"A fool and his money are soon parted," thought Hoag as he reached two thousand feet and leveled his single-engine plane. Then he leaned down into the cockpit, smiled at the camera lens, and tightly grabbed the toggle switch. He was still smiling as the camera lens shot forward like a projectile, driving directly into his heart with enough force to shatter his sternum and explode it throughout his chest cavity.
The coroner never figured this out, though, because there wasn't very much left of Winston Hoag when the pieces of everything were picked up off the red-clay dust of the Georgia field.
The plane's wings were shredded, the fuselage was junk, and Winston Hoag resembled bones held together by blood clots. The only things that emerged unscathed from the wreck were the reinforced insecticide tanks, two bright metal cylinders that looked like unexploded bombs.
Eyewitnesses said that Hoag had been flying at about two thousand feet, very level and steady, when the plane suddenly went into a crazy spin and flew into the ground at top speed, narrowly missing a peanut farmer who had his eyes on a rabbit that he thought ready to attack him.
It was only when the local television station got an anonymous phone tip that the coroner found out it had been a murder and not just an accident.
"If you look for a camera lens," said the caller, "you'll find that it has been shot into the chest of mass murderer Winston Hoag."
"Mass murderer? Who did Hoag murder?" asked the reporter, desperately signaling someone to get the police to trace the call.
"Everything," said the telephone voice. "He murdered the mornings, the chirps of birds and the loping beauty of the endangered timber wolf. He murdered our water and our sky. Most of all, he murdered tomorrow."
"He was just a crop duster," the television man said.
"Exactly," said the caller. "We are the SLA and you're not going to do this to us anymore. Neither you nor the other Winston Hoags of this world."
Why would the Symbronese whatever-it-was want to murder a crop duster? thought the TV reporter.
His question was answered without even being asked.
"We are the Animal Liberation Alliance," said the caller. "It was a moral killing."
"It's moral to kill the father of three kids?" said the reporter losing his dispassionate professionalism and was yelling into the telephone.
"Yes. We crashed a plane and took a pilot without adding further trauma to the environment. The insecticide tanks did not release their genocidal poison."
In the next month, there were three other "moral killings." The Species Liberation Alliance took credit for strangling a cattle rancher with his own barbed wire. They did not, as they carefully pointed out in phone calls to the press, leave the barbed wire around for animals to cut themselves on, but instead imbedded it all in the rancher's throat. The SLA also wrapped the crew of a tuna boat in their own nets and sank them in the Pacific, off Baja, California, in such a way that the net would never break loose to trap any more fish. And they capped an oil well in Georges Bank off the Massachusetts coast with the crushed skulls of the drilling crew, proudly proclaiming that they had used a "natural nonpolluting plug."
Waldron Perriweather III did not attempt to justify the killings. After each one, he appeared on several television programs to explain his position on the deaths: "While I disapprove of violence in any form, we have to look at the root causes of these murders." And then he lectured for a half-hour on the cruelty of man to other living creatures:
"What sort of society are we," he asked, "that would say of cruelty, 'he treated someone like a bug'? Or a worm. We impale living creatures on barbed metal hooks to bait other living creatures that we ensnare and then suffocate to death, and call it sport. I am talking, gentlemen, about fishing."
"We understand that, Mr. Perriweather," said the commentator. "Particularly in your position as America's leading protector of nature. But what about murdering an entire rigging crew?"
"What about the millions of deaths every day that a biased press does not report? After all, what is the Species Liberation Alliance trying to do but bring to the public's attention the atrocities done in their name with government support."
"What atrocities?" asked the interviewer, and on national television, Waldron Perriweather III, heir to the Perriweather fortune, a handsome blond man whose delicate features were the result of Perriweather money always marrying beauty, listed the atrocities done with American money. Mass murder of insects. Poisoning of fish and air. Legalized murder of moose called hunting.
Waldron Perriweather III had little use for those groups that merely protected the obviously lovable, like pets, birds and beautiful animals.
"What about the Inga worm?" he asked. "Around the clock, scientists are working to find a spray that will stop this creature's respirations. It reminds me of the Nazi gas ovens."
"Doesn't the Inga worm destroy crops?" he was asked.
"So does man," said Perriweather. "How does man destroy crops?"
"The same way the Inga worm does. He eats them," Perriweather said. "But when the Inga worm attempts to share the bounty of the earth, we feverishly try to destroy it with chemicals. It is about time we stopped our human-centered biases. We must all share this earth together or we will lose it together."
On that note, he left the studio to polite applause. But some of the newsmen were talking about the need for a new awareness of lesser creatures, and some in the audience nodded their heads approvingly. For one who did not condone the killing of Winston Hoag or the cattle rancher or the drilling crew whose families had to bury the headless bodies in closed coffins, Waldron Perriweather III had done much to promote the SLA's cause.
Perriweather returned to his palatial estate in Beverly, Massachusetts, a giant rock fortress set on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, in an area the Perriweathers had ruled for more than a century and a half. There were no lawns around the Perriweather mansion only high grass where birds and insects could nest. No pesticides ever touched the Perriweather fields.
Any servant caught using a repellent during mosquito season would be fired. Nor did the Perriweathers use netting to deter mosquitoes, preferring instead what they called the "humane approach." This involved having servants staying up all night fanning the Perriweathers so that the gentle breezes would not let a mosquito land on Perriweather flesh. Of course the servants, in truest Perriweather tradition, worked during the day as well. Just because the Perriweather family showed morality toward insects did not mean that they were financially foolish. There were, after all, limits to one's sense of decency.
At the entrance of the estate, Perriweather's Rolls-Royce halted. The chauffeur bent over and Waldron climbed onto his back to be carried by foot to the great stone mansion. Waldron did not like driving on the estate because he did not believe in spewing oil exhaust into the air of his "fellow residents," namely the flies, worms and mosquitoes.
This day, he was especially anxious to reach the main building, so he kicked his heels into the chauffeur's flanks to get him to run faster. He didn't understand what was wrong with the chauffeur when the elderly man broke out into a terrible sweat, and at the steps, he bucked and convulsed, almost knocking Perriweather to the ground.
Waldron stepped over the stricken man, commenting to the butler that he wondered where the driver had been trained. Then Waldron rushed into a rear room of the mansion, sealed by an iron door, and with netting that closed on both the inside and outside.
Air ducts fed the room. They were also sealed by fine mesh netting. The temperature was a perfect 85 degrees: Ripe fruit and spoiling meat made the air so heavy with decay that Waldron felt he could swim in it.