Three very crowded hours went past. They involved quite a lot of phone calls, telexes, and faxes. Twenty-seven people were got out of bed in quick succession and they got another fifty-three out of bed, because if there is one thing a man wants to know when he’s woken up in a panic at 4:00 A.M., it’s that he’s not alone.
Anyway, you need all sorts of permissions before they let you unscrew the lid of a nuclear reactor and look inside.
They got them. They unscrewed it. They had a look inside.
Horace Gander said, “There’s got to be a sensible reason for this. Five hundred tons of uranium don’t just get up and walk away.”
A meter in his hand should have been screaming. Instead, it let out the occasional halfhearted tick.
Where the reactor should have been was an empty space. You could have had quite a nice game of squash in it.
Right at the bottom, all alone in the center of the bright cold floor, was a lemon drop.
Outside in the cavernous turbine hall the machines roared on.
And, a hundred miles away, Adam Young turned over in his sleep.
Friday
RAVEN SABLE, slim and bearded and dressed all in black, sat in the back of his slimline black limousine, talking on his slimline black telephone to his West Coast base.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
“Looking good, chief,” said his marketing head. “I’m doing breakfast with the buyers from all the leading supermarket chains tomorrow. No problem. We’ll have MEALS™ in all the stores this time next month.”
“Good work, Nick.”
“No problem. No problem. It’s knowing you’re behind us, Rave. You give great leadership, guy. Works for me every time.”
“Thank you,” said Sable, and he broke the connection.
He was particularly proud of MEALS™.
The Newtrition corporation had started small, eleven years ago. A small team of food scientists, a huge team of marketing and public relations personnel, and a neat logo.
Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW™. CHOW™ contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn’t matter how much you ate, you lost weight.24
Fat people had bought it. Thin people who didn’t want to get fat had bought it. CHOW™ was the ultimate diet food—carefully spun, woven, textured, and pounded to imitate anything, from potatoes to venison, although the chicken sold best.
Sable sat back and watched the money roll in. He watched CHOW™ gradually fill the ecological niche that used to be filled by the old, untrademarked food.
He followed CHOW™ with SNACKS™—junk food made from real junk.
MEALS™ was Sable’s latest brainwave.
MEALS™ was CHOW™ with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS™ you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.
The paradox delighted Sable.
MEALS™ were currently being tested all over America. Pizza MEALS, Fish MEALS, Szechuan MEALS, macrobiotic rice MEALS. Even Hamburger MEALS.
Sable’s limousine was parked in the lot of a Des Moines, Iowa, Burger Lord—a fast food franchise wholly owned by his organization. It was here they’d been piloting Hamburger MEALS for the last six months. He wanted to see what kind of results they’d been getting.
He leaned forward, tapped the chauffeur’s glass partition. The chauffeur pressed a switch, and the glass slid open.
“Sir?”
“I’m going to take a look at our operation, Marlon. I’ll be ten minutes. Then back to L.A.”