Distraction - Bruce Sterling [199]
“We agree with that assessment,” Menlo said. “The President asked him to give those gas weapons back. No go. So, he must mean to use them.”
“What’s the nature of this substance in the microspheres?” Greta said.
“Well, psychotropics seem likeliest. If they hit a place the size of Buna, you could have the whole town basically insane for forty-eight hours. But those microbeads could hold a lot of different airborne agents. Pretty much anything, really.”
“And there’s a battery of these missiles pointed at us, right now?”
Menlo nodded. “Just one battery. Twenty warheads.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Gazzaniga announced, “if there was a limited, surgical raid … not by U.S. troops officially, but let’s say, by some competent combat veterans disguised as irregular Moderators …”
“Completely different matter,” said a department head.
“Exactly.”
“Actually defuses the crisis. Increases the general security.”
“Just what I was thinking.”
“How long before you can attack, Marshal Menlo?”
“Seventy-two hours,” the Field Marshal said.
But Huey had bombed them within forty-eight.
The first missile overshot the Collaboratory dome and landed in the western edge of Buna. A section of the city the size of four football fields was soaked with caustic black goo. The arrival of the bio-missile and its explosion were completely silent. It took until three in the morning for a partying German film crew in a local bed-and-breakfast to notice that the town’s streets, roofs, and windows were covered with a finely powdered black tar.
The reaction was mass hysteria. The captive Haitians in Washington, DC, had been getting a lot of press lately. The attack of gas psychosis in the Air Force base had not been forgotten, either. The news from the Collaboratory’s War Committee had, of course, immediately leaked to the public—not officially, but as rumor. Confronted with this black manifestation of their darkest fears, the people of Buna lost their minds. Fits of itching, burning, fainting, and convulsions were reported. Many of the afflicted claimed to have bicameral consciousness, or second sight, or even telepathy.
A courageous Collaboratory krewe donned emergency respirator gear and rushed to the site of the gas attack. They gathered samples and returned—barely able to make it through the panicked crowds at the Collaboratory’s airlocks, townsfolk desperate for the safety of the airtight lab. There were ugly incidents at the gates, where families found themselves separated in the crowds, where women held their children up in the air and begged for safety and mercy.
By ten AM, a lab study of the black tar had revealed that it was paint. It was a black, nontoxic, nonremovable caustic polymer, in a fog of gelatin beads. There was no psychotropic agent at all. The insanity of the townsfolk had been entirely a case of mass suggestion. The missile was just a silent paint balloon, a darkly humorous warning shot.
The CDIA’s raid across Louisiana’s border was canceled, because the missile battery had been moved. Worse yet, twenty new dummy missile batteries had suddenly appeared in its place: on farms, in towns, roaming on shrimp trucks, all over Louisiana.
Despite the fact that scientific analysis had proved that the missile was paint, a large proportion of the population simply refused to believe it. The state and federal governments officially announced that it was paint; so did the city council, but people simply refused to accept this. People were paranoid and terrified—but many seemed weirdly elated by the incident.
In the days that followed, a thriving gray market sprang up for samples of the paint, which were swiftly distributed all over the country, sold to the gullible in little plastic-topped vials. Hundreds of people spontaneously arrived in Buna, anxious to scrape up paint and sniff it.