Oblivion_ stories - By David Foster Wallace Page 0,27

to the green room in order to avoid making her jump and lay her palm against the flounces of her blouse’s front by ‘com[ing] up behind [her] like that,’ as she’d accused him of doing once during the six-month period when SRD Awad really had been coming up stealthily behind her all the time and her own and everyone else’s nerves were understandably strung out and on edge. Schmidt would shortly then pour a cup of R.S.B.’s strong sour coffee and join Darlene Lilley and today’s so-called experimental project’s other two Field Researchers and perhaps one or two silent and very intense young R.S.B. Market Research interns in the row of cushioned chairs before the screens, Schmidt next to Lilley and somewhat in the shadow of her very tall hair, and Ron Mounce would as always produce a pack of cigarettes, and Trudi Keener would laugh at the way Mounce always made a show of clawing a cigarette desperately out of the pack and lighting it with a tremorous hand, and the fact that neither Schmidt nor Darlene Lilley smoked (Darlene had grown up in a household with heavy smokers and was now allergic) would cause a slight alliance of posture as they both leaned slightly away from the smoke. Schmidt had once swallowed hard in his chair and mentioned the whole smoking issue to Mounce, gallantly claiming the allergy as his own, but since R.S.B. equipped its green room with both ashtrays and exhaust fans and it was eighteen floors down and 100 yards out the Gap’s rear service doors into a small cobbled area where people without private offices gathered on breaks to smoke, it wasn’t the sort of issue that could really be pressed without appearing either like a militant crank or like someone putting on a show of patronizing chivalry for Darlene, who often crossed her legs ankle-on-knee-style and massaged her instep with both hands as she watched her Focus Group’s private deliberations and Schmidt tried to focus on his own TFG. There was never much conversation; the four facilitators were still technically on, ready at any moment to return to their respective groups’ conference rooms if the screen showed their foreman moving to press the button that the Groups were told activated an amber signal light.

Team Δy chief Alan Britton, M.S. & J.D., of whom one sensed that no one had ever even once made fun, was an immense and physically imposing man, roughly 6'1" in every direction, with a large smooth shiny oval head in the precise center of which were extremely tiny close-set features arranged in the invulnerably cheerful expression of a man who had made a difference in all he’d ever tried.

In terms of administration there was, of course, the ramified problem of taste and/or texture. Ricin, like most phytotoxins, is exceedingly bitter, which meant that the requisite 0.4 mg must present for ingestion in a highly dilute form. But the dilution seemed even more unpalatable than the ricin itself: injected through the thin wrapper into the 26 × 13 mm ellipse of fondant at the Felony!’s hollow center, the distilled water formed a soggy caustic pocket whose contrast with the deliquescent high-lipid filling itself fairly shouted adulteration. Injection into the moist flourless surrounding cake itself turned an area the size of a 1916 Flowing Liberty Quarter into maltilol-flavored sludge. A promising early alternative was to administer six to eight very small injections in different areas of the Felony! and hope that the subject got all or most of the snack cake down (like Twinkies and Choco-Diles, the Felony! was designed to be a prototypical Three-Biter but also to be sufficiently light and saliva-soluble that an ambitious consumer could get the whole thing into his mouth at once, with predictably favorable consequences for IMPCs* and concomitant sales volume) before noticing anything amiss. The problem here was that each injection, even with a fine-gauge hypodermic, produced a puncture of .012 mm diameter (median) in the flimsy transpolymer wrapper, and in home tests of individually packaged cakes at average Midwest-New England humidity levels these punctures produced topical staleness/desiccation within 48-72 hours of shelving. (As with all Mister Squishy products, Felonies! were engineered to be palpably moist and to react with salivary ptyalin in such a way as to literally ‘melt in the mouth,’ qualities established in very early Field tests to be associated with both freshness and a luxe, almost sensual indulgence.†) The botulinus exotoxin, being tasteless as well as 97% lethal at .00003