffed experimentally. The bus was equipped with a filtration plant, but it wasn't oxygenated. Anyway, smelled okay to him. What was that disease that guy on TV had said was on the increase? Anorexia? Naw, that was teen-age tarts starving themselves to death.
It occurred to him to wonder that if there
On the back seat Mara sat with folded arms, oblivious to the jolting motion of the bus, oblivious to everything. The small gray metal cylinder was wedged beside him so that it couldn't roll off the seat.
He was submerged fathoms deep, his heartbeat like a slow muffled drumbeat, his circulatory and respiratory systems slowed right down to the minimum for life support. Time had no reality. At the very center of his consciousness there was a fierce, white-hot, molten core of purpose. Nothing else mattered or had meaning or existence.
He didn't have to think.
The instruction had been implanted during trance.
It told him precisely what had to be done.
And how it was to be achieved.
His life and being were dedicated to the single act he was about to perform. In the language of the Faith he was approaching the moment of Optimum Orbital Trajectory. In that moment everything he had learned would become meaningful and fulfill its purpose in the one supreme act.
And I, Mara thought exultantly, I am the chosen instrument of sweet searing death.
They had seen all the sights and visited the tourist attractions. The Statue of Liberty inside its transparent protective dome, like an ornate green cake under a glass cover; the Empire State Building, where they had hired masks and strolled blindly around the now purposeless observation deck on the one hundred and second floor; Central Park with its hellish landscape of stunted trees, gray grass, searchlight towers, and graffiti scrawled in blood on Wollman Rink; the eternal guitar-shaped holographic flame of the John Lennon Memorial on the upper west side; Checkpoint X, which marked the entrance into the electrified perimeter fence surrounding Harlem; the one remaining steel-and-glass rectangle of the World Trade Center alongside its shattered sister tower, which had burned down in the three-week-long hostage caper in 2005.
Dan was eager to see everything. Rather than to enjoy the experience itself, Chase suspected, this was more so that he could boast afterward of having been to New York, which was considered daring and dangerous, like penetrating a forbidden zone, a dark continent.
They dined with Ruth at a small restaurant on Third Avenue. All that day Dan had been chirpy and in high spirits, and so the change in him was apparent straightaway. He hardly touched his ragout de boeuf bourguignon. He looked pale and said he felt sick. Chase wanted to get him to the hospital, but Ruth advised against it; hospitals in New York were no places for sick people. Her apartment was three blocks away and they managed to get him there in a sealed cab. In the bathroom he heaved up some stringy black bile and complained of dizziness and buzzing in the ears. Ruth examined him and said he had a touch of 'Manhattan Lung,' prescribed aspirin and rest, and insisted on putting him in her own bed.
Chase felt guilty at this imposition, though Ruth told him she had two days off-duty owed her and could catch up on her sleep later.
'It isn't anything serious?' he asked when they had tucked Dan in and closed the bedroom door.
'Most out-of-towners feel the effects. Streaming eyes, nausea, dizziness, and so forth. You can't help breathing in some of the foul stuff that passes for air in this city.' Ruth poured out two glasses of bourbon. 'Were you outside for any length of time today?'
'For minutes at a time, that's all, between cars and enclosures. What did you call it?. 'Manhattan Lung?' '
Ruth nodded. 'Some people are more allergic than others. Don't worry, Gavin, he'll be fine in the morning. He's young and strong.' She gave him a reassuring smile and sat back in the square chunky armchair. The living room was furnished with period pieces and bric-a-brac in the style known as mid-century kitsch. There was a half- moon coffee table inlaid with tiles of antique cars. The three-pronged tubular light fitting had inverted pink plastic shades. In an alcove were a circular dining table and four chairs in matching blond wood.
'Why does anyone stay here?' Chase asked with genuine consternation. 'Why do you, for God's sake?'
'I guess people just come to accept things. Conditions get worse year by year and you learn to live with them.' Ruth shrugged, the green velvety material of her dress, pinned by a dark green brooch at the gathered neckline, emphasizing the pale rounded smoothness of her neck and shoulders. 'Think of the really terrible conditions people have endured in the past. New York isn't the first city to choke its inhabitants to death. It's been going on for centuries.'
'Is it safe for Dan to travel? The sooner I get him out of this place, the better.'
'Let him rest for a couple of days, then it should be okay. Are you ready to leave right away? What about your business at the UN?'
'Good question.' Chase sipped his drink. 'Wish I knew the answer.'
'The answer to what?'
Chase told her about his meeting with the secretary-general and Senator Prothero. It wasn't so much, he felt, that he needed Ruth's advice as to air his own feelings, examine his own doubts out loud. She was a receptive audience and could be trusted.
As he spoke he could see Ruth becoming absorbed in the proposal as put to him by Ingrid Van Dorn and Prothero. Finally she said, 'Quite honestly I don't see the dilemma. If it's technically possible, then you've got to do it.'
'But don't you see, Ruth, that
'What is?'
'I don't know if it can be done--nobody does. Take any ten scientists and you'll get three who'll say yes, three who'll say no, and the other four wouldn't care to express an opinion either way.'
'Then suppose we leave the environment alone,' Ruth said. 'Does it have the ability to restore the natural balance without our interfering? Perhaps in a few years time the biosphere will revert back to normal.'
