Operation Damocles (30 page)

“No, I’m not a socialist or communist. I believe that restrained capitalism is the best way. And, you are right about the darker nature of man. But it can, with effort, be controlled. It was you who were setting up a socialistic hierarchy—a return to feudalistic serfdom. You would have owned everything. The rest of humanity would have been equal only in their abject poverty and lack of say in their lives.

“I believe that all of humanity, as individuals, should enjoy the things that they earn through honest labor and personal ingenuity. That does not include the theft, coercion, fraud, rape, subjugation and murder that you practice. Those who make their living by those means are no better than savages and sewer rats, no matter how well they dress, or how modern the methods they employ.” Somerset picked up his wine glass and held it toward Salvitore, in salute.

“Here’s to mankind, Mr. Salvitore. To another chance for happiness. Maybe they will use it wisely, and maybe they won’t, but they’re going to get another stab at it. Here’s to all of you,” he swung his glass at the watching faces around the room, “in the hope that there is such a thing as divine justice.” He lowered the glass, and his voice, looking inward for a moment. “Here’s to the atonement of Leland Somerset; I just hope I don’t have to spend eternity in the same hell as all of you.”

“You haven’t said who your organization is, Dr. Somerset,” said Salvitore.

Somerset emptied his wine glass, considered it briefly, then set it aside. “Forgive me, Mr. Salvitore,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’m afraid I tend toward verbosity once I get started. We are just a group of concerned scientists.”

###

The city of Rome felt a small tremor during the evening of the eighth of August. People noted and forgot it. A seismologist at the University of Rome made a note of its direction and amplitude the following day, and assumed that some construction company was blasting nearby. It would be two days later that a delivery driver would discover that the Villa Salvitore, and the hilltop that it had occupied, were gone.

XLIV

It was early morning, on the tenth day after the excursion to Palo Alto. Jack and Eve Townsend had risen at 5:30 a.m., and Jack was squatting in front of the camp stove, near the mouth of the pipe, boiling water for coffee. Eve was under the camouflage canopy just outside, rummaging around in the back of the Cherokee for another can of coffee. The one Jack had was almost empty.

Suddenly, a tremor ran through the ground. They both froze for a moment. It happened again, closer and more energetic than before.

Jack stood up. “Honey, get out of there,” he called. “C’mon, hurry up.”

Eve complied, running to stand beside him. They were both looking around in all directions, searching for clues.

“Earthquake?” asked Eve.

“Maybe,” he responded. “Let’s go up on top and see if we can see anything.”

They scrambled up the slope. Another closer tremor began before they reached the top, causing them to slip and falter, but they kept on going until they could look out over the long valley towards Mountain View.

A flickering at their backs made them turn, and to the distant south, a shaft of bluish light danced and flickered in a sky gone black and ominous. They could see minute flashes of lightning arcing sporadically in the distant, roiling cloud. The tremor rumbled again, and very faintly now, they could hear a crackling and popping noise, and an eerie singing drone, like someone blowing through a bamboo pipe.

“What the hell . . . ?” Jack murmured, watching the blue spear of light dance and flash back and forth across the horizon. As they stood watching, the tremors became continuous, and continued to increase in amplitude. The crackling and popping was gradually increasing in volume, also, and the background drone was now a deep thrumming that was becoming synchronized with the vibration in the ground. Realization dawned in Jack’s mind.

“Get down! Hurry! Get inside the pipe,” he shouted, dragging Eve down the slope after him. They fell and slid the last few yards down the dirt embankment. Jack scrambled to his feet, lifting and pulling Eve into the opening of the pipe. He moved them back to the tent and inside it before he stopped.

“It’s the weapon,” he said. “It’s Damocles. Lay down and wrap the pillows and blankets around you. We’re going to get shaken pretty hard, I think.”

“Are we going to die?” she asked calmly, looking at him.

“I don’t know, honey,” he said, hugging her to him. “We’re probably as safe here as anywhere. It’s a choice between being inside this pipe if it collapses or getting fried by radiation outside. We can only hope we don’t get a direct hit. Cover up. Cover your eyes and ears as best you can.”

It occurred to him that if the beam hit the reservoir, boiling water and super-heated steam would flow through the pipe. He didn’t tell her.

The jarring vibration in the earth was being transmitted to the concrete pipe now, and Jack could feel the low-frequency sonic waves passing up the length of the pipe as it coupled weakly with some harmonic in the modulated beam. The thrumming drone was so loud now that they would have had to shout to be heard above it.

Jack could differentiate now between the crackling and popping as it grew louder, and could feel the shocks, as individual blows followed the louder pops more closely than the distant ones. Hope grew in him, even as the bouncing tent frame was slapped more and more violently against the concrete floor of the pipe. The beam was not being fired continuously, was not obliterating everything. It was selectively darting from target to target across a wide area as it advanced northward, hitting dozens of individual, pinpoint targets each second, sparing non-enemy real estate. If he was right, the reservoir might not be hit. Their main danger would be from the seismic shock.

Even as he thought it, a mighty bang almost deafened them, as a pulse of hellish energy vaporized the military encampment near San Jose, ten miles to the east. The pipe moaned like the bass pipe in a gigantic church organ.

Two seconds after the bolt hit San Jose, they were lifted almost to the ceiling of the pipe—tent, wooden pallets and all—and slammed against the concrete floor. The roof of the tent collapsed on top of them, pushed down by the ceiling of the pipe. Eve screamed. The breath was knocked from their bodies when they hit the floor. A spray of water hit them, but no flood came through because the pipe was no longer connected to the reservoir. It had jumped upward, through the ridge of covering earth that formed the rim of the reservoir, and separated into the twenty-foot sections of which it was composed.

Jack and Eve held grimly to each other, and he tried to pin her body between his and the pallet that they were clinging to, shielding her from the walls of the pipe as it spun around sickeningly, bounced and began to roll down the hill. There was a two-hundred-foot fall where the hill sloped steeply down into the canyon, and he knew they did not have a prayer of surviving it.

They were wrapped in blankets and he couldn’t see anything, could only feel what was happening to them. He heard a grinding crunch, like a metal trash can being run over by a truck, and the pipe stopped rolling, rocked back and forth a couple of times and was still. The heavy thrumming vibration was gradually fading, and a minute later, bruised and hurting, they began to claw their way out of the wet, tangled bedding.

When they could see, they discovered that they lay in a section of pipe, open at both ends, with water flowing around and by them, running down the slope. Jack got shakily to his feet and hurriedly half-dragged, half-carried Eve out of the pipe and along the slope until they were out of line with the breach in the wall of the reservoir, and on dry ground. They collapsed together, then rolled up on their elbows and looked back. The section of piping they had occupied had rolled up on and partially crushed the Jeep Cherokee. The vehicle had formed a chock that held the pipe in place on the gentle slope, not fifty feet from the edge of the canyon.

As they watched, the water sluiced away the soil beneath the pipe and vehicle, and they shifted sideways. The section of pipe rolled slowly at first, gained momentum, then bounded over the lip of the canyon. A long moment later they heard it hit and shatter against the canyon bottom.

Jack and Eve looked at each other, gasping and bruised, not saying anything. Jack ran his hands over her legs, arms and ribs, then collapsed beside her, his head resting on her chest. Eve lay panting, looking up at the sky, now clearing above them.

After a while, she put her hand on his head, closed her eyes and smiled. They were alive.

XLV

Senator Isley banged his gavel. The mutter of conversation began to die out in the auditorium. It was a bright, sunny October day in Atlanta, and the university was the rich, dark green of late summer in the South.

The seating was at rows of long, narrow tables, set up like a Bingo hall. Possibly three hundred people were present—Congress, scientists, administrators, educators, businessmen, bankers, newspeople and the military. On the stage, Isley shared the long table with Hector Ortiz, Clarence Patterson, Gene Stickle, Able Johnson, Joseph Miller and Paul Haas. They comprised a panel that would answer some of the remaining questions these new leaders and the public had, concerning the past ten days of committee meetings. Joseph Miller, Acting President of the United States, opened the meeting.

“We have decided on a course of action that will surely be criticized by many, but we believe that it is vital to the emergence of a new public philosophy. The new International Union of Scientists will act as an oversight committee for the independent national governments. They have mapped out a twenty-year plan, complete with benchmarks and periodic assessments of policies and performance, for global democratization. Those countries that have never known democracy will need the time to learn how to live and work in a democratic environment. In many cases, it will scarcely be long enough.

“It will be organized as a controlled experiment, and adjusted as necessary. Grassroots feedback will be the principal yardstick used to assess effectiveness, so in a sense, it will be a democratic experiment in government—a scientific approach to what works best for a free society in education, commerce and law. I can tell you right now that the core tenet and law of political reform will be to tell students the truth, and only the truth. In commerce, we believe that American free enterprise proved itself for two hundred years to be superior to all other economic systems. In a free society, it is the only choice possible. Stocks and securities trading will be curtailed, and in future, done very differently. We need a method of obtaining investment capital, but it will no longer be a poker game for the wealthy. With regard to civil law, we will start by building a constitutional matrix against which every existing law, regulation, ordinance and policy must be tested. If a law fails the matrix, it will be deleted from all justice codes. To begin with, in the United States, it cannot conflict with the existing U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Until amended by the people, that proven document, with its universal concepts, shall remain the basis for all our laws. Secondly, the law, rule, ordinance or whatever cannot be redundant. It is asinine and unnecessarily restrictive to make multiple laws to address one crime. The old legal system could make a jaywalker appear to be the most heinous of criminals, simply by the number of redundant laws he had broken. We want to clean the legal system up and make it the purposeful tool it is supposed to be in a society, rather than a burden imposed on the populace by grafters. The old state policy, that ignorance is no excuse, pretty much permitted any law—no matter how esoteric or hidden—to go unchallenged. You didn’t know what laws you had broken until the judge told you.

“To summarize, the new legal architecture will be designed for the people it is supposed to serve, not for the benefit of lawyers and government control freaks.

“The industrialized nations will start off with a much greater latitude of self-determination, but they too, will need time to adjust to principles of true justice and ethical practice in government and business. Since the practice of those principles are rather rare in some societies, including our own, punishment for non-compliance will be severe at first. Make no mistake, the old ruling families and autocratic governments are gone. It will take time to decide how best to reapportion the wealth those regimes sequestered from the people they ruled, but it will be done, even if it comes down to just dividing it evenly and starting over from scratch.

“The tax ceiling will remain for now, and we’ve agreed it shall be a global practice. No citizen may be taxed more than twenty percent of her income, ever again, and whatever method of taxation is adopted by the various countries, the rate and method of enforcement must be the same for every citizen. It allows countries to differentiate based on their own regional assets, cultural preferences, and so on, but protects the citizen from uneven and excessive exploitation. Private property and privacy are two more common tenets already agreed upon as basic human rights that are not the purview of government.

“It will be a twenty-year, gradual, hopefully bump-free transition period. In America, free enterprise, affordable education and self-determination will be the cornerstones of this administration. It will also be an honorable government, an accountable government, without secrets, for the first time in at least a century. We must have and enforce those tenets above all else.”

“We’ve heard rumors that all armies are to be disbanded. Is that true?” asked a reporter.

Miller motioned to Gene Stickle, who turned from those he was conversing with on stage, and came to the podium to stand beside Miller. “Not completely,” responded Stickle. “We’ve agreed that each country will be permitted to retain an independent military, and to develop technological defense systems—excluding biological, chemical and radionuclides. Military expenditures may not exceed one percent of the country’s GDP. This really amounts to just local security forces. Anything excessive, such as a sudden massive buildup, will trigger a response from the machines, and censure from the world community. For America, it works out to be about a hundred-billion-dollar budget for the combined military services, about a fourth of what it was. We’re still human—we have to be eased into the idea of no armies, no wars, and from a survival perspective, we can’t afford not to develop and maintain both a national and global capacity for defense. Who knows when, or from where, a threat to human survival may come. It may eventually come from space. We have to continue learning and advancing technologically, even in weapons of destruction. From now on, though, the President will not have the authority to commit the military without a national vote. Neither will Congress. The only exception is when the United States is under immediate attack. Then, and only then, can the President act unilaterally. Even then, congressional and state controls come into play within twenty-four hours.”

“What about all the military personnel that have spent their careers in the service? What happens to them?” asked a military man. “When the services are down-sized, there will be a lot of jobs lost.”

“That’s true,” Stickle responded. “Right now, the public doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for the military. About half the personnel strength is gone, anyway—dead or in camps. Nevertheless, the IUS has agreed to a fair draw-down and dispersion, over a two-year period. The military will be restructured. There will be an Air Force and a Navy. The Marines will remain as assault troops under the command of the Navy. The Army, as a separate service, will be no more. As you can see, our purpose is to eliminate the capability of any nation to form a large invasion or occupational force.”

“There will be some demand for various military skills in the new United States Space Service,” said Patterson, stepping forward. “The Air Force Space Command, for example, will be absorbed by NASA. There will be no military involvement in space anymore, except for operation of reconnaissance satellites.

“I’ve gotten involved in this thing so recently that I’m not up to speed yet on projects and programs, but we’ve had a lot of scientific projects waiting in the wings for years, overlooked for lack of funding, or deferred due to misguided priorities. We’re dusting them off and reexamining them in light of new objectives. Earth and planetary sciences, and space exploration are worthy areas to apply all of that national investment in military training and equipment, and humanity will reap a remarkable harvest of advancements.

“We’re going to develop commercial interests in space—orbital factories and research facilities. We will need engineering and manufacturing skills in propulsion systems, avionics, radar, communications, aerospace systems, microgravity construction and maintenance, as well as jobs in administration. We will begin constructing an orbital research station next year, and permanent manned bases on the moon and Mars as soon as we can get there.

“As for the infantry and similar support skills, they will have to seek jobs in private enterprise, retrain, re-educate themselves. Pensions will be prorated in some fashion, and if they choose, they can roll them over into private retirement funds or draw them out. We don’t want to create another punished caste. We want to forget and go on with life in a better world. We’ve all earned the right to a new day, not just a new beginning of the same old world. This is a transition time in human history.

“Two teams of administrative and fiscal scientists are working out the economic and government fiscal parameters for the U.S. Without thirty percent of our national budget going into defense-related activities, we should have the funds to generate lots of productive jobs in health services, scientific agribusiness, scientific exploration, orbital space factories, alternative and renewable energy industries, green automobiles, etc.

“We have an ambitious agenda on the table, and we welcome input. There are going to be lots of town-hall meetings and national interactive discussion of issues in the future. You might not think so now, but I think you will all come around, and truly like what is ahead for us. It’s going to be exciting and productive times. We hope to have more specific answers shortly.”

“What happens to all the prisoners you’ve taken?”

“They will be isolated from society on island work farms,” Ortiz responded, ambling over to join the group at the podium. “They will produce their own food and clothing and shelter. They will have no rights or interactions with normal society, outside the boundaries of their farm communities. They will be allowed to trade, so as to diversify their lives. That’s more than they had in mind for us. Internally, they may operate as they like, within limits. They may not leave their island. They shall not be supported. Excepting the initial tools, educational materials, medicines and supplies they need to get started, they will be on their own. They will work, and make their living, build their own society, or starve. All work farms will be located in moderate climates in the tropics. They will have a far better beginning, and a far better chance than our pioneer ancestors had.”

“What if they have children?”

“The prisoners will be segregated by sex until they can be sterilized, then they will be put together so that they can have a semblance of normal life. Any existing children shall be removed into normal society. It wouldn’t be right to punish them for their parents’ sins.

“For the present, that’s the best plan we’ve come up with. Their philosophy is not going to change, and they can’t be allowed to raise another generation of potential tyrants. The chain must be broken. Their philosophy must die out with them. It’s as humane as we can be, and still accomplish our purpose.”

“Some people are concerned that we will all be lumped together, just as the Euro-American Alliance had planned. Is that what is planned?” asked the first reporter.

“No,” said Miller. “The United States of America will still be an independent nation, as will all other countries. We believe that nationalism is a good thing, that different customs, traditions and cultures are what make life interesting. If the world were forced into a polyglot culture, most of the beauty of the world would be lost. We don’t have to have the same customs, or language, or religious beliefs in order to get along with one another. All we have to do is practice tolerance and honesty in our relations.

“In the past, the term ‘diversity’ was a cover for making everyone exactly the same, an ignorant robot reciting a politically correct mantra. The subterfuges of government and international business are largely responsible for every war ever fought. When greed and lust for power are allowed to flourish, a commonness of slavery is always the natural end product. How can it be otherwise? Who wants uniformity, especially at that price? It is not the common people who start these things. It is the ambition and greed of those in power.

“To that end, the nations of the world have agreed to become a little isolationist. We will trade and travel freely, even undertake joint ventures, but we will no longer permit foreign investment or interference in each other’s internal affairs, beyond the establishment of the basic human rights I’ve mentioned. When permitted, foreign influence is seldom in the interest of the penetrated nation. It becomes an influence that destroys cultures and makes enemies. Such activities shall be universally illegal. We think that the force of self-determination, by its very nature, can only propagate greater freedom and greater individual opportunity for everyone, no matter what other cultural traditions make up their society.”

“The banking community and foreign investors are really going to hate that idea,” said a businesswoman sitting in the front row. Several other voices echoed the sentiment.

Ortiz spoke up, “What we are trying to do is lay a common groundwork for a free society, based on principles that are common to humankind. To establish liberty throughout the world’s peoples. Beyond that, we will not interfere in each other’s affairs. The peoples of other nations can take the common substrate of freedom and shared knowledge, and build on it what they will. We want to elevate mankind as a whole. As an administrative body, we scientists agree that there are few political or commercial advantages consistent with universal liberty, that are derived from the capital investment of outside businesses in other countries. Investors want control of any resources they put money into. That foreign influence overruns local concerns and customs, and disenfranchises the natives. We want to live together on this planet, like brothers and sisters who live together in the same house, each with our own things and our own ways. We can find ways to communicate and work together in harmony, and to trade, and still retain our individuality. Only commercial greed and political ambition require the invasion of another’s territory, or acquisition of his resources. The citizenry of each country must learn to control their would-be despots and monopolistic enterprises. They will be held accountable.”