The physician tossed the square of paper down under Mudgett's eyes.
"Summary of the press reaction to Hamelin's speech last night," he
said. "The total effect is going against us, Colonel. Unless we can
change Hamelin's mind, this outcry to re-educate civilians ahead of
soldiers is going to lose the war for us. The urge to live on the
surface again has been mounting for ten years; now it's got a target to
focus on. Us."
Mudgett chewed on a pencil while he read the summary; a blocky, bulky
man, as short as Carson and with hair as grey and close-cropped. A
year ago, Carson would have told him that nobody in Re-Ed could afford
to put stray objects in his mouth even once, let alone as a habit;
now Carson just waited. There wasn't a man--or a woman or a child--of
America's surviving thirty-five million "sane" people who didn't have
some such tic. Not now, not after twenty-five years of underground life.
"He knows it's impossible, doesn't he?" Mudgett demanded abruptly.
"Of course he doesn't," Carson said impatiently. "He doesn't know any
more about the real nature of the project than the people do. He thinks
the 'educating' we do is in some sort of survival technique--That's
what the papers think, too, as you can plainly see by the way they
loaded that editorial."
"Um. If we'd taken direct control of the papers in the first place--"
Carson said nothing. Military control of every facet of civilian life
was a fact, and Mudgett knew it. He also knew that an appearance
of freedom to think is a necessity for the human mind--and that
the appearance could not be maintained without a few shreds of the
actuality.
"Suppose we do this," Mudgett said at last. "Hamelin's position in
the State Department makes it impossible for us to muzzle him. But it
ought to be possible to explain to him that no unprotected human being
can live on the surface, no matter how many Merit Badges he has for
woodcraft and first aid. Maybe we could even take him on a little trip
topside; I'll wager he's never seen it."
"And what if he dies up there?" Carson said stonily. "We lose
three-fifths of every topside party as it is--and Hamelin's an
inexperienced--"
"Might be the best thing, mightn't it?"
"_No_," Carson said. "It would look like we'd planned it that way. The
papers would have the populace boiling by the next morning."
Mudgett groaned and nibbled another double row of indentations around
the barrel of the pencil. "There must be something," he said.
"There is."
"Well?"
"Bring the man here and show him just what we _are_ doing. Re-educate
_him_, if necessary. Once we told the newspapers that he'd taken the
course ... well, who knows, they just might resent it. Abusing his
clearance privileges and so on."
"We'd be violating our basic policy," Mudgett said slowly. "'Give
the Earth back to the men who fight for it.' Still, the idea has some
merits...."
"Hamelin is out in the antechamber right now," Carson said. "Shall I
bring him in?"
* * * * *
The radioactivity never did rise much beyond a mildly hazardous level,
and that was only transient, during the second week of the war--the
week called the Death of Cities. The small shards of sanity retained
by the high commands on both sides dictated avoiding weapons with
a built-in backfire: no cobalt bombs were dropped, no territories
permanently poisoned. Generals still remembered that unoccupied
territory, no matter how devastated, is still unconquered territory.
But no such considerations stood in the way of biological warfare. It
was controllable: you never released against the enemy any disease you
didn't yourself know how to control. There would be some slips, of
course, but the margin for error--
There were some slips. But for the most part, biological warfare worked
fine. The great fevers washed like tides around and around the globe,
one after another. In such cities as had escaped the bombings, the
rumble of truck convoys carrying the puffed heaped corpses to the mass
graves became the only sound except for sporadic small-arms fire; and
then that too ceased, and the trucks stood rusting in rows.
Nor were human beings the sole victims. Cattle fevers were sent
out. Wheat rusts, rice molds, corn blights, hog choleras, poultry
enteritises fountained into the indifferent air from the hidden
laboratories, or were loosed far aloft, in the jet-stream, by
rocketing fleets. Gelatin capsules pullulating with gill-rots fell
like hail into the great fishing grounds of Newfoundland, Oregon,
Japan, Sweden, Portugal. Hundreds of species of animals were drafted
as secondary hosts for human diseases, were injected and released to
carry the blessings of the laboratories to their mates and litters.
It was discovered that minute amounts of the tetracycline series of
antibiotics, which had long been used as feed supplements to bring farm
animals to full market weight early, could also be used to raise the
most whopping Anopheles and Aëdes mosquitoes anybody ever saw, capable
of flying long distances against the wind and of carrying a peculiarly
interesting new strains of the malarial parasite and the yellow fever
virus....
By the time it had ended, everyone who remained alive was a mile under
ground.
For good.
* * * * *
"I still fail to understand why," Hamelin said, "if, as you claim, you
have methods of re-educating soldiers for surface life, you can't do so
for civilians as well. Or instead."
The under-secretary, a tall, spare man, bald on top, and with a heavily
creased forehead, spoke with the odd neutral accent--untinged by
regionalism--of the trained diplomat, despite the fact that there had
been no such thing as a foreign service for nearly half a century.
"We're going to try to explain that to you," Carson said. "But we
thought that, first of all, we'd try to explain once more why we think
it would be bad policy--as well as physically out of the question.
"Sure, everybody wants to go topside as soon as it's possible. Even
people who are reconciled to these endless caverns and corridors hope
for something better for their children--a glimpse of sunlight, a
little rain, the fall of a leaf. That's more important now to all of us
than the war, which we don't believe in any longer. That doesn't even
make any military sense, since we haven't the numerical strength to
occupy the enemy's territory any more, and they haven't the strength to
occupy ours. We understand all that. But we also know that the enemy is
intent on prosecuting the war to the end. Extermination is what they
say they want, on their propaganda broadcasts, and your own Department
reports that they seem to mean what they say. So we can't give up
fighting them; that would be simple suicide. Are you still with me?"
"Yes, but I don't see--"
"Give me a moment more. If we have to continue to fight, we know
this much: that the first of the two sides to get men on the surface
again--so as to be able to _attack_ important targets, not just keep
them isolated in seas of plagues--will be the side that will bring this
war to an end. They know that, too. We have good reason to believe
that they have a re-education project, and that it's about as far
advanced as ours is."
"Look at it this way," Col. Mudgett burst in unexpectedly. "What we
have now is a stalemate. A saboteur occasionally locates one of the
underground cities and lets the pestilences into it. Sometimes on our
side, sometimes on theirs. But that only happens sporadically, and
it's just more of this mutual extermination business--to which we're
committed, willy-nilly, for as long as they are. If we can get troops
onto the surface first, we'll be able to scout out their important
installations in short order, and issue them a surrender ultimatum with
teeth in it. They'll take it. The only other course is the sort of
slow, mutual suicide we've got now."
Hamelin put the tips of his fingers together. "You gentlemen lecture
me about policy as if I had never heard the word before. I'm familiar
with your arguments for sending soldiers first. You assume that you're
familiar with all of mine for starting with civilians, but you're
wrong, because some of them haven't been brought up at all outside the
Department. I'm going to tell you some of them, and I think they'll
merit your close attention."
Carson shrugged. "I'd like nothing better than to be convinced, Mr.
Secretary. Go ahead."
"You of all people should know, Dr. Carson, how close our underground
society is to a psychotic break. To take a single instance, the number
of juvenile gangs roaming these corridors of ours has increased 400%
since the rumors about the Re-Education Project began to spread.
Or another: the number of individual crimes without motive--crimes
committed, just to distract the committer from the grinding monotony of
the life we all lead--has now passed the total of all other crimes put
together.
"And as for actual insanity--of our thirty-five million people still
unhospitalized, there are four million cases _of which we know_,
each one of which should be committed right now for early paranoid
schizophrenia--except that were we to commit them, our essential
industries would suffer a manpower loss more devastating than anything
the enemy has inflicted upon us. Every one of those four million
persons is a major hazard to his neighbors and to his job, but how
can we do without them? And what can we do about the unrecognized,
sub-clinical cases, which probably total twice as many? How long can we
continue operating without a collapse under such conditions?"