The reaction was mass hysteria. The captive Haitians in Washing-ton, 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, imme-diately 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 con-sciousness, 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 be-lieve 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 coun-try, sold to the gullible in little plastic-topped vials. Hundreds of peo-ple spontaneously arrived in Buna, anxious to scrape up paint and sniff it. A large number of miracle cures were attributed to use of this substance. People wrote open letters to the Governor of Louisiana, begging him to bomb their own cities with the “liberation gas.”
Huey denied all knowledge of any missiles in Louisiana. He stoutly denied that he had anything to do with black paint. He made fun of the ridiculous antics of the war-crazed populace — which didn’t require much effort — and suggested that it proved that the federal government had lost its grip. Huey’s two Senators had both been purged from the Senate, which was behaving with more purpose than it had managed to show for years; but this allowed Huey to wash his hands of Washington entirely.
Huey’s mood darkened drastically after his own bomb attack.
One of Huey’s trusted henchmen had planted an explosive briefcase inside the statehouse. Huey’s left arm was broken in the explosion, and two of his state senators were killed. This was not the first con-spiracy against Huey’s life; it was far from the first attempt to kill him. But it was the closest to success.
Naturally the President was suspected. Oscar very much doubted that the President would have stooped to a tactic so archaic and crude. The failed assassination actually strengthened Huey’s hand — and his hand came down hard on Louisianans, and on the Regulator hierarchy in particular. It was of course Louisianans who had the greatest reason to kill their leader, who in pursuit of his own ambitions had placed their state in a hopeless struggle against the entire Union. The Regu-lators in particular — Huey’s favorite fall guys — had a grim future ahead of them, if and when they faced federal vengeance. Regulators from outside Louisiana — and there were many such — were sensing which way the wind blew, and were signing up in droves for the quasi-legitimacy of the President’s CDIA. Huey had been good to the proles, he had made them a force to be reckoned with — but even proles understood power politics. Why go down in flames with a Governor, when you could rise to the heights with a President?
The missile attack had one profound and lasting consequence. It jarred the Collaboratory from its sense of helplessness. It was now quite obvious to everyone that the War was truly on. The black paint had been the first shot, and the likelihood was quite strong that the city of Buna would in fact be gassed. The prospect of choking in a silent black fog while surrounded by neighbors turned into maniacs — this prospect had clarified people’s minds quite wonderfully.
The Collaboratory was airtight. It was safe from gas; but it couldn’t hold everyone.
The obvious answer was to launch an architectural sortie. The fortress should be extended over the entire city.
Construction plans were immediately dusted off. Money and rights-of-way were suddenly no problem. Locals, wanderers, soldiers, scientists, Moderators, men, women, and children, they were one and all simply drafted into the effort.
All these factions had different ideas of how to tackle the prob-lem. The gypsy Moderators understood big-top tents and teepees. The people of Buna were very big on their bio-agricultural green-houses. The SO/LIC soldiers, who were trained in environmental disaster response, were experts at sandbags, quonset huts, soup kitch-ens, latrines, and potable water supplies. For their own part, the tech-ies of the Collaboratory flew into a strange furor over the plans of Alcott Bambakias. The scientists were long-used to the security of their armored dome, but it had never occurred to them that the rigid substance of their shelter might become cheap, smart, and infinitely distensible networks. This was architecture as airtight ephemera: struc-ture like a dewy spiderweb: smart, hypersensitive, always calculating, always on the move. There seemed to be no limit to the scale of it. The dome could become a living fluid, a kind of decentered, mem-branous amoeba.
It would have seemed sensible to weigh the alternatives carefully, hold safety hearings, have competitive bids submitted, and then, fi-nally, engage in a major building project. The mayor of Buna, a well-meaning middle-aged woman who had made a bundle in the greenhouse-flower industry, made a genuine effort to “assert control.”
Then two more paint bombs arrived. These were better-aimed.
They hit the Collaboratory dead on — it was a large target — and splat-tered the glass sky with black muck. The dome’s interior light became dim and scary, the temperature dropped, the plants and animals suf-fered, and the people were grim and enraged. Confronted with this direct insult, their will to resist stiffened drastically. It was personal now — they could see the evil slur against them, hovering above their heads.
All debate stopped. There was no longer time for talk, and the decision was a fait accompli. Everyone simply began contributing ev-erything they could all at the same time. They dropped all other ef-forts. When projects overlapped or interfered, they simply tore the little one down and built the more ambitious one. The town of Buna as people had previously known it simply ceased to exist. The dome metastasized; it sent out giant filmy buttresses on Daliesque walking stilts. The greenhouses of Buna linked together spontaneously into endless ramparts and tunnels. City blocks transmuted overnight into gleaming fields of plastic soap bubbles. Airtight brick crypts and bomb shelters sprang up everywhere, like measles.
Huey chose this moment to launch a well-documented outing attack on Oscar and Greta. There was no denying it this time. It was sordid and painful, but Huey’s timing could not have been worse. In a time of peace, it would have been politically disastrous to learn that a Machiavellian campaign adviser (of dubious genetic heritage) had fiendishly installed his girlfriend as the quasi-dictator of a federal sci-ence facility, while she paid him off with sexual favors in a Louisiana beach house.