The Thanatos Syndrome

from?” He sits back, drinks his drink. “I knew you knew about Blue Boy. Seriously, where does your water come from?”
    â€œSame as yours. The town has an artesian well.”
    We look at each other. He smiles for the first time. “You’re a sly one. You didn’t suppose, did you, that I didn’t know that you knew about the boys’ little Hadacol juice in the water?”
    â€œI supposed that you knew. I talked to Bob Comeaux and he told me you were on the ACMUI team.”
    Van Dorn snorts and pushes back in his poker chair. “Me with those Rover boys? No way. No, I’m only a visiting fireman, consultant, no, those guys wanted some coolant—I’m the project engineer—I got the go-ahead from the guys at NRC. They had medical spread sheets from NIH, which looked promising to me. Hell, that’s down your alley, Tom. You’re the expert on the pharmacology of radioactive isotopes, especially sodium. You tell me.”
    â€œWhat do you think of that pilot, Van?” I ask, watching him.
    â€œBlue Boy? Shit.” He clucks, makes a face, pulls up close. “You really want to know what I think of those guys?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI think they’re a bunch of Rover boys, eagle-scout mid-level bureaucrats, Humana airheads, Texas cowboys—hell, that’s where I made my money, Texas, remember? I know those types—who ride into town and shoot up the rustlers and have a ball doing it.”
    â€œYou don’t approve of what they’re doing?”
    He gives a great open-hand Texas shrug. “Well, who’s going to argue about knocking back crime, suicide, AIDS, and improving your sex life—any more than you’d argue about knocking back dental caries by putting fluoride in the water. But that’s not the point.”
    â€œWhat’s the point?”
    â€œThe point is, you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. You don’t treat human ills by creaming the human cortex. That’s a technologist for you. Give a technologist a new technique and he’ll run with it like a special-team scatback.”
    â€œAre you talking about Dr. Comeaux and Dr. Gottlieb and their colleagues?”
    Van Dorn makes a face. “Max Gottlieb is unhappy with them too. He’s a reluctant conspirator. But he’s locked in—by his position at Fedville. But the rest of those guys, you want to know what they are?”
    Not really. “What?”
    â€œThose guys are a bunch of ham-fisted social engineers, barnyard technicians, small-time Washington functionaries, long-distance reformers—you know who they remind me of? They remind me of the New England abolitionists, that bunch of guilt-ridden Puritan transcendentalist assholes who wanted to save their souls by freeing the slaves and castrating the planters. These guys—you know how they produce Olympic weight lifters in the U.S.S.R.? By steroids and testosterone—the same way they do football players and racehorses in Texas. These guys are running a barnyard. That’s no way to treat social ills or to treat people. Those damn cowboys are killing flies with sledgehammers. Do you know the latest they’re up to?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œOkay, so we’ve got a problem with teen pregnancy, children getting knocked up by the thousands right here. Plus a mean, demoralized, criminal black underclass. A real problem, right? But you don’t cure it by knocking back all women in the pilot area into a pre-primate estrus cycle, do you? You don’t treat depression by lobotomizing the patient anymore, do you? You don’t treat homosexuals by dumping stuff in their water supply and turning them into zombies, do you?”
    â€œWhat do you do, Van?”
    But he doesn’t need an answer. He’s jumped up to fix another drink and is pacing up and down. He stops above me. “You don’t treat the ills of society by dumping stuff in the water supply, Tom.”
    â€œThen why did you participate in the project? It was you who gave them the sodium isotope.”
    â€œI’ll tell you why, Tom.” He’s brooding now, eyes as brilliant as agates. “Because it’s war. In time of war and in time of plague you have to be Draconian.”
    â€œPlague? War? What war?”
    â€œTom, we have, as you damn well know, three social plagues which are going to wreck us just as surely as the bubonic plague