The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [81]
Which they did, though with many sincere protestations of thanks to Sir Tariq, and by two-twenty they were leaving England behind and approaching the eastern coast of Ireland.
Ranjit was all solicitude. “I haven’t rushed you too much, have I? You’re not—?” The whoopsing gesture he made at his mouth elucidated the question for Myra, who laughed. She held up her glass for an orange juice refill from the attendant, who was quick to oblige.
“I’m fine,” she said. “And yes, you and I can come back to England when it’s nice and warm—say June. But are you sure you’re doing the right thing now, going to America?”
Ranjit finished spreading the clotted cream and strawberry preserves on his scone and popped the product into his mouth. “Of course I am,” he told her, chewing. “I checked the New York weather reports for myself. Right now they’ve got a low of nine, looking to a high for the day of eighteen. I’ve been colder than that in Trinco.”
Uncertain whether to laugh or cry, Myra set down her glass. “Oh, my darling,” she said. “You’ve never been in America, have you?”
Suddenly worried, Ranjit turned to face her. “What do you mean?”
She reached out to stroke his hand. “Just that you haven’t noticed that they’re pretty old-fashioned there in some ways. The way they still use miles instead of kilometers, for instance. And—I hope this won’t upset you—the way they cling to the Fahrenheit thermometer scale instead of going to Celsius along with the rest of the world?”
22
THE NEW WORLD
Apart from the great thermal disappointment that the climate of New York represented for Ranjit, the news that kept coming over their hotel suite’s large supply of TV sets was even more disheartening than usual. For example, South America had been relatively quiet, war-wise, for some time. No longer. Now (as one of their American hosts explained it to Myra and Ranjit) what had changed was the fact that the United States had revised most drug crimes down from felonies to, at most, misdemeanors. That had decriminalized nearly all the stock in trade of the Colombian drug merchants. That change in the laws made it possible for any American addict to get what he needed for his habit, cheap and without gangster intervention, at any local pharmacy, thus effectively putting the gangsters out of business. (It also made it pointless for any neighborhood pusher to hand out free samples to twelve-year-olds. That would no longer ensure him a supply of addicted customers for the future, since none of those future customers, if there were any, would be buying from him anyway. And so each year the census of American addicts slowly dwindled as the oldest ones died or went dry, and few new ones came along as replacements.)
But that was only the good part of drug decriminalization. There was a bad part as well.
The bad part, or the worst of the bad parts, was that the drug cartels, deprived of the profits from their coca plantations, began to look longingly at the equally addictive stuff that was being exported by their neighbors in Venezuela. Why, there was even more money in oil than there ever had been in drugs! And so armed parties from the Colombian drug citadels were infiltrating the oil fields of their neighbor. The relatively small (and often quite purchasable) Venezuelan army was putting up a show of resistance, sometimes, but the powerful motivation was all on the Colombian side, and so were almost all the victories.
All this, of course, in addition to the latest list of vicious little escapades from the Adorable Leader’s North Korea, and in addition to the renewal of violence in the irreconcilable fragments of what had once been Yugoslavia, and more and more heavy fighting in parts of what had once been the Soviet Union, and the Middle East….
It was all bad. What made up for it, a little, was the city of New York itself, not in the least like