To the socially controlled, highly integrated economy of Twenty-First Century Federation America, Carl Englehardt was an enigmatic anachronism. Nobody knew, for certain, die true extent of the industrial constellation he headed. The analysts and doom-harbingers in DEPCO clucked and squawked in protest, propounding theories and citing figures that Englehardt and a stable eco-govemment were mutually exclusive and could not conceivably coexist in the same plane. But they inevitably had to ask Englehardt what his plans were for the next two or three year period when they were setting up the parameters for the annual VE economic prognosis, and they had to admit, however grudgingly, that Englehardt’s vast interlocking holdings were invariably the buffer that absorbed the stresses and strains of the annual VE plan.
Since the earliest days of the VE system, Englehardt had walked the tightrope of that controversy, managing a balance of opposing forces with a finesse that was exceeded only by the legendary skill with which BRINT effected the balance of power in the Eastern turmoil.
And now, faced with a crisis, they were turning to him again. As the car left the overhead road and moved down toward the circle of government buildings, Englehardt considered the circumstances. He knew what they wanted, and he knew, on the other hand, what he was prepared to provide. The meeting would be a violent one. But violence was no stranger to him.
He had weathered violence before, and survived.
Mark Vanner had predicted, almost to the week, the time when the society of the late 1990’s, like a Hegelian pot of water absorbing energy without recognizable change, would suddenly begin to boil. In the case of the old United States economy, it was crumble rather than boil, but the pattern of collapse had followed exactly and disastrously the steps that Vanner had outlined as much as ten years before.
The brilliant sampling and determinants theory for constructing a total sociological-economic-psychological picture of a nation at any given moment in time had been the work of the obscure British economist Peter Elling, but the mathematical extension of the theory into a workable, reliable technique for predicting and controlling the future was the creation of sociologist-mathemetician Mark Vanner. He had tried in vain to convince the shaky, frightened Hartman administration that the wild, exhaustive race with the Eastern bloc to mount permanent, maimed and armed satellite ships in space and manned garrisons on the moon was leading the country to the brink of economic disaster; that unless it were stopped in time, it would inevitably lead to a total collapse of the economy. It had been clear since the early 1960s that a dangerous proportion of the national reserve of money and man-hours was being poured into defense tactics, but the continuing drain of the XAR spaceship project was staggering, multiplying with each succeeding year.
Carl Englehardt had read Vanner’s works, had talked with Vanner, and had seen the fissures in the clay. He was fifty then, chairman of the board of Robling Titanium, and in a small way a strikingly successful man. Robling had been supplying structural titanium to the spaceship project in New Mexico, the project Vanner had denounced so clearly as the economic blight of die century, and he realized that when the abreaction came, the spaceships and everything connected with them would be trampled under.
He also realized that the Eastern bloc would wait, poised and ready, until the American economy had broken at the wheel, and then launch the all-out H-missile attack that would finally and decisively destroy the North American continent as a political or military threat.
What Englehardt did then was still considered by some to be the most colossal act of high treason in the history of Man; by others, a stroke of military and diplomatic genius. It was during the first barely evident economic dehydration of the early weeks of the crash that he made his proposal to the President. By having parts made in European factories, and by having the parts assembled and tested by Ferranti and launched from British installations in Australia, Englehardt was in a position to supply intercontinental ballistic missiles accurate within one mile of ground zero with a maximum range of eight thousand miles. Such missiles had already been built and tested by Robling subsidiaries, and could be delivered to specified launching sites at the rate of ten per day. If prepared and stationed quickly enough, they could forestall the H-missile attack from the East which was almost a day-to-day certainty.
The missiles would be delivered to the American government in exchange for food; there was no money available, with the strangling cost of the still uncompleted satellite ships and, anyway, Englehardt was clearly aware that within a few short months money would no longer buy work.
But there was a single condition. The Robling missiles were not for sale. They were for rent.
There would be no blueprints. The missiles would be manufactured, sealed, and aimed for launching by Robling employees. The design of the guiding mechanism and the propellant would remain the exclusive private domain of Robling Titanium.
The proposal was staggering in its audacity. The Hartman administration was still not convinced that Vanner was right, and chose to bicker. Already the economy was splitting at the seams, the stock market lurching, strikes spreading, food supplies in urban areas becoming scarce, but they would not agree to Englehardt’s terms. There were threats, accusations, appeals to patriotism, but Englehardt had remained adamant. He did not want his designs and his technicians commandeered, his contracts and legal protection invalidated and himself impoverished and cast out by any sudden governmental confiscation of private properties during the impending crisis. He had deep-rooted, almost archaic convictions against socialization and government ownership after the still memorable experiences of the Sixties.
He would not yield. Quite abruptly, he vanished. Before the Hartman administration could reconsider, the horror of a great national economy in its death agonies was sweeping the western hemisphere. In three short days the stock market collapsed and ceased to exist as an instrument of business exchange when the New York Stock Exchange was raided and burned by panic-stricken mobs. The military struggled helplessly to contain the spreading violence in the face of its own mounting toll of insubordination and desertions. Within weeks the value of the dollar had dwindled to nothing; in the overcrowded cities, thieving, blackmarketing and prostitution ran rampant. The embattled government withdrew to the armored sub-basements of the Pentagon to await the inevitable attack of H-missiles from the East.
But the attack from the East never came.
Gradually, the reason why became clear. Ten missiles a day were emerging from the Robling foreign interlock, paid for by the British, and guarded by the British, who had fewer scruples about dealing with private munitions makers than the Hartman administration had had. A series of highly publicized demonstrations had been conducted, proving conclusively that the Robling missiles would do all that Englehardt had promised they would do, and the British published an ultimatum that pulled the teeth of the Eastern bloc: Any H-missile launched, from either the East or the West, would be intercepted and answered by Robling missiles. The British, for the first time in eighty years of tight-rope walking between the Cold War powers, now held the whip hand.