Drop by Drop

7

Straddling a bend of the Sycamore River, the eponymous town appeared peaceful and superficially law abiding. Most of it was solidly middle class. Apart from RobBenn there was little industry; factories were reserved for Benning, the nearest large town. Sycamore River was almost but not quite self-sufficient. Its inhabitants mostly worked in offices, retail businesses and the service industry, providing a comfortable lifestyle for their families.

South of the river were busy shopping centers and leafy neighborhoods populated by those who could employ the less privileged to mow their lawns and clean their houses.

North of the river were discount shops whose customers mowed lawns and cleaned houses for a living, or struggled to stretch their welfare checks. There were also a few immigrant families that did not yet speak good English.

To the west lay Daggett’s Woods, originally a forest containing over nine hundred acres of native hardwood. A sharp-eyed settler named Elias Daggett had laid claim to the land when the settlement on the riverbank was only a huddle of shacks. Elias did some timbering, made some money. Mostly he liked to camp out among his trees. Eventually his grandson, Ephraim, left the entire property to the expanding town of Sycamore River, to be held in perpetuity as a nature reserve.

To the environmentalists Daggett’s Woods was a slice of paradise. Others saw it as a wasted asset that should be profitably exploited. For a few, Daggett’s Woods was a temple.

Robert Bennett had spent a small fortune on lawyers’ fees and bribes to politicians in order to carve out ten acres in the forest. There he had built a research and development center. Inspired by the plans for the Mars settlement, the architect had created a futuristic complex of cement and glass.

Except for RobBenn and the private access road that connected it to the main highway, the forest remained much as Ephraim had left it, its virginity slightly tainted by discarded beer cans, used condoms and festering heaps of rubbish. A slab of granite at the foot of the access road was carved with only two words: RobBenn Enterprises.

A local wag had nicknamed it the Tombstone.

Jack Reece was collecting information about the Change. Not because of Robert Bennett; Jack had decided he wanted nothing more to do with the man. But the puzzle was fascinating. Instinct warned him the Change might be the advance guard of an attack. For as long as he could remember there had been attacks on the American way of life: have-nots rebelling against the haves, political parties seeking to discredit their opponents, foreign powers jealous of America’s position in the world.

“So far the Change doesn’t seem to benefit any particular group,” Jack commented as he sat with Bea watching the wallscreen. The latest world news program was almost over. Another would begin after a long interval of commercials.

The screen started to flicker around the edges. “Jack?” Bea said warningly. “Can you…?”

“Sure, wait a minute.” He fiddled with the controls until the picture steadied, though it seemed to have lost its third dimension.

The network commentator was reporting, “From Boston to Beijing to Botswanaland, storage containers are disgorging their contents as they collapse.”

Bea said, “Do you suppose any storage containers are dissolving in the Pentagon?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, but we’ll never hear about it.”

“You don’t have much confidence in the media, Jack.”

“The same people who use war for entertainment value? We get ‘real time’ news from the wallscreen and we’re supposed to accept it without question. Listen, Aunt Bea; I’ve been over there, I know what’s going on. People used to believe what they read in the papers because journalists took time to investigate before they wrote. Now any sort of lie can turn up in print and we’ve lost the ability to discriminate.”

“Frank Auerbach still publishes The Sycamore Seed, and I don’t think he tells lies.”

“That’s a labor of love; how much longer can he keep it up?”

She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “How long can we keep up anything?”

The wallscreen hissed. Jack began fiddling with the controls again.

Shay Mulligan told Paige, “I went to our supplier to restock pet supplies and found what looked like a nest of snakes in a drawer. All the collars and leashes had stuck together and turned slimy. They weren’t real leather, but the bastard’s been charging me for real leather. You can bet I’m changing suppliers!”

“The miracle material of the twentieth century is getting downright dangerous in the twenty-first,” Jack Reece said to Gerry Delmonico via AllCom. “Have you heard the latest news?”

“Bennett won’t allow a wallscreen in the lab, not even a two-dimension without interaction. Says it’s too distracting and he’s probably right. Then when I get home Gloria and I share the chores, and so forth. You know. Tell me what’s happened now.”

“A ballerina with the touring company of the Bolshoi broke her ankle during a performance of Swan Lake. The hardened toe of her ballet slipper contained a small amount of plastic sandwiched with rubber to cushion the foot, and the plastic dissolved while the dancer was en pointe.”

“Ouch.”

“I’ll say. But listen to this one. Have you ever been to Bruges, in Belgium?”

“’Fraid not.”

“You should, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. For five hundred years a brewery in the heart of the city has produced a famous barley beer that accounts for a big chunk of the nation’s economy. To spare the ancient cobbled streets from thousands of delivery trucks, years ago a network of plastic pipes was run underneath them to carry the beer from the brewery to the distributors. Now those pipes are dissolving. The subsoil of Bruges is being saturated with beer!” Jack roared with laughter.

Gerry didn’t laugh. “If the Change is extending to larger items…”

“Stories like this are popping up all over the place,” said Jack. “You should see some of the ones I’ve found.”

“If the Change is extending to larger items,” Gerry continued doggedly, “it’s really bad news. No one knows how much plastic is used in everyday life. Since this thing is advancing it might be moving from one set of polymers to another, or one molecular structure to another. Sort of like a disease. I hope they can stop it.”

“‘They’? Haven’t you noticed we always expect someone else to do the heavy lifting?”

Bit by bit, drop by drop, decay was setting in.

Lines began to form outside of banks. Nervous depositors wanting to withdraw their money were requesting old-fashioned paper bills. It was a new sort of run on the banks.

Bea Fontaine was embarrassed by the excuses she had to offer old friends.

“I’m sorry,” she told Edgar Tilbury when he appeared at her window, “but for the time being we’re limiting the size of cash withdrawals.”

A lean, grizzled man in a plaid lumberjack shirt and faded denims, Tilbury might have been sixty, he might have been eighty. He was as sharp-featured as a fox and his eyes were very bright. “You know where I live?” he asked in a voice rusty with disuse.

“Of course I do. Out in the country.”

“That’s right, way out. No supermarkets. If I buy eggs or a couple of cabbages from my neighbors I have to pay them in cash, not cards, which is why four times a year I withdraw cash from your bank. I’ve always done it that way.”

“And I’ve always said you shouldn’t keep that much cash at home.”

“It couldn’t be safer in Fort Knox,” he assured her.

Lila Ragland kept a wealth of information in the most sophisticated AllCom on the market, a top-of-the-line multitasking international communicator with an immense data-storage system guaranteed to thwart hackers. It was set in a handsome case made to resemble platinum, and included a retinal identifier concealed in the hinge. The device gave her access to enough skeletons-in-closets to bankrupt billionaires and bring down foreign governments.

Many people put their AllComs beside their beds at night; she put hers under her pillow.

The furnished apartment she was renting did not contain anything else that might tempt a burglar. She did not even own a gun.

She abhorred guns.

Waking one morning from a restless sleep, Lila slipped her hand under the pillow.

And felt something sticky.

Robert Bennett stormed into the editorial office of The Sycamore Seed. “What the hell’s going on, Frank? Something’s gone wrong with my personal AllCom and there are things out at RobBenn that’ll be ruined if the Change isn’t stopped. My employees are freaking out.”

“What things?” Frank Auerbach inquired.

Oh, no you don’t, thought Bennett. My business is strictly my business. “The equipment it takes to run this factory,” he said blandly. “Like polycarbonate safety goggles for the assembly line.”

Auerbach gave a contemptuous snort. “Cyber attacks and chemical warfare and proxy wars around the globe and you’re worrying about goggles? Get real, Rob; this is the world we live in.”

“We who?”

“Us. The good guys.”

“This ‘good guy’ isn’t just talking about goggles, and I damned sure don’t want to see any mention of my problems in your chickenshit newspaper! Just let me know as soon as you hear about a solution to the Change. Some of your money’s invested in this place too, you know.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Would I threaten you? Aren’t I the guy who advised you to diversify because the Seed wasn’t making enough in advertising revenue to keep food on the table?”

Robert Bennett stayed in his office late that night. Eschewing the company cafeteria, where he would have been asked questions he couldn’t answer, he deliberately chose the highest-cholesterol items in the vending machines for supper at his desk. Potato chips, corn chips, salted peanuts and a sickeningly sweet candy bar in a neon blue wrapper that urged, “Try Me! I’m Good for You!” An obvious lie, he thought. No truth in advertising. Who should know that better than me?

At last he fell asleep on the seven-foot-long couch in the reception area of the executive suite. Upholstered in the softest Italian glove leather, the couch had been purchased in anticipation of interviewing female personnel but was rarely used for its intended purpose. In retrospect, Rob decided, the ploy had been too obvious. He had exhausted his limited supply of subtlety years ago, wooing Nell.

He awoke with a start shortly before dawn. Like a ghost, he wandered through the deserted offices surrounding the executive suite. Not a living soul in any of them. No one had looked into his office to wish him good night either—though he had never encouraged that sort of camaraderie from his employees. He recalled the time Nell had visited the complex with him shortly before it opened. He was proud of the place after the years of hard work, and eager to show his achievement to his wife. All she had said was, “It’s hard to take it in, Rob. A manufacturing complex buried in the woods like this, far away from people… it seems so impersonal.”

He had never invited her back. Except for the grand opening, of course, when the lavishly decorated lobby was filled with loud music and important guests, and pretty girls were circulating with trays of wine and canapés. He had wanted to show off his lovely wife, so he steered her by her elbow around and around the room, introducing her to the men and enjoying the expressions on the faces of their female companions; the false smiles of wariness and jealousy.

Nell had left early that night, summoning a taxicab from town. They had quarreled about it later. One of those unresolved arguments that would come to punctuate their marriage.

The complex was worse than impersonal now; it was eerie. While Bennett was asleep the dissolution had spread. He went from one area to another, following its trail. In the business office the computer screens waiting on their workstations were supposed to transmit the slogan of RobBenn in red letters: We Package the Future! But the screens were blank.

He punched an on button.

Nothing happened.

He went from one machine to the next, punching buttons, holding them down, breaking into a nervous sweat.

Nothing happened.

An old joke ran through his head: If a bus station is where a bus stops and a train station is where a train stops, what happens at a workstation?

“Shit on a stick!” he said loudly. Into the silence.

He tried to restore normalcy by returning to his private office for a quick shower and shave. The adjoining bathroom contained a precise arrangement of mirrors that allowed him to see himself from every angle, to check on how far the creeping baldness on the crown of his head had spread. His daughter, Jess, had begun calling him Baldy. It didn’t feel like a joke to him.

On the top shelf of a bathroom cabinet was a carefully drawn grid chart depicting his fight against alopecia. When it reached a predetermined point he would start having hair transplants. This morning he wasn’t interested in his baldness problem. The haggard face in the mirror told him he had something worse to worry about.

Only slightly refreshed after his shower, Bennett called home. To his surprise his AllCom hissed when he thumbed the keys, but the call went through.

Nell’s personal AllCom was inactive.

He switched to the house number. No answer.

Shit and fuck. Doubled.

As Rob drove out the main gate of RobBenn, he paused to speak with the night watchman in the security hut. At least there was one person he could talk to. “Everything all right out here, Jimmy?”

“Same as allus,” the gray-haired man replied, “’cept for my coffee cup. I’m headin’ home to the missus as soon as that new fella arrives for the morning shift.” Noticing the expression on his employer’s face, he added, “’S everything all right with you, boss?”

“What happened to your coffee cup?”

Jimmy held both hands palms up in a gesture of helplessness. “Just went whoosh! It’s the cup on top of my thermos, y’know? I allus drink my coffee out of it. When I poured out the last bit this morning the cup went whoosh. Nasty mess all over my shoes. Go figure.” He gestured toward his feet.

Looking down, Bennett saw that there was indeed a nasty mess on the other man’s shoes. A revolting mix of viscous red jelly and coffee with cream.

Robert Bennett drove home well over the speed limit. The summer sunrise flooded the valley with light, but when he reached the main road there was scarcely any traffic. He did not even see a delivery truck, though within another hour the approaches to Sycamore River would be suffering from clogged arteries.

The Bennetts’ mock-Normandy château was located in a gated enclave west of town, close enough to be convenient to the city but within easy reach of Daggett’s Woods and RobBenn. Bennett parked his silver-blue Mercedes on the circular brick drive in front of the house and strode briskly to the double front doors with his AllCom in his hand.

Something was wrong with the chandelier in the entry hall. The flambeau bulbs were tilted sideways in the plastic cups that were supposed to simulate Waterford crystal. The decorator had assured Nell that “no one can tell the difference.” Already one bulb had fallen out and smashed on the black-and-white–tiled floor that was supposed to be indistinguishable from marble.

A similar problem affected the light fixtures in the great hall, replicas of medieval torches arranged in clusters. A peculiar smear on the inner frames of the triple-glazed windows across the front of the room indicated the sealant was… was what? Dissolving?

“Nell?” Bennett shouted. “Cookie! We’ve got some problems down here!”

No answer.

Where was everybody?

It was far too early for his wife to go into town to that office of hers. Jessamyn and Colin were on summer holiday and undoubtedly still asleep, which explained why there was no sound from them. Bennett strode to the kitchen. Although Nell was an early riser there were no breakfast dishes set out on the polished granite countertop. No coffee was perking in the latest espresso maker.

Nothing was perking anywhere.

When Bennett opened the walk-in refrigerator the light was out. The recessed lights under the kitchen cabinets also failed to come on. He repeatedly thumbed his AllCom to restore electricity to the system, but nothing happened.

Unbelievable.

In the bedroom wing the master bedroom looked normal; their double-king bed was made up and the doors of the two walk-in closets were closed. When he opened Nell’s and peered in the light didn’t come on, but he could see that her clothes were hanging neatly on their hangers. But the beds in the kids’ rooms were unmade. In their twin bathrooms the basins and bathtubs were dry to the touch. Unused towels hung on their rails with the monogram facing outward, as he demanded they must do.

The people who should have been in the house were nowhere to be found. Not even the dogs were there. The Irish setters were not shedding hair all over the carpets, nor was the Rottweiler barking in his chain-link pen outside.

The mock-Normandy château was as unnaturally silent as the complex in the woods.

He savagely thumbed his AllCom, trying to force a response from his wife wherever she was. No reply.

He hurried to the attached three-car garage to see if her car was still there. It was. He yanked open the door—she never thought to lock it in their own garage—and briefly inhaled the scent of Chanel that wafted out from the little two-seater sports car.

Bennett felt his anger spike.

How typical of Nell to buy a car that was too small to accommodate a man’s legs! But where is she? And where are the dogs, for God’s sake?

What the hell is going on? Who the hell is in charge?