CHARLES COLEMAN FINLAY

A Game of Chicken

GRAVEL CRUNCHED UNDER the car tires as Ed pulled off the country road beside the big iron gates. A few placid bison grazed on the green slopes behind an electric fence. An old white farmhouse, bright red barn, and drab prefab research buildings rested on the hilltop. The sunset turned the clouds into hues of pink and blue, like cotton candy at the circus.

And there's the freak show, Ed thought as he spied several cat-sized shapes pecking at the grass beside the driveway.

He parked the car, got out, and buzzed the gate, waving into the little camera like an idiot. He never thought of himself as such, but he'd come out here without knowing why he'd been invited. Still, how could he pass it up?

The gate swung open and he decided to walk up the long driveway, just to stretch his legs. And to take a closer look at the famous chickens.

Yes, they certainly were four-legged chickens all right. Amazing and amusing. They strutted awkwardly, as if always falling forward. The front legs looked too short, at least compared to the pictures he'd seen online.

"Ah! There you are!" cried an enthusiastic voice.

Ed glanced up. A tall, fit, silver-haired man in a polo shirt and khakis lunged toward him, hand outstretched. Ed thrust out his own hand in self-defense, had it gripped, and shaken.

"Walter Griffin," said the man, introducing himself. "Guess you could say I'm the rancher hereabouts."

"Edward Bango. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Griffin."

"Griffey. All my friends call me Griffey." He grinned conspiratorially as he removed a silver card holder from his pocket, and offered Ed his business card.

Ed took it, even though he'd probably misplace it before he could scan it into his rolodex.

Griffin Farm Products "Growing For The Future"

That's all it said, plus the usual address information. It was made of some fancy brown paper with bits of seed and grass in it, and printed in maroon ink. Looked handmade. Ed shoved it in his pocket. "Thanks. So these are the chickens you invented?"

"Yes!" cried Griffey, still wearing that unexplained grin. "Though invention is too strong a term. We take research from other fields and find commercial applications for it. With the chickens, it was a simple modification to gene Tbx4."

"This came out of some medical research?"

"Correct! Holt-Oram Syndrome. Where other people saw a birth defect, we saw opportunity! Twice as many drumsticks, and easier to care for."

"Well they can't fly the coop, that's for sure!"

The smile on Griffey's face disappeared like ice in a deep fryer. "Actually, that's one of our selling points. We have chicken producers lined up to buy them, if it weren't for the protesters. You think that they'd see us for what we are -- a pro-environmental business."

Ed sighed. People thought that just because he published a magazine, he had some kind of arcane power over public opinion. "If you think I can help you with .... "

Griffey waved his hand, and the smile came back again. "No, wouldn't dream of it, Ed. Can I call you Ed? I invited you here to get in on the ground floor of our next venture."

Ed looked out to the fields, where the bison grazed. Maybe they'd invented real buffalo wings. Which would be interesting, although he couldn't imagine eating them. "And that would be?"

"Let me show you. We'll start with the end product, so you can judge the quality, then we'll look at the production process."

Griffey led him past the Norman Rockwell farmhouse to the functional research bunkers inset into the hillside. Even though he knew better, Ed still half-expected to see Frankenstein's laboratory inside. What he saw were stacks of paper, various sizes and colors spread across ordinary work desks. "Is this your design department?" he asked.

"This is our product development lab." Griffey picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to Ed. "What do you think?"

Ed was no judge of paper in anything except bulk, by the roll. This looked like some fancy Japanese stationery, a pale ivory color with hints of grasses in it. "Uh, very nice," he said. What exactly was he supposed to say?

"Where do you think it comes from?" asked Ed, grinning again.

"Some importer from Tokyo?"

"From right here on the farm. We make it from bison excrement. First we--"

"You what?"

"We collect the bison excrement, mix it in a vat with some water, some hydrogen peroxide, a few other things, and then pour it out in sheets to dry."

"Why?" Why in God's name, is what he wanted to ask.

"It's the perfect connection between the manufacturing process and nature's own design," enthused Griffey. "To make paper out of the exact same plant fibers, a human would have to gather the grasses, which the bison does by grazing; then pulp them, which the bison does by mastication; then treat them with chemicals, similar in this case to the stomach acids; then roll them into sheets, which the bison does by extruding --"

"I beg your pardon."

"By extruding," stumbled Griffey, thrown off his rhythm. "It's a technical term meaning --"

"Oh, I know what it means," interrupted Ed. He'd just never heard it as a synonym for crapping. "Please go on."

"Yes. Well then. The paper must be dried, which we do by exposing it to the sun. Some Swedish inventors developed the process using elk dung, for specialty papers, but we think we can mass produce it. We chose the bison for symbolic reasons. The American frontier, pioneer spirit, taking risks. All that."

"All that," Ed repeated. Just to see if it sounded more reasonable coming out of his own mouth.

"In a way, it's very similar to the pharmaceutical industry -- goats producing drugs in their milk. Or our chickens. But we expect much less opposition to this product because there are no genetic manipulations involved. The potential return on investment, once this is done in a broad scale, is quite profound."

"Profound." Ed was too stunned to add more. "Quite."

"Although," said Griffey, lowering his voice, "we do have some ideas for three to five years down the road, once the public becomes better educated and more accepting. We think selective genetic modifications could significantly enhance efficiencies."

Ed had a sudden horrific image of genetically enhanced rectums, different sizes for different products --bison crapping out magazines, cows pooping paperbacks. Elephants for newspapers. Sheep for business cards.

He remembered the card in his pocket and resisted the urge to yank it out and fling it to the ground. "Very interesting."

"Come on out to the barn with me," said Griffey. He was Mister Smugness now. "You'll love this. Just keep in mind that we're in the prototype stage of research."

Inside the barn, there were tiers of cages containing more of the chickens, all clucking and pecking at their wire prisons. There was something wrong with them. Or rather, more wrong. When Ed looked closely, he saw deformed front legs, stunted wings, limbs that were neither. The bottoms of the cages were filled with a horrible, bloody-colored paste. His stomach churned.

"What you see," Griffey proclaimed, spreading his arms like a prophet, "is recycling in action. These are some of our failed experiments, useless for breeding purposes. So we've put them to another use."

"Oh, that ought to appease the animal rights folks," said Ed. But he found it hard to introduce the right tone of sarcasm while holding his breath.

"Our thinking exactly! You know that birds have very primitive kidneys compared to mammals?"

"I had no idea."

"Yes. To help stem fluid loss, they absorb most of the moisture from their urine through the cloaca. Reptiles are the same. Look at this."

Ed didn't really want to, but it was too late to stop the enthusiastic inventor from undoing a bracket on the bottom of one of the wire cages. The chicken flapped its stunted, thumb-like limbs and snapped its beak at him.

"Just let me remove the stencil," Griffey said, "and here we go!" He proudly held up a sheet of business cards, exactly like the one in Ed's pocket. "We can concentrate the urine until it's as thick as some inks. In this case, we've supplemented their diet with beets, which is a perfect natural dye. Environmentally friendly. We're doing some experiments with indigo as well."

"Fascinating!" The whole concept boggled Ed. "And you invited me here because you want me to write a column on this for my magazine?"

"Not at all," said Griffey, as if astonished that Ed would think so small. "We want you to publish a special issue using our paper, our inks!"

The laugh leaped out of Ed's lips like a chicken taking flight. A four-legged chicken. "What?"

"Yes! It's perfect. Your audience is science fiction readers, who are much more open-minded than the general public. It's the perfect connection between our product and its natural market! It'll promote our product, and bring extra attention to your magazine, even help your sales. It benefits both of us."

Ed could see it now -- The Magazine of Chickenshit Science Fiction. "What's your price per roll then?"

"We'll have to work out the details on that. We need a firm commitment up front to raise more venture capital. Obviously, the price will go down once we can mass produce."

Yeah, thought Ed. He might as well save himself the time, print the magazine on dollar bills, and give it away.

"So what do you think? Perfect, isn't it?"

"Well," Ed started slowly, "at least when the readers write in to say the magazine stinks, there'll be no reason for the writers to take it personally -- they'll just be talking about the paper."

Indignation twitched across Griffey's face. "There is absolutely no odor at all to our product. Except for a slightly pleasant, grassy smell." He ripped off a corner of the sheet in his hand, and shoved it into his mouth. "Once we're done treating it, it's just like any other paper, and perfectly safe for human consumption," he said between chews. He thrust it out at Ed, daring him to take a bite.

"You know," said Ed, recalling a line from a favorite e. e. cummings poem, "there is some shit I will not eat."

He walked out of the barn before Griffey could swallow his pride. Or his paper. The four-legged chickens chased Ed all the way back to his car, like a little pack of feathered terriers.