The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  It was not technology, in itself, that constituted the great evil. The real target of the kind of antagonisms which Seybelman’s exemplified was the Western democratic process. Capitalism provided the economic foundation that supported it, industry was the engine that drove capitalism, and technology made industry possible. And the crusade didn’t end with technology, but became an attack on the sciences that were the origins of technology, and ultimately upon the faculty of reason itself, of which science was the formal expression. In earlier years, Stephanie had considered herself apolitical, devoting all of her time and energy to her scientific studies. But now, perhaps as a result of two weeks of concentrated effort at having to think like Eva, she found herself seeing the situation through Eva’s eyes and recognizing many of the things that she remembered Eva trying to convey.

  For what the Seybelmans of the world hated with such ferocity at the root of it all, she realized, was not capitalism or democracy, but freedom. The freedom of ordinary, unaspiring individuals to live their lives as they chose, following their own whims and preferences, independently, self-sufficiently, without the license, approval, regulation, or permission of anyone. The ultimate, unforgivable sin that would-be social engineers like Seybelman could never tolerate was a world that didn’t need them. And a free world would be such a world. For what did they have to offer that anyone with the freedom to choose would ever want, expressed either with a dollar spent freely in the marketplace or a vote cast freely at the ballot box?

  Nothing.

  In a world where innovators, producers, creators, entertainers—anyone with knowledge or ability that others judged to be of value—could make millions, every nickel of it given willingly by customers who had earned it, they could never compete. And so they directed their suppressed envy at the institutions responsible for the existence of a world in which others could. Incapable of earning the recognition they craved, unable to persuade, they would compel society to take notice of them by resorting to force. With the powers to pass laws and the rights they could confer upon themselves to bestow favor and privilege, they would make people need them.

  Such goals were never admitted openly, but hid behind moral pretensions. Deception and coercion were thus inseparable from such systems by their nature. Every form of tyranny and totalitarianism that the world had known had begun the same way.

  Now, for the first time, Stephanie felt the revulsion that she had sensed from Eva but never really understood. Eva had often said that the biggest single fault of true free-enterprise capitalism was its consistent failure to defend itself against enemies who used lies and violence as a matter of policy, and then claimed the moral high ground. The people who practiced it were too busy doing something useful and getting on with their own lives to have any interest in controlling other people’s. After talking to Seybelman, she now thought she knew exactly what Eva had meant.

  CHAPTER 38

  By the time Stephanie got back to Pacific Heights, her tension was finally releasing itself. She found her hand shaking as she let herself in. Mel had heard the key in the door and was coming out of the room that Eva had used as an office. “How’d it go?” he asked.

  Stephanie leaned against the side of the kitchen doorway and tossed her purse down on the hall table. “Well, I’m still alive. I need some caffeine—preferably intravenous.”

  “You see, I’m a long-range mind reader, too.” Mel moved past her into the kitchen and indicated the coffee pot, perked and ready on the counter.

  “You’re a saint.” Stephanie went through into the lounge and sat down.

  Mel poured out two cups, put them on a tray with a couple of sandwiches that he’d prepared, and joined her a minute later. “Was it rough?” he asked as he sat down.

  “At times.”

  “What happened?”

  Stephanie sipped from her cup, put it back down, and rested her head on the back of the chair. “He doesn’t like you here—says it makes me unprofessional.”

  “Too bad.”

  “Uh-huh. But he got friendlier when he found I’d delivered the package to scuttle Kirkelmayer and was definitely going in his place.”

  “You think you passed off okay?”

  “There was a time when I thought it was all about to blow up…” she exhaled a long breath at the recollection, “but we got through it. But yes, I think it went okay.” She sat forward and picked up her sandwich.

  Mel waited expectantly, but she began to eat. “So,” he said finally, “did you find out anything about what they want you to do there?”

  Stephanie shook her head. “Seybelman has decided it’s time for me to meet some of the faces farther up the totem pole. My guess is that that’ll be when I get to know what it’s all about.”

  “Hmm… because you passed your brownie test?”

  “Presumably.”

  Mel scratched an eyebrow. “I’m surprised they ’re willing to show themselves at this point. It seems needlessly risky.” He glanced across at Stephanie. “Eva would have picked up on that. I hope—”

  “I know, and I made the same comment. It’s to make sure I’ll be suitably impressed—which fits with the line Eva gave for changing sides. I never realized how well she’d played it.”

  “To get names, you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, you don’t know who you’re likely to be meeting.”

  “Not yet.”

  There was a strange, mischievous light in Mel’s eyes, Stephanie saw as she resumed eating, the look of somebody who had been successfully keeping a secret. “Would you like to?” he asked her.

  “What are you talking about?” Stephanie asked.

  In reply, Mel got up, walked out of the room, and Stephanie could hear him go back into Eva’s office. He came back a few moments later carrying some sheets of handwritten notes and a wad of papers bound into a blue folder. He lifted the top sheet of notes and glanced down at it. “How about a man called Wilson Clines? Ever hear of him? Not many people have. He keeps out of the public eye. Ostentatious displays aren’t considered to be in good taste these days—or very prudent, come to that. His family is known to be worth at least twenty million—and that doesn’t say anything about the reserves they’ve scattered away among various trusts or dispersed in other ways to avoid concentrations that would be too conspicuous. Most of it comes from international financing and the capitalization of Third World development projects at ruinous interest rates underwritten by U.S. and various European governments—he has a cousin who’s married into the Vandelmayne-Myer international banking group.” Stephanie, looking astounded, opened her mouth to say something, but Mel continued. “Behind the scenes, he’s also one of the country’s archconservatives. His pet obsession is getting the Bible back into the schools. He’s on public record as being in favor of making adultery punishable by law. How’s that for a throwback to the Dark Ages? Interesting?”

  Stephanie took the sheet of paper from Mel’s hand. “This is Eva’s writing. Where did you find it?”

  Mel ignored the question and read from the next of the sheets he was holding. “Jeffrey Matterson, intellectual—it says here.” His voice took on a ringing tone as he exuberated, “Originally a humble professor of social studies, but now elevated to the ranks of the better-than-the-likes-of-us, and heading up his own bloatocracy in Washington. Chauffeured limousine, automatic cost-of-living-linked raises, and full-salary retirement, all out of your pocket and mine. He’s best known for the plan he’s been pushing for years to set up a full-blown, Department of Economic Planning. He also wants to nationalize the ten biggest insurance companies and soak them to stave off the social security mess.”

  Mel abandoned his affectation of a variety-show compere and carried on in his normal voice as he sat down. “I found a dossier that Eva had been putting together but presumably hadn’t passed on to Landis yet.”

  “Let me see those.” Stephanie held out her hand. Mel passed her the rest of the notes but kept the blue fol
der. She looked down and turned the sheets slowly, one by one as he carried on speaking.

  “It seems that she was in the process of finding out quite a bit about who pulls the strings,” Mel said. He gazed at her soberly. “I don’t think either of us realized how good at this business she was.”

  He watched in silence as Stephanie scanned quickly down the next page, flipped it over, and read on. A puzzled frown formed on her face. She looked up. “Does anything strike you as strange about these people?” she asked.

  Mel seemed to have been waiting for her to notice something. “How do you mean?” he asked curiously.

  “First we had an ultraright banker who wants to institute a new feudal order. Then a rabid socialist trying to set up an American Gosplan.” She inclined her head briefly at the papers on her lap. “This one here is in the public eye because of his anticommunist, antidrug crusade, but half his money came from arms deals that were funded by drug money. But the next page talks about a woman who’d be thrown out of the Young Trotskyites for being too far over on the left.” She looked up.

  “Go on. What?”

  Stephanie gestured at the notes again and shook her head. “It’s just a weird mix of bedfellows. Everything from about as far right as you can go to about as far left. And yet from what Eva is saying, they’re all connected in the same network. It just seems… incongruous. It doesn’t seem to make sense. I mean, these people are supposed to be enemies aren’t they?”

  Mel nodded. “I agree. But doesn’t it bring to mind what Henry Newell said when we met him in San Francisco? He said that the conventional left-right spectrum that people think of doesn’t really mean anything. Both ends are out to screw the middle. One end does it by confiscatory taxes and seizing control of the economy, the other by outlawing competition. But both depend on a command system as the basis for society, as opposed to individual freedom and choice. So both are natural enemies of the Constitutional party.” He nodded toward the papers in Stephanie’s hand. “And that’s what we’re seeing here: an alliance of what appears to be opposites at first sight, but which are really mirror images of the same thing.”

  Stephanie looked down again and nodded distantly. “Yes… And that’s what Eva was on the verge of uncovering, wasn’t it?”

  “Have you looked at the last couple of pages yet?” Mel asked.

  “What? No.” Stephanie turned to them, and at once became absorbed.

  “I thought you’d find that interesting,” Mel said after letting her read in silence for a short while. “The energy business is represented, too. You don’t need any introduction to the five names at the top there. They own Texas, Colorado, and Alaska. Ever since the early seventies, their companies have been quietly buying up mineral and surface mining rights from federal and state governments—in some cases for as little as one dollar an acre—in areas designated the Powder River Basin and Fort Union formation, which covers two hundred fifty thousand square miles from North Dakota to New Mexico. That area holds the richest deposits of coal ever discovered. The strip-mining rights alone are worth thirty billion tons—more coal than the U.S. has used since it began mining it in the eighteenth century. How’s that for collusion at the public expense?” Mel smiled humorlessly. “And purely by coincidence, of course, those same sources turn out to have virtually bankrolled the antinuclear movement. Oh, I know they own that too… But if you were holding both cards, which would you want to play first?”

  Stephanie turned over the last page, and a moment later gasped audibly. There was a list of figures and references, and halfway down, scrawled in ink in Eva’s handwriting and circled for emphasis:

  Sabotage of advanced energy technologies to maximize returns on existing investments? Or ploy to steer Third World over to outmoded methods, then go nuclear and pull out rug? (Who wants ten more Japans on planet?) Possible connection with problem at GPD, Denver? Talk to Steph for background.

  There was no date on it.

  “Do you think…” Stephanie’s voice trailed off as if she’d had second thoughts on what she was about to say.

  But Mel had already wondered the same thing. “When we talked that first night at my place, you said that Eva had some other reason for calling, apart from just social, but she never got to tell you what. ” He nodded at the sheet that Stephanie was holding. “I think this could be it.”

  Stephanie nodded. “I think you’re probably right…” She frowned. “But what did Eva mean by a possible GPD connection?”

  Mel produced the blue folder he’d been keeping back. Stephanie leaned forward to peer at it. The title read: PROPOSED FISSION-FUSION PROGRAM OF GENERAL PLASMA DYNAMICS INC.—TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC APPRAISAL. She stared and read it again in astonishment. The document was a hefty affair of at least two hundred pages. “My God!” she whispered. “Where on earth did she get that from?”

  “Who’ll ever know? But look inside at the credits page. Tell me if there’s anyone there that you recognize.”

  Stephanie took the folder and opened it. From the preamble, it had evidently been prepared at the request of a consortium of investment banks and other prospective financial backers. A list of contributors appeared a few pages farther in. Figured prominently among them as “Chief Scientific Advisor” was “Dr. Hermann M. Oberwald, National Advisory Commission on Advanced Energy Systems.”

  “Interesting, isn’t it?” Mel said. “The network of mirrors connects. We started out with Oberwald over, on the right, and his connection with a Soviet spy ring. Then we put that aside for a while and came here to help Henry Newell follow up a different line that had nothing to do with that, but involved the liberal left. But here they are, as you said, all in bed together. Let’s make sure that it all gets back to Landis this time, before anything else happens.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Brett threw the newspaper down on the breakfast bar in disgust and buttered himself another piece of toast. “Goddam Gestapo!” he growled.

  “What?” Mel asked as he pushed aside the bacon sizzling in the pan on the stove and cracked a second egg into the space.

  “Guy comes back from overseas someplace and finds the IRS have grabbed his house, and his wife and kid have had to move in with the people across the street—all over a lousy seventeen hundred bucks! I mean, what’s it all coming to? Gas chambers next for defaulters?”

  “How old’s the paper?”

  Brett glanced at the date. “What’s today?”

  “The sixteenth.”

  “Ten days.”

  “Brett, when are you going to finish fixing the TV? Then maybe we’ll be able to get some up-to-date news.”

  “The scan output driver blew up. I just need to get a new part. It’s a simple job.”

  “You’ve been saying that for two weeks.”

  Brett smeared marmalade on his toast and gulped from a mug of coffee. “Wasn’t Eva saying something the other day about getting rid of taxes altogether?”

  “Eventually, maybe.”

  “It couldn’t work.”

  “Maybe it seems that way right now because of the attitude that people are conditioned to. I mean, who likes having what they’ve earned taken away at gunpoint? But it doesn’t mean you can’t have it as an ideal to work closer to.”

  Brett snorted. “Who the hell’s gonna give it if they don’t have to?”

  Mel scooped the bacon out to drain and slid some mushrooms off a plate into the space in the pan. “Well, there was a time when English and Americans were famous for paying their taxes on time, and in full. If people believe that what they’re being asked for is reasonable and that everyone else is paying their share too, they’ll go along with it. They don’t want to be carried.”

  “You’re gonna get some free riders all the same,” Brett insisted. “What do you do about them? Just accept it?”

  “There have to be other ways of getting people to pay for what they want,” Mel said. “Ways that don’t involve coercion. You’d have to experiment and see what worked.�
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  “There’d still be problems.”

  “Hell, are you saying that what we’ve got doesn’t have problems? The amendment they’re proposing doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. It just sets out the basic principle that any acceptable system should measure up to. Figuring out the specifics is going to be what it’s all about for the next fifty years.”

  Just then the sound came of the front door being opened. A moment later Stephanie appeared with some bags of shopping. “You couldn’t have timed it better,” Mel said. “I just put yours under the grill.”

  “Wonderful. ” Stephanie used a cloth to take the plate from the grill, and sat down at the table by the window.

  Mel looked at her purse, which she had put down with the bags. “Are you still carrying that thing around? Hey Brett, you’ve been promising Steph a new one ever since we met her.”

  “I’ll get around to it.”

  “I’ll get you a new one,” Mel told her.

  “You’ve been saying that for nearly two years, too,” she said.

  “Well, we re going to the beach today,” Brett said to Mel. “Since Eva’s out of town, why don’t you come along? It’s about time you took a break and got some sun, anyhow.”