Foreign Constellations

been fool enough to alter the 1 stamped on his hand to a 4 and in accordance with regulations had been refused any food at all.
It wasn’t fair on the kids for him to have done that.
His eyes strayed to the hillside. To left, to right and also at his back, the slopes were littered with what had been handsome expensive homes before the ghetto-ghouls began their rampage through this valley. He tried to picture it as it had been five years earlier; failed, because as a kid he had never lived in nor even visited such a wealthy suburb; then tried not to visualise it as it inevitably would be after the winter and failed again. But for the frequent rain this land would already be shedding dust this fall as once it had shed leaves.
The helicopter settled on the patch where the soup-tanker ordinarily drew up, the most defensible spot. Alerted by radio, the commanding colonel and his adjutant were on hand. An armed private with the professionally paranoid air of a bodyguard jumped out, only condescending to salute after he had swept the vicinity with his suspicious gaze. Then an important passenger climbed down, encumbered with a bulging paunch, and shook the colonel’s hand and marched off with him to the supermarket.
Among the refugees there had grown up a ritual to be performed on catching sight of anybody fat. Behind the wire a defiant old man demonstrated it, being himself as scrawny as a beanpole; he spat on the ground, trod on the spittle, turned his back with an over-shoulder scowl. To this the young policeman was directed to reply with a gesture towards his gun and a threatening glare, rehearsed again and again to render it maximally convincing and save the ammunition that would be wasted were he to have to shoot.
But the landing of the chopper had saved him from—from something. He had been on the edge of—of—of. . . It wouldn’t come clear. He could, though, sense it would have been disastrous. (Maybe he himself would in a fit of craziness have spat on seeing how fat the visitor was?)
He did not even drop his hand to his holster. He simply stood and shivered, more from the narrowness of his escape from— from whatever it was he had escaped, than from the chill that harbingered the rain.
Who was this person, anyhow, who rated a slow, expensive, wasteful mode of transport like a chopper in times of planetary dearth? The machine’s pilot, a lean man with a close-trimmed dark beard, had got out and stood a few feet away, stretching himself limb by limb as he looked the scene over. The young policeman attempted to utter a greeting, pose a question . . . and abruptly couldn’t. His mouth was watering incredibly. He had caught a scent so indescribably delicious it dizzied him. It awoke hunger that seemed to cry out from his very cells.
Hideously embarrassed, he gulped and gulped, hoping the bearded man would not notice. Seemingly he was more interested in the workers returning with their loads of greenstuff and the armed men lined up to receive them.
After a few moments he said, “Get much trouble with thieves, do you?”
The salivation was coming under control. (What could have triggered it?) “Not twice,” the policeman managed to quote.
The pilot glanced at him as though surprised. “Hmm! It’s long since I heard that crack! Must have been when the cows went on their involuntary seven-year diet . . . Still, I guess granary guards are much alike wherever and whenever.”
The policeman let that pass without bothering about its meaning. Now that he could speak normally again, he preferred to put the question he had originally intended about the passenger.
“Government food chemist,” the pilot answered.
The policeman essayed a joke. “Looks as though he tests his products on himself, doesn’t it?”
A merely polite smile. “If you knew him you couldn’t picture him being his own guinea pig . . . Oh-oh. Here it comes!”
Like stabbing needles the first drops of rain. In the car-park the refugees ducked under cover; workers lining up to be shepherded into the supermarket made what use they could of their bundled twigs and leaves.
“Inside, quickly!”
The policeman started. The pilot had scrambled back into his seat; now he was patting the place next to him, which had been occupied by the bodyguard. There were two more seats in back. One, the passenger’s, was empty. In the other dozed a top sergeant, a man heavy-set without being fat, on whom the refugees would not have expended spittle, with great pouches under his eyes and sagging empty jowls that testified to his having lost much poundage since—since whenever. He snored occasionally.
“Come on!” the pilot urged. “The rain’s doing half your work for you, isn’t it?”
True, true. It dampened spirits as it wet the ground. He climbed three wide-spaced rungs and sat, pulling the door to behind him. At once his mouth flooded again. The same scent was in the air, far stronger.
“It’s no fit way for a human being to end the day’s work,” the pilot muttered. He was staring as the workers formed a tidy line between the spikes of barbed wire and of bayonets. “To sweat from dawn to dusk, creep homeward folded double by your load, be told there’s too much dirt and grit in it, half rations for your family tonight . . . And it’s making more desert when we need less.”
The policeman had heard that sort of talk before. But when people were starving by the tens of millions it was no time for fancy fits of conscience. Just so long as they were kept alive.
“You got a patch of dirt on your face,” the pilot said after a pause. “Right cheekbone.”
The policeman almost raised his hand to rub before he remembered. “Oh, that. No, it isn’t dirt. I guess I bruised it somehow.”
“Ah-hah?” The pilot scrutinised him. “Bruise easily, do you? Yes? Do your joints hurt?”
“Sometimes. Seems