Page 15 - Unlikely Stories 3

The World Trafe Center

secret. After some consideration, I had realized only a daredevil
activist would have the means and the moxie to get me into the pens.
And she knew where to find this place: the people objecting to it
were not vegetarians—they did not live in that part of town. Two
very clannish groups, orthodox Moslems and Jews, had gotten wind
of the place, and a rumor about “the World Trafe Center” had
reached me in Washington.
No questions asked, she had told me, after I established contact
with her tiny splinter group of radical environmentalists. By
accompanying her this far, I had clearly established my criminal bona
fides. She knew the law concerning entrapment, and had decided I
was not a policeman. Now, having crossed the line, I was risking a lot
more than that. For all I knew, she had a bomb hidden in her
clothing. Or a can of spray paint. I just wanted to get out in one piece
with representative blood samples.
“According to the floor plan,” said Ayla, squinting at a blurred and
sketchy diagram on a cocktail napkin, “manure is sent down to the
basement in a dedicated elevator for processing into pellets; another
revenue stream. The floors above are age-graded: maternity ward on
the top, abbatoir on the first floor. Ventilation straight up through
the roof. If anybody in the city wonders why their pork chops are so
deliciously fresh and surprisingly cheap, this is the answer: it’s locally
produced in an urban vertical piggery. And the poor animals aren’t
treated any better than they would be in Iowa or North Carolina.
Worse, probably. Let’s get going: don’t have time for much more
than a fifty-cent tour of this inferno.”
After checking that the stairwell’s doors were not locked on the
inside, we ascended cautiously. Ayla somehow knew the elevators
would not be safe. The echo off the metal stairs seemed terribly loud
to me—or was it my pounding heart? We held our breath and peeked
into the slaughterhouse—really a slaughter-suite. I took a panorama
shot and we moved on. None of the blood and guts in that place
were fresh enough for my purpose.
“The six floors above this are all mature swine,” she whispered.
“Do you want to see them all?”
“One will do,” I gasped.
Up a couple of flights we entered a dimly-lit maze of low-
partitioned cubicles; once, perhaps, their occupants were clerks. I
approached a somnolent sow and opened a needle-syringe pack.
14