Apart from all the other things the War had done, it made a pretty big change in my personal life. Congress got nervous, and so weapons research got a huge infusion of money. The Fort doubled its lab space. So then they needed somebody with the right degrees and the amount of right at-the-front experience to head it up. The one they picked was me. I was never sure why. Silvie—we were still married then—refused to believe that it was just that I was Iraqi by ancestry and the government wanted to show all the other Arab-Americans that Arabs were considered as loyal as anybody else, but I was never really convinced that that hadn’t been a big part of the reason.
Naturally the promotion was the end of my career as a working scientist, even as the kind of working scientist that sniffed around captured Islamist labs for signs of worrisome weaponry. I had now become an administrator.
Whether I was qualified for that sort of thing or not is a whole other question. The government didn’t care much about physics any more. Biowarfare looked cheap and effective. And what, for instance, did I know about polymerase chain reactions or maintaining a database of aerosolizable organic molecules? Not much, surely, but things like that were pretty basic to the Fort’s work those days. We just didn’t make nasties to kill Arabs with, we did our best to identify Arab bioweapon nasties before they spread enough to kill too many of our people. Like, for instance, inventing quick-acting techniques to electrospray suspicious compounds into a mass spectrometer and—well, never mind. That’s the general idea, anyway.
Of course, we did do the nasties, too, because the DOD was convinced that you could never have too much of a bad thing. The big debate in the Fort one week was picking the best ways to deploy the toxic strains of Sargasso actinobacteria and firmicutes that the biomass people had come up with. The way they seemed to think would be most convenient was to seed the shallow waters of Arab bathing beaches with them.
That was when I realized I was losing Silvie. “But you’re talking about killing children,” she complained when she heard about it. She was really, really angry, but I refused to discuss it with her. She wasn’t supposed to know about those things, and I had a pretty good idea of which of my scientists had leaked it to her. I thought about turning the leaker in, but that would have been too personally embarrassing, since he, as it happened, had recently become my wife’s lover.
But, as I say, that was a long time ago.
When those Beloved Experimenter kooks began to show up I didn’t take them very seriously at first. The Fort wasn’t their first target, and I didn’t really care much about what they were doing to the churches.
Not to just some of the churches, either. What I mean is to all of them. I guess that was predictable enough. The churches were the institutions that got hurt worst when the idea of an alien experimenter began to take hold, and human beings, like hyenas, do love to pick on the weakest animals. So first, at Sunday services—well, at the Jewish Saturday ones too, because the Beloveds were a pretty ecumenical lot—you’d see one or two pickets wearing sandwich boards with messages like, “You do know it’s all a lie, don’t you?” Then you’d begin to see dozens of the pickets, then hundreds, marching civilly enough around the churches’ parking lots. Then, when it got to be thousands, the picketers hardly had anybody left to picket anymore, because by then they way outnumbered the handful of people that were still inside.
Then, when the religions were so battered that they weren’t much fun any more, the Beloveds began to move on to other targets. First they did the Congress and the Senate and the White House and all the lesser governing bodies.
Why did they pick the politicians? Certainly not because there was anything the politicians could do, because there wasn’t. But when things go wrong you blame the politicians. You don’t necessarily have any better ideas than they do, but they’re there for the purpose of being blamed. That’s the American way.
Then, I guess having run out of more powerful people to blame, they got around to us.
Actually I was a little surprised they had taken so long. It seemed to me that the Fort, and all the other scientific labs and institutions in the world, were tempting targets for more reasons than one. The Beloved Experimenter people really got a kick out of having this new proof that the world’s most celebrated scientists were as full of crap as their local Congressman.
We couldn’t debate them any more, either. That was a letdown, because we’d really been used to those debates, you know. Since time immemorial, we scientists had been plagued by arguments from the inerrant Bible people and the flat-Earthers and the anti-evolutionists and the flying saucerers and every other sort of nut that thought their intuitions trumped natural physical law. We didn’t always win the debates. Witness Galileo and the Roman Inquisition, for instance. But we did win sometimes then and couldn’t win ever again now, because this time the flakes and the nutcases weren’t any wronger than we had been all along.
Even when the demonstrators multiplied into the thousands they weren’t a serious physical threat to us. The town cops just borrowed more crowd-control stuff from neighboring municipalities, and the Beloveds got herded off to side streets and parks where no one would be much bothered by them. Half of the cops were overseas veterans from places like Iberia and the Moroccan beaches. After their struggles with the mujahadeen, a few thousand chanting crazies were no problem.
Until they were.
The biggest mob yet turned up on Christmas Eve. They were divided about half and half between the ones chanting slogans about the Beloved and the ones who were singing “Silent Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” They weren’t divided any other way. They stuck together no matter what the cops did and, of course, because of the holidays the police force was depleted. The cops left on duty couldn’t hold them. Two or three thousand of the demonstrators came boiling through our gates, and then it was up to our MPs. Who were, God (if any) be thanked, up to the task, because the MPs’ numbers weren’t depleted at all. None of them had received any Christmas leave; the Fort had abolished all holidays long before. Those guys were combat veterans, too, and they were spoiling for the fight because policy had made us keep them out of all the crowd-control problems that the town cops were supposed to handle. Military didn’t bother with civilian and civilian didn’t touch military, those were the rules. The MPs kept the mob moving right down to the parade ground, and then they began carving them up into parcels of a hundred demonstrators or so and herding them to places where they could conveniently be detained for as long as we liked.
When I saw from my window that Billy de Blount was in the crowd it occurred to me that it would be a generous act to have him brought up to my office, maybe even to share my Christmas Eve meal.
I don’t know why I wanted to be generous to the little turd. He had been nothing but an annoyance all those years when he was growing up across the street. Not so big an annoyance, though, that I wanted to stick him with the dried food packets and unbottled water which were all he would get from my MPs.
I always thought that was no way for a civilized human being to live. Certainly I wouldn’t like it for myself, and I don’t suppose my cousin Fahzeed had liked it either.
I haven’t mentioned Fahzeed. His problem was that his parents had emigrated to the States just as mine had, all right, but they had taken their time about it. They wanted to be absolutely sure before they moved. So Fahzeed had been born in Basra. Which meant that when the War got sticky and the American government began rounding up all the country’s Arabs and Islamists they left me alone. U.S. born, already a first lieutenant in the American army, I was a protected species. Fahzeed wasn’t. He got a resettlement camp in Utah that was called the Salt Lake Protective Custody Depot, along with eighteen or twenty thousand other possible, but not definite enough to make it to the penal camps in Alaska and Guam, security risks.