A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman

Author:Joe Haldeman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We did go out to see it the next day, and I could have made a case for or against Jain’s suspicions. The Texas truck did have a tank in the back that had exploded, but the part that remained attached was identified as LP gas, which it seemed to have been using for fuel. Of course that might have been camouflage for a tank full of the mystery virus; the engine was set up to switch between LP and gasoline.

The driver had died in the explosion. Jain’s theory for that wasn’t simple suicide, but rather that he had driven around the black neighborhoods for hours, maybe a whole day, releasing the stuff slowly, making sure it would get to its target. He himself would have been one of the first infected. He survived through the initial symptoms, and when he was sure it was working, destroyed the evidence, killing himself.

You would think a nutcase like that would want people to know who had done it, get his name in the history books, but they don’t always. The Oklahoma City bombing when I was a kid, and the St. Louis Arch.

Anyhow, my job wasn’t to explain anything, but just to demonstrate. For that, I only had to stay alive.

After the first symptomless day, I was pretty sure. They wanted me to stay with them for a couple of weeks, to prove their point beyond a shadow of a doubt, which was no problem. I moved in with Jain, and we sort of picked up where we’d left off. She looked a little different, but it wasn’t her looks that had attracted me to her.

And instead of the walk-up in Roxbury, we were living in a three-million-dollar suite overlooking the Charles. We could even have taken the twelfth-floor penthouse, but under the circumstances that wouldn’t be practical. Without elevators, it was still a walk-up, and we had to carry all our water up from the river.

It was not a typical lovers’ reunion. So much of the catching up was about the horrors she had survived and my own less dramatic horror of watching martial law and paranoiac isolationism erode the American way of life.

Or maybe this nightmare was the real America, stripped of cosmetic civilization. What my mother had called the Reaganbush jungle, the moneyed few in control, protecting their fortunes at any social cost. That was Jain’s party line, too.

But the people who owned this huge suite would probably like to have it back. The Brahmins who owned Boston would definitely like it back.

And every day I remained uninfected made the situation more mysterious. Who was profiting from this big lie?

We would find out. In a way.

The mechanics of the expose had to be a little roundabout. We couldn’t just go on television and do a tell-all show. There were plenty of stations in Boston, but nobody knew the equipment well enough to juryrig it to work with our low-voltage sun power, or even knew whether it was possible.

It was

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