Then he went to sleep.
Fifty years before, the Third World War had finally broken out. It had been preceded by thirty years of Cold War Phase II. Phase I had ended in the 1970s, when it was obvious that War was inevitable. Phase II had been the defensive measures against overkill. They had sunk the subterranean cavern cities, the “canister cities” as the sub-urban planners called them. (They weren’t called anything as unglamorous as that publicly. In the press releases they were glowingly named Jade City, DownTown, Golden Grotto, North and South Diamond, Onyxville, Sub-City, East Pyrites. And in the Smokies they sank the gigantic North American Continent antimissile complex, Ironwall, two miles down.)
The breeding had started long before Phase I. Malthus had been right. Under the impetus of fear, people multiplied as never before. And in canister cities like Lower Hong Kong, Labyrinth (under Boston) and New Cuernavaca the enclosed conformity of life left them few pleasures. So they multiplied. And again. And geometrically the progression filled the canister cities. They sent out tunnels and tubes and feelers, and the Earth filled up with the squalling, teeming, hungry inhabitants of the land of fear. Aboveground only the military and scientific elite chose to live, out of necessity.
Then came the War.
Bacteriologically, atomically, with laser and radiation it came.
It was bad enough on the North American continent: Los Angeles was slagged. Ironwall and half the Smokies were gone, the missile complex buried forever under mountains that were now soft, rolling hills. Oak Ridge went up in one bright flash. Louisville was reduced to rubble. Detroit and Birmingham no longer existed; in their places were smooth reflective surfaces, almost perfectly flat like mirrored wafers of oxidized chrome plate.
New York and Chicago had been better protected. They had lost their suburbs, but not their canister subcities. And the central cores of the metropolises remained. Battered, but still functioning.
It had been just as bad, even worse, on the other continents. But there had been time during the two Phases of the Cold War to develop serums, remedies, antidotes, therapeutics. People were saved by the millions.
Even so…one could not inject an ear of corn.
Nor could one inoculate every cat and dog and wild boar and antelope and llama and Kodiak bear. Nor could one seed the oceans and save the fish. Ecology went mad. Some species survived, others died out completely.
The Hunger Strikes and the Food Riots began.
And ended quickly. People too weak from hunger cannot fight. So the cannibal times came. And then the governments, terrified by what they had done to themselves and each other, banded together at last.
The United Nations had been rebuilt, and they had commissioned the Companies to solve the problems of artificial foodstuffs. But it was a slow process.
What they had only dimly realized was that the Westerly Winds, carrying all the radiation and residue of bacteriological lunacy, had swept across the North American continent, picking up their additional loads at the Smokies, Louisville, Detroit, New York, and had carried the polluted and deadly cargo across the Eastern Seaboard, across the Atlantic, to dissipate finally in the jetstream over Asia. But not before massive fallout off the Carolinas had combined with sunlight and rain to produce a strange mutation in the plankton-rich waters of Diamond Shoals.
Ten years after the end of the Third World War, the plankton had become something else. It was called goo by the fishermen of the Outer Banks.
Diamond Shoals had become a cauldron of creation.
The goo spread. It adapted. It metamorphosed. And there was panic. Deformed exo-skeletal fish swam in the shallow waters; four new species of dog shark were found (one was a successful adaptation); a centipedal squid with a hundred arms flourished for several years, then unaccountably vanished.
The goo did not vanish.
Experiments followed, and miraculously, what had seemed to be an imminent and unstoppable menace to life on the seas, and probably on the planet as a whole…revealed itself as a miracle. It saved the world. The goo, when “killed,” could be turned into artificial nourishment. It contained a wide spectrum of proteins, vitamins, amino acids, carbohydrates, and even necessary minimum amounts of trace elements. When dehydrated and packaged, it was economically rewarding. When combined with water it could be cooked, stewed, pan fried, boiled, baked, poached, sautéed, stuffed or used as a stuffing. It was as close to the perfect food as had ever been found. Its flavor altered endlessly, depending entirely on which patented processing system was used. It had many tastes, but no characteristic taste.
Alive, it functioned on a quasi-vegetative level. An unstable protoplasmic agglomeration, it was apparently unintelligent, though it had an undeniable urge toward form. It structured itself endlessly into rudimentary plant and animal shapes, none viable. It was as if the goo desired to become something.
(It was hoped in the research labs of the Companies that the goo never discovered what it wanted to become.)
“Killed,” it was a tasty meal.
Harvesting factories—the TexasTowers—were erected by each of the Companies, and harvesters were trained. They drew the highest wages of any nontechnical occupation in the world. It was not due to the long hours, or the exhausting labor. The pay was, in fact, legally referred to as “high-hazard pay.”
Joe Pareti had danced the educational pavane and had decided the tune was not nearly sprightly enough for him. He became a harvester. He never really understood why all the credits being deposited in his account were called high-hazard pay.
He was about to find out.
It was a song that ended in a scream. And then he woke up. The night’s sleep had held no rest. Eleven hours on his back; eleven hours of helpless drudgery; and at last an escape, an absurd transition into exhausted wakefulness. For a moment he lay there, he couldn’t move.
Then getting to his feet, he found himself fighting for balance. Sleep had not used him well.
Sleep had scoured his skin with emery paper.
Sleep had polished his fingers with diamond dust. Sleep had abraded his scalp.
Sleep had sand-blasted his eyes.
Oh dear God, he thought, feeling pain in every nerve ending. He stumbled to the toilet and hit the back of his neck a sharp, short blast with the needle-spray of the shower head. Then he went to the mirror, and automatically pulled his razor out of the charge niche. Then he looked at himself in the mirror, and stopped.
Sleep had: scoured his skin with emery paper, polished his fingers with diamond dust, abraded his scalp, sandblasted his eyes.
It was barely a colorful way of putting it. Almost literally, that was what had happened to him while he had slept.
He stared into the mirror, and recoiled from the sight. If this is what sex with that damned Flinn does to a guy, I’m going celibate.
He was totally bald.
The wispy hair he recalled brushing out of his face during the previous on-shift, was gone. His head was smooth and pale as a fortune teller’s crystal ball.
He had no eyelashes.
He had no eyebrows.
His chest was smooth as a woman’s.
His pubis had been denuded.
His fingernails were almost translucent, as though the uppermost layers of dead horn had been removed.
He looked in the mirror again. He saw himself… more or less. Not very much less, actually: no more than a pound of him was gone. But it was a noticeable pound.
His hair.
Assorted warts, moles, scar tissue and calluses.
The protective hairs in his nostrils.
His kneecaps, elbows and heels were scoured pink.
Joe Pareti found he was still holding the razor. He put it down. And stared at himself in horrified fascination for several timeless moments. He had a ghastly feeling he knew what had happened to him. I’m in deep trouble, he thought.
He went looking for the TexasTower’s doctor. He was not in the sickbay. He found him in the pharmacology lab. The doctor took one look and preceded him back to sickbay. Where he confirmed Pareti’s suspicions.
The doctor was a quiet, orderly man named Ball. Very tall, very thin, with an irreducible amount of professional ghoulishness. Normally he was inclined to gloom; but looking at the hairless Pareti he cheered perceptibly.