projected schedule, despite badly deteriorating relations between the two countries. China invaded and annexed Tibet, but China hadalways invaded and annexed Tibet, and only the human-solidarity people objected. Next, however, China annexed the Kamchatka Peninsula, where American biosolutions companies were working on the clean-up of Vladivostock. The genemod engineers brought back frightening stories of advanced Chinese engineering: room-temperature superconductors. Maglev trains. Nanotechnology. There were even rumors of quantum computers, capable of handling trillions of operations simultaneously, although Mal discounted those rumors completely. A practical quantum computer was still far over the horizon.
AbbyWorks was ordered out of Shanghai by the United States government. The company did not leave.
Abby1 was jailed, but this made no difference. The Shanghai profits were paid to offshore banks.
AbbyWorks claimed to have lost control of its Shanghai employees, who were making huge personal fortunes, enough to enable them to live outside the United States for the rest of very luxurious lives. Then, abruptly, the Chinese government itself terminated the contract. They literally threw AbbyWorks out of China in the middle of the night. They kept for themselves enormous resources in patented scientific equipment, as well as monies due for the last three months’ work, an amount equal to some state budgets.
At three o’clock in the morning, Mal received a visit from the Office of National Security.
“Mallings Goldstone?”
“Yes?”
“We need to ask you some questions.”
Recorders, intimidation. The ONS had information that in 2175 Mr. Goldstone had conducted two people to the Minnesota site of the space object: Abby4 Abbington, president of AbbyWorks Biosolutions, and Mr. Kim Mao Xun of the Chinese government.
“Yes, I did,” Mal said, sitting stiffly in his nightclothes. “It’s on record. I had proper clearances.”
“Yes. But during that visit, did Mr. Kim take out and attach to the space object an unknown device, and then return it to his briefcase?”
“Yes.” Mal’s stomach twisted.
“Why wasn’t this incident reported to the State Department?”
“I didn’t think it was important.” Not entirely true. Abby4 must have reported it…but whynow? Because of the lost monies and confiscated equipment, of course. Adding to the list of Chinese treacheries; a longer list was more likely to compel government reaction.
“Do you have any idea what the device was, or what it might have done to the space object?”
“No.”
“Then you didn’t rule out that its effects might have been dangerous to your country?”
“Dangerous’? How?”
“We don’t know, Mr. Mallings-that’s the point. We do know that in nonbiological areas the Chinese technology is far ahead of our own. We have no way of knowing if that device you failed to report turned the space object into a weapon of some kind.”
“A weapon? Don’t you think that’s very unlikely?”
“No, Mr. Mallings. I don’t. Please get dressed and come with us.”
For the first time, Mal noticed the two men’s builds. Genemod for strength and agility, no doubt, as well as maximum possible longevity. He remembered Mr. Kim, scrawny and wrinkled. Their bodies far outclassed Mr. Kim’s, far outclassed Mal’s as well. But Mr. Kim’s body was somewhere on the other side of the world, along with his superior “devices,” and Mal’s body was marked “scapegoat” as clearly as if it were spelled out in DNA-controlled birthmarks on his forehead.
He went into his bedroom to get dressed.
Mal had been interrogated with truth drugs-painless, harmless, utterly reliable-recorded, and released by the time the news hit the flimsies. He had already handed in his resignation to his company. The moving truck stood outside his apartment, being loaded for the move to someplace he wasn’t known.
Mal, flimsy in hand, watched the two huge stevies carry out his furniture.
But he couldn’t postpone reading the flimsy forever. And, of course, this was just the first. There would be more. The tempaper rustled in his hand. It would last forty-eight hours before dissolving into molecules completely harmless to the environment.
CHINESE ARMED “SPACE OBJECT” TO DESTROY US!!!
“MIGHT BE RADIATION, OR POLLUTANTS, OR A SUPER-BOMB,” SAY SCIENTISTS
TROJAN HORSE UNDER GUISE OF BIOSOLUTIONS CONTRACT
TWO YEARS AND NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE!!!!
Flimsies weren’t subtle. But so far as Mal could see, his name hadn’t yet been released to them.
Mal said, “Please be careful with that desk, it’s very old. It belonged to my great-grandfather.”
“O, yes, friend,” one of the stevies said. “Most careful.” They hurled it into the truck.
A neighbor of Mal’s walked toward Mal, recognized him, and stopped dead. She hissed at him, a long ugly sound, and walked on.
So some other flimsy had already tracked him down and published his name.
“Leave the rest,” Mal said suddenly, “everything else inside the house. Let’s go.”
“O, just a few crates,” said one stevie.
“No, leave it.” Mal climbed into the truck’s passenger cubicle. He hoped that he wasn’t a coward, but like all meeting brokers he was an historian, and he remembered the historical accounts of the “Anti-Polluters’ Riots” of the Collapse. What those mobs had done to anyone suspected of contributing to the destruction of the environment…Mal pulled the curtains closed in the cubicle. “Let’s go!”
“O, yes!” the stevies said cheerfully, and drove off.
Mal moved five states away, pursued all the way by flimsies. He couldn’t change his retinal scan or DNA ID, of course, but he used a legal corporate alias with the new landlord, the grocery broker, the bank.
He read the news every day, and listened to it on public radio, and it progressed as any meeting broker could foresee it would.
First, set the agenda: Demonize the Chinese, spread public fear. Second, canvass negotiating possibilities:
Will they admit it? What can we contribute? Third, eliminate the possibilities you don’t like and hone in on the one you do: If the United States had been attacked, it has the right to counterattack. Fourth, build in safeguards against failure: We can’t yet attack China, they’ll destroy us. Wecan attack the danger they’ve placed within our borders, and then declare victory for that. Fifth, close the deal.
The evacuation started two weeks later, and covered most of northern Minnesota and great swathes of southern Ontario. It included people and farm animals, but not wildlife, which would, of course, be replaced from cloned embryos. As the agrisolution inhabitants, many protesting furiously, were trucked out, the timed-release drops of engineered organisms were trucked in. Set loose after the bomb, they would spread over the entire affected area and disassemble all radioactive molecules. They were the same biosolutions that had cleaned up Boston, the very best AbbyWorks could create. In five years, Minnesota would be as sweet and clean as Kansas.
Or Shanghai.
The entire nation, Mal included, watched the bomb drop on vid. People held patriotic parties; wine and beer flowed. We were showing the Chinese that they couldn’t endanger us in our own country!
Handsome genemod news speakers, who looked like Viking princesses or Zulu warriors or Greek gods, speculated on what the space object might reveal when it was blasted open. If anything survived, of course, which was not likely…and here scientists, considerably less gorgeous than the news speakers, explained fusion and the core of the sun. The bomb might be antiquated technology, they said, but it was still workable, and would save us from Chinese perfidy.
Not to mention, Mal thought, saving face for the United States and lost revenues for AbbyWorks. It might not earn them as much to clean up Minnesota as to clean up Shanghai, but it was still a lot of money.
