Lore expands the news box. Now a mestizo woman is talking. She looks upset. “. . .got nothing! ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘it’s not our fault.’ Then whose fault is it? The government can’t afford to help. Look, this is my daughter. . .” She pulls a flat from her pocket, the camera zooms in. It is a picture of a limbless child, grinning. “She’s dead now. My only child. And thousands of others ruined because someone thought they could make some money. Because. . .” She seems to catch sight of something offscreen. “Because of you!” She points and the camera pans wildly, picking up Carmen Torini, still talking to reporters. The reporters, sensing drama, part and let the two women confront each other. One, plump and weeping, beside herself with rage; one slim, well-dressed, patient.
“You’re all so greedy! For the sake of making more money—”
“It was not our fault. If our design specification had been followed to the letter, this would not—”
“Fault! Liability! Just words! Does it matter to our children who is to blame? No. All they want is their lives back. Lives that were ruined because of the van de Oest patenting policy. What would it cost to set right? A few million? Hardly a drop in the company coffers. You should do what you can out of common decency. Who cares about who should have done what? We want to fix it. If guilt at your greed doesn’t motivate you, then humanity, common decency should.”
Carmen seems impervious. “The van de Oest Company sympathizes with your grief in the light of this tragedy. Although the suit for compensation and total grafts for all victims has been dismissed and we have been judged not liable, as a gesture of sympathy to the people of Caracas, the company has authorized me to offer prostheses to all who feel the need—”
The mother of the dead child is having none of that. “We don’t want charity,” she spits. “We want justice! We will not give up. While our children lie in their beds and look at us with their sad eyes we will follow you from country to country, crying ‘Justice! Justice!’ and we will be heard!”
Lore towels her hair dry. It was not Torini’s fault that the locals had tried to cut costs and improve their profit margin by using a generic substitute for the specially tailored van de Oest bacterium around which the whole project had been designed. She thinks about the project in Gdansk and what might happen if, sometime in the next eight months, some greedy or stupid contractor swaps out one bacterium for another. Disaster. She makes a note on her slate to review the continuing supervision of this project and the others in which she has so far been involved. Mistakes happen, but they can be prevented. Then she turns off the screen, dismissing the matter from her mind. It has nothing to do with her and there is a cold drink waiting in the bar.
FIFTEEN
Common decency.I pushed my way out of the floor office and began to run. It was difficult to breathe in the hot, humid air by the water, and by the time I reached the readout station, I was gasping. I ran from trough to trough. No Paolo.
I stopped a moment. Think. I had to think. How would he be feeling? What did he know about the plant? Where would he go?
“Sabotage? How could someone sabotage this place?”
“Any number of ways, but the best place would be right at the beginning . . .”
The influent. I ran.
There are times when the brain can’t deal with what it sees, so part of it sits back and the rest looks closely at some irrelevant piece of information. I noted that the concrete under my feet was shuddering with the weight of water coursing beneath it; that when the huge trap in the floor was pulled back the air not only hissed and roared with the exposed flow, but that it tasted different.
And why, I wondered, were people who were about to kill themselves so compulsively neat?
Paolo’s skinny was beautifully folded, collar top-and-forward the way shirts are sold in their cellophane packages. I had never been able to fold clothes like that. His limbs were piled just as neatly next to the skinny, all except one arm, which lay on its own to the side. I wondered idly how he had managed to take off that last arm, the right, I