Baisley DePauw picked up a picture of a black man.
"Dammit," one industrialist yelled. "If you want to discuss social programs, do it somewhere else. You're wasting our time with this crap."
"I am showing you a resource," said DePauw. He had dealt with these men and taken their measure, and their anger was just where he wanted it.
He showed a photograph of Lucius Jackson. "Resource," he said.
Someone guffawed. "That is about as much a resource as cancer," said a computer executive.
Baisley DePauw allowed a thin knowing smile to cross his face.
"This man, part-time pimp, part-time mugger, on and off welfare I don't know how many times, father of countless children he doesn't support, is now a fine worker who costs the manufacturer forty cents a day and, if he does reproduce, will give us another fine worker just like himself. Better workers than you have. And no union leaders to fight with."
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"I don't believe it. I don't believe in social programs."
"That's why I brought you down here. Gentlemen, just a few feet from here is my proof. We are going to revolutionize American labor practices, undercut Taiwan and Hong Kong on prices, and make our cities once again the playthings of the rich."
DePauw took them down to a subbasement and what the eight executives saw shocked them. There was a white man with a whip at one end of the small room. Thirteen black men stood at a conveyor belt. The first seven busily wrapped a metal band around a wooden pole and the last six busily unwrapped it. The men worked at a steady pace that did not slacken. They had chains on their ankles.
DePauw stood on a small balcony overlooking the work room. He yelled out to the first man in the line, "If you could have anything, what would you want?"
And Lucius Jackson smiled and said, "Sir, the only thing ah wants is for the line to be speeded up so I can meet my quota, sir."
DePauw turned and nodded, then closed the door behind him and took the eight executives back upstairs to his office suite.
One said, "We are talking about slavery. We are talking about the enslavement of human beings for profit. We are talking about the most reprehensible use of one human by another."
DePauw nodded. The other executives crowded around.
"We are probably talking about another civil war," said the executive.
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DePauw nodded again.
"We are talking about violating every civilized principle known to mankind."
"Not every one," said DePauw. "We will not desecrate private property."
DePauw watched these powerful men exchange glances. He knew the question that was coming. He knew as surely as he had known many of these men since childhood. He knew he was proposing a revolution with more real change in how people lived than any that had been done in Eussia.
"Baise," said the executive who had been doing the major share of questioning. "You know you have raised a very, very serious question here."
"I know," said DePauw.
"Can you," said the executive and now everyone hung on every word and everyone watched DePauw for his answer.
"Yes?" said DePauw, waiting for what he knew would come.
"Can you ... get skilled workers?"
"You bet your ass," said DePauw. "Skilled workers. The cheapest v/ork force since the Confederacy. Gentlemen, we will break the unions with the best scabs who ever lived. Slaves."
But some had doubts. It sounded too good to be true. DePauw pointed out that blue collar workers, who would ultimately lose the most from a slave labor force, would be the biggest supporters.
"I have a military arm already in operation," said DePauw, "but I don't think we'll ever need it. What I think we're going to do is to create a public sentiment so overwhelming that millions of
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people are going to fall in step behind our army and march on Washington and make them do what we want. We'll have a referendum and we'll carry it ten to one."
"You think Americans would vote to create a labor force that would wreck their own bargaining power?"
"I've been working on this plan since the sixties. Why do you think I financed all those militant blacks on television shows? You know who watched them? An eighty-one percent white audience. And when they were through, the whites who watched showed an overwhelming desire to shoot blacks. We have the old films of blacks saying they were going to get whitey. We've financed more black television this year than ever before. Next week we start our real advertising program, and just as it gets underway, nobody in America will be able to turn on a television set without seeing a black face telling them how if they don't move on over, he's going to move on over them. It's beautiful."
"Too bad Malcolm X is dead," said one executive. "You could have given him a TV series."
"We've got something just as good. A sociology professor telling whites how rotten they are and then in the background we show films of Harlem and the South Bronx and Watts and Detroit."
"But you'll never be able to get a national referendum on slavery."
"Oh, come on," said DePauw, a bit annoyed. "We're not going to call it that. It will be an affirmative action law, giving blacks a right to security and whites the right to safe streets. I haven't gotten this far thinking the American
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people know what they're doing. My family came over to this country in seventeen eighty-nine and we haven't stopped stealing since, and the only time we take a break is to receive a good citizenship award."
There was silence in DePauw's office suite.
"Baise, I don't know if the public will vote for it," said one executive.
"They've got to," said DePauw.
"Why?"
"I've got a real big advertising budget," DePauw said.
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CHAPTER SEVEN
There were police reports, newspaper reports, and in-depth analyses of the strange disappearance of the more than a dozen urban poor. Newspapers were still unsure of how many had really disappeared at the time of the invasion incident in Norfolk, because some might just have moved on to another town.
Chiun heard Ruby explain everything. She said her sources were better than newspapers or police.
"And what are you telling us all about it for?" asked Remo.
"Because I checked and the CIA don't know anything and I figured that organization of yours probably knows and you and the old gentleman can help me get Lucius back."
"First of all," Remo said, "I'm not working for that organization anymore. I quit. Second, why should I help you get Lucius back?"
"Because I saved your life and you owe me."
"And I got you out of jail," Remo said, "back on Baqia. So we're even."
"Not even," said Ruby. "Not even. I was gonna be getting out of that jail anyway and you just messed it up."
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"Well, I won't mess this up. Find Lucius yourself," Remo said.
"I saved your life," Ruby said. "I saved your life."
Chiun, seeing the possibility of Ruby and Remo presenting him with a male offspring slowly vanishing, nodded his head. "Remo, this is a debt unpaid. She gave us our lives, we must give her the life of this Lucius, whoever he is."
"My brother," said Ruby.
"See, Remo?" said Chiun. "Such devotion to family. Such a woman is a fine woman. She would make a wonderful mother for a male child."
"Knock it off, Chiun," said Remo. "I'm not going into stud service for Sinanju. All right, Ruby, we'll help you get your brother back. But we're not going to do it with the organization. I've quit and that's that."
"All right," said Ruby.
They went back to Norfolk, Virginia, and Chiun insisted that he and Remo stay with Ruby in the apartment over her factory. Perhaps proximity could produce the kind of results persuasion could not. His fourteen steamer trunks were moved into a back room of the small apartment and when Remo wasn't listening, Chiun told Ruby that he would get any male child from the relationship, providing it was healthy. The Gonzalezes could keep the females.