quacks like a duck, it cooks, flies and dies like a duck, but it isnât a duck because its molecules are different. So much for that. If it doesnât make sense to you, complain to your congressman.
âNow. What I know. Itâs 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, kidâno, we donât make it.âThe lady in the hat.â
âThank 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?â
Mitchell said nothing; then he said, âI do, but I donât think youâd print it.â
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 â¦
(⦠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, âPolice think it happened at the plant. If it did, do you believe that the product could survive?â
Mitchell took a breath. Then he said, âI think I stopped beating my wife on September twenty-second.â He shrugged. âWhat the hell. Thatâs the kind of question youâre asking me, isnât it? Because first of all I donât think it happened at the plant, which doesnât mean Iâm closing my mind to the subject. Weâre working as closely as we can with the police but I think theyâll find nothing. I think within a week theyâll find the packets were jimmied. But againâweâve been launching our own investigation and weâre helping the police.â
Mitchell looked around. He drank a little water and knuckled at his jaw. âI donât know. Kind of looks like a duck, though, doesnât it. Listenââ He paused, lifting his shoulders, pacing, having no idea what he was doing.
âOkay. If it happened at the factory,â he said, âthen, one: We wouldnât know it with an ordinary test. What weâre talking here is basically a microdot amount. Itâs a microdot in twelve out of six million packets. The only way youâd 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 hadnât turned into pigs. Itâs one of those things you wouldnât think of till after.â
He took another breath. âSo now you want to ask me if the product could survive. I donât know. Maybe the real question is if civilization can survive. I donât know. The only thing I know is whateverâs going on here is way beyond the question of quality control. Or of any control. The controls arenât working. Our assumptions arenât working. The social contractâs been broken with an axe and your lawyer canât fix it. We seem to be living where the rules donât apply and the more rules we add, the more they donât apply.â He shrugged.
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