“You see,” said Somerset, “we couldn’t risk waiting any longer, while you consolidated your control. By the way, before you knew of Damocles, when had you planned to establish autocratic rule? Did you have a date in mind?”
Salvitore shrugged noncommittally. “Nothing specific. We had planned to assume overt control in another five or ten years. Things were going the way we desired anyway. There was no pressing hurry. We had hoped to disarm the United States through gun control legislation first, and to execute a more gradual, less violent takeover. We would have liked to have accomplished it without open warfare.”
“That’s sooner than we thought,” said Somerset. “We had estimated another ten or fifteen years.”
Salvitore waved his hand dismissively. “It may have taken that long. What difference would it make?”
Somerset sipped the wine. “None, to you. At least not in the way you’ve envisioned things working out, but to us, it was imperative that we act while we still had the freedom to do the things necessary to put our weapons systems in place. We also had to wait for you to move in and begin taking overt actions. To have acted too early would have triggered a backlash in the American people. Until the Vanderbilt Administration, many people still clung tenaciously to a misguided loyalty to those figureheads that you put in positions of authority, thinking they were being patriotic. We had to wait until a lot of people were openly disenchanted, almost the last possible moment. If we had waited much longer, though, we would not have had the freedom to construct the weapons and get them into orbit. Right now, your control is almost complete. Research programs are dead, government institutions in limbo. I doubt that we could manage it under today’s conditions.”
“I compliment you on your assessment, and your achievement,” said Salvatore, casually lighting a cigarette. “What made you believe that you could precipitate our takeover?”
“We watched as you gained control of NATO and the United Nations, and the development of the hand-in-hand conspiracy between the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Economic Council, the Federal Open Market Committee and the Federal Reserve Board. It was obvious to all but the blind. The engineered collapse of most of the private banks and lending institutions, followed by the assumption and sale of assets to the bigger banks under the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation, and finally, the rash of mergers of the larger banks and corporate holding companies in America, the unprecedented bullish market—it all seemed to point toward a final commitment on your part. We assumed that if we fanned the flame of independence for a little bit, then appeared to fail, that you would seize the chance to get it over with once and for all. It appears that we’re batting a thousand, so far.”
Salvitore stirred the air with his finger. “You say that you intended to fail?”
“We intended for you to think we had failed. Otherwise, you would never have surfaced. Now, we know who you are, those of you here, and the smaller fry that are running things for you. Once you’ve all been taken or destroyed, your holdings and your fortunes will finance a new cooperative of independent governments without hegemony. It will take some fine-tuning, no doubt, but it will work.”
Salvitore laughed. “Are you telling me that this organization of yours has tricked us—that you are in control? Your weapon is destroyed! We have armies in every major city on the globe. What do you think you can do—you and your band of renegades? Who are you, anyway?”
“On the contrary,” said Somerset, rolling the wine glass between his hands. “Damocles is still very much in existence. Two more weapon systems are also in orbit. As we speak, Damocles is locking grid coordinates into his fire-control computer. Your main troop contingents are being recalled to their local bases and barracks. They each think it’s just a local thing, and they are not the least bit alarmed. In a few moments, at 9:00 p.m., to be exact, those armies will be as imaginary as your belief in your cultural superiority.
“Speaking of culture, with your Greco-Roman heritage, you should appreciate the irony of the names we gave to the weapon systems, the instruments that are about to compass your defeat. We decided to retain the Grecian mythology theme. Damocles held the threat over your heads, forcing you to react in a predictable way. Ariadne was the Greek princess who gave Theseus a thread with which to find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. She hangs above our heads now, doing the same thing that Damocles is doing over the American continent. We wanted our daughters to be able to identify in gender with one of them, you see.
“Apollo, god of the sun, music, medicine, prophecy and poetry, hangs over Asia. Actually, we had a bit of dissension there; some of our Asian members wanted to call him Rama, and of course, Buddha came up, along with Allah, Mohammed and several other deities and prophets. Apollo won out. It maintains the poetry, don’t you see? Damocles to show humanity the direct; Ariadne to show us the way out; Apollo to heal us, and show us the beauty of the new day. If that isn’t poetic justice, I don’t know what is. I wish my friend Paul could hear that. He’s always getting the last word. I don’t think he could top me tonight.”
“I appreciate your droll wit, Dr. Somerset,” said Salvitore. “If what you say is true, what do you think you will accomplish? Man is man. They will just revert again. People do not change. Do you think you’re going to divide up everything equally, and it will stay that way? The very day that your great Utopia is founded, someone will bring forth a pack of cards or a pair of dice, and the reapportionment of wealth will begin anew. What will you have gained? Come, come, Dr. Somerset, surely you’re not that naïve or socialistic in your thinking. Would you overrun all good things with the common herd?”
“No, I’m not a socialist or communist. I believe that restrained capitalism is the best way. And, you are right about the darker nature of man. But it can, with effort, be controlled. It was you who were setting up a socialistic hierarchy—a return to feudalistic serfdom. You would have owned everything. The rest of humanity would have been equal only in their abject poverty and lack of say in their lives.
“I believe that all of humanity, as individuals, should enjoy the things that they earn through honest labor and personal ingenuity. That does not include the theft, coercion, fraud, rape, subjugation and murder that you practice. Those who make their living by those means are no better than savages and sewer rats, no matter how well they dress, or how modern the methods they employ.” Somerset picked up his wine glass and held it toward Salvitore, in salute.
“Here’s to mankind, Mr. Salvitore. To another chance for happiness. Maybe they will use it wisely, and maybe they won’t, but they’re going to get another stab at it. Here’s to all of you,” he swung his glass at the watching faces around the room, “in the hope that there is such a thing as divine justice.” He lowered the glass, and his voice, looking inward for a moment. “Here’s to the atonement of Leland Somerset; I just hope I don’t have to spend eternity in the same hell as all of you.”
“You haven’t said who your organization is, Dr. Somerset,” said Salvitore.
Somerset emptied his wine glass, considered it briefly, then set it aside. “Forgive me, Mr. Salvitore,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’m afraid I tend toward verbosity once I get started. We are just a group of concerned scientists.”
###
The city of Rome felt a small tremor during the evening of the eighth of August. People noted and forgot it. A seismologist at the University of Rome made a note of its direction and amplitude the following day, and assumed that some construction company was blasting nearby. It would be two days later that a delivery driver would discover that the Villa Salvitore, and the hilltop that it had occupied, were gone.
XLIV
It was early morning, on the tenth day after the excursion to Palo Alto. Jack and Eve Townsend had risen at 5:30 a.m., and Jack was squatting in front of the camp stove, near the mouth of the pipe, boiling water for coffee. Eve was under the camouflage canopy just outside, rummaging around in the back of the Cherokee f
or another can of coffee. The one Jack had was almost empty.
Suddenly, a tremor ran through the ground. They both froze for a moment. It happened again, closer and more energetic than before.
Jack stood up. “Honey, get out of there,” he called. “C’mon, hurry up.”
Eve complied, running to stand beside him. They were both looking around in all directions, searching for clues.
“Earthquake?” asked Eve.
“Maybe,” he responded. “Let’s go up on top and see if we can see anything.”
They scrambled up the slope. Another closer tremor began before they reached the top, causing them to slip and falter, but they kept on going until they could look out over the long valley towards Mountain View.
A flickering at their backs made them turn, and to the distant south, a shaft of bluish light danced and flickered in a sky gone black and ominous. They could see minute flashes of lightning arcing sporadically in the distant, roiling cloud. The tremor rumbled again, and very faintly now, they could hear a crackling and popping noise, and an eerie singing drone, like someone blowing through a bamboo pipe.
“What the hell . . . ?” Jack murmured, watching the blue spear of light dance and flash back and forth across the horizon. As they stood watching, the tremors became continuous, and continued to increase in amplitude. The crackling and popping was gradually increasing in volume, also, and the background drone was now a deep thrumming that was becoming synchronized with the vibration in the ground. Realization dawned in Jack’s mind.
“Get down! Hurry! Get inside the pipe,” he shouted, dragging Eve down the slope after him. They fell and slid the last few yards down the dirt embankment. Jack scrambled to his feet, lifting and pulling Eve into the opening of the pipe. He moved them back to the tent and inside it before he stopped.
“It’s the weapon,” he said. “It’s Damocles. Lay down and wrap the pillows and blankets around you. We’re going to get shaken pretty hard, I think.”
“Are we going to die?” she asked calmly, looking at him.
“I don’t know, honey,” he said, hugging her to him. “We’re probably as safe here as anywhere. It’s a choice between being inside this pipe if it collapses or getting fried by radiation outside. We can only hope we don’t get a direct hit. Cover up. Cover your eyes and ears as best you can.”
It occurred to him that if the beam hit the reservoir, boiling water and super-heated steam would flow through the pipe. He didn’t tell her.
The jarring vibration in the earth was being transmitted to the concrete pipe now, and Jack could feel the low-frequency sonic waves passing up the length of the pipe as it coupled weakly with some harmonic in the modulated beam. The thrumming drone was so loud now that they would have had to shout to be heard above it.
Jack could differentiate now between the crackling and popping as it grew louder, and could feel the shocks, as individual blows followed the louder pops more closely than the distant ones. Hope grew in him, even as the bouncing tent frame was slapped more and more violently against the concrete floor of the pipe. The beam was not being fired continuously, was not obliterating everything. It was selectively darting from target to target across a wide area as it advanced northward, hitting dozens of individual, pinpoint targets each second, sparing non-enemy real estate. If he was right, the reservoir might not be hit. Their main danger would be from the seismic shock.
Even as he thought it, a mighty bang almost deafened them, as a pulse of hellish energy vaporized the military encampment near San Jose, ten miles to the east. The pipe moaned like the bass pipe in a gigantic church organ.
Two seconds after the bolt hit San Jose, they were lifted almost to the ceiling of the pipe—tent, wooden pallets and all—and slammed against the concrete floor. The roof of the tent collapsed on top of them, pushed down by the ceiling of the pipe. Eve screamed. The breath was knocked from their bodies when they hit the floor. A spray of water hit them, but no flood came through because the pipe was no longer connected to the reservoir. It had jumped upward, through the ridge of covering earth that formed the rim of the reservoir, and separated into the twenty-foot sections of which it was composed.
Jack and Eve held grimly to each other, and he tried to pin her body between his and the pallet that they were clinging to, shielding her from the walls of the pipe as it spun around sickeningly, bounced and began to roll down the hill. There was a two-hundred-foot fall where the hill sloped steeply down into the canyon, and he knew they did not have a prayer of surviving it.
They were wrapped in blankets and he couldn’t see anything, could only feel what was happening to them. He heard a grinding crunch, like a metal trash can being run over by a truck, and the pipe stopped rolling, rocked back and forth a couple of times and was still. The heavy thrumming vibration was gradually fading, and a minute later, bruised and hurting, they began to claw their way out of the wet, tangled bedding.
When they could see, they discovered that they lay in a section of pipe, open at both ends, with water flowing around and by them, running down the slope. Jack got shakily to his feet and hurriedly half-dragged, half-carried Eve out of the pipe and along the slope until they were out of line with the breach in the wall of the reservoir, and on dry ground. They collapsed together, then rolled up on their elbows and looked back. The section of piping they had occupied had rolled up on and partially crushed the Jeep Cherokee. The vehicle had formed a chock that held the pipe in place on the gentle slope, not fifty feet from the edge of the canyon.
As they watched, the water sluiced away the soil beneath the pipe and vehicle, and they shifted sideways. The section of pipe rolled slowly at first, gained momentum, then bounded over the lip of the canyon. A long moment later they heard it hit and shatter against the canyon bottom.
Jack and Eve looked at each other, gasping and bruised, not saying anything. Jack ran his hands over her legs, arms and ribs, then collapsed beside her, his head resting on her chest. Eve lay panting, looking up at the sky, now clearing above them.
After a while, she put her hand on his head, closed her eyes and smiled. They were alive.
XLV
Senator Isley banged his gavel. The mutter of conversation began to die out in the auditorium. It was a bright, sunny October day in Atlanta, and the university was the rich, dark green of late summer in the South.
The seating was at rows of long, narrow tables, set up like a Bingo hall. Possibly three hundred people were present—Congress, scientists, administrators, educators, businessmen, bankers, newspeople and the military. On the stage, Isley shared the long table with Hector Ortiz, Clarence Patterson, Gene Stickle, Able Johnson, Joseph Miller and Paul Haas. They comprised a panel that would answer some of the remaining questions these new leaders and the public had, concerning the past ten days of committee meetings. Joseph Miller, Acting President of the United States, opened the meeting.
“We have decided on a course of action that will surely be criticized by many, but we believe that it is vital to the emergence of a new public philosophy. The new International Union of Scientists will act as an oversight committee for the independent national governments. They have mapped out a twenty-year plan, complete with benchmarks and periodic assessments of policies and performance, for global democratization. Those countries that have never known democracy will need the time to learn how to live and work in a democratic environment. In many cases, it will scarcely be long enough.
“It will be organized as a controlled experiment, and adjusted as necessary. Grassroots feedback will be the principal yardstick used to assess effectiveness, so in a sense, it will be a democratic experiment in government—a scientific approach to what works best for a free society in education, commerce and law. I can tell you right now that the core tenet and law of political reform will be to tell students the truth, and only the truth. In commerce, we believe that American free enterprise proved itself for two hundred years to be superior to all other economic systems. In a free society
, it is the only choice possible. Stocks and securities trading will be curtailed, and in future, done very differently. We need a method of obtaining investment capital, but it will no longer be a poker game for the wealthy. With regard to civil law, we will start by building a constitutional matrix against which every existing law, regulation, ordinance and policy must be tested. If a law fails the matrix, it will be deleted from all justice codes. To begin with, in the United States, it cannot conflict with the existing U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Until amended by the people, that proven document, with its universal concepts, shall remain the basis for all our laws. Secondly, the law, rule, ordinance or whatever cannot be redundant. It is asinine and unnecessarily restrictive to make multiple laws to address one crime. The old legal system could make a jaywalker appear to be the most heinous of criminals, simply by the number of redundant laws he had broken. We want to clean the legal system up and make it the purposeful tool it is supposed to be in a society, rather than a burden imposed on the populace by grafters. The old state policy, that ignorance is no excuse, pretty much permitted any law—no matter how esoteric or hidden—to go unchallenged. You didn’t know what laws you had broken until the judge told you.
“To summarize, the new legal architecture will be designed for the people it is supposed to serve, not for the benefit of lawyers and government control freaks.
“The industrialized nations will start off with a much greater latitude of self-determination, but they too, will need time to adjust to principles of true justice and ethical practice in government and business. Since the practice of those principles are rather rare in some societies, including our own, punishment for non-compliance will be severe at first. Make no mistake, the old ruling families and autocratic governments are gone. It will take time to decide how best to reapportion the wealth those regimes sequestered from the people they ruled, but it will be done, even if it comes down to just dividing it evenly and starting over from scratch.
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