Chapter 12

Linda Grange was sitting in her kitchen eating a bran muffin and contemplating the importance of fiber in total colonic health when George appeared on the Today show. She was in shock. She had met Harold and George several times and immediately disliked them both because of their lack of agreement with all of her ideas. Now she was livid. As the concept unfolded and she saw the scope of the project she almost had a stroke. Her husband had been duped by these planetary rapists into helping them. Her husband, the man who had been re-washing plastic bags for ten years and bringing home his paper lunch sack for reuse, had actually helped these men get the project off the ground. She knew in her heart they were inherently evil men, she now had proof. She immediately called Bob. He of course was busy and wouldn't understand the outrage until she explained to him how he should feel.

It was almost nine and she was late to her job at the organic food store. She picked up her green 60/40 jacket and locked up the house on the way to the bus stop. The Granges owned a Volvo and a Izuzu Trooper but Linda liked to ride the bus to her environmentally conscious food store. They only sold food that had been planted and picked by hand by workers with good health insurance, retirement plans, and benefits. No pesticides and only natural fertilizers were used. Naturally all of the fruits and vegetables were a bit smaller, more expensive, and many of them had insect damage long before they got to the store, but they were so much better for you. Linda was still fuming when the bus stopped in front of the store. Her manager welcomed her with a "nice of you to show up." He apparently had not yet heard the news. She did not feel any better once she realized that her boss didn't particularly care what was done with Venus as long as she was at work checking in fruit. After work she said to herself, they will understand at the Womyn's Center.

Around five thirty she was done with the ordering and the stacking and the washing, and the total fruit experience. She put her jacket back on an took the bus downtown. This was her evening at the Womyn's Center. They had a speaker tonight from the radical feminists. She loved these discussions. Thirty women who all agreed on the basic truths of life. All democrats, that went without saying, all hated nuclear power, freeways, gas guzzling cars, the military, American foreign policy, Jesse Helms, The Moral Majority, the Religious Right, Bob Dole, and Newt Gingrich. All of them believed in free child care, socialized medicine, abortion on demand, gay marriage, and birth control in the schools. They all had a basic set of tenets and one only need add one more to the list and you had a natural contingent of advocates who would protest, write letters, do anything except the most effective thing: contribute big bucks to senators and congressmen.

Tonight the panelist was going to discuss the evils of gynecologists. Linda had never really gotten into the radical feminist separatist mentality. Being a heterosexual she couldn't relate to the concept that every action a male had ever done or ever would do was a direct effort to exploit women. She did believe that a lot of men were scum, and tonight George Stone and Harold MacAnish were high on the list, but not all men. The speaker began with a discussion of the evils of episiotomies and then broke into a discussion of how natural childbirth was the only way to go. Linda raised her hand.

"Excuse me. Ms. Slater, As a representative of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Partituents, SPCP, we agree that in the past, some of the efforts of medicine were less than optimal, but in an age where the death rate from childbirth is 1 in 10,000 when it was 1 in 10 prior to modern medical care, why are you so critical of the obstetricians?" Linda had just done the unthinkable. She had brought reason before dogma. That was about like bringing matter and antimatter together in the same space.

The conference degenerated from there. Most of these Volvo driving Sierra Clubbers had loved their OB's and wouldn't sit still for the rest of the talk. After the conference had fully degenerated, Linda stood up again. "Ms Slater, we at the SPCP believe that obstetrics and specifically obstetrical anesthesia is important. Our motto - "It's not over until the fat lady stops screaming" - represents this fact. I would like to take this moment to suggest that we change the discussion to an important one and one that we as environmentalists can sink our teeth into. We need to stop those BioAtmospheric planetary rapists George Stone and Harold MacAnish!

The crowd went wild. They hadn't been as excited since the days of trying to make roast Bork. Linda fed the frenzy. "They have wiped out the bald eagle and the California condor. They have tried to kill the whales. Now they are going to wipe out an entire planet if we don't stop them!" It was as if you had suggested putting RU 487 in bubble gum at a Moral Majority meeting. By the end of the evening, they had organized the groups to write letters, the groups to begin boycotts, and the groups to find funding for the legion of attorneys that was going to chase poor George and Harold for the rest of their natural days. What had started as a simple meeting condemning gynecologists had become a referendum to convert the BioAtmospheric project into the equivalent of interplanetary genocide.

When Linda got home Bob had just finished cooling off after his run. Linda was flushed with the excitement of the meeting but she had her first villain in her grasp. She was never one to use sex as a bargaining chip but after she castrated this bozo she was married to, she wouldn't need to worry about that issue for a long time.

"Bob, did you have any idea what those two were up to when they hired you?" She was all sweetness and light to start with.

"Honey, I thought they were going to clean up sulfur dioxide in smoke stacks. I had no idea where the smoke stacks were located."

"Didn't they give you the technical data on the conditions for the process?" She began to press.

"They were really vague. They knew how you would react. They hid it from the both of us." He began to fold

"How I would react!" It was obvious to Bob she was about to blow. He was just trying, in his own way, to figure out how to duck. His last sentence had just thrown gasoline on the flames. Typical, he thought, one horrible mistake compounded by another.

"Darling, I was trying to help them with what sounded like an environmentally sound reprocessing plan. They tricked us. You know I would never want to change anything." He snuggled closer to her trying to kiss her. She rolled right and clipped him in the stomach with a fist as she walked off to the bedroom and locked the door. "George, you little twit. You did it again."

Chapter 13

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