The Brazilian mission had been sent back for reconsideration or put on hold or shifted to a back burner or ticketed for reevaluation or whatever you wanted to call it for the ninth or eleventh or hundred and third time. None of it had anything to do with the mission. All of it had everything to do with the political relationship of the North American Authority and the remaining nations of South America, several of which, including Brazil, had not reacted well to the Authority's recent annexation of South Mexico after that country's army and government had both collapsed in disarray. The relief operation was mounted from bases provided by the government of North Mexico. Despite, or perhaps because of, that cooperation, serious charges were being raised in many Latin capitals that the collapse of South Mexico had been engineered north of the Rio Grande.

I had no personal knowledge of the incident. I'd been involved elsewhere at the time, participating in an experiment in brainwashing, one of several then in practice. But I wouldn't have been surprised to find an American presence in the matter. South Mexico's not-so-secret-anymore cooperation with the Fourth World Majority in the abortive Gulf Coast invasion had not exactly won them friends in the hallowed halls of Congress. When it also turned out that they had allowed the invading forces to establish clandestine staging areas in the eastern wilderness, sixteen bills to declare war on South Mexico were introduced in the Senate. The President vowed to veto every one. The war against the Chtorr, she said, was more important, and this particular matter would be resolved in its own time and in its own way. She didn't specify what she meant, but after that the discussions on Capitol Hill became much more restrained.

Not too long after that, the United States and Canada created the North American Operations Authority, and each nation ceded specific parts of its national sovereignty to the new body; in particular the jurisdiction of all military and scientific bodies immediately involved in combating the ecological infestation. Both Mexicos had also been invited, but only the Republic of North Mexico had joined, and that only in exchange for significant trade agreements.

The obvious advantage of the Authority was that it allowed the United States to set the Moscow Treaties aside without specifically violating them. Giving control of your military to another body, which you just happened to control, was about as transparent as a lawyer's promise, but nevertheless legal. Not that anybody cared anymore, but the whole of politics is to find a way to legalize your particular crime. Politicians have different priorities from real people.

That the government of South Mexico had collapsed six months later was only a coincidence: So I'm told. It takes longer than six months to deliberately topple a government. If it can be toppled in six months, it was already on its way out anyway. For the protection of the, people, the Authority annexed the territory and . : . here we were, picking up the pieces of a project that somebody else had started.

And in the meantime, the Brazilians weren't speaking to us. They'd come around, eventually, but who knew how long that would take?

Abruptly, the smell got worse. I wouldn't have believed it possible.

They say you get used to even the worst smells. Not true. What happens is that your olfactory nerves shrivel into insensibility, refusing to come out again for two years afterward, not even when tempted with the most alluring scents of all: steak, buttered potatoes, chocolate ice cream, hot fudge, fresh strawberries, new car smells, fresh money-nothing.

This smell, the new one, lay across the previous stench like chocolate icing on a skunk. Neither smell was happy about it. The truly awful thing was that I recognized the smell.

The screen in front of me showed our location on the contour-delineated terrain. The depth was deliberately exaggerated to compensate for the limitations of human senses. I touched a button and noted for the mission log that we had encountered olfactory evidence of a fumble of gorps, also called gorths, gnorths, and glorbs, depending on who you were talking to. The military designation was ghoul.

This was a very bad sign.

Gorps or ghouls were scavengers, garbage-eaters, carrionfeeders. Fully mature, they stood three to four meters tall. A gorp was a sloth-shaped tower of hair. It had a barrel chest, a flexible prognathous snout, numerous small nasty eyes, and an attitude almost as bad as its smell. Its coat was a filth-ridden, flea-infested, rust-colored, dirty mass of coarse stringy hair and age-hardened mats. Its arms were disturbingly long, and the things it used for hands and feet were immense. Gorps were Chtorran bag ladies.

They ranged in color from startling orange to glow-in-the-dark brown. Sometimes they shambled along in a vaguely upright stance; most of the time they lumbered on all fours. Because they moved in slow motion, like koala bears, some people made the mistake of thinking they were gentle beings. It was not a mistake that anyone had lived long enough to make twice. Gorps were about as gentle as rhinoceroses. Think of a gorp as a giant, rabid, psychopathic, mutated, hydrocephalic orangutan with the mother of all hangovers-and you were working in the right direction. But this was a complimentary description; on a bad day, a gorp looked even worse.

It wasn't simply that a gorp could do you physical harm; it could, and it would, if you annoyed it long enough; no, the real horror was that its bouquet alone could raise blisters on a boulder. What a concentrated dose would do to human lungs was presumed fatal.

A gorp knew only two words: "Gorp?" and "Gorth!" The former was a questioning gulping sound, halfway between a yawn and a bark. The latter was a low-pitched rumble, which was generally interpreted as a warning growl.

Gorps were the biggest slobs in the Chtorran ecology. They damaged everything they came near. After a fumble of gorps wandered through a neighborhood, it looked like the aftermath of a blood feud between tornadoes. It wasn't malicious; they weren't angry creatures; it was simply the naked curiosity of a hungry scavenger raised to a new low. Even those few things that gorps occasionally left undamaged behind them carried their incredible reek for weeks afterward.

Gorps were always a bad sign. They weren't particularly wicked by themselves, and they were easy enough to avoid; their far-reaching smell usually gave enough advance warning that you could move to another state before they arrived in your neighborhood. Even if you weren't that smart, their lack of speed made it easy for you to keep out of their way; anyone who got caught by a gorp did it deliberately.

But the presence of gorps almost always meant that there was either a major infestation of worms nearby-or a grove of shambler trees. Probably shamblers. Even though Gorps preferred to live on the garbage of the worms, it was safer to trail the shamblers and feed upon the leavings of their tenants. Their appetites were ghoulish; hence the military designation.

My headset beeped abruptly-"McCarthy here," I answered.

"What is it, Captain?" The voice was Major Bellus. Major Robert E. Bellus, officially just an observer. Unofficially, I didn't know; but I had my suspicions. I'd met him only three days earlier. He was riding in the rear tank. The comfortable one.

"It's nothing, sir."

"But the smell-?"

"Gorps-or gorths. Or ghouls. But they could be miles from here. They might be rutting. We know that there are certain times when their stench gets strong enough to be detectable a hundred klicks away. The skyballs don't show anything within a radius of five, but their visibility is down due to the haze."

"Go to the satellite view and scan-"