"So?"
Matson said grimly, "So our UN Secretary General had a mandate before he had a solution. And to the German mind that means one thing and one thing only. The cat and rat farm solution." Or, as he now suspected, the dog-food factory solution.
It had been suggested, ironically, in imitation of Swift, by a fiction writer of the 1950s, that the "Negro Question" in the U.S. be solved by the building of giant factories which made Negroes into canned dog food. Satire, of course, like Swift's A Modest Proposal, that the problem of starvation among the Irish be solved by the eating of the children... Swift himself lamenting, as a final irony, that he had no children of his own to offer to the market for consumption. Grisly. But —
This all pointed to the seriousness — not merely of the problem of overpopulation and insufficient food production — but to the insane, schizoid solutions seriously being considered. The brief World War Three — never officially called that; called instead, a Pacifying Action, just as the Korean War had been a "Police Action" — had taken care of a few millions of people, but — not quite enough. As a solution it had worked to a partial extent; and was, in many influential quarters, viewed exactly as that: as a partial solution. Not as a catastrophe but as a half-answer.
And Horst Bertold had promised the balance of the answer.
Whale's Mouth was it.
"So in my opinion," Matson murmured, to himself mostly, "I've always been suspicious of Whale's Mouth. If I hadn't read Swift and C. Wright Mills and the Herman Kahn Report for Rand Corporation..." He glanced at Freya. "There have," he said, "always been people who would solve the problem that way." And I think, he thought, as he listened to the aud tape of the crowd noises, a tape which pretended to consist of a transcript from the launching, at Whale's Mouth, of the ritualistic, celebration-inspired time capsule back through hyper-space — or in some such ultra high velocity fashion — to Terra, that we have those people and that solution with us again.
We have, in other words, UN Secretary General Horst Bertold and Trails of Hoffman Limited and its economic multi-pseudopodia empire. And dear Dr. Sepp von Einem and his many Telpor outlets, his curiously one-way teleporting machine.
"That land," Matson murmured, vaguely quoting, lord knew who, what sage of the past, "which all of us must visit one day... that land beyond the grave. But no one had returned to report on't. And until they do — "
Freya said perceptively, "Until they do, you're going to stay suspicious. Of the whole Newcolonizedland settlement. Aud and vid signals are not good enough to convince you — because you know how easily they can be faked." She gestured at the deck running the tape at this very moment.
"A client," Matson corrected her. "Who on a nonverbal level, what our Reich friends call thinking with the blood, suspects that if he takes his one remaining inter-stellar worthy flagship, the — " What was it called? "The Navel," he said. "The Omphalos; that's what that lofty Greek word means, by the way. Takes the Navel direct to Fomalhaut, that after eighteen years of weary deep-sleep which is not quite sleep, more a hyponagogic, restless tossing and turning at low temp, slowed-down metabolism, he will arrive at Whale's Mouth, and oddly it will not be beer and skittles. It will not be happy conapt dwellers, smiling children in autonomic schools, tame, exotic, native life forms. But — "
But just what would he find?
If, as he suspected, the aud and vid tracks passing from Whale's Mouth to Terra via von Einem's Telpor mechanisms were covers — what really lay beneath?
He simply could not guess, not when forty million people were involved. The dog-food factory? Are, god forbid, those forty million men, women and children dead? Is it a boneyard, with no one there, no one even to extract the gold from their teeth — because now we use stainless steel?
He did not know, but — someone knew. Perhaps entire New Whole Germany, which, having cornered the lion's share of power in the UN, hence ruled throughout the nine planets of the Sol system; perhaps as a totality it, on a subrational, instinctive level, knew. As, in the 1940s, it had intuited the existence of the gas chambers beyond the cages of twittering birds and those high walls that kept out all sight and sound... and except for that oddly acrid smoke from chimneys all day long —
"They know," Matson said aloud. Horst Bertold knew, and so did Theodoric Ferry, the owner of THL, and so did doddering but still crafty old Dr. von Einem. And the one hundred and thirty-five million inhabitants of Neues Einige Deutschland, to some degree; not verbally — you couldn't put an expert psych rep of Lies Incorporated in a small room with a Munich cobbler, run a few routine drug-injections, make the standard quasi-Psionic transcripts, EEGs of his para-psychological reactions, and learn, know, the literal, exact truth.
The whole matter was, damn it, still obscured. And this time it was not cages of twittering birds or shower baths but something else — something, however, equally effective. Trails of Hoffman published 3-D, multicolor, brilliantly artistic, exciting brochures displaying the ecstatic life beyond the Telpor nexus; the TV ran ceaseless, drive-you-mad ads all day and night, of the underpopulated veldt landscape of Whale's Mouth, the balmy climate (via olfactory track), the warm the-answer-is-yes two-moon-filled nights... it was a land of romance, freedom, experimentation, kibbutzim without the desert: cooperative living where oranges grew naturally, and as large as grapefruits, which themselves resembled melons or the breasts of the women there. But.
Matson decided carefully, "I am sending a veteran field rep across, via normal Telpor, posing as an unmarried businessman who hopes to open a watch repair retail shop at Whale's Mouth. He will have grafted sub-derm a high-gain transmitter; it will — "
"I know," Freya said patiently; this was evening and she obviously wished for a relaxation of the grim reality of their mutual business. "It will regularly release a signal at ultra-high frequency on a none-used band, which will ultimately be picked up here. But that'll take weeks."
"Okay." He had it now. The Lies Incorporated field rep would send back a letter, via Telpor, in the customary manner encoded. It was that simple. If the letter arrived: fine. If not —
"You will wait," Freya said, "and wait. And no encoded letter will come. And then you will really begin to think that our client, Mr. ben Applebaum, has tripped over something ominous and huge in the long darkness which is our collective life. And then what will you do? Go across yourself?"
"Then I'm sending you," Matson said. "As the field rep there."
"No," she said, instantly.
"So Whale's Mouth frightens you. Despite all the glossy, expensive literature available free."
"I know Rachmael is right. I knew it when he walked in the door; I knew it from your memo. I'm not going; that's that." She faced her employer-paramour calmly.
"Then I'll draw at random from the field-personnel pool." He had not been serious; why should he offer his mistress as a pawn in this? But he had proved what he wished to prove: their joint fears were not merely intellectual. At this point in their thinking neither Freya nor he would risk the crossing via Telpor to Whale's Mouth, as thousands of guileless citizens of Terra, lugging their belongings and with innocent high hopes, did daily.