"Why do you think some people don't understand it, Mrs. Volmer?"
"Their eyes have been darkened by Satan, Dave."
"One thing about his story impresses me. The collections he talks about-all kinds of plants and animals."
"Yes? Why?"
"Well, it makes sense. If you ask yourself what the aliens came here for-"
"To rescue us before the Earth is destroyed."
"Well, that too, maybe, but what were they doing out there in the first place? They didn't know we even existed until they came. In other words, what could they find on other planets that would be worth the cost of the trip? Now Ed isn't a scientist; he's not even an educated man. If he had made this story up, he probably would have thought of something simpler. Metal ores or something like that, that wouldn't make any sense at all. The only thing that does make sense is biologicals. There are so many possible organic compounds that it would take you forever to synthesize every one and find out if there was any use for it. So you go to planets and take samples of things that are already being used. We've been doing the same thing for thousands of years on our own planet. Any working organic chemical might have hundreds of other uses. You might find something in cats' saliva that would cure a disease we never heard of. Or you could splice in genes from an oak tree to modify some other organism. That's the real gold in interstellar exploration-everything else is nonsense."
"The idea is that we clear out South America, and Central America and the Caribbean, then we go over to southern Africa and clear that out up to here, leaving just the countries along the northern coast-"
"Why stop there?"
"Because it makes more sense to get them from the Mediterranean side when we do western Europe and the Middle East. Okay, and then we get southwestern and eastern Europe and the Slavos, then India and so on, and then North America starting with Mexico, then northwestern Europe, then Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, then the Pacific islands, then the Philippines, Japan and Korea, and China last."
"Haven't you got North America and Western Europe out of order?"
"Right, and they say that's because most of the industrial plant and technical stuff is there, and most of the food stockpiles too, but I think there's something else going on. There was some heavy lobbying by the multinationals."
"What for, do you think?"
"I don't know, unless they think something's going to happen to the Cube Project."
In October, 2005, Stone got back from a three-week trip; he had been to London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vatican City, Warsaw and Moscow. He looked tired, and he was drinking more than usual. He hadn't been sleeping well, Rong said.
"He's not looking at all well," said Mrs. Rooney. They were having tea in the penthouse living room.
"He's looking like puke. He don't sleep enough, and sometime he wakes up yelling."
"Isn't he taking his pills?"
"Yeah, but they don't do him no good. All the travel, you know, that's bad enough all by itself. It's daytime when you think it's dark out, and then you get home and you have to tum around again. So I tell him, man, after one of them trips, take a week to relax before you take another one, but he says no, he's got to keep moving. He got a big map in the plane with markers on it all the places he's been, but there's a hundred he ain't, and he frets about it. The food don't agree with him neither. He's got to go to these breakfasts, these lunches, these banquets, and they're not going to feed him nothing healthy, they're going to spread their-selves because he's important, right, and he's got to eat it because he's a guest. ”
"What can we do?"
"We had them put a gym in the plane, at least he can get a little exercise. That helps some, but the only thing going to make him better is a month off, and he won't take it."
"Can't you let up a little?" Lavalle asked that evening. "I mean, the Cube Project is under way, what more do you want?"
"No, because some of these places, the leadership has changed, and the rest of them, I have to keep going back because I think the stuff in the ring is starting to wear off.
Did you see where Chelmsford denounced me as a charlatan?"
"The ex-prime minister? No."
"Well, he's ex, and they say he's senile anyway, so it's not too bad. But I shook hands with him just a little over three years ago, and that means if I don't keep shaking hands with the same people, there might be a bunch of them turning against me. I can't take the chance."
Wellafield cleared his throat. "It's going to happen anyway, isn't it, Ed? You can't keep up with them all."
"I can try."
Stone was in Europe all through the spring and summer, working with the Oversight Committee of the International Human Rescue Corporation, and consulting with the Farbenwerke engineers who were designing transport mechanisms for the Cube. A pilot project was going up on the floodplain of the Elbe near Hamburg.
The media campaign was in full swing. A virtual sculpture fifty feet tall had been put up in UN Plaza, where Lavalle passed it every day on her way to work: it consisted of a twenty-two-foot white cube and a blue cloud-speckled globe suspended and slowly rotating above it.
Sylvia showed her a present she had just bought for a new nephew: a jack-in-the-box that popped up a globe instead of a clown. For older children there was a toy cube which, when opened, disgorged a vast number of compressible dolls.
Lavalle's boss got rid of all the office furniture and replaced it with cubical desks, cocktail tables, armchairs, end tables. She noticed that most of the stuff she and Sylvia brought home from the supermarket or ordered on the net was in cubical packages.
Every sitcom involved the new planet in some way. The nonfiction best-seller that year was New World Revealed, by Moamaddar Parthava, an Iranian mystic who claimed to have received messages from outer space describing the new planet in great detail. Sylvia, who read the book, said that the new world was called Twonola, and that it was partly covered with trees you could eat and have sex with. There was also a friendly race of stunted humanoids who spoke Finnish and enjoyed working hard for other people.
The holo was called Flash Gordon on the New World. It started off like the old flatfilm, with the planet Mongo approaching the Earth and about to destroy it. In a violent storm, Dr. Zarkov, Flash Gordon, and Dale Arden took off in Zarkov's experimental spaceship. The strange planet loomed nearer. They landed, and then it was all different. They were in a verdant valley dotted with ranch houses and a few high-rise buildings. Zeppelins and gaily colored little airplanes soared overhead. A welcoming committee of tall, smiling people came toward them.
Then they were at a beach where tanned athletic people were sitting under striped umbrellas on a terrace overlooking a calm baby-blue ocean. Down on the beach, fishermen in striped shirts were hauling in an enormous fish, something like a twenty-foot grouper; it was gasping and waving its fins. On the terrace, the people picked up bits of cooked fish on their forks, tucked them into their pink mouths, and smiled.
"Not very exciting," Lavalle said.
"No, because it's paradise. You can't have bad things happen in paradise."
"I'm not sure I want to go there."
The Premier of China, beaming for the cameras, dug a symbolic spadeful of dirt and deposited it in a basket. Following him in order, the other visiting dignitaries did the same. There were speeches; champagne and Chinese wine were drunk, many photographs taken. Then the bulldozers moved in.
The dusty plain northwest of Shanghai had been spread with flower petals, on which the eight hundred twenty-six converging rail tracks gleamed like the stems of a metal bouquet.