Stark by Ben Elton Page A

mercury threatened to burst out of the top of his tube.
    ‘No rush, the guy’s meter’s running,’ said CD who was in much the same position himself.
    ‘I’m ready,’ replied Rachel.
    CD nearly fell over — down boy, down! This was more than he had dared hope for! What sort of phrase was that to use at eight-thirty! The temptress, the teasing, taunting, tempting sauce bucket! Clearly she wanted him, that much was obvious, wanted him badly. ‘I’m ready,’ she had said…God that was fast work, this lady wanted it all and she wanted it now. Why else would she put it that way? She could have said anything…she could have said…uhm ‘we can leave immediately’ or…well anything, but no, she said ‘I’m ready.’ Said it? she breathed it. If that wasn’t the old green light to oblivion thought CD, he was a stupid wanker. And, of course, he was right. It wasn’t and he was.

30: TURNING GREEN IN LA
    I t was, without doubt, the longest dinner it had ever been Sly’s misfortune to attend.
    Festel had begun to speak, the head of a Norwegian chemical consortium. Here was a man with a monumental contempt for the common good. A man proud of his record that despite the numerous compensation claims that resulted from him putting poorly test’ed drugs on the market he had never paid out a single penny. He remained oblivious to the anguish of gangs of mothers holding up babies with no legs or torsos.
    It was widely believed that Festel had personally arranged the framing and imprisonment of an employee who had threatened to expose the way his company rushed drugs onto the market. And yet, to Sly’s astonishment and anger, this same man suddenly seemed to have turned into a sort of wood-nymph, Pan-like figure, desperately concerned for the pastoral balance of the planet. He pointed out that fifteen million trees were felled every twenty-four hours in India alone. The resulting soil erosion was almost visibly creating deserts. What was more, without the forests there was a terrible danger of catastrophic flash-flooding.
    India? Sly was at a loss to understand why he had flown all the way to LA to whine on about trees in India…Bastard probably owns property in Delhi, he thought.
    Trunk spoke next. Trunk was a car man. He had been a colossus in motoring for over thirty years. Hence few had been closer to the vanguard in the battle against legislation on lead- free motoring than he. Trunk had fought it tooth and nail, lobbying politicians, obstructing research, deliberately encouraging his own technicians to distort their findings in order to produce ambiguous results. This, despite being well aware all along of the terrible toll that lead emissions take on growing bodies and minds. Trunk’s motive in all this had been the fear that other manufacturers might not take on the cost of the retooling required and of the slightly more sophisticated engines. He could be left on his own with the other bastards selling slightly cheaper cars. Rather than risk this, he had tried to stop the whole idea. This was the metal of the man Sly now heard bleating on about sneezing seals and how some damn mammal or other was choking on its own phlegm.
    Sly knew all this, he read his Sunday colour supplements, everybody knew about pollution, so what? One thing was for sure, if he had come half-way round the world to be asked to join some damn top-snob, green charity whinge for tax loss purposes, he would tell them to stuff it up their arseholes.
    Lord Playing, the British tobacco giant, spoke up. Here was a man who was presently denying, on his mother’s grave, that his company had been sure about the connection between tobacco and lung cancer since the mid-fifties. Denying that he had personally suppressed the findings and harrassed independent researchers. But now this same cynical man was shouting down Festel claiming that it was the salination caused by the rise in the water-tables that was the most terrifying aspect of the death of the