“So you seriously plan to overthrow the Party?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“That woman you brought with you says she can keep you alive by making you a cause celebre.”
“Celia?” Casper blinked. “She's probably right.”
“Then why bother with the rest of this?”
Casper suddenly looked blank.
“I don't know,” he admitted. He looked back at the computer screen in puzzlement.
“You said you had several reasons for this stuff.”
“Yeah,” Casper said, still puzzled. “I'm trying to gauge the depth of existing resentment, and to make indirect contacts with any organizations that can be recruited to help us.”
“All in service to the revolution?”
“I guess so.”
“I think you're wasting your time.”
Casper looked up. “Oh?”
Colby nodded. “I've studied Mao and Lenin and the rest-maybe you think they were wrong about how to run a government once they'd succeeded, we don't have to agree on that, I don't necessarily agree with them myself, but you'll admit they understood how to stage a revolution, won't you?”
“I suppose so,” Casper said-not so much because he agreed, since he had not actually read Mao and Lenin, as to see where Colby was leading.
“Well, they agree, and anyone can see, that the peasants-the common people, they don't need to literally be peasants-will obey whoever is in power; as Mao put it, the masses need not be educated in the new thought until after the revolution. If you seize the centers of power, the existing power structure will yield.”
“Uh huh. Sure. Seize the centers of power. And how are you planning to do that?”
Colby frowned. “We do need a solid cadre, ready to die for the cause, before we can take control of the communications and command centers. But you don't recruit true revolutionaries by posting frivolous complaints about government abuse; everyone knows the government is corrupt.”
“Oh, I see-and you've been able to recruit these loyal troops we need? Like Ed, the guy the rest of you watch nervously because he blew up that cop four years ago? Or wasn't I supposed to notice that?”
Colby stared angrily at him.
“Look,” Casper explained, “you're right that I'm not going to suddenly convert anyone; I'm mostly just planting seeds that may or may not yield something later. But I'm also providing encouragement for anyone who's already on our side to join us.”
Colby considered that, then changed the subject.
“And if you succeed,” he said, “you plan to replace the corrupt so-called Party with true representives of the people, and redistribute the stolen wealth of the capitalists to the workers?”
Casper stared up at him.
“Jesus,” he said, “what rock did you crawl out from under? No, I'm not going to do anything like that! I want a proper, democratically-elected government, and a free-market economy-I'm an American, for heaven's sake!”
“Isn't that what we have now?” Colby asked sardonically.
Casper blinked.
Colby waited for a reply, but Casper could not come up with anything to say, and at last Colby snorted in disgust and turned away.
Casper watched him go.
And finally, the words came to him, too late to be spoken aloud.
No, they didn't have a democratically-elected government, they had a one-party state. Even in the primaries, when there were primaries, the only choices the voters were offered had been selected for them from the class of professional politicians by other professional politicians. And they didn't have a free market economy because the Consortium and the other government-granted monopolies had, with the help of the Party politicians, taken over the marketplace and rearranged it to suit themselves.
But was that enough to justify a revolution? The politicians had been elected; even if people weren't happy with them, they'd voted for them. The two old parties had been merged into the Party to deal with the Crisis, and the Party had done what it promised. The Crisis was over, but the people still voted for the Party; the Greens held a few West Coast seats in Congress, but not enough to matter, while the Libertarians and Socialist Workers and the rest couldn't get more than one or two percent of the vote.
And that meant that those people were hardly likely to march in the streets in protest, let alone take up arms and assault the power stations and communications centers.
Casper frowned.
There was something wrong here. There was something in his thinking that didn't match the real world.
If it was his thinking, at all.
He'd never really hated the Party before; he'd considered it a sort of necessary, or at least inevitable, evil. A divided, two-party government had been inefficient and wasteful, unsuited to the complex modern world, and had brought on the Crisis, when the American economy virtually collapsed-that's what the propaganda always said, and most of the American people believed it. George Washington's warning against political parties was a favorite theme in Party literature, and the countries of eastern Europe, with their dozens of parties and unstable coalition governments, were held up as bad examples-better by far, the Party said, to have one organization providing the candidates. And everyone agreed that the little parties, with their extremist views, were all just eccentrics and crazies, relics of an earlier era. No one wanted them in power. The Greens were useful as a prod, but nobody wanted a Green government.
Casper had always gone along without really thinking about it. He'd been too busy with his own problems to care about politics.
But now he was thinking about it. He thought about it constantly. He was obsessed with politics, with strategies and tactics, with theories of government and constitutional rights, all of it stuff that had never concerned him before.
This wasn't anything a spy would need, let alone an assassin-but it wasn't, Casper realized, his own thinking at all.
Just what had NeuroTalents put in his head?
Chapter Sixteen
“If you look at history,” Casper said, “you'll see that a revolution can only succeed if the military either supports it or remains neutral. The final Soviet coup failed because the military came out for Yeltsin; Napoleon succeeded where Robespierre failed because he had the army behind him.”
“You think you can subvert the military, then?” Colby asked. He, Casper, and Ed, the bearded member of PFC, were seated around the kitchen table, talking.
Casper considered that question for a long moment, then admitted, “Probably not. Not as it's presently constituted.”
“Then how can you expect to win?” Ed demanded. “Maybe now you're beginning to see why we've used terrorism-there isn't much hope in historical models, but we have to do something.”
“But it won't work,” Casper insisted. “Terrorists can't overthrow a government. The only times terrorism has been at all successful have been in driving out an occupying army, by making it too expensive to stay; that's not the situation here. An occupying army has somewhere else to go home to; the Democratic-Republican Party doesn't.”
“We know it doesn't work,” Colby said, glaring at Ed. “That's why we stopped. But what other choice do we have?”
“You have to take the long view,” Casper replied. “Build up discontent, use non-violent civil disobedience, force the government to crack down-that makes the people in power appear as oppressors.”
“They are oppressors.”
“Of course, but you have to make them look the part.”
“Which is what you're doing,” Ed said. “Well, I don't have your patience.” He stood up.
Casper watched as Ed walked away, then turned to Colby, who shrugged and sat silently in his chair.
Casper was thinking over what he had just said to Ed, and trying to match it against reality-the reality of the history of the United States.