“Give us a break! We can’t right every wrong all the way back to Cain and Abel! We’ll do what we can to make territorial homelands for people who want ‘em. That’s the best we can offer.”
“You’re nuts. I am working for a sackful of certifiable pecans!”
“At least, we’ll try. We won’t just stand around with our fingers up our asses and watch doomsday come rolling in, like the politicians and liberals now.”
Lessing snorted.
The rattan porch chair squeaked and crackled as Wrench dragged it back out of the brazen sunshine. “How about it, Lessing?” He held out a hand. “You in or out? What do I tell Mulder?”
“I’ve already said. I don’t give one flying finger-jerk about your hare-brained ‘cause.’ You’re welcome toil. I workforpay. You pay, I work. Okay? Verstehen Sie? Tell your teddy-bear Führer that.”
Wrench shook his head. “Money’. A helluva reason to do things! Low class, man!”
“I know. It’s not everything.”
“But it’ll do until ‘everything’ comes along. Okay, I’ll tell Mulder. He won’t like it, and Goddard’ll beg for your balls on a platter. But Mulder’s the boss. He’s one of the Directors. I don’t mean a director of Indoco… they’re just front men… but a ‘Descendant ‘ in the Central Directorate of the movement. You saved his life, and he likes you.” He feigned a thick, British accent: “A mercenary’s mercenary, wot?”
Lessing opened the screen door. “Answer me one last question. Are you one of these… these…?”
“‘Descendants?’ Nope, just a red-blooded, American boy fresh out of Rapid City, South Dakota.”
“How did you get in with this gang? You always struck me as somebody with sense.”
“Just a maverick, I s’pose.” Wrench shifted to a cowboy twang. “Ever since ‘hah skull.’ Never did believe the cow-pucky they taught us in civics class. Started readin.’ Got interested in political systems, then in history, and then the Third Reich. Met a guy who knew a guy who knew Mr. Mulder, and here I am.”
“Jameela said you had an advanced degree…?”
“Oh, I do. But it didn’t completely wreck my ability to think, like it does for some folks.”
“God, a sackful of pecans…,” Lessing muttered to himself. He dove into the cool shadow beyond the screen door. Wrench stood and blinked after him for a moment, then followed.
A movement which proposes to reshape the world must serve the future and nor just the passing hour. On this point it may be asserted that the greatest and most enduring successes in history are mostly those which were least understood in the beginning, because they were in strong contrast to public opinion and the views and wishes of the time.
CHAPTER FIVE
Wednesday, July 9, 2042
The boardroom could have been anywhere: plastics, mahogany-J. veneer paneling, soft lights, air-conditioning, metal chairs with green upholstery, a polished, oaken table as big as two king-size beds, cut-crystal decanters, smeary-looking abstract paintings on the walls, and an enigmatic sculpture of crusty, black metal in one corner. All the trappings of corporate grandeur.
This particular room was part of a concrete-and-glass penthouse. Outside, seven stories down, were the streets of Guatemala City, rebuilt after the great quake of 2031. Colorful morning crowds bustled through the cement canyons, neither caring nor knowing about the assemblage gathered above.
Lessing leaned against the west wall, that farthest from the windows. The sun beat against the tinted glass, and he preferred the cooler, shadowier depths at the opposite end of the room. Chairs had been placed along the side walls for the “hired help.” Wrench sat in one of these, and Goddard occupied a place of greater glory just behind Herman Mulder himself. Lessing was tired of sitting. He had already drunk his fill of ice water, read two pages of Wrench’s news magazine, and nibbled on the bland crackers that the three dark-eyed Guatemalan female secretaries provided.
Lessing had spent much of his life among dark-eyed, brown-skinned people, men and women who gesticulated and spoke in alien tongues, who wore strange clothes, who ate foods that blazed with hot peppers and spices, who struggled and pushed and crowded… and hungered… and yearned… and demanded.
He considered that. The cover of Wrench’s magazine pictured a myriad of tiny, naked bodies swarming over one another like ants in a sugar bowl. Those at the bottom of the page were portrayed as crushed under the weight of those above and were colored a bloody scarlet. The yellow header said: “How ya gonna keep ’em…?”
The world overflowed with restless people, hordes of Asians and Africans and Latin Americans. Only disunity, inertia, and a certain lack of technology and organization kept them from spilling out of their boundaries and swamping the rest of the world beneath a sea of flesh. The magazine was not known for irrational doom-saying.
The West was moribund, it said. North America and Europe were strangling in their own pollution, their jungle of bureaucracies, their greedy lobbies, their economic woes, and their insoluble social ailments. The will to act was slipping away from Western society, day by day, hour by hour, like a rope from the clutches of a drowning man.
Wrench’s magazine also contained yet another fright lesson, one that was repeated almost daily: the specter of all-out war, the Atomic Debacle, the Big Ka-Boom! In 2010 the Vietnamese and the Chinese had lambasted each other with small but very dirty fission bombs. Now both Shanghai and Hanoi were fit only for tourists who enjoyed their vacations in radiation suits. A million people suffered from bums, wounds, and genetic defects.
It was a fright lesson indeed, one that might recur at any time, given humanity’s usual stupidity, poor judgment, and bad luck. The weapons were all set and ready; yet not even the saber-rattlers wanted to use them. Satellites infested the skies, silent fireflies in the dusk, but their particle beams, lasers, and missiles remained inert, and their functions were limited to intelligence gathering and communication. The ground silos were jammed with rockets and warheads, but none had ever gone screaming up to burst into flowers of crimson death. The submarines, the aircraft carriers, and the underwater launching sites were maintained, but toy boats in a bathtub saw more combat. The land armies and bases and all the rest of the accoutrements of war were the same: they stood idle in the fields and cities of the world, and no mighty hero dared send them to the attack.
An end to war? No Armageddon? No kidding?
Hallelujah!
It should be a happy time: children growing up in peace, their parents free of fear. Utopia! The Millennium! Humanity could go down on its collective knees and give thanks that the raging Flame Lord of the Rockets lay chained, gorged upon blood from the mayhem of all the ages gone before.
Yet there was a cost, one that was only now becoming apparent. It was a high cost indeed.
The world was at peace, but that peace could be maintained only by a dangerous and frustrating balancing act. Pull society one way, and something else had to tug it back again; otherwise equilibrium would be lost, and the rockets would rise, shrieking and hungry, upon grasshopper legs of fire.
It was a balancing act above a tiger pit. The world teetered and sweated above the lunging beasts of chaos. One could not allow changes, reforms, or major repairs to the social fabric. Inventions of the more radical sort were out, too; they were too unpredictable, too dangerous, too unbalancing.
One false step, and down went the circus’s only acrobat from the high-wire. Not with a whimper but with one hell of a thud. A fine finale for an audience on Alpha Centauri.
The world could make no major changes: none that mattered, not the ones needed to halt pollution, to slow the birthrate, to increase efficiency, to end festering social ills, to alter the structure of government and law and custom to conform with modern exigencies. The world hadn’t moved one way or the other in half a century. It didn’t dare.