"I am not asking you not to think. What direction?"
"Well, let's look at what we have. We have controlled access to unfiltered sun, the power rays, so to speak. They are ours. And they are ours safely. You know that in any experiment like this there was a danger we could rip the ozone shield and turn the earth into a cinder. Then none of our ideas would have been any good." Bolt looked everyone in the face and paused. There was no applause. "So," said Bolt. "We now move into the applications phase with a fantastic advantage."
"Yes?" said the chairman of the board. "What are we going to do with this thing to get our fifty million dollars back and make money? Who are we going to sell this to? What are we going to use it for? I have read your secret reports, and so far all we can do is ruin lawns and kill animals painfully. You think there is a market for that?"
"Of course not. Those were just experiments to define what we have."
"We know what we have. What are we going to use it for?"
The chairman of the board had hit the last little bug. "I don't want to rush this. I want Marketing to come up with a good range and a direction I can stand behind," said Bolt.
"Bolt, that fifty million dollars costs us one hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars a week in interest. Please don't take your time in coming up with an application we can sell."
"Right," said Reemer Bolt. And he got out of that boardroom as quickly as he could because he didn't want anyone asking him about ideas for commercial use.
The problem with something that cost fifty million dollars to develop was that you couldn't use it for something small. You had to have something big. Big. Big.
That was what Reemer Bolt was yelling at his staff the following morning.
"Big industry. Big ideas. Big. Big."
"What about as a weapon? It would make a great weapon. And fifty million dollars would be pennies for something that might end all life on earth if used improperly. "
"Not fast enough. The money's there, but the government takes forever. A weapon is the last resort. There has got to be something we can do with this thing. Something big: Big industry. It's got to revolutionize something."
Then a lower-level employee had a magnificent idea. It didn't have to do with animals. And it didn't have to do with lawns. But it did have to do with a baking effect.
None of them knew as they were congratulating themselves that even to a lower-level Russian general, the experiment they were planning could only be a prelude to ground action all across the European front.
Even if Bolt had known, he might not have dwelt on that. Here was an idea that would not only get CC of M out of the hole, but possibly revolutionize a major industry. And even better yet, a lower-level employee had thought it up. He would have no troubie taking full credit for it.
"Are you sure this is the right jungle?" said Remo.
"Sure," said Kathy. She was still suffering from jet lag and the atrocious landing at Chitibango airport in San Gauta. The runway was built for smuggling out cocaine and bringing in tourists who liked to discover new vacation spots unspoiled by other tourists. San Gauta was always being discovered for the first time. It was the sort of place that photographed magnificently.
What did not appear in the photographs were the bugs and the room service. In all Gauta there were only four people who could tell time. And they were all in the Cabinet. The rest of the people thought that the only time one had to respect in this little tropical paradise was bedtime and dinnertime. Bedtime was determined by the sun and dinnertime by one's stomach.
Only crazy foreigners and the Maximum Leader for Life had to tell time. The Maximum Leader needed the time device to know when to meet airplanes, start parades, and most of all to declare when time was running out.
In the 1950's Generalissimo Francisco Eckman-Ramirez declared time was running out against atheistic communism. During the sixties it was imperialism. During the seventies it became, on alternate days of the week, either Cuba or America. Now, the new time running out was for population control.
The Generalissimo was not exactly sure how it worked, but somehow the Western World, especially America, was to blame for the incredible promiscuity of the San Gauta maiden and the magnificent sex drive of every San Gauta male. Ordinarily bad sanitation disease, and the starvation that had afflicted this area for aeons kept an almost mathematical balance of people.
But because of all the warnings that time was running out, Western agencies began shipping food, cleaning up sewers, and teaching new methods of living longer. They sent down doctors and nurses. There was medicine. The shame of so few babies living to maturity had been conquered. Which led to more grown-ups. Which led to more grown-ups making more babies. The whole place was like a giant guppy tank run amok. And now time was truly running out on San Gauta for Generalissimo Eckman-Ramirez. With all the people crowded together, pollution was getting worse. Starvation was getting worse and then came the worst assault of all. It was a combination of liberal Protestants, Jewish intellectuals, and an order of nuns. Between them they came up with a massive social program to eradicate all evils.
They presented it in such a way that anyone who allowed the current state to persist appeared to be some form of devil. Therefore, anyone fighting that person was on the side of good. Willing to fight the Generalissimo were the usual hill bandits who had specialized for generations, even before the arrival of the Spaniards, in pillage, rape, and the murder of innocents: women, children, unarmed farmers in the field.
But now they put a little star on a red flag, called the pillage and rape "guerrilla warfare," and announced their goal as liberation. What they wanted to liberate was what they had always wanted to liberate: everything the townsfolk couldn't protect.
They were immediately armed by the Cubans, which left the Generalissimo reaching out for the Americans to help him counter their new and better weapons. Whereas before, a village or two might suffer an attack by the hill bandits once a year, now the attacks came weekly. Whereas before, the national army might respond once or twice a year by shooting some cannon into the hillsides, now there were daily fusillades.
The death count became enormous, especially as the nuns returned with stories of atrocities to America, where they called upon their countrymen to donate money to fight barbarism. This was not altogether a lie. The Generalissimo was indeed barbaric. But so were the liberating forces whom the nuns in their innocence now declared as saviors. The one thing the nuns never seemed to entertain was the possibility that they themselves were indeed innocents and didn't know what was going on. But they were always good for a story of suffering.
There seemed to be no end to the blood running daily through the streets of Chitibango, because not quite enough people were killed to balance out the new advances in medicine and agriculture. This was a problem typical of a Central American country.
And thus did San Gauta receive journalists who detailed the atrocities of the Generalissimo. And thus did Kathy O'Donnell, like anyone else who followed the news, hear of Eckman-Ramirez the butcher, the man whose estates were guarded by fire and steel and barbarous henchmen.
It was this time that came first to Kathy's mind when this magnificent specimen with the thick wrists entered her life. She wanted to see the butcher of Chitibango pulped.
She could have chosen someone else. This wonderful man she was with could destroy anyone. But she wanted someone far away from Boston and the fluorocarbon generator. She wanted someone who would be a challenge for her brutal stranger. The Russians apparently weren't. And so, in that one instant, she fondly chose the butcher of South America. She thought of the nice fight his notorious guards would put up. If this man called Remo lost, she could always buy her way out, but if he won, well, she would be there for the magnificent thrill of it.