The Observers, page 21
part #2 of CV Series
The holo sound was turned down to where he could barely hear the voice of the announcer, but he caught the words, “has declared he will take a firm stand against…
There was a phone window at the bottom right, blank at the moment. Then the face of Colonel Harvine slid into view. He looked steadily at the Governor and spoke. “Sir, my men have taken up their positions. What are your orders?”
Three now? Too many?
No, stressed but stable. Four
more are waiting.
Here comes decision. Meanwhile a global topic.
I think he will Species can’t control
tell them to shoot. population
except by famine, war.
Can, but won’t.
Have tried, Can we inhibit conception? Why not let
failed. Would problem rest
mean being in every until we equal
female host at moment of population?
conception.
Might take seventy years.
Population now doubling every forty.
Means thirteen billion people.
What others? Impossible. Another
famine first.
Change network to make
females desire intercourse If they want children, will
only when not fertile? calculate dates, conceive
anyway.
True. Make them not
desire infants, then? Serious distortion.
Will cause other
imbalances.
He has decided. Call Here. Here. Here. Here,
the others. Heart stopping.
Now, all out!
But what is
optimum
*Pop.* *Pop.* *Pop.* *Pop.* *Pop.* *Pop.* *pop?*
The Governor had opened his mouth as if to speak. His face was a little more flushed than usual; then it seemed pale. With a startled look, as if he had suddenly remembered something, he pitched forward, turning slightly as he did so. One of the aides shouted, “Get the doctor!” Another knelt beside the body of the Governor and loosened his tie. The Governor seemed to be breathing, but by the time the doctor got there, he was dead.
36
The blond man smiled confidentially out of the tube. “Hello, I’m Fred Ostrow and this is Think Tank. Tonight we have with us John F. Persson, the distinguished foreign correspondent”—a gray-haired man who nodded without smiling—“T. Y. Okawa, president of the Wyandotte Foundation, and Barbara Pauling, the author of Being Everywhere.” The others smiled and nodded.
“We’re here,” said Ostrow, “to talk about a rather disturbing and significant development. In a series of recent events, it appears that a number of people have been killed by McNulty’s parasites when they were about to commit acts of violence, or, in three cases, to order them committed. The most familiar of these, of course, is Governor Tom Yount of Texas, just last week, but reports have been coming in of parallel events in Nigeria and Afghanistan. In brief, an army colonel in Nigeria collapsed when he was about to give the order to fire at a group of rebel soldiers. On the other side, the rebel commander also collapsed when he was about to give the same order. The two sides retired, and there was no bloodshed. In Afghanistan, a provincial governor appeared to be on the point of ordering the execution of fifty prisoners when he was stricken. In each case there was evidence that people around the victims, if I may call them so, had been infected with the McNulty parasite. Now I think you’ll all agree with me that it is too early to draw any firm conclusions, but I would just like you to speculate with me. Supposing it is true that the parasites are actually causing the death of people who attempt to injure other people, what will this mean to society? John?”
“Lawfully or unlawfully.”
“Yes, that’s right, and that’s an important point—”
“Yes, it is, because they don’t seem to distinguish between a soldier and a murderer. Now we have always made that distinction, but to an alien intelligence, if that’s what we’re dealing with here, the distinction might not make any sense. And indeed, we might find it hard to explain. Why is it not okay for a civilian to kill somebody, but okay for a soldier to do it?”
Okawa interjected, “They don’t care about our laws.”
“No, that’s probably so. After all, they’re really above our law, aren’t they?”
“Should we be afraid of them? Ms. Pauling.”
“Well, I think it’s natural to be afraid of them, because we know so little about them and they’re so powerful. But just looking at what they’re doing, I wonder if we shouldn’t be grateful to them instead. Can you imagine what it would be like if nobody could use force or violence against anybody else?”
“I can,” said Okawa, “and I’m a little more worried than Barbara. Remember we’ve always relied on violence or the threat of violence to keep order in society. Does this apply to policemen?”
“Apparently it does, at least there have been two cases of police officers dying suddenly while attempting to shoot a criminal. I agree with you that this is a problem we should explore. What are we getting into, if we go into a world without violence?”
“Let me suggest a scenario,” said Persson. ‘I’ll put this in general terms. Let’s say there’s a place where all the good agricultural land is owned by a few people, and there are a lot of landless farmers. One morning they say to themselves, let’s go take that land. And they just do it, they walk onto the land and say this is yours, this is mine, and they start farming. Now what does the landowner do?”
“He goes to court?”
“All right, and the court upholds his right to his land and issues a dispossess order. Now the sheriff or whoever it is comes out and serves the order. He says you’ve got to get out. The farmers don’t move. Now what?”
There was a little silence.
“Another issue that troubles me,” said Okawa, “is the moral dimension. In a sense, you might say that these creatures are making it impossible for us to sin. In that case, what happens to morality? Does it mean anything? Do we have a moral choice anymore, or are we just puppets?”
“Don’t you think some people would refrain from killing other people even if they didn’t know they’d be punished?” asked Pauling.
“Certainly, but—”
“Well, those people are certainly exercising a moral choice, and so are the other ones, or at least they have been. I mean, if you choose to murder somebody, that’s a moral choice, it just happens to be the wrong one.”
“Barbara, doesn’t it bother you that your kids might grow up being coerced into moral behavior, behaving well because of the fear of punishment—knowing there’s somebody watching every minute?”
“Yes, it does. But John, think about this a moment. I grew up knowing that if I did certain foolish things, like stepping off the curb into traffic, I would probably be killed. You know there are automatic punishments for certain things, and you just don’t do them. You don’t get careless with hot grease, you don’t stick your finger in a light socket, and it never occurs to you that you’re being manipulated to behave correctly or that you’ve lost any moral choice, you just know that’s the way it is. So I just don’t see there’s any big difference here, and one more thing. My son is probably not going to have to go to war, and my daughters probably are not going to get raped and murdered. I don’t care whether the men who might have raped and murdered them have lost their moral choice. I’m glad.”
“Isn’t there one difference?” asked Persson.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t stick your finger in a light socket because you know the laws of the universe will punish you. But now it seems you won’t hit anybody with a hatchet because some alien creature will punish you if you do.”
“Our new masters?” said Okawa.
After a while Draffy began to realize that his mind was changing about some things. Or not changing exactly but just a different slant. Well, there was a certain amount of B.S. in everything, wasn’t there? Maybe he hadn’t noticed so much before, but it didn’t make any difference, because he was committed to the principles that had made the country great and got him elected, and if he reneged on any of that where the hell would he go?
One thing he knew, the parasite had to be stopped. If it could give him even the shadow of a doubt, why, look at all the dim bulbs in the country who might be knocked over by it! He was delighted at the progress being made at the Medical Detention Center. He particularly liked the prototype detection devices which had been sent to the White House. As soon as the remodeling was done, he was going to have them installed in the anteroom to the Oval Office and the foyer outside his private quarters. When he knew that everybody who came near him had been screened, he would feel a lot safer. Yes, he had had the disease once, but what if he got it again? What if they came after him to change his mind? And of course he knew they would; that was obvious.
One afternoon he woke up from his nap boiling mad. It was as if something had happened during his sleep, as if they had almost got him. He dressed and called Buz and Larry into the office. “Draft me an emergency decree,” he said. “Any woman that’s pregnant, if she can show the virus was in her when she got that way, she can have an abortion for the asking. Then I want another one, where we can examine hospital records and if we find out there’s reason to believe a woman is carrying the virus, we can go to court and get an order for abortion. Third thing, I want an order setting up a national system of clinics, or whatever you want to call them, to examine kids under the age of four for signs of virus behavior. Kind of thing they’ve been finding on CV—little bastards don’t play with other kids, so on.” Buz started to speak, but Draffy overrode him. “And when we find those kids I want them put on CV for study or any damn thing, I don’t care what, but I don’t want them to come out.”
“Chief, that might be going a little bit far.”
The President turned to him. “Buz, this is the survival of America we’re talking about.”
“I know that, Chief, and you’re right, of course. All I’m thinking is, do we want to sit down and consider, are there things, like killing unborn children, that we’d say, well, we draw the line here, that’s not the kind of thing—” Draffy stopped him. “All right, I know, I know. Forced abortion and so on. Believe me, Buz, it’s the last thing in the world I would ever want to do. My God, you know that. But look at it from my position. Am I going to go down in history as the guy who saved the country by nipping this goddamn thing in the bud, never mind if I had to get a little bit rough? Or am I going to be the one who sat back and said, well, I’m too squeamish, let them take over. Suppose I did that, who the hell do you think would write the histories?” He was beginning to shake; his eyes were bloodshot and bulging. He struck the table with his fist. “They would, and they’d write whatever they damn please, because it would be all over with America!”
“Chief, you’re right, you’re absolutely right,” said Buz. He laid a hand on Draffy’s arm. “Easy, Chief, easy. Get Oliver in here,” he said to Larry.
“Well, I’m just—so—” Draffy’s face turned redder; his eyes clenched shut and moisture brimmed over the lids. “I have to carry the whole damn—”
“I know it, Chief, it isn’t fair, but you’ll come through. You always have and you always will.”
Oliver Grummond entered and put his black bag on the desk. “Get his jacket off,” he said. “Little too much tension again?” he asked the President. Draffy nodded, unable to speak. Buz was taking the jacket away; Larry rolled up the President’s sleeve, patted his shoulder and then stood aside. Grummond held up a syringe.
Larry and Buz had a private skull session over drinks and sandwiches in Larry’s office a little after eight. They had both been busy putting out fires all afternoon, and they were tired. “Old man’s going overboard about this thing,” Buz said gloomily. “Had a lot on his mind.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Larry. He was the younger of the two; he had been a successful ad writer before he went into government.
“How do you mean?”
“Well, think about it. We have all these ways of kidding people that they like their jobs, or if they don’t, it’s because they’re freaky and they wouldn’t like any other job any better, and anyhow they’re going to think of some scheme to get rich as soon as they get around to it, and besides if they quit those jobs they wouldn’t be able to afford all the goodies they want, and so on. Little stories that we keep telling them so they can get up in the morning.”
“You’re saying they don’t like to work for a living, right? What else is new?”
“No, I’m saying people who have had McNulty’s don’t seem to believe those stories anymore. There’s some kind of change that happens in their heads. Maybe the parasite just calls their attention to something they knew all along. Look at this.”
He delved into his briefcase, came up with a printout. “Voluntary job changes for the first six months of twenty ought-four are up seven percent over last year. And that’s only people who couldn’t manage to get fired to collect unemployment. The real figure must be at least twelve percent, and remember, this is in the trough of a growth adjustment. If times were good, God only knows what the rate would be.”
“I still don’t see it. Suppose they quit their jobs—they still have to eat, don’t they? So there’s a higher turnover. A nuisance, so what.”
“No, you don’t see it, do you?” Larry said. “All right, never mind. But here’s another question to think about. How many other stories do we tell people to keep them happy?”
Later that night Draffy invited Buz to the Lincoln Sitting Room, where he usually spent his evenings. He poured Buz a bourbon. He had already had two or three before he decided to call Buz, and he was feeling them a little, although fully in command, of course.
“Don’t tell anybody I broke down,” he said.
“I won’t, Chief.”
“Dick Nixon broke down and cried, and they crucified him. I never forgave those sons of bitches. Never.” He took a pull at his bourbon. “Fact is, he was a great president. He wasn’t afraid to do the right thing even if was unpopular.”
“That’s right, Chief.”
“Know damn well it’s right. And he knew, and if was right, he did it.” His consonants were getting a little indistinct, but he held himself upright and looked at Buz with great earnestness.
“Now, I’m talking to you because I know can trust you. With my life. Trust you with my life, Buz. And I want you to know, I’m not afraid to do the right thing if I have to. What the hell, everybody dies. It’s a fact of life. Fact is, we’re at war. People get killed in a war. Thousands. Millions. Innocent people get killed, children get killed. Well, once you’re dead, what difference does it make?”
“Good question, Chief.”
“Damn right. I’m not afraid to die. You know that?”
“I know you’re not, Chief.”
“In a war, somebody has to die. But, better them than me or you, right?”
“That’s right, Chief.”
“Let’s get down and pray, Buz.”
In October the growing crisis in the Middle East gave Draffy the best of reasons to cancel almost all his remaining appearances and stay close to the White House—“taking the high ground,” Buz and Larry called it. That was really not the issue, though; Draffy was the President and he did have to deal with this situation, which might erupt into war at any moment, a war which he as Commander in Chief would have to direct, and if the Democrats didn’t like that, tough titty.
Ever since the civil war broke out in Iran, the Soviets had been threatening to cross the border in support of Colonel Hourani’s government, but Draffy had gone eyeball to eyeball with them and had continued to send American advisers, weapons, and supplies to the rebels headed by Colonel Khadouri. Then the damn rebels had captured a Russian out of uniform in their territory. Mad Mike Dougherty was pretty much in the saddle there, but the rebels were Iranians, after all, and they were threatening to shoot the Russian as a spy. There had been a hotline message last week that the Soviet Union would “take severe retaliatory action” if that occurred, and it looked like it was going to. On the one hand, he was right where he wanted to be, on top of a situation that could make him more famous than Roosevelt or Truman, and on the other hand the suspense was making him edgy. His spirits were up and down like a yo-yo, and Grummond had to give him a shot once or twice a week.
