Морган Лливелин - Drop by Drop

At six minutes after five Louise Mortenson exclaimed, “Your phony flowers melted , you cheap bastard!” She hit her husband square in the face with her grandmother’s cast-iron skillet, breaking his nose and knocking out three of his teeth.

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.”