Foreign Constellations

to be a thing going around.”
“Be damned,” the pilot said softly. “I knew the refugees were getting it, but I thought at least the guards. . . Here, boy.” He reached under the instrument panel and produced a lunchbox previously hidden in shadow. The instant he opened it the delicious scent became unbearable.
“Boy?” the policeman bridled.
“Hell, if you’re old enough to vote I’ll personally eat the shit you’ve passed since your birthday. . . .” Taking from the box something brown and white, something pink, something round and red. Also a knife.
“Should give you an orange or a lemon,” the pilot said musingly. “Don’t have any by me, though. . . . What’s ‘going around’, as you call it, is something we’ve known the cure for since about the eighteenth century—scurvy. I recall at Alexandria it made the soldiers so listless they paid no attention when the enemy approached. Bad stuff. Here, eat this. Best be quick and not let any of the refugees see you with it.” He held out a swiftly-fashioned sandwich of bread and ham, and also a tomato.
“Are they real?” the young policeman breathed.
“I should live so long and grow so rich! Hell, no. These are berendtised.”
“All made out of—of. . .?” With a gesture at the workers’ forage.
“Sure, but don’t be put off. It’s not rat-meat I’m giving you. That’s officer-grade food, four hundred fifty bucks’ worth of power to every pound. You won’t taste the same again in a hurry . . . Mark you, when there’s nothing else even rat-meat can be tasty.”
Taking the sandwich gingerly the policeman said, “I never got that far down. Seen plenty that did, of course. Uh—where were you reduced to rats?”
“Oh, there’s nothing very special about rats. After the cats and dogs are all gone . . . In Paris, though: that was something else. We had some very strange meats when we cleared out the Zoo—elephant, giraffe, even python . . . Say, eat up, will you, instead of staring? It’s not poisoned!”
The policeman opened his mouth and crammed it in, trying to savour each crumb and morsel, failing because his hunger was so deep, so keen.
“Oh, God,” he said at length, and ran his tongue hopefully around his lips to trap a last elusive drop of tomato juice. In back, the sleeping sergeant shifted but didn’t open his eyes.
The pilot closed the lunchbox and carefully put it away. There was a little silence, but for the sound of rain. At last the policeman said, “I heard a story about Berendt. Is it true he killed himself by jumping into his own food-converter?”
“It’s true he killed himself. Whether he did it in that precise way is just about impossible to find out. They prefer people not to know they killed him.”
“What? You just said he killed himself and now—”
“Did you never wonder what decided him?”
“Ah . . . Well, sure. It seems kind of odd he did it just when he’d succeeded in his life’s ambition, right?”
“Ambition,” the pilot repeated thoughtfully. “Obsession may have been more like it. The story goes he never talked or thought about anything except his plan to save the world from famine.”
“What—what drove him, do you think?”
“Heaven knows. Some people say his father had been eaten. Things like that did happen. It was a vicious winter. Of course it was just a Little Hunger, and at that it was in wartime. The Big Hunger hadn’t more than started.”
“Where was that?”
“Leningrad.”
There was another pause. Now dusk and denser rain had almost veiled the late-returning workers. The soldiers, as wet and cold as their charges, were beginning to raise their voices and threaten to cuff with gun-butts.
“For whatever reason,” the pilot resumed unexpectedly, “Yakov Berendt made the food converter his personal crusade. He had no scientific talent, so the first thing he had to do was make a fortune so he could hire top chemists and engineers and dietitians. It cost every penny he had just to build one pilot model. But when he had that, he had proof it could be done. He was able to borrow. Altogether he borrowed over twenty million. Produced the machine he’d always dreamed of. Drop in any kind of vegetation, even the poisonous kind, even the useless kind like straw and twigs, fit the right master-tape, and out would come good nourishing food. How could there be any more starvation when there was one of his machines in every village?”
“But there isn’t,” the policeman said, settling back comfortably in his seat and folding his hands on his stomach. It was amazing how full and sleepy that one sandwich had made him.
“Right. There isn’t. With the Big Hunger looming larger by the day, the people who had loaned him the money to develop the converter branded him a crank and a lunatic and had him voted off his own company’s board. Once they were in control they made sure the price of a Berendt converter was the highest the market could bear. No, there £re not converters in every village. But there are in every smart restaurant and hotel. And some private homes, come to that. This guy I’m ferrying around: he has one.” The pilot scowled into the gathering dark.
“But in any case,” he added, “he was completely wrong to think his machine could save us.”
“How’s that again?” The policeman’s eyes threatened to drift shut; he forced the lids apart and forced himself to concentrate on what the pilot was saying.
“Proof is all about us. Like I said, this project and those like it are making more desert when we need less. There’s nothing wonderful about being a villager, you know—what reason is there to think peasants would behave any differently from townsfolk? Just as your rich family in the big city buys dirt- cheap rubbish for the converter and puts on an expensive tape and eats the haute cuisine, so villagers would have been content to chuck in leaves and grass and the hell with actually planting