Payback by Sam Stewart Page A

quacks like a duck, it cooks, flies and dies like a duck, but it isn’t a duck because its molecules are different. So much for that. If it doesn’t make sense to you, complain to your congressman.
    â€œNow. What I know. It’s unbelievably potent. You want to know how potent? If one bad chemist worked eight hours straight, he could make enough to fly every addict in America for twenty-four hours. You turn that around and you can kill fifty people with whatever you can feed them from the head of a pin. The addicts who shoot it call it Russian Roulette. It can take you on a moon-trip or scramble your brain cells or freeze you like a pillar or kill you like a shot. So in answer to your question, kid—no, we don’t make it.—The lady in the hat.”
    â€œThank you. The stock market closed in New York and the story is your stock was down nine and a quarter. Have you got any comment?”
    Mitchell said nothing; then he said, “I do, but I don’t think you’d print it.”
    The answer got a quick tension-breaking laugh.
    ***
    The man right in front of her listed to the right and Joanna got a good open picture of the stage. She liked the way Mitchell was reacting to the laugh, unassuming but aware. She liked the way he stood there, not quite relaxed, in his sober single-breasted navy blue suit, blue shirt, blue eyes. She liked the way he looked …
    (… only, wait a second, wait a second. How could you know about the color of his eyes …?)
    She stared at the stage again, squinting through the distance, and suddenly she knew about everything there was. Exactly how his hair grew closely on his neck and the funny little mole in the center of his palm. His face seemed to come at her from two ways at once, from outside and in, and the absolute punch of it brought her to her feet.
    ***
    A TV reporter was telling him, “Police think it happened at the plant. If it did, do you believe that the product could survive?”
    Mitchell took a breath. Then he said, “I think I stopped beating my wife on September twenty-second.” He shrugged. “What the hell. That’s the kind of question you’re asking me, isn’t it? Because first of all I don’t think it happened at the plant, which doesn’t mean I’m closing my mind to the subject. We’re working as closely as we can with the police but I think they’ll find nothing. I think within a week they’ll find the packets were jimmied. But again—we’ve been launching our own investigation and we’re helping the police.”
    Mitchell looked around. He drank a little water and knuckled at his jaw. “I don’t know. Kind of looks like a duck, though, doesn’t it. Listen—” He paused, lifting his shoulders, pacing, having no idea what he was doing.
    â€œOkay. If it happened at the factory,” he said, “then, one: We wouldn’t know it with an ordinary test. What we’re talking here is basically a microdot amount. It’s a microdot in twelve out of six million packets. The only way you’d find it, you could open every packet, you could test it specifically for TMF. Scientific equivalent of opening the barn door every two seconds to be certain that the horses hadn’t turned into pigs. It’s one of those things you wouldn’t think of till after.”
    He took another breath. “So now you want to ask me if the product could survive. I don’t know. Maybe the real question is if civilization can survive. I don’t know. The only thing I know is whatever’s going on here is way beyond the question of quality control. Or of any control. The controls aren’t working. Our assumptions aren’t working. The social contract’s been broken with an axe and your lawyer can’t fix it. We seem to be living where the rules don’t apply and the more rules we add, the more they don’t apply.” He shrugged.