Still, Chesley's first official act was to visit his old employer, and that made up for a lot, There is no need to go into details about it. Chesley was not yet used to throwing his weight around, but he knew the principles of throwing a scare into the lesser breeds, having been subjected to the technique many times, and it is of record that fifteen minutes after he had left the laboratory where he had formerly slaved, Dr. Pebrick called up his lawyer and made the will he had been putting off for ten years.
After that Chesley began to see the world.
He was amazed to see what sort of a world it was.
There are people who take seriously the pronouncements of politicians and government leaders, who realize the connection between a change of policy on bimetallism and the fact that today or tomorrow the price of eggs will go up or bombs will fall on Nova Scotia. Chesley was not one of them. He had heard everything the Viceroy had had to say, but it simply had not registered.
For example, there was the Viceroy's long and famous General Orders Number One, which prescribed exactly what the human race was required to do in order to make their miserable little pebble of a planet fit to be occupied by the Viceroy's race. The celebrated Para. iv (c) of those orders read:
It is contemplated that 50% of the human race will be required for maintenance duties under the occupation. Since the other 50% will not be adequate to the task of feeding the maintainers, it will be necessary to increase the adult, healthy human population as quickly as possible.
Therefore no beer; therefore no drugs; therefore no time wasted on amusements; therefore children, children, children. It was the Viceroy's orders. And the penalty for failure to comply was a violet flare and bam.
It had never occurred to Chesley that the flare might some day consume him. It simply didn't seem to matter. If it had been guaranteed that he would get it at a specific time, why, then, he might have paid some attention. But the danger was so indefinite that it seemed foolish to waste time on it.
Others were not so placid.
The old life was disintegrating. The mores of the world were changing every day—at least on paper; for what was permitted was compulsory, and nearly everything that was not compulsory was verboten. Artists were giving up their art ("non-essential") and musicians their music ("manpower-wasting") in order to go to work on a Viceroy's Project. It was like a great war effort. And yet there was none of the self-sacrifice, none of the shared resources that mark a people fighting a war. Everywhere there was springing up a shoddy second growth of new companies, new plants, that would somehow cash in on the great Projects. With the Viceroy creating money as he pleased, while governments stood by helpless, there was a fantastic spiral of inflation. The governments themselves were falling apart; no one would work for them. It paid off much better to be an agent of the Viceroy than to serve some possessor of minute authority like the American Government, the Russian, even the UN.
And there was one universal solvent—money.
On the first day of Chesley's employment in the V.G. he was offered a bribe. Berkeley Project Six Four Three had ordered a thousand bags of Portland cement; it was nearly half sand; the salesman grasped Chesley's hand anxiously and said, half pleading, half in contempt: "What's the difference, pal? A little sand isn't gonna hurt —saves putting the sand in later, right? Everybody's doing it." And when he took his hand away there was a thousand-dollar bill, wadded damply tight, left in Chesley's.
Chesley walked out of there and made a little note in his book; that was the first rule of the V.G.; anyone offering a bribe was to be reported for punishment.
But, somehow, that didn't seem to stop it. By the end of the second day he had been offered money to suppress a report on inferior steel alloy in fourteen thousand tons of I-beams; to help throw a contract to a firm that lacked plant, raw materials and employees; to change the wording of a bid specification so that a speculator could unload water-damaged organic chemicals, utterly worthless for any purpose. He was even bribed on general principles—because he was a member of the V.G., as a sort of general prophylaxis against any future illegal activities.
Chesley took his notebook in hand and reported to the District Sub-Office.
It was in a Project building—a spidery tripod a mile and a half high. Steel skeleton and blue-plastic frame, it rose on three thin legs, one planted firmly on lower Manhattan, one rooted in Staten Island, one plunging into the river off the Jersey piers. Chesley stepped into a glassy capsule at the base of the Manhattan leg and was blown by pneumatic force straight up the leg. It was a whirling, dizzying experience, but he could catch sight of the other Project buildings scattered across the land and sea—the giant bubbly dome over Astoria, Queens, with its revolving ruby lights; the pale, square monstrosity that floated in the ocean just off Coney Island; the sun glinting from the twenty enormous swimming pools the Viceroy had commanded all over New York and New Jersey.
Some day the Projects, all of them, would be used by the Viceroy's people, for purposes that were far outside of human understanding. But for now they belonged to the V.G., six-foot humans occupying rooms scaled for a race of no fixed size or shape, where some doors were so tiny a man had to crawl through on his belly, some ceilings so high that the lights had to be swung at the end of twenty-foot cables. Chesley slid through a narrow elliptical door marked AREA COMMANDER, saluted the first man he saw and said: "Sir, I wish to speak to Captain Carsten."
"Sit down, bud." The wind screamed and the overhead lights swung at the end of their long cables. Chesley took a seat on a curiously shallow bench at one end of the triangular room. It was full of members of the V.G., male and female, all in the blinding blue uniforms. They seemed to pay no attention to him—and even less attention to the TV repeaters that were scattered all over every room in the Project buildings, where every minute of every day the face of the Viceroy was in the screen ordering, exhorting, commanding his followers. Perhaps it was a recording, Chesley thought; although it seemed live, for at every twentieth word or so the Viceroy had to pause in what he was saying to glance at a memorandum handed him by a sweating human aide, or to stop, and close his eyes, and seem to concentrate for a second, while the faint halo flared around him. It was:
"—no human who dares interfere with the occupation of"—pause, while he glanced at a slip—"this miserable little planet by"—pause, while he closed his eyes and the halo glowed bright—"the invincible race I represent will escape. No, not one! And if any"—pause for another slip from another messenger—"human is presumptuous enough"— pause, while the halo flared—"to attempt to thwart my plan for"— pause again; and words and pauses and words and ...
Chesley stopped a girl in the blue uniform. "What's he doing?" he asked.
She stared at him. "Oh, a rookie. That's how he blasts 'em, boy," she said, and bustled on. Chesley was very impressed. Imagine seeing the Viceroy in the actual act of execution! It didn't seem to be very difficult for him—and yet, Chesley thought, if you assume that one person out of a thousand needs execution every year, and that there are three billion persons alive on the Earth, those three million annual executions must occur at an average rate of—of— of, he finally computed, one every ten seconds or so, night, day, weekends and Sundays included. No wonder the Viceroy was harried!