'Don't put yourself in a bind with Young over it, Eve. The President has some strict ethics about drugging his people.'
Delighted laughter, as though Mills had sprung a salacious joke. 'Shyster ethics: if you might get punished for it, it's unethical.' Long ago, Mills had learned Eve's method of bedding a man who did not fancy tussling with cellulite. She merely laced his food with lobotol, a controlled substance developed to aid hypnotists in making the most intractable patient highly suggestible. While fuddled in this fashion, a man would believe whatever Eve told him, e.g., that she was the most desirable sexual provender he could possibly imagine. And he would further believe that he had hungered all his life to test the adage that whatever one can imagine, one can do.
Mills had discovered Eve's ploy two years previously, after waking one morning with a swirling recollection of boffing his blousy ex-bimbo in ways he had never before contemplated. Those memories did not please him much; the exhausted Mills had the distinct impression that, he’d spent the night with a dirty joke. His cold rage on learning her deception had left Eve frightened and astonished; she'd thought the whole business would amuse him. She had never repeated her mistake on Mills but still found lobotol her chief procurer for the one-nighters she chose like a young Messalina.
Deliberately abrading a troubled spot: 'Anyhow, I don't keep my slaves endlessly hooked on heavy shit — like
Icily: 'If there were any other way to pursue the most awesome breathrough in recorded history,
'Without giving anything away to John Q. or our glorious government, you mean.'
Mills, now standing, showed every sign of truncating their old debate. 'Eve, if you can keep your great wanton ass out of trouble at the top — and if I can get the San Rafael Desert lab to come through for us — you and I will be the glorious government, for all practical purposes. I know you're laying poor strung-out Chabrier every time you visit the lab; considering the stuff he pollutes his system with, I don't think your lobotol could do him any additional harm. Be circumspect; that's all.'
'I don't need lobotol with Chabrier,' she said, feeling that her charm had been questioned.
'Thai hash, then,' Mills sighed; 'whatever. I must get back upstairs; thanks for the warning on individually tailored messages, I'm sure you're right.'
Her languid purr followed him to the door. 'With enough lobotol in a metro water supply you wouldn't need tailored messages, luv.'
'Now you're being absurd, Eve. Only half the population would be tuned to FBN and besides, a steady diet of judgment suppressants would put Mexicans in New Denver inside a month.'
'But I can see you've given it a lot of thought,' she said, and her cruel cupid lips mimed a juicy kiss of parting.
Mills strode to the executive lift, exasperated.
She hadn't even said whether she'd go to Santa Fe. But Mills knew her cravings; she'd be there, all right.
He made a mental note to check the remote monitors at the desert lab by way of his private access code.
Eve Simpson was the only soul running loose, besides himself, who knew just how Marengo Chabrier's lab was run — and for what purpose.
CHAPTER 9
Cloistered in Utah's San Rafael desert region was Mills's most secure research facility, where need-to-know was as strictly monitored as on any proving ground in the world. There, Mills had carefully assembled a group of the technological elite whose drug requirements made them tractable. From Marengo Chabrier, the French program administrator, to the illegal aliens, all lived out their days behind particle-beam fences within a trackless waste. Their one goal: to find some way to scale up the mass synthesizer which China had developed during the war.
All but a few Chinese researchers had been liquidated by their own leaders, and only Boren Mills had a working model of the device. He had killed to get it. No larger than an overnight bag, the synthesizer had powered the reaction engine of a tiny Sino submarine, also providing oxygen and simple nutrients for the hibernating crew.
Now, twenty-seven months into his scale-up program. Mills rejoiced and writhed. Chabrier, physicist- turned-administrator and a druggie of broad scope, boasted that the little Chinese synthesizer could now produce small amounts of organic dyes, pheromones, heavy alcohols, and other complex chemicals using plain air as conversion input mass. But an inherent limitation existed in the size of the gadget's toroidal output chamber. The Chinese had already built the thing with its maximum output, and neither Chabrier nor subtler asiatic minds in the lab could even posit, let alone demonstrate, a rig that could do any better.
Within a few weeks, the lab would try out the new prototype which could produce an incredible range of substances, so precisely metered that it could issue a shot of bourbon or a root beer complete with effervescence. Mills was no fool; his lab personnel, Chabrier very much included, wore implant monitors that kept Mills informed of their drug abuses. He could not prevent them from manufacturing booze or Fentanyl, but he would know if any one of them absorbed any of it at other than scheduled times. And that would mean cold turkey withdrawal in a padded cell for Chabrier as well as the abuser. So far, Chabrier's vigilance was flawless.
Still more disturbing, Mills found it easier to fund the lab's exotic needs from his own pocket than to continue siphoning money from projects known to IEE board members. Those expenses were mounting, but Mills did not dare permit use of the synthesizer for cash crops; gold, pharmaceuticals, plutonium. Not yet; not until Mills had absolute control of a synthesizer that could produce its goods in staggering quantity.
To make a million copies of the Chinese model would be to court disaster. Eventually its secrets would become known to others outside his grasp and, once every citizen had access to a synthesizer, government-by- scarcity would be a thing of the past. No wonder the Chinese had purged their technocrats; in the nether corners of his mind, Mills had scheduled something similar for his own lab people — but only after they'd done their work.
Mills, who loathed procrastination, had decided to put off his decision for another year. If by that time it still seemed impossible to design a factory-sized synthesizer, he might order a factory full of the small ones. But: should he try to coerce his captives into building wholly automated repair equipment for the inevitable maintenance?
If 'yes', they might prove laggards, even sabotage their own work. To underestimate them would be a disaster; they surely knew their utility would end when a million synthesizers were self-maintaining.
If 'no', then Marengo Chabrier and nine other brilliant trip-freaks would be the maintenance crew, the most expensive mechanics on earth and worth it — and they would know it! The plutonium scenario, for example: what if they produced enough of it, despite the best monitors Mills could employ, to build a — well, call it a negotiating device? It could be scarifying. Hell, it was already scary! With a factory full of small synthesizers, his goosepimple factor would be raised to the nth power. It was almost enough to make Mills ask for government control.
Hypothesis 1: A special security force would help.
Hypothesis 2: A special security force would multiply his security problems. Quis custodiet?
Boren Mills's basic problem was easily stated: he had a cornucopia by the tail.
CHAPTER 10
A half-century earlier, the Santa Fe Opera complex had been modern, a layered amalgam of steel and adobe on concrete, thrusting up from fragrant serrated hills at the city's edge. Noah Laker, the S & R regular who'd piloted Quantrill and four others into the huge parking lot, stood with him at parade rest stance near the nose of their sprint chopper.
'Quaint,' muttered Laker, one of the few regulars who saw nothing unGodly about talking in ranks. 'But that open roof is a crime against thermal efficiency. Saints! Just look at all that wasted concrete swooping around. Ever see such a thing?'
