As he waited for the sorter to nominate any likely couples it might have, Stirling absent-mindedly lifted a bundle of the rejected cards and riffled through them. The undistinguished names flickered under his thumb, each name representing an undistinguished life, or death. Feeling himself sink further into depression, Stirling squared the cards up and dropped them back in the tray. As he did so, one of the names registered, belatedly, on the part of his mind that was always alert for such things. John Considine.
My mother is called Considine now, he thought mechanically. And my half-brother is called John—but it couldn’t be. Considine is a common enough name; besides, somebody would have been in touch with me. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the cards, and went through them again.
The card was four days old, and it contained very little information. John Considine, aged 31, unemployed mathematician, reported missing by family, no criminal record, no reason to suspect foul play. Stirling skipped the vague description and read the address: Fam-apt 126-46, Flat-block 353, Res-area 93N-54W.
When Johnny and he were boys, they had joked about that string of numerals and butchered words. (It isn’t much, but we call it home. I always think a good address is so important, don’t you?) Now they served to confirm that the missing person was a flesh-and-blood reality, not just a few magnetic ink marks on a comp-card, but the only human being Stirling had ever really known.
He worked his way back to his desk, lifted a phone, and rang his mother’s number. The fluffy ringing tone dragged on for a couple of minutes before he accepted there was going to be no reply. Stirling set the phone down and began struggling through the ant-heap activity of the editorial office to reach the door. McLeod looked up in surprise. “Victor?” “Can’t stop. I’m going out.”
“I want to talk to you, Victor.” McLeod’s voice had developed a metallic edge.
“Send me a note. I’ll read it when I get back.” Stirling went out through the doorway and thumbed the elevator button, wondering if he had pushed McLeod too far. It was more than a year since a reporter had been sacked from the Record, and McLeod never allowed the big axe to get too rusty.
When the elevator had carried him up to the sixth level, Stirling went out onto the street and signaled for a cab. It was a clean, jewel-bright morning in May and—as there was only one street level above the sixth—sunlight was flooding freely over the shuttling traffic. It gave him a feeling of airy warmth.
A cab obligingly slowed down, but at that moment three men in the immaculate white uniforms of Food Technologists emerged from another entrance. The cab speeded up again to pass Stirling and picked up the three Techs.
“Hold it,” Stirling shouted angrily. “That’s my cab.”
He ran a few paces towards the waiting automobile, but the men got in and were whisked away. One of therri was grinning as he glanced back. Halting his ungainly run, Stirling squandered most of the day’s ration of swear serum, although he knew the cab driver had only been looking out for his own interest. The Food Techs were flush with money and could be big tippers; they were also flush with power and a complaint from one of them, no matter how groundless, would be enough to deprive a hack of Ms license. About once a month Stirling gave up some of his spare time to write feature articles about this sort of occurrence but, not surprisingly, the Record never printed them. The East Coast Government kept a pretty tight hold over what appeared in the newspapers1—and the Food Technologists kept a pretty tight hold over the Government.
A few minutes later another cab appeared and Stirling got in. When he had given the driver his mother’s address, he settled down in the back seat and stared morosely through the bubble’s sides at the unfolding vistas of multi-layered cityscape. The cab was skimming along two thousand feet above what had once been the smallish manufacturing center of Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimack River. Now the original city was buried in the massive East Coast conurbation, which was effectively a single building stretching from above Boston right down to Miami, and which included New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore in its basement layer.
Roughly one-third of the population of the United States had lived there since the Compression.
Stirling tried to visualize the region as it had been in the bright, brave past when the whole country had been available for living space, but his mind balked at the task. In 1992. almost a century ago, World War III had come and gone, and none of the theoreticians had been able to predict the form it would take. It had always been assumed that the Big War would annihilate most of the population and turn the major countries into vast uninhabited areas similar to what they had been in pre-history. That had been the first misconception. Humanity had survived practically unscathed—the only real casualty had been the land itself.
The second mistake had been in the assumption that—if war came—America, Russia and China would fight it out among themselves in one or another of the few simple permutations possible. In the real event, America, Russia, and China had found themselves on the same side; and they never did find out for certain who the opposition was. The enemy had assembled his forces, struck, and retired to safety before any of the Big Three discovered the war had started.
The first indications had come when the soil began to die.
Soil sterility occurred in great swathes from coast to coast and removed traditional agriculture from the tally of meaningful human activities in a matter of months. In the beginning, China had seemed a possible culprit because she was suffering slightly less than Russia and the States; but it was quickly established that this was a lucky accident due solely to the fact that her airline services were underdeveloped in comparison to those of the other two powers concerned—for the unknown enemy had used each country’s civil aircraft as weapons carriers.
The annihilation of the soil had been accomplished by widespread dissemination of one of the bipyridylium herbicides, paraquat dichloride, modified to protect its characteristic flat molecules from becoming inactivated through interaction with clay minerals. The beauty of the technique—or the ugliness, depending on how one looked at it —was that the modification enabled the chemical entity to perpetuate itself, even in the harshly inimical environment of jet fuel. At some time in the early part of 1992, the herbicide had been introduced into major fuel depots; and the big jets had obligingly dusted whole continents with it as their exhaust trails drifted downwards in gigantic, invisible, rolling clouds of death.
Only massive technological resources had prevented the extinction of the multitudes the soil supported. When it had become apparent that the work of reclaiming the land would take centuries, the big powers turned to the sea for their food. Whole populations had been transferred to the coastal regions, partly so that they could be more efficiently suckled by the mother of all life, mainly because human existence had become too difficult to maintain under the seething ocher blankets of continent-wide dust bowls.
This was the world in which Victor Stirling had grown up. He had never known any other. But that did not prevent him from occasionally feeling nostalgia for a way of life he was scarcely able to comprehend.
“Oh, it’s you. What do you want?”
Mrs. Mary Considine glanced up briefly, saw her older son for the first time in two years, and returned her eyes, unimpressed, to a bouquet of artificial ferns she was build- , ing from a kit. She was a big woman, heavy-boned, with red forearms and slightly thinning brown hair. Her fifty-five years, the last thirty-five of them in Fam-apt 126-46, had