Systemic Shock (4 page)

Little's first act on returning to camp was to call his own emergency session. He blew three short blasts on his whistle, jaw the bandages on Joey Cameron's face, then glanced at lis Eagle. “Good to see you practicing first aid with Joey,” he began. "I need to talk with my patrol leaders."

“Practice hell,” Atkinson said, regarding his splinted left middle finger. Then he remembered to smile. Regardless of the facts, Little always favored the one who was smiling.

"Language," Little tutted; "settle down, now." He draped an avuncular arm over Wayne's shoulder, raised his voice over the hubbub as other scouts surrounded him. “I've got good news, boys. Despite some rumors among our—" he sought the gazes of Ted and Ray, "—young worry warts, we're not going home. I've talked with some parents, and they're confident that our country is not about to make war on China or Atlantis or Venus."

As every boy knew from holovision, the Venus probes had returned with wondrous samples from the shrouded planet. Mineral specimens suggested only a form of primitive quasilife there, and holo comics had extracted all available humor from the notion of intelligence on Venus. Dutiful laughter spread from the patrol leaders.

Little went on to warn his scouts against further worrisome talk about the outside world, and ended by announcing that he'd found a berry thicket not far from camp. Wayne Atkinson bided his time. When the patrols were out of sight searching for berries, he doubled back to find his scoutmaster. Somewhat later he brought Schell and Cameron back, and later still the rest of the troop straggled back with their booty. By then, Purvis Little understood the hostilities in his world roughly as well, and with roughly the same amount of bias, as India understood her problems after her secret session with her Chinese allies.

The President sat back in his chair to give an impression of ease as he regarded the image on his holoscreen. The transmission link to the American embassy in Moscow was only as good as its security, and he worried about that. "You haven't answered the question," he said to the image, then glanced toward the Secretary of State who sat near him.

"Mr. President, Mr. Secretary," said the American ambassador from half a world away, and hesitated, "—I can only say I
believe
that the RUS will be patient. I 'm convinced they really did pick up faint signatures of Chinese tugs under polar ice—or at least they think they did. But they've assured me they will take no unilateral action as long as there's a shred of doubt."

"What they really doubt," rumbled the Secretary of State, "is the motive for our patience. Isn't that it?"

"With all due respect, Mr. Secretary," said the ambassador, unwilling but staunch, "that's it. The RUS isn't so concerned about its own view as about that of the Chinese and Indians. What
if they
think we're lacking in resolution?"

"They might make a terrible mistake," said the President. “We have conveyed that to Peking, of course. You're aware the Chinese are serious about offering 'acts of God' as the explanation for the sinkings or whatever the hell they were?"

"Divine retribution for the Gujarat thing? I can't believe it, no sir," said the ambassador.

"Neither do they, obviously," said the Secretary of State. "But the SPC must think that position might be useful if taken seriously by a lot of Judeo-Christian Americans. And that could weaken us from the inside. Guilt enfeebles the sword arm," he said with a thin smile.

"Pity there aren't many Christians in the SPC," said the ambassador.

While it may have been a pity, all three men knew it had been no accident. While the Socialist Party of China carefully nurtured its mosques, its Central Committee regulated the churches and synagogues on the mainland; and those were in major cities where Judeo-Christian worship could be watched easily. The Buddhist and Neo-Confucianist ethics of Chinese intellectuals depended strongly, as they had for centuries, on the concept of shame—to the virtual exclusion of guilt. Proper behavior in China was reinforced not by one's internal fear of wrongdoing, but by one's fear of being caught at it. The Japanese found it easy to deal with the difference; Islamic countries found it almost as easy. On the other hand, most western Russians, particularly since their post-collapse rapprochment with the west, were still molded from the cradle by basically Christian traditions of Godhead, and of guilt. In this dichotomy of basic motives, the Russian Union of Soviets was like the western world, sharing an ethic that looked inward for strength.

In China however, the individual was not the basic societal unit, but only apiece of one. China was hoping to exploit our notions of guilt as a weakness. RUS leaders were regaining tight control over Russian media, the better to exclude such disturbing ideas as the Chinese suggestion that God had taken two tankers in punishment for Gujarat. But Americans were free to choose their messages, and some would focus on the Chinese message in all honesty. Our President knew all too well that assumed guilt might be laid at the feet of his administration in the form of blame—especially by religious fundamentalists who had heard Senator Collier speak.

"Damn the SPC," the President muttered aloud, "
and
our guilt-hoarding Christians."

"Not for attribution," said the Secretary with quick humor.

"Just those who aren't reasonable," said the President in irritation. "You know who I mean."

They knew, and changed the topic to guess at reprisals the RUS might select for the loss of the
P. Tuzhauliye
. The ambassador and the Secretary quite properly stuck to the foreign issue; the domestic issue looked even bleaker. Every media survey pointed to the growing strength of the coalitions behind Senator Yale Collier of Utah.

It was not that the President was, as Collier hinted, godless; it was just that Collier was so spectacularly Godly. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints had no better exemplar of Mormonism than the best-known of its Council of Apostles, the organ-voiced Yale Collier. Educated at Brigham Young University, trained as a young missionary in Belgium, seasoned in argument on the Senate floor, Collier kept his farmboy accent and exuded a sense of destined greatness. He was also one of the best verbal counter-punchers on anybody's campaign trail.

In June the President had made a passing reference to Collier as a fundamentalist. Collier had tickled millions of holo watchers by his droll objection. He presumed, with a shake of the great head, that the President knew the term 'fundamentalist', among Mormons, meant 'polygamist'. The Senator had taken only one wife, his handsome mate Eugenia. Perhaps, Collier added waggishly, a man without children found it difficult to believe that a single union could be blessed with eleven children, but such was the case. He, Yale Collier, humbly awaited an apology.

By this stroke, Collier implied that the President was either ignorant of religious terms or casual about the truth; and stressed his own status as a virile family man;
and
left room for comparison between a once-married man who had eleven kids and a twice-married man who had none. The nation's holo pundits had played the potency jokes threadbare until July.

For example: one satirist noted that the Collier union was in better shape than the national union. The current administration was cursed with two issues, while the Colliers were blessed with eleven.

One major political issue revolved around relations with the Russian Union of Soviets. The liberal administration favored stronger ties with the RUS, still the largest geographic entity on the globe though it had lost the monolithic control it had once exerted over the southern, strongly Islamic, border states. The RUS was currently getting American help toward its goal of making each state in its union self-sufficient in energy resources.

The conservatives under Collier were quick to point out that the US, with its hodgepodge energy programs, could not afford to help make Russians stronger—again!—than we were. A healthy RUS, they argued, was a threat to a fading America. The blossoming SinoInd romance was too obvious a threat for dispute.

Thus, for its Presidential campaign, conservatives linked the foreign issue to the domestic issue of energy programs. For a dozen years America had annually spent billions on fusion research, to be met largely by frustration as most avenues of study terminated in blind alleys. Physicists believed that clean, safe fusion power might yet be practicable, if research programs were expansive enough. But progress was slow at best. One by one, members of Congress yielded to the cries of a public that was paying higher taxes for its energy programs without a downturn in the costs of electricity, fuel, travel. Fusion research funds, pared in 1994, were cut to the bone in 1995. The administration protested: "You can't expect stronger progress from a weakened program."

First give us tax relief," the electorate seemed to be saying, "and other progress second. We can wait for more tokamaks and the other fusion mumbo-jumbo—and don't mention fission to us again."

By this topsy-turvy expectation, the American public further delayed their fusion panacea, and found alliance in a coalition between big business and conservative religious groups. Big business, as always, felt galled by taxation. Besides, as long as energy could be kept expensive to the consumer while industry got it cheaply by tax relief, one could make a profit selling an endless array of windmills, solar panels, storage batteries, and alcohol stills to two hundred and fifty million Americans. This view accorded well with groups that—with some justification—yearned for an earlier time. Fundamentalists tended to favor a still that yielded grain alcohol from corn in a process one controlled at home, over an electric outlet that drew power from a distant turbine/alternator in a process one couldn't understand at all. Besides, you couldn't drink electricity…

Gradually, Americans were reviving a general opinion that muscle power was more ethical than machine power; that simplicity was next to Godliness. The tenets of Mormonism, outwardly simple in its absolutes and its demands that each Mormon household be as independent as possible, became more attractive. One out of every twenty-five Americans was now an LDS member—ten million Latter-Day Saints. They comprised a heaven-sent bloc of patriots, and a hell of a bloc of votes. Privately, the Secretary of State suspected that the country might prosper under a Mormon President. In a liberal democracy, the administration usually bowed to its citizens. In an honest-to-God theocracy the administration bowed only to revelation from Above.

Quantrill was scouring his messkit after supper on Saturday when Tom Schell, without elaborating, told him he was wanted by the scoutmaster. Ted paused long enough to slip on his traditional kerchief, plodded through the dusk with a naive sense of mission in his soul. He felt sure that Little wanted to hear the truth until he entered Little's tent, saw the smugness in Wayne Atkinson's face.

"Sit down, Quantrill," said Little. It was either the best or the worst of signs; for minor discipline, you stood at attention. "What I have to say here is very painful for me."

Ted didn't understand for a moment. "I'm not happy about it either, Mr. Little. When I saw that Ray was unconscious, I just—"

"Don't make it worse by lies," Little cut him off wearily. “I've had the whole story from my patrol leaders, Quantrill. They were all witnesses, and they agree in every detail."

Tom Schell would not meet Quantrill's glance, though Atkinson and Cameron were more than happy to. Ted, angrily: "Do they all agree they'd nearly drowned Ray Kenney?"

"I'm sure Ray Kenney would say anything you told him to," sighed Little, and went on to describe a fictional scene as though he had seen it. Ray, running from a harmless splashing by a good-natured Eagle scout; Wayne, alone, brutally attacked from behind; Joey, trying to reason with the vicious Quantrill after Wayne's aloof departure; Ted Quantrill, hurling stones from shore at the innocent Joey. "It was the most unworthy conduct I have ever encountered in all my years of scouting," Little finished.

"You didn't encounter it at all, Mr. Little," Ted flashed. Anger made him speak too fast, the words running together. "It didn't even happen."

Little swayed his head as if dodging a bad smell. "Oh, Quantrill, look at the lads! I'm sure you'd like to think none of it happened. You may even need—psychological help—to face it," said Little, leaning forward to brush Ted's shoulder with a pitying hand. "But we can't have that sort of violence—mental imbalance—in a scout troop, Quantrill." Almost whispering, nodding earnestly: "It all happened, son. But we can't let it ever happen again. The best thing I can do is to let you resign from the troop on your own accord.

Wouldn't that be easiest for you? For all of us?"

A sensation of enervating prickly heat passed from the base of Ted Quantrill's skull down his limbs as he let Little's words sink in. Fairness, he saw, was something you gave but should never expect to receive. In the half-light of the single chemlamp he noted the simple deluded self-justification on Joey Cameron's face, the effort to hide exultation on Wayne Atkinson's part. Tom Schell fidgeted silently, staring upward . Ted showed them his palms. “What else can I do, Mr. Little? You wouldn't believe me or Ray. Maybe I
should
resign. Then I won't have to watch Torquemada Atkinson hit on my friends."

"You're the hitter, Quantrill," Joey spat.

Quantrill's head turned with the slow steadiness of a gun turret. "And don't you ever forget it," he said carefully, staring past Joey's broken nose into the half-closed eyes.

Purvis Little jerked his head toward a movement at the tent flap. "Go away, Thad; this doesn't concern you, son."

"Durn right it does," sniffled Thad, pushing his small body into the opening. Behind him, Ted saw, other boys were gathered in the near-darkness. “We been listening, Mr. Little."

A wave-off with both hands from Little: "Shame on you boys! Go on, now—"