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  Jack said nothing.

  Bennett tried to conceal his annoyance. “Well, then. With your contacts, can you at least discover who’s behind the so-called Change? It’s industrial sabotage, that’s for damned sure. The stunt’s very clever, but there’s greed written all over it. Someone intends to make a hell of a killing by marketing the solution to the destruction of plastic.”

  “You think there is a solution?”

  “Of course there is; the whole thing’s a gimmick—so maybe there’s some way we could cut ourselves in on it. You know the shakers and movers; not the Gnomes of Zurich, that was last century. This is a different ball game now. Find out who’s behind the Change and you could become a rich man.”

  “I’m sure plenty are on that hunt already.” Jack cast a covert glance around the office, wondering if Bennett had the place bugged. For a heartbeat he was returned to the shadowy world of billionaire arms dealers and secret intelligence organizations controlled by forces playing deadly games with the future of the planet. “I’m not equipped to compete with them,” he said aloud.

  Bennett felt his blood pressure rising. “Okay, okay, I get it. You’ve lost your nerve, right?” Before Jack could respond he continued, “There is something else you can do for me. A pack of crazy tree huggers in this town is out for my scalp. I’d feel better if I had reliable personal protection, if you know what I mean. Is it something you could handle? You do have contacts for that sort of thing, don’t you?”

  * * *

  After Reece left his office Bennett replayed their conversation in his head, looking for possible mistakes on his part and vulnerabilities the other man might have revealed. Then he sat for a while, staring into space.

  No one appreciates how hard I worked to achieve this. Or how easily I could lose it. If I sweat blood, who cares? Nell and the kids spend money as fast as it comes in and never say thank you. Maybe Jack Reece has it right, don’t tie yourself down with other people.

  But I love them, damn it. They’re my family.

  I give them everything they want.

  * * *

  Fred and Louise Mortenson were anticipating their wedding anniversary. “Twenty-five years of wedded bliss,” Fred announced as he entered Gold’s Court Florist shortly after three in the afternoon.

  “Isn’t that lovely, Walt,” cooed Martha Frobisher, a birdlike little lady in a rayon dress that hung halfway down her shins. “If only my Phil had lived, we—”

  “I’m double-parked in the lane, Martha; mind if we get on with this? I want a dozen red roses delivered to my house this afternoon between four and five. No later. If they’re any later I’ll send them back. Got it?”

  Her lips tightened to a thin line. “I have it, Mr. Mortenson.” And I hope you spear your fingers on the thorns, you nasty old so-and-so, she said silently to his departing back as he left the shop. How could a sweet-tempered woman like Louise Mortenson put up with such an unpleasant man for twenty-five years? And there’s my poor darling Phil up in Sunnyslope Cemetery.… She thrust two fingers into the sleeve of her dress and pulled out a wadded handkerchief. Dabbing her eyes, she looked out the front door of the shop to make sure no customers were approaching, then went into the back to check the stock in the walk-in refrigerator.

  Nine red roses. Only nine. Martha did a quick mental calculation. There was not enough time to send for more from the commercial flower market in Nolan’s Falls. By the time the order went through it would be tomorrow, knowing those people. As she returned to the shop area she noticed an elaborate flower arrangement in a celadon vase beside the credit card machine. The arrangement included several long-stemmed red roses, full blown and gorgeous. They were artificial, but in these days when flowers could be replicated so easily no one could tell the difference. Certainly not Fred Mortenson, who refused to have the basic eye surgery that people of his age usually did. “No kid fresh out of medical school’s going to laser my eyes!” he declared.

  The florist selected three magnificent blooms to be included in the Mortenson order.

  * * *

  Fred Mortenson stopped to compare his AllCom with the clock on the front of Goettinger’s department store, nipped into the pharmacy for a bottle of antacid, then walked around the corner into Miller’s Lane.

  There was a parking ticket on his windshield.

  “Damn that everlasting bitch to hell!” he cried, snatching the ticket and tearing it into tiny independent republics.

  His outburst startled a mother passing by with her little boy. The child began to cry; the mother gave Mortenson a dirty look. “Language!” she reproved him.

  “Bitch!” he shot back.

  He was not referring to the child’s mother, or the traffic warden who had written the ticket, but the wife for whom he had just ordered a dozen red roses.

  For most of their marriage the two had shared an abiding passion. Even their closest friends were unaware of their true feelings. The tumultuous love that brought them together had faded to be replaced by a different emotion; one which brought just as much sustenance and would last longer. Both Fred and Louise possessed a talent for hating.

  They hated everything about each other. Down to the smallest detail Louise loathed her husband and he loathed her. Their joint acrimony defined their lives and fueled a flame so steady they relied on it as an asset. Neither had a sense of personal responsibility. Anything that went wrong in one person’s life was the fault of the other one.

  A quarter century of such constancy deserved commemoration. Such as a dozen red roses for a woman who was allergic to flowers.

  At four thirty a van bearing the name of Gold’s Court Florist delivered a stunning floral arrangement to 29 Patterson Place. Framed in cellophane were a dozen perfect red roses set off by green ferns and a large satin bow. The delivery boy admired them as he carried them up the sidewalk. He wished he could afford such a treat for his girlfriend. Maybe then she’d put out.

  At five minutes after five Fred Mortenson opened the front door of his house and walked in.

  At six minutes after five Louise Mortenson exclaimed, “Your phony flowers melted, you cheap bastard!” She hit her husband square in the face with her grandmother’s cast-iron skillet, breaking his nose and knocking out three of his teeth.

  7

  Straddling a bend of the Sycamore River, the eponymous town appeared peaceful and superficially law abiding. Most of it was solidly middle class. Apart from RobBenn there was little industry; factories were reserved for Benning, the nearest large town. Sycamore River was almost but not quite self-sufficient. Its inhabitants mostly worked in offices, retail businesses and the service industry, providing a comfortable lifestyle for their families.

  South of the river were busy shopping centers and leafy neighborhoods populated by those who could employ the less privileged to mow their lawns and clean their houses.

  North of the river were discount shops whose customers mowed lawns and cleaned houses for a living, or struggled to stretch their welfare checks. There were also a few immigrant families that did not yet speak good English.

  To the west lay Daggett’s Woods, originally a forest containing over nine hundred acres of native hardwood. A sharp-eyed settler named Elias Daggett had laid claim to the land when the settlement on the riverbank was only a huddle of shacks. Elias did some timbering, made some money. Mostly he liked to camp out among his trees. Eventually his grandson, Ephraim, left the entire property to the expanding town of Sycamore River, to be held in perpetuity as a nature reserve.

  To the environmentalists Daggett’s Woods was a slice of paradise. Others saw it as a wasted asset that should be profitably exploited. For a few, Daggett’s Woods was a temple.

  Robert Bennett had spent a small fortune on lawyers’ fees and bribes to politicians in order to carve out ten acres in the forest. There he had built a research and development center. Inspired by the plans for the Mars settlement, the architect had created a futuristic complex of cement and glass.


  Except for RobBenn and the private access road that connected it to the main highway, the forest remained much as Ephraim had left it, its virginity slightly tainted by discarded beer cans, used condoms and festering heaps of rubbish. A slab of granite at the foot of the access road was carved with only two words: RobBenn Enterprises.

  A local wag had nicknamed it the Tombstone.

  * * *

  Jack Reece was collecting information about the Change. Not because of Robert Bennett; Jack had decided he wanted nothing more to do with the man. But the puzzle was fascinating. Instinct warned him the Change might be the advance guard of an attack. For as long as he could remember there had been attacks on the American way of life: have-nots rebelling against the haves, political parties seeking to discredit their opponents, foreign powers jealous of America’s position in the world.

  “So far the Change doesn’t seem to benefit any particular group,” Jack commented as he sat with Bea watching the wallscreen. The latest world news program was almost over. Another would begin after a long interval of commercials.

  The screen started to flicker around the edges. “Jack?” Bea said warningly. “Can you…?”

  “Sure, wait a minute.” He fiddled with the controls until the picture steadied, though it seemed to have lost its third dimension.

  The network commentator was reporting, “From Boston to Beijing to Botswanaland, storage containers are disgorging their contents as they collapse.”

  Bea said, “Do you suppose any storage containers are dissolving in the Pentagon?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised, but we’ll never hear about it.”

  “You don’t have much confidence in the media, Jack.”

  “The same people who use war for entertainment value? We get ‘real time’ news from the wallscreen and we’re supposed to accept it without question. Listen, Aunt Bea; I’ve been over there, I know what’s going on. People used to believe what they read in the papers because journalists took time to investigate before they wrote. Now any sort of lie can turn up in print and we’ve lost the ability to discriminate.”

  “Frank Auerbach still publishes The Sycamore Seed, and I don’t think he tells lies.”

  “That’s a labor of love; how much longer can he keep it up?”

  She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “How long can we keep up anything?”

  The wallscreen hissed. Jack began fiddling with the controls again.

  * * *

  Shay Mulligan told Paige, “I went to our supplier to restock pet supplies and found what looked like a nest of snakes in a drawer. All the collars and leashes had stuck together and turned slimy. They weren’t real leather, but the bastard’s been charging me for real leather. You can bet I’m changing suppliers!”

  * * *

  “The miracle material of the twentieth century is getting downright dangerous in the twenty-first,” Jack Reece said to Gerry Delmonico via AllCom. “Have you heard the latest news?”

  “Bennett won’t allow a wallscreen in the lab, not even a two-dimension without interaction. Says it’s too distracting and he’s probably right. Then when I get home Gloria and I share the chores, and so forth. You know. Tell me what’s happened now.”

  “A ballerina with the touring company of the Bolshoi broke her ankle during a performance of Swan Lake. The hardened toe of her ballet slipper contained a small amount of plastic sandwiched with rubber to cushion the foot, and the plastic dissolved while the dancer was en pointe.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I’ll say. But listen to this one. Have you ever been to Bruges, in Belgium?”

  “’Fraid not.”

  “You should, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For five hundred years a brewery in the heart of the city has produced a famous barley beer that accounts for a big chunk of the nation’s economy. To spare the ancient cobbled streets from thousands of delivery trucks, years ago a network of plastic pipes was run underneath them to carry the beer from the brewery to the distributors. Now those pipes are dissolving. The subsoil of Bruges is being saturated with beer!” Jack roared with laughter.

  Gerry didn’t laugh. “If the Change is extending to larger items…”

  “Stories like this are popping up all over the place,” said Jack. “You should see some of the ones I’ve found.”

  “If the Change is extending to larger items,” Gerry continued doggedly, “it’s really bad news. No one knows how much plastic is used in everyday life. Since this thing is advancing it might be moving from one set of polymers to another, or one molecular structure to another. Sort of like a disease. I hope they can stop it.”

  “‘They’? Haven’t you noticed we always expect someone else to do the heavy lifting?”

  * * *

  Bit by bit, drop by drop, decay was setting in.

  Lines began to form outside of banks. Nervous depositors wanting to withdraw their money were requesting old-fashioned paper bills. It was a new sort of run on the banks.

  Bea Fontaine was embarrassed by the excuses she had to offer old friends.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Edgar Tilbury when he appeared at her window, “but for the time being we’re limiting the size of cash withdrawals.”

  A lean, grizzled man in a plaid lumberjack shirt and faded denims, Tilbury might have been sixty, he might have been eighty. He was as sharp-featured as a fox and his eyes were very bright. “You know where I live?” he asked in a voice rusty with disuse.

  “Of course I do. Out in the country.”

  “That’s right, way out. No supermarkets. If I buy eggs or a couple of cabbages from my neighbors I have to pay them in cash, not cards, which is why four times a year I withdraw cash from your bank. I’ve always done it that way.”

  “And I’ve always said you shouldn’t keep that much cash at home.”

  “It couldn’t be safer in Fort Knox,” he assured her.

  * * *

  Lila Ragland kept a wealth of information in the most sophisticated AllCom on the market, a top-of-the-line multitasking international communicator with an immense data-storage system guaranteed to thwart hackers. It was set in a handsome case made to resemble platinum, and included a retinal identifier concealed in the hinge. The device gave her access to enough skeletons-in-closets to bankrupt billionaires and bring down foreign governments.

  Many people put their AllComs beside their beds at night; she put hers under her pillow.

  The furnished apartment she was renting did not contain anything else that might tempt a burglar. She did not even own a gun.

  She abhorred guns.

  Waking one morning from a restless sleep, Lila slipped her hand under the pillow.

  And felt something sticky.

  * * *

  Robert Bennett stormed into the editorial office of The Sycamore Seed. “What the hell’s going on, Frank? Something’s gone wrong with my personal AllCom and there are things out at RobBenn that’ll be ruined if the Change isn’t stopped. My employees are freaking out.”

  “What things?” Frank Auerbach inquired.

  Oh, no you don’t, thought Bennett. My business is strictly my business. “The equipment it takes to run this factory,” he said blandly. “Like polycarbonate safety goggles for the assembly line.”

  Auerbach gave a contemptuous snort. “Cyber attacks and chemical warfare and proxy wars around the globe and you’re worrying about goggles? Get real, Rob; this is the world we live in.”

  “We who?”

  “Us. The good guys.”

  “This ‘good guy’ isn’t just talking about goggles, and I damned sure don’t want to see any mention of my problems in your chickenshit newspaper! Just let me know as soon as you hear about a solution to the Change. Some of your money’s invested in this place too, you know.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “Would I threaten you? Aren’t I the guy who advised you to diversify because the Seed wasn’t making enough in advertising revenue to keep food on the tab
le?”

  * * *

  Robert Bennett stayed in his office late that night. Eschewing the company cafeteria, where he would have been asked questions he couldn’t answer, he deliberately chose the highest-cholesterol items in the vending machines for supper at his desk. Potato chips, corn chips, salted peanuts and a sickeningly sweet candy bar in a neon blue wrapper that urged, “Try Me! I’m Good for You!” An obvious lie, he thought. No truth in advertising. Who should know that better than me?

  At last he fell asleep on the seven-foot-long couch in the reception area of the executive suite. Upholstered in the softest Italian glove leather, the couch had been purchased in anticipation of interviewing female personnel but was rarely used for its intended purpose. In retrospect, Rob decided, the ploy had been too obvious. He had exhausted his limited supply of subtlety years ago, wooing Nell.

  He awoke with a start shortly before dawn. Like a ghost, he wandered through the deserted offices surrounding the executive suite. Not a living soul in any of them. No one had looked into his office to wish him good night either—though he had never encouraged that sort of camaraderie from his employees. He recalled the time Nell had visited the complex with him shortly before it opened. He was proud of the place after the years of hard work, and eager to show his achievement to his wife. All she had said was, “It’s hard to take it in, Rob. A manufacturing complex buried in the woods like this, far away from people … it seems so impersonal.”

  He had never invited her back. Except for the grand opening, of course, when the lavishly decorated lobby was filled with loud music and important guests, and pretty girls were circulating with trays of wine and canapés. He had wanted to show off his lovely wife, so he steered her by her elbow around and around the room, introducing her to the men and enjoying the expressions on the faces of their female companions; the false smiles of wariness and jealousy.

  Nell had left early that night, summoning a taxicab from town. They had quarreled about it later. One of those unresolved arguments that would come to punctuate their marriage.