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for example, are positively Byzantine. Something sinister is taking place within our groceries, and whatever it is, it’s finding its way into our children’s lunch pails.” He turned wistful.
    “Thirty years ago I would’ve said it was all a Russian plot, but I think the poor Russians are likewise on the verge of succumbing to the same sort of global gut-busting infiltration.”
    “Right.” She made a production of checking her watch. “Well, you’d better finish up your studies here fast, Professor. We close in thirty minutes.”
    “I need more time than that.”
    “Thirty minutes.” She turned and headed north, in the direction of the checkout registers, and safety.
    Idiots, Moke thought. Blind fools. He was going to save the country, save the world, in spite of its slavish ingrained genuflection to oversweetened dreck. Considering current dietary habits it was a wonder the species continued to survive at all.
    Facts were undeniable. When his paper finally exploded on the world convenience food scene, specialists would rush to confirm his findings. Too late then for the bloated minions of a bilious multibillion-dollar industry to conceal the truth any longer from a hitherto thoroughly duped market-going public.
    Emerging from beneath the concealing pile of un-crushed cartons, he climbed out of the compacter and surveyed the storage room at the rear of the market. It was dark and deserted. Refreshed from his nap, he had a couple of hours before the store reopened. It was all he would need.
    Using his keychain flashlight, he returned to the aisle where he’d had the encounter with the young clerk. Going to save her too, he thought determinedly, before her body was unalterably poisoned. It was his crusade, and his alone. The big health-food groups didn’t have a clue. Or his analytical expertise.
    A few final notes and his research would be complete. Then to the computer, to integrate final thoughts with the rough manuscript. Polish and publish, then sit back to await the coming explosion.
    This was the last store on his list, the final line of the last page of statistics in a study that had taken decades to compile and encompassed more than fifty cities and towns. All visited personally by him. He couldn’t trust graduate students to carry out the fieldwork. They were all contaminated by the very products he was sworn to eradicate from the shelves of the world’s supermarkets. He’d been forced to do all the research on his own.
    It was the same wherever he went. Identical eccentric molecules and weird peptide chains in dozens of products, regardless of brand name. Clever they were, but Moke had stumbled on their secret. Soon he would expose the full nature of their callous perfidy to a shocked public.
    Aisle Six stretched on ahead of him; shelves crammed full of brightly colored air-puffed victuals utterly devoid of nutritional value and inherently antithetical to the digestive system of the human body. They all but glowed behind their glistening, brightly colored wrappings; tantalizingly easy to consume, irresistibly crammed full of false flavor, quisling comestibles capable of rapidly weakening both mental and physical resolve. He knew them for what they were: opiates for the progressively brain-damaged.
    Something quivered slightly on the shelf just behind his left shoulder.
    He whirled, saw nothing. Chuckling uneasily to himself, he sauntered on. And froze.
    They were moving. The packages on the shelves ahead. Twitching slightly, jerking against their containers and restraints. Huge bags of intimidating chips, densely packed containers of vacuum-restrained pretzels, stacks of creme-filled non-cakes. All gyrating and weaving and rustling invitingly. And he could hear the sound now—a low, insinuating moan. The tempting murmur of empty calories, of empires of gluttony built on mountains of salt and plains of refined white sugar.
    “Eat us,” the enticing susurration whispered coaxingingly. “You have