Read Online Impossible Places by Alan Dean Foster - Free Book Online

shoppers remorselessly cruised the aisles, dumping toilet tissue, canned dog food, cereals and breads and optimistically dolphin-safe tuna into their carts. Their expressions were resigned, their postures lethargic. Except when they passed through this aisle. Then cheerful gossip freshened the air like verbal Muzak.
    Everyone, absolutely everyone, bought something from Aisle Six, and luxuriated in the process.
    The clerk was reluctant to abandon her morose, angular stray. “So if you don’t mind my askin’, mister— what’s to shut down? We’re as clean as anyplace in town, an’ our inventory’s just as fresh. We ain’t violating no ordinances. We ain’t guilty of nothin’.”
    “No?” Moke’s sweeping gesture encompassed the entire aisle. “You’re like everyone else. You don’t see what’s going on here. You really don’t see it.”
    The clerk blinked at the shelves, seeking enlightenment and finding only cellophane and plastic.
    “This, all this, is garbage, young lady. Offal, swill, chromatic slops: the insidious poisoning of a people who have forgotten the nature of real food.”
    Until now emotionally becalmed, the clerk straightened. “Our stock is checked and replaced every day, sir. Everything on our shelves is fresh. If you don’t like it here, why don’t you shop someplace else?”
    “It wouldn’t make any difference. It’s the same everywhere,” Moke informed her sorrowfully. “Do not think that in my ire I have singled out your place of work for especial condemnation. The entire supermarket industry in which you are but an insignificant if courteous cog is equally culpable. All participate eagerly in the general conspiracy.” He peered intently at her.
    “Are you aware that today’s junk food contains more than a hundred times the volume and variety of chemical additives than the junk food of just twenty years ago? That the very companies that disgorge this mountain of hyena chow on an innocent unsuspecting public have little or no idea of how the human body will react to increased consumption of their products over a reasonable period of time?”
    The checkout clerk relaxed. Everything was clear enough to her now for her even to forget that she’d been called an insignificant cog. She even managed a sly smile.
    “I know—you’re a health-food nut.”
    “And proud of it. Do you know that ever since I first unearthed the conspiracy and swore to expose it I haven’t touched any of this stuff?” He indicated the marshaled ranks of sugar-stuffed cakes, of candy-coated marshmallow, of puffed imitation cheese and fried air. “And that since then I haven’t been sick a day? Not a day! Not a cold, no flu: nothing. There
has
to be a connection. And I’m going to reveal it.”
    “Uh-huh.” The clerk had begun to slowly back away.
    Moke noticed the look in her eyes. “You’re the one who should be afraid of these remasticated additives; not me. My system is clean, pure. I’m a trained scientist, young lady. My specialty is nutrition chemistry. I have devoted all of my adult life to this Study, and next week I shall at last begin to publish. What I will reveal will rock the American junk food industry to its grotesquely profitable core.”
    She halted, grinning insouciantly. “I ain’t afraid of no potato chips.”
    “You should be, because I have discovered that they, in common with most other popular junk foods, contain hidden within their artificial flavorings and artificial colors and preservatives and pseudoingredients newly developed complex amino acids of extraordinary vitality and volatility. Either the food companies have been far ahead of the pharmaceutical and pesticide industries in genetic engineering or else we are witnessing sustained sequential organic mutation on an undreamt-of scale.
    “To what nefarious end the food companies are striving I have yet to discover, but rest assured that I will. Some of the molecules I have isolated within Shoo-pie Bunny Cakes,