“No. We’ve had the Crandall video decrypted. They’re animations. Is he dead?”
“Certainly not. He—he wanted animations. Security reasons. Can’t reveal.”
“Oh, yes? Very improbable. I’ve spoken to the Inner Circle. You are to be detained pending an investigation. Please come along.”
Watson pointed at the guards, spoke in his most authoritative tone. “This man is attempting a coup. Drag him out of here and lock him up.”
They didn’t respond. They walked across the room, stepping around the boxes, but working their way implacably to him. Giessen had chosen men loyal to him.
The mirror-visored helmets reflected his face as they came toward him. He saw himself, doubly reflected. Shaking, angry.
Saw his own image get closer and bigger. And saw the expression on his face change as they took him by the wrists.
Change from anger to fear.
Russ Parker blurted the whole thing as he rushed through the hatch of Claire’s office, barely clearing the low doorframe with his head as he came in. “He’s frozen the doors! He brought one of those autohacker programs with him, booted it into the door control. They’re locked but good. Permanently. Shutting off the power wouldn’t help.”
Stoner, sitting on the only other chair in the little office, was staring at the monitor that showed Witcher’s apartment door. Two Colony Security guards were there, working at it with tools. “How long will it take them to get through?”
Claire, sitting at her desk nursing a cup of cold coffee, said, “Two hours. It’s pretty well reinforced. Could take even longer, in fact. We can’t blast through—he’s too near the outer hull. Too much risk we’d rupture the Colony. Anyway, he’s got bodyguards in there. Those women—with their guns. They could hold off our people indefinitely from in there.”
The fone on Claire’s desk chimed. Witcher smiled out of the little monitor. “Hello, all,” he said. “And how are we today? One big happy family?”
Claire switched on the fone’s cam so Witcher could see her. “We’ve got the full story now, Witcher,” she said, trying to control the tone of her voice. Best not to provoke this paranoid. “We know about the S1-L and the timetable. What we don’t know is why. You want to tell me about it?”
“Is this some sort of delaying tactic till they can break through the door? They’ve got a long way to go. You can tell them to stop, though. First of all—I’m well protected here.” He gestured, and the big busty blonde stepped into the shot, brandishing an autopistol.
God, Claire thought, what an arrested adolescent this old man is. Keeping walking-talking soft-core porn foldouts around him. Barbie-on-Her-Honeymoon dolls with GI Joe accessories. Too much James Bond in his youth. Why hadn’t she realized before how sick he was? Psychopaths are clever. That’s why.
“Second,” Witcher went on, “don’t try it, because if you do, I’ll transmit the signal ahead of time, if anyone interferes with me here. I prefer to time things my way, to get all my people under cover, but if I have to…” He shrugged. “And don’t think about interfering with my transmitter. I have a monitor on it for spacecraft. If any of your EVA pods come near it, I’ll know. I’ll transmit.” He clapped his hands together once. “You’ve got thirty seconds to tell them to stop.” He kept smiling, pleasant as a kiddy-show host.
Claire hesitated, then said, “Hold on.” She cut to another line, called the guards, gave the order and quickly came back to Witcher.
“It sounds as if they’ve stopped,” he said.
“They have. So now it’s not a delaying tactic, you can tell us what the fuck you think you’re doing.”
He looked at her with a little surprise. “Hanging out with those streetfighters affected your speech mannerisms. Well, yes, I’ll tell you. I was planning to tell you, a little later, anyway. I was going to warn the resistance people to take refuge just before it all went down. Minutes before.”
“Killing how many others?” she asked hoarsely.
“With luck, ninety percent of the population of the world, Claire. Across racial boundaries. Across the spectrum. The S1-L virus is not racially selective. And I’m no racist. I will, in fact, be killing most of the racists. I’m having the canisters placed that way. This will eliminate the Second Alliance. And that’s just the beginning. We’ll have a chance to make the world a just place to live, for the first time.”
“Yeah,” Russ muttered, “you’re real morally uplifting.”
Claire gestured at Russ for silence. She bent closer to the fone-cam. “Go on.” Thinking that if she understood his logic, maybe she could talk him out of it.
Witcher sipped a mineral water reflectively, and then said, “Why do you suppose racism arises? Why conflicts of any kind, really. It’s all instinct. Sociobiological necessity. Xenophobia coming out of territoriality responses. Ultimately, from a territory that’s overburdened by population, strain on its resources. Smoke believes much the same thing.”
“Up to a point, maybe.”
“But, you are implying, he would never advocate mass extermination for population control. Ah, now. True. It’s an ugly thing for me to do. It will create, in fact, major health problems on Earth due to all those decomposing bodies. For a while. But I’ll be up here, and most of the survivors will manage to protect themselves. The virus will die out. The bodies will be dealt with. The population of the Earth will be a tiny fraction of what it was—and suddenly, for the first time, Utopia will be possible, Claire.” Real fervor was coming into his voice now. “We’ve had the technology for Utopia for years—but population stresses made that technology more a disadvantage than an asset. Wipe out most of the population, and suddenly everything becomes manageable. We can let most of the planet revert to its healthy, natural state. We can afford to end pollution. We can organize a world government at last—in this situation, it would be inevitable. Think of it! One world! My company’ll be ready. My trained security people. We’ll take control. Slowly we’ll bring the population back up—but only a bit, to manageable levels. Most of the people in the world, Claire, are suffering—they are better off dead. We have to think of those who will come: they’ll live in a world without racism—I’ll outlaw even the faintest tinge of racism! A world without organized religion! I’ll outlaw that, too! A world without crime, because there’ll be abundance. A world without pollution. Without urban sprawl, or suburban blight. All those damnable housing projects. Gone, all of it. Look at that side of it. I’ll restructure things for real social justice. No more slums. An end to exploiting the Third World.”
“Christ,” Stoner said. “A liberal’s version of fascism.”
“It’s order, is what it is, order and peace. No armies when I’m done,” Witcher went on smoothly. “No more fighting. No wars! Not one more war!”
“Not one more word,” Russ interrupted. “I can’t handle one more word of this crap. This is some kind of special blasphemy against God. It’s as bad as the Second Alliance and as bad as Hitler.”
Claire nodded. Numb with disbelief. “You’ve been planning this all along, Percy?”
“No. I expected the NR would be a vehicle to overthrow the competition. Rid me of the other ones who want to unify the planet—enslaving it is their way of unifying it. I thought I’d see my chance at some point. And then one of my people made contact with Dr. Cooper, and after our London computer break-in cued me on their viral experimentation… Well, the S1-L has a short life. The other bioagents are too unpredictable, too long-lived. And of course, I didn’t want the racially selective one.”