Inside the revelry continued as the bus rolled down the four-lane highway toward the darkening mountains in the distance. But five miles beyond the main gate the sounds suddenly diminished. One minute there had been a clink of ice in glasses, good-natured banter, a voice raised in song; the next minute a deathly silence. If the bus driver observed the abrupt change in mood, he gave no sign.
When he reached the foothills twenty minutes later, he turned on the bus’s ventilation system full blast. Ten miles farther on he pulled onto the shoulder, stopped, and set the brakes. He levered himself out of his seat and walked back through the bus, looking into every face. Then he returned to the driver’s seat, removed his gas mask, and drove on.
At his official home at the Naval Observatory in Washington, Vice-President David D. Castle received the diplomatic correspondent of the New York Times in a private interview on the eleventh of June.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to have those seventeen-ah-ah-”
“Killed, murdered, assassinated, rubbed out?” Ilse Freemann laughed. “Because, David, my dear, you might have raised objections that I had no time to listen to. But you knew what would happen. You knew that we couldn’t let them go back to their homes and families and blab their heads off about the sensitive work they had done ‘for the government.’ You knew, but you just didn’t want to think about it.”
Vice-President Castle pulled his chin and looked glum.
“As of Thursday, the twenty-eighth of last month, my dear David, you became accessory before and after the fact to the murder of seventeen of America’s more promising young scientists. These days conviction on first-degree murder charges is a hanging crime. Just remember that, if at any time you have second thoughts about which country you’re working for, sweetheart.”
12. AGAINST THE GRAIN
25 JUNE 2009
Ripley Forte spread the map of the Republic of Texas out on the drafting table in the Abilene office of Forte Ocean Engineering. At his side was Mark Medina, the courtly, white-haired Mexican-Texican who had been his first mentor in the construction business, and now acted as engineering chief of staff for all Forte enterprises. Grouped around them were the division heads of FOI, Triple Eye (Iceberg International, Inc.), and GRIT (Gwillam and Ripley International Traders), the foremost commodity traders in North America.
“The main oil product lines were, of course, already in place when FOI rescued Phil Guthrie’s Texas-Southern pipeline in June 2006,” said Medina, pointing at the red schematic tree whose trunk was planted in Houston and ascended to Kansas City, with branches extending to Cincinnati and Chicago in the Midwest and to Albuquerque, Denver, and Billings on the eastern slopes of the Rockies. “Phil’s been working like a Turk ever since, building subsidiaries off the trunk lines to every agricultural and range area within the T-S Corp network, which covers approximately two million square miles of the United States and Texas. To conserve the iceberg water, we’ve opted for drip irrigation, about 50 percent more efficient than any other means. On a fifty-fifty basis with tens of thousands of farmers, we’ve also built thousands of small plastic-lined, plastic-covered catchments to minimize winter-rain runoff; the dammed waters will be distributed by means of the pipeline throughout our operating areas during the dry season.”
“So the pipeline’s now fully in operation?” asked Dr. Roger Nucho, GRIT’s president.
“Not quite,” said Medina. “We’re melting down something on the order of three billion tons of iceberg every month at Matagorda Bay. That’s not nearly enough to reverse the drought the Republic’s suffered these past four years. Our first task has been to recharge the soil, start rebuilding the aquifers, and finish the pipeline network. By next year this time we hope to be melting eleven billion tons a month, and we’ll be able to restore adequate farming conditions as far north as mid-Nebraska. Eventually, with thirty-four billion tons- that’ll take three more years-we’ll be providing water right into Saskatchewan and Manitoba.”
Nucho’s eyes glinted behind his granny glasses. “It’s going to be one hell of a harvest, once all that water starts flowing.”
“Right,” agreed Forte. “And we’re depending on you to find markets for it. What are the prospects?”
“Couldn’t be better. The world’s population is rising 1.83 percent per year. With just over seven billion people in the world today, that’s an addition of 128 million a year, more than the population of Japan. A lot of the food they’ll need will come from the Plains states, and more from Triple Eye’s Nullarbor Plain holdings in Australia when they begin to come into production in 2011. There is, to be sure, the problem that more than two-thirds of those 128 million are in equatorial regions, and rice eaters. That will mean the conversion of a considerable part of our acreage to rice production.”
“And this year?”
“An improvement, but nothing to shoot off rockets about,” said Dr. Nucho. “Remember, we started from dust-bowl conditions. The percentage increase in yield will be phenomenal, but the actual tonnage will be way below the ten-year average. We’ll get an idea of the possibilities when the Panhandle wheat harvest figures come in in a few days. If it’s as good as I think it’s going to be, then-” He smiled and gave a thumbs-up sign.
As Nucho pointed out, prosperity seemed to be just around the corner, but how long was it going to take to reach the corner? The triple depression of the oil, cattle, and grain industries in Texas-brought about by the simultaneous disasters of an international drought and a drying up of oil reserves-had exacted an ugly human toil. Businesses and schools closed, wages plummeted, unemployment-compensation lines grew ever longer, and crime and vagrancy, along with drug and alcohol abuse, became the only growth industries. Downtown Houston, never an aesthete’s joy, was rapidly becoming a skid-row slum. Suburbanites habitually carried handguns, even to church. Vigilantes began to hang rapists, murderers, and robbers-and a few mistaken for them-when law enforcement broke down along with other civic services. Only the sweeping emergency political powers given Governor Tom Traynor, when he became president after Texas declared its secession from the United States, halted the Republic’s slide toward catastrophe. Even now, after he had imposed draconian economy measures, instituted compulsory fifty-hour work weeks for relief recipients, beefed up the courts and police forces, and made the work ethic and lowered economic expectations basic elements of state policy, it was still touch and go. Traynor was hoping the people would see a good wheat crop that year as a symbol of national recovery and thus they would edge back from the popular revolt that had seemed imminent for some months.
Ripley Forte had used his considerable fortune to bankroll any and every enterprise that gave promise of increasing production. He didn’t give a penny to publicized charities. But his Texas-wide banks gave low-interest loans to small industry, family farms, and students whose records demonstrated a serious interest in scholarship. His many corporations hired men and women who agreed to do an honest day’s work, and fired them when they didn’t. He paid annual bonuses based on each worker’s productivity. He didn’t countenance unions: if his workers voted to organize, which they were free to do, he sold his companies to the workers on easy terms. When the new entity failed, as it did more often than not because the owners spent more time jockeying for position than working, he bought it back again at a fire-sale price, fired the work-floor politicians, and reinstituted hard-nosed management. Not everybody in Texas loved him, but those who worked for him seemed to prosper more than those who didn’t,
“Well,” Forte summed up after all the division chiefs had had their say, “it looks like we’re still walking a tight-rope. If we keep our noses to the grindstone, if Texans see that their fortunes will soon take a turn for the better, if Antarctica doesn’t suddenly stop calving icebergs, and if Russia leaves us the hell alone, maybe we’re all going to end up dying with our boots on instead of at the end of a rope on some friendly Texas Telephone and Telegraph pole. Breathe shallow for the next three months, and if the harvest is what Roger expects it to be, we’ll be able to cancel our unlisted telephone numbers and return to the living.”
“Amen,” said all.
‘Trouble,” said Joe Mansour the next day, calling from his yacht Linno off the island of Maui to Forte in his Houston office.
“Handle it yourself,” Forte advised. “I’ve got a plateful.”
“Everybody’s going to have a plateful, it looks like … of our wheat. In the past five weeks I’ve received orders for more than 1.6 million tons of wheat for delivery during the next six months, and orders are piling in every day.”
“That’s trouble?”
“Considering the origin of the orders, that kind of market movement is totally unexpected and unexplainable, and that’s trouble.”