“Bring up the cages.”
Khomich turned to Robinson. “We wait for ten minutes to allow the stun-gas to liquefy, then your men will identify the terrorist leaders. Your men will not be required to eliminate their own nationals. The snatch- group will provide the execution squad.”
“You’re just going to mow them down?”
“Summary punishment is the more usual expression.”
“All for a television show? No wonder they call you the bloody butcher!”
Khomich’s face was expressionless. “All right, Captain, today you can make the decisions. Call, it part of your education.”
Putting on their helmets, they went outside. Misty traces of greasy vapor lay in puddles on the broken ground. The big mobile cage vehicles were brought into line. Black-uniformed SD men and padded snatch-
From the nose of a black and yellow helicopter came a spurt of white flame.
commandos moved among the crowd. People docilely allowed themselves to be searched and then steered up the steps into the cages. Among them were women and teenagers. Occasionally, a man would be led to a group being guarded by commandos. One helicopter was still filming overhead. Khomich watched impassively, his back as straight as a concrete post.
Somebody screamed. Clutching fingers rattled the mesh cages. From the group of men ringed by the snatch-commandos came a shout.
“England Alone! Down with the Treaty! Long live Free England!”
The rest of the slogans were drowned in wails and screams from the people in the cages. A snatch-group sergeant approached Khomich. “Twenty-three ringleaders, sir—one is a female, sir.”
“You are not going to shoot a woman, are you?” Robinson demanded.
“It was women who insisted on abolishing gallantry. You would like these gangsters to be reprieved, Captain?”
“Of course I would!”
“One minute. Decisions must take into account all known facts. There are similar riots taking place at this moment in Charleroi and Milan. It is expected that Monday’s proclamation of ration reduction will cause even greater unrest. The film of this Event will be shown on all networks as a salutory reminder that neither WFC nor the Zonal Councils will tolerate civil disobedience. It is within my authority to reprieve these gangsters, but I do not have total discretion. The mandatory alternative—I repeat, mandatory—in this case would be the complete cessation of all external food supplies to the Inner London district for a period of ten days.”
“But that would mean hundreds of people starving!”
“They are your people, Captain. You decide.”
Robinson looked at the faces pathetically crushed against the mesh cages and then at the shabby group beside the wire. In the end, there was no choice.
“Do the others have to watch?”
THE MICRONAUTS
“The lesson must be learned by everybody.”
Robinson covered his eyes for a moment. “Shoot them then.”
He stared at a point on the warehouse roof. Rifles chattered. For a few long seconds, there was total silence
The wailing and screaming started in earnest as the big mobile cages began to pull out. The bodies lay in an untidy row on the rough ground.
“All you have to remember is that it was necessary to save a far greater number of lives, Captain,” Khomich said quietly. “I take my orders from the Commissioner— he is our best hope, believe me.”
They saluted. Khomich hesitated. “You made the correct decision, Captain. Punitive action should never be delayed.” He stared at the ground, dragging a little furrow with his black army boot. Robinson could not understand what was making him uneasy. Then he looked up. “Would you like to re-muster to the Department of Security, Captain?” he said quickly.
“I hadn’t ever considered it, sir.”
“I will speak to your Area OC.” Then, to Robinson’s surprise, Khomich’s square, white hand gripped his arm. “You think I enjoy being known as The Butcher’?” He turned quickly and climbed into the big black MCV. As it pulled away Sergeant Smith took off his helmet.
“Gave me the shudders just looking at that bastard.”
“Shut up, Smith,” Robinson said angrily. “Get those bodies piled up for burning.”
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With only thirteen days before the most crucial Supreme Council of his career, the Commissioner rose at 0500 hours on Saturday morning. He then read reports in his bath, using no soap although as chief executive he was exempt from water-cycling regulations.
There was something inhuman, almost ominous, about the shiny black walls of the steamy bathroom, the stainless steel of its fittings. Yet, even naked, Towne held on to his aura of power, his shoulders and arms as powerful as a longshoreman’s, only his silver hair indicating the imminence of old age.
While his hands were still dry, he looked at a leather-bound book with a gold-embossed title —The Blind Years, a pictorial album of the pre-famine decades. PropEd had produced it for official libraries to show in human terms the mistakes which had produced global starvation and the deaths of two billion people. Archive photographs showed dirty, overcrowded streets in the human anthills of the pre-famine cities, smoke-belching industrial complexes, sulphuric rivers, sterile lakes, oil- clogged beaches.
“Commissioner to PropEd,” he said into his minirecorder, “your new book is excellently produced, but do you remember pornography? These street scenes, for instance—why do I enjoy looking at them? The faces heading for doom are too damned fat. Read this on Grade Two rations and you wouldn’t care about pollution, you’d only go mad with jealousy.”
Next, he read a much-amended proof of the text for the entry under Pollution—Specific Factors in a schools audio-visual encyclopedia, rewritten many times by various committees to meet all policy objections. Scientific experimentation must not be shown as bad in itself, although the recklessness of past scientists was blamed by many for the famine cycle—the theory that germ warfare trials in the middle of the century had unleased the mutant blight bacteria.
Another theory was that shrinkage of the upper- atmosphere ozone layer, through the wholesale release of industrial and commercial gases, had allowed an increase of radiation to produce the virus mutants. And a third theory was that an infinitesimal shift in the Earth’s tilt had produced the erratic weather patterns which turned arable lands into deserts—and that the mutant viruses had merely flourished because of their new environment. It all boiled down to whether you believed that men had brought disaster on themselves by meddling with chemical-bacteriological forces they did not understand and to whose repercussions they had a childish indifference—or whether the famines would have come anyway, through the forces of nature itself.
The problem was that each theory had more than purely philosophical ramifications; if nature—the universe—was to blame then people might ignore the lessons of the past. But if all responsibility was put on the scientists of previous generations, then modern science—and modern government—might easily come under public suspicion.
Loss of WFC’s governmental authority was what he feared most. He held the recorder well above the warm water. “Commissioner to History Department. Old wars and old defoliants belong to history and, in any case, why pick on the U.S.A.? Didn’t the United Kingdom hold germ warfare trials off the coast of Scotland, making, one island too dangerous to walk on for a hundred years? Did the Soviets have no military bacteriological establishment? Didn’t the Chinese and the French go on testing nuclear devices long after everybody knew of the dan-
gers? Didn’t India insist on a nuclear program although millions of her people were starving? Let’s write this again and be less emotive—history can hand out the verdict.”
The next report in his wire basket was marked MOST SECRET. It came from the Department of Population, a statistical analysis of sample censuses. After reading a few pages, he hissed sharply.
‘‘Commissioner to Secretary for Popula
tion. I refer to Memorandum Delta Two attached to your report dated September second. To say that a drop of nought-point- seven-percent in the registered populations of six small subdistricts in Sao Paulo and Kobe indicates the possibility of a geometrical collapse in the world population is wildly alarmist. All copies must be withdrawn immediately. See me today.”
As he shaved with his grandfather’s cut-throat razor, the commissioner, a stocky man with stiff white hair and the hard belly of a fitness fetishist, frowned at himself in the mirror. Had Eisentrager gone against him as well?
By 0540 he was having breakfast in the kitchen of his private apartment on the top floor of the WFC Building; that morning he had one slice of a new simulated bacon, one ounce of cassava-based steak, two slices of bread- style cellulose for roughage, and half a liter of direct- grass milk. At the end of this meal, his elderly servant Josef, a Berliner who had been with him since his days as Canadian delegate to the old EEC crisis conferences, said, ‘‘You should have real food from our research farms, Herr Commissioner, that ersatz rubbish is no good for you.”
‘‘Millions exist on worse.” He drank the rest of his gray milk. “Josef—sit down for a moment. Have we any tobacco cigarettes left?”
“There are still four in the box from the East African delegation.”
“Have one—I’ll sniff and pretend it’s thirty years
ago.
The old man’s rheumatic hands shook as he lit up. The commissioner watched approvingly, feeling almost
paternal although Josef was fifteen years older than himself and would have been downgraded to Grade Three rations but for his protection. “Josef—isn’t it a fact that all the great rulers of the past inevitably suffered from paranoia?’’
The old man blinked as unaccustomed smoke reached his eyes. “Stalin did, most of his life. Adolf Hitler tended more to schizophrenia. Generally, it was their subjects who did the suffering.”
“Josef—apart from you, I feel pretty much alone, certainly since Beatrix died. I’m not sure but I might not be suffering from paranoia. How can you tell?”
“You have delusions that people are conspiring against you. Unfortunately, they usually are.” Seeing that the Commissioner was in no mood for jokes, Josef added quickly, “A psychiatrist would know—if you believe in them.”
“I can’t even ask a psychiatrist. If it leaked that I was having treatment for paranoid delusions, I would be finished.”
“You are suffering from delusions?”
“Half the time I’m sure they’re delusions—then, in the bath a few moments ago, for instance—there’s a new Population survey, some small areas show reductions of less than one percent. But Eisentrager has allowed one of his statistical evaluators to attach an analysis which says we may be faced with a geometrical collapse, not simply a gradual decline in numbers over two or three generations, but an accelerating collapse—fewer workers producing less food, therefore more starvation, therefore fewer workers—and so on. If this projection became public knowledge—ifWFC’s zero population growth policy can be shown to be failing to keep even two billion alive then—I would be removed from office and I don’t see the organization lasting long after me.”
“All this from a few sample statistics?”
“We’re talking about the extinction of the human race, Josef—nobody will wait around for boring old facts, it’ll be panic stations, every man for himself. The rich U.S.A. Zones would grab the program for petroleum-
based protein—half of their zones are self-sufficient as it is. The Soviets would take over the geothermic stations. They’re already well ahead with the barrage construction for diverting the Kuro Siwa current into the Tartar Strait; if they can turn the Sea of Okhotsk into a temperate zone, they’ll have extra food for millions of people—that frozen tundra of theirs is free from blight. Look at Brazil—they could support thirty million people without our programs. Even if the Councils wanted to stay in—would their populations allow them once they got the idea they were doomed? And what would happen to the non- technological zones? Back to the Stone Age, a few nomads scratching around for roots and grubs? They’d go to war to prevent that. The same old story that cursed the human race for five thousand years: greed, jealousy, destruction— ”
The old man scratched the bridge of his nose. “What are these so-called delusions of yours?”
“I’m beginning to think there are people in this building actively conspiring against me. Eisentrager must have known that the Memorandum could leak in a hundred different ways. In thirteen days, the heads of the zonal councils and their secretaries will be flooding into this building—half of them looking for excuses to cut their Budget contributions, the other half determined to get bigger allocations. That Memorandum could start a stampede.”
Reluctantly, Josef stubbed out the precious tobacco cigarette. “It’s not much to base fears of a conspiracy on, Herr Commissioner.”
“All right—why did I have to tell Security Secretary Khouri to assign Khomich to the London riots? He knew we’d want to deal with one of these outbreaks before Monday’s ration-cut proclamation. We think there are secret lines of communication between the subversive groups—why hasn’t Khouri produced any of these gangsters for a Network Trial? Is he trying to discredit me? Or is he in league with them?”
Josef scratched his ear. “The Supreme Council would never back a wolf like Khouri— ”
“No, but they might back George Richards—the richer zones anyway. There is a lot of support for his philosophy—he and his kind see the human race as some kind of mystical entity. I always get the impression they think the deaths of a billion or so people would be a blessing in disguise—some way of producing a world of plenty for the chosen survivors, the strongest and the cleverest. Meaning themselves, of course. I just happen to believe that every one of the two billion people out there has an equal right to live. Am I wrong?’’
“I am only an old man with shaky hands,’’ Josef said quietly. “I go nowhere and I have no friends, but every morning I am glad to find myself still alive. Herr Commissioner—I don’t care how you do it, but just keep me alive.”
Half an hour later, the Commissioner was in the Main Operation Room in the lower basement. He and the duty controller leaned forward into the brilliant light from the canopy over the vast contour map of the Western hemisphere. He saw the positions of supply convoys in the south Atlantic. He read the latest brigade reports from the European riot cities. He saw the latest telex from the East African campaign, where a combined force of Indian and Turkish troops under Supreme Council mandate was bringing the remainder of Kenya’s agricultural land into Scheduled Zone control. Casualties among the resisting farmers were not as heavy as the chiefs of staff had projected.
“That will disappoint the public,” said the young German controller, “fewer mouths to feed—that’s what everybody thinks when they hear about deaths and disasters. They’d be dancing in the streets if the old bubonic plagues came back—somewhere else, of course.”
“Fewer mouths means less manpower,” the commissioner said firmly. “We are having to declassify another ten thousand kilometers of roads in southern Europe because we don’t have the men to maintain them.”
“But the air is cleaner, sir.”
“You think starvation is a reasonable price to pay for clear blue skies?”
By 0730 hours he was at the marble-topped desk in his own office, a long, windowless room with a low ceiling and only one chair—his own. As he signed letters and directives typed the previous evening, he thought of old Josef’s words —“Keep me alive ’’—one old man speaking for the millions. He was their protector; he needed no other justification.
At 0800 hours his personal secretary, Madelaine Schumann, a 50-year-old Viennese who had been with him for nine years, arrived. Many wondered why so important a man kept such a plain woman as his secretary, but, in his experience, beauty had no loyalty. At 0825 Mazzini, head of the WFC networks, came on the
videoconsole of his desk console.
“Mazzini—I want an all-networks report on the London riots for Sunday—prime time in all zones. Better satellite it to the U.S. as well. You think an hour would be too long? Khomich is handling it—Maximum Impact.”
“For me a minute of The Butcher’ is too long, Commissioner, speaking as a human being—but, as network controller, I have to acknowledge his star rating—he deals in death and that is what viewers like— other people dying, of course.”
“I want it presented more in sorrow than anger— don’t let it sound like a grim warning.”
“Understood. You are coming to our preview this morning?”
“Yes.”
Mazzini’s smiling face went off vision. He was loyal—yet why did he make that remark about Khomich? Everybody knew that he had personally brought Khomich up from the ranks. Was it a criticism of himself?
Schumann showed in Secretary for Population Eisentrager, a man he had known and trusted for a quarter of a century, a bit of a pedant, but a dedicated servant to the ideals of WFC.
“I don’t understand why you want the reports withdrawn, Commissioner,” said the thin, doleful Bavarian.
“What the hell got into you, Kurt?”
“Facts must be faced, Commissioner. Those sample areas are our showpieces. They were among the first to
come under full WFC control. No child is born but to parents who meet our highest medical and psychological criteria. There have been no epidemics and not even any temporary food shortages.”
‘‘How could the population be dropping then?”
‘‘Computer analysis revealed several factors. A slight increase in miscarriages, an increase in the suicide rate— ”
“Suicide?”
‘‘We live in a depressing world, Commissioner.”
‘‘But those areas have had no food shortages.”
‘‘Technically, no. According to our nutritionists the Grade One and the Grade Two rations contain all the proteins, carbohydrates, fats, salts, and vitamins necessary to sustain active life. But we are not battery hens, Commissioner. We left our ape cousins behind in the equatorial forests because Homo sapiens could eat anything, therefore he could live anywhere and adapt to all climatic conditions. Perhaps his varied diet was what opened up his brain and made him curious about the world and his place in it. The main factor in these population samples is a rising incidence of failure to conceive—among healthy, scientifically-selected breeding couples. There seems to be no physiological reason. Is it simply boredom? Monotony? Perhaps men need the psychological release of intermittent gluttony, perhaps it was wars and violence that made us strong— ”
The Micronauts Page 2