free hit counters
Chapter 29
One day, twenty years before, when Heather Sanford was nine, her mother turned to her father and said, "What are we going to do about Heather sucking her thumb?"
Most children give up sucking their thumb at age two or so, but Heather had never quite broken herself of it. It was a matter that caused her mother a lot of concern, but didn't quite bother her father as much, although he agreed with his wife that it wasn't a good
habit. However, since this was possibly the thousandth time that his wife had brought up the subject in the last five years or so, he was a little tired of the issue, so he decided to throw a curve ball back. "Look on the bright side," he'd said. "If she keeps in practice, in a few years,
she's going to make some young man VERY happy."
It took a few moments for Heather's mother to figure out what he was talking about, but when she did, she was less than pleased. But, she didn't bring the subject up again for almost two weeks, which pleased her husband.
Under constant pressure from her mother, Heather gave up sucking her thumb, at least while she was awake, when she was around twelve. However, her subconscious kept the habit going, and even as she was pushing thirty, she often slept with her thumb in her
mouth. The constant exercise, sometimes several hours a night, gave her tongue and jaw muscles as strong as the average politican's.
However, when Heather was twelve, something else entered her life: Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond.
Living not too far from Concord, Massachusetts, her family sometimes went for a couple of hours at the beach at the state park, up at one end of Walden Pond. Her father once told Heather that it was a very famous place, and when she discovered Thoreau's
"Walden" at age twelve, she thought that she might learn why it was famous.
It was a tough read for a twelve-year-old, even one that was a little precocious, but it was clear to her early on that the Walden Pond of the 1840s had little to do with the Walden Pond of 1970. She was sad about it, in a way, but wasn't sure why.
She read the book again when she was fifteen; read it carefully, more comprehending, now. Several times in the summer of her fifteenth year, she rode her bicycle over to Walden Pond, not to go swimming, though that was what she told her mother, but to walk where
Thoreau had walked, sit where he sat, and try to feel what he must have felt, but the best she could manage was a sickness at thinking what Thoreau would have thought if he were to rouse from his grave of over a century. Old Henry wouldn't be very happy, she realized; things
had changed a lot, and changed for the worse, and from that realization came a determination to try and do something about it.
Her father's prophecy didn't come true until the spring of her twenty-first year, when there also came a chance to do a part in turning back the deterioration of the earth she had promised old Henry's ghost to do something about.
By that spring, Heather had blossomed into a young woman of medium height, with hair that indeterminate shade that's right between redheaded and blonde, and freckles on her face, which she never covered with makeup. She didn't have exactly what you would call
a bikini body, but wasn't so heavy that a bikini would have made her body look uninteresting, if she ever wore one, which she only did rarely. Her green eyes blazed with a fierce intensity as she carried a picket sign, day after day, outside the Old Brook Nuclear Power Plant.
There had been protests outside Old Brook for years, while the plant had been under construction. While Heather knew that the reactor would be the devil unchained if anything ever went wrong, her concern was really more with what would go wrong even if
everything went right. The coolant water from the plant would raise the temperature of the coastal river by several degrees, and even of the coastal waters by a few, and there was no telling what damage would be caused to an established natural habitat. Since carrying a picket sign
was about all she could do, she was out there regularly.
The organizers of the protest were amateurs, and they had made a pain in the butt of themselves, but hadn't done much to slow the fast-approaching date the plant would go on line. They had had help from anti-nuclear organizations around the country, with no great
effect, and were approaching despair, when someone managed to interest the president of the Defenders of Gaea.
When Dale McMullen came to town, he came like an avenging angel. All of a sudden, the protests at the plant weren't just a few bored lines buried in the local news; almost before they were aware of it, after years of effort, they were getting national coverage. Not a
lot, but enough to give them heart.
One afternoon, there was a rally of the protesters, leading up to a march on the plant to be held the next day. With a warm glow following listening to the heated speech that McMullen had made, Heather and a few others of the locals joined McMullen over coffee for
a strategy session.
One thing made her curious, and she went ahead to ask McMullen: "After all the work we've done, without getting anywhere, why'd you come here?"
"That's not easy to answer," McMullen said. "We can't be everywhere at once. We have to pick battles we can win."
"You mean, we really can stop this plant?" she brightened.
"I wish I could promise you that we will," he said. "We may, and we may not. Stopping it would be a victory, of course, but this close to completion, as much money has been put in there, we may not be able to. But, if we can make enough stink here, a dozen, two
dozen, a hundred nuclear power plants that are on the drawing board will never get off the ground. That's a real victory."
"But it doesn't stop Old Brook," she said.
"You're right," he said. "There will be a loss if we can't. But think of the big picture. What kind of harm will it do if those hundred nuclear power plants go on line?"
The thought left her dumbfounded for a moment, then perspective crawled in. "I think I see," she said slowly.
"That's the kind of battle that we fight in the Defenders of Gaea," McMullen explained. "We just don't have the means to fight every battle, so we have to pick the ones that we can get the most out of by fighting. Now, if we have a big march tomorrow, we can
possibly do some good. If things get a little out of hand, and we get good national TV coverage, we can do a lot of good. We can't afford to be seen starting a riot, or anything like that, but one thing we learned back in the sixties: if it ain't on TV, it ain't news."
"You mean you're looking for a riot?" she said.
"No, I didn't," he said. "But if one were to happen, like the police getting out of hand, like they did in Chicago in '68, then our message would get through a lot better."
"The local cops aren't going to start a riot," she said. "They're with us. We even had some out there with us today, out of uniform, of course, but not spies, or anything."
"It would be nice if it were true," he counseled, "But don't believe it. Cops have their own reason for doing things."
"They're with us, I tell you."
"I'll believe it when I see it," he smiled.
There was good light the next afternoon, one of the reasons the time was selected, to provide better lighting for the video cameras if anything were to happen. The march to Old Brook filled both lanes of the road, a quarter mile long, people carrying signs and singing
"We Shall Overcome", a good protest song in any situation. At the head of the demonstration walked four local policemen, in uniform, but wearing arm bands of the movement, and not too far behind them was a redhead/blonde with vivid green eyes, who had a broad grin on her
face every time McMullen looked her way.
There was a confrontation, nose to nose, at the plant gate. Angry words were exchanged; nightsticks were brandished; fingers pushed "Record" buttons on video cameras; a nightstick was swung, and then another. Somebody threw a rock; somebody threw a punch,
and suddenly the main gate of the Old Brook Nuclear Power Station resembled a bar brawl. The guard shack was set on fire, but the gates held, or else the whole station might have been burned to the ground.
McMullen was laying low in a motel room across a state line a few hours later. He'd managed to avoid the brunt of the fight, and it was clear that he hadn't been an instigator of the riot, but the videos of cops nightsticking it out with other cops over the plant led three networks.
There came a knocking on the door. "Well, even King had to go to jail sometime," he thought, "But just think of how that man made out." He got up and answered the door.
It was Heather, with a black eye, a bruise on her face, and an even bigger grin. "They told me you wanted to see me," she said.
"I did, indeed," McMullen said. "Was that your doing, today?"
"Well, sorta," she admitted. "I went and had a talk with one of the guys I know on the police force, and sort of told them what you said."
"And he agreed to do it?"
"No, he laughed at me." The grin vanished.
"Then, Heather," McMullen asked, "How did you get them to do that?"
She stammered for a moment before she managed to get it out. "He said that I'd . . . uh, have to use my mouth on him, if you know what I mean, to get him to."
"And you did?"
She nodded shyly. "Him, and his buddies," she said finally. "It was disgusting, but like you said, you have to look at the big picture. It was worth it if we can stop all those other nuclear plants."
That stopped McMullen in his tracks. The implications were obvious. If she were that good . . . that dedicated . . . then there were places where the Defenders of Gaea could put a talent like that to good use. He thought fast; she was going to have to be approached
the right way.
"Heather," he said. "There's often things that we have to do that we don't like to do, if we're going to keep Gaea a living creature. I'm proud of you for doing what you had to do, for Gaea's sake. You sound like a real Defender of Gaea to me. In addition to your
heroism here, you've been a hell of an organizer, and the Defenders can use you. How'd you like to work as a special agent out of our California office?"
