Summitt

Chapter Thirteen

Camp Saliaris (in General Adam Taggart’s original and highly classified precis) was described to the projects board of the U.S. Chemical Corps as a “locus for experiments in synthetic behavioral concepts,” experiments to be independent of standard civilian or military overview.

A rubber stamp from the relevant congressional committee (Senator Mark Rowan’s) had approved these conditions and appropriated the camouflaged funding to implement them.

Camp Saliaris was twenty miles from Summitt City. Much of its hundred-odd acres was in sandy soil. Stunted pines and tangled bracken bordered the camp’s parade ground and playing fields where members of the post stood formations and engaged in various athletic activities.

In this closely guarded inner area were air-conditioned mess halls, officers’ quarters, laboratories, auditoriums and classrooms.

The table of organization at Saliaris was top-heavy with brass, field grade officers (majors, colonels) and general officers (one to three stars). The camp’s name had been chosen by General Taggart in honor of the Roman celebration of Coena Saliaris. Taggart had first learned of this ancient feast as a cadet at Virginia Military Institute, and had pondered the legend of the holy shields during his tours of duty in Europe and Korea. The fate of Rome, according to legend, depended on the veneration and safekeeping of these sacred shields, the ancilia, dropped from the sky by the gods in answer to that eternal city’s prayers. These myths appealed to the general’s imagination, coupled as it was to a highly practical view of world affairs.

On a chill morning, a Correll Group four-engine jet landed at Camp Saliaris, having cleared customs at New Orleans en route from Portugal. The passengers, sixteen men and five women, were delivered by limousines to the general officers’ mess hall, where breakfast was waiting, foods and beverages chosen to respect and satisfy ethnic backgrounds and religions: yoghurts, semolina cakes, Turkish coffee with chocolate almonds, lamb savory with rice, pita breads, rashers and grilled tomatoes, kola nuts as big as tulip bulbs, roast okra, sausage puddings and fragrant kedgerees of smoked fish and cream requested by the Lord Conestain party. Also on the sideboard were Darjeeling and gunshot teas, bottled soda and palm-wine beers.

Later the group was conducted to the auditorium, a soundproofed room with overhead lighting, and a high ceiling of patterned acoustical tiles.

The rows of spectator seats were separated by a single aisle, the chairs made of chrome frames and leather slings. The double doors were guarded by post soldiers wearing side arms.

The passengers from the Lisbon flight filed past these guards after breakfast and selected seats, their common mood subdued but expectant.

They had come here from Pakistan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, Argentina and Sri Lanka. From Great Britain, Yugoslavia, Italy and Algeria.

At the Correll Group’s headquarters near Escorial, each had received final briefings on the financial responsibilities his (or her) government would assume as participants in the Correll Group program.

Individually, the delegates were hardly known outside their own countries. Even within their particular departments and ministries, most were virtually anonymous. Their names — Feisal Bonahan, Niles Smythe, Jomo N’kruma, Morris Plumb and the others — were familiar, however, to geopolitical specialists who studied the international scene and made it their business to keep watch on these seemingly inconspicuous men and women who shaped, decided and carried out their governments’ policies.

When the house lights were turned down, General Taggart and George Thomson entered through side doors and took their seats.

Simon Correll’s security chief, Marvin Quade, appeared in the stage wings and stood studying the dimmed theater. After a moment of silence, broken only by someone with a nervous cough, Simon Correll walked from the wings to the speaker’s stand. His body was almost lost in the shadows, but his deeply tanned face was outlined by the thin spotlight from the proscenium arch. Characteristically, he began speaking without introduction or greeting.

“What we will presently show you on film may outrage some of you. You may be disposed to deny that the past history of the world has ordained this experiment, and therefore deserves it. But we have learned by now that optimism in human affairs is nonsense.”

As the audience stirred, Correll said, “I’m pleased you are paying attention. You can wake people who are sleeping, Gandhi observed. But if they are only pretending to sleep, you will have no effect on them.”

Turning to the control panel beside the speaker’s rostrum, Simon Correll depressed a tab on the keyboard. A white light illuminated the screen, twin beams flooding it from a projection booth.

Pictures appeared without sound: homes, apartment buildings, lakes and green belts. Children playing baseball. Men in golf carts. A crowded shopping mall. Industrial buildings with antiseptically clean windows.

As the camera panned slowly over these scenes, picking out smiling faces, gardens of shrubs and flower beds, running youngsters, a flag at full staff, Correll pressed a tab which froze the frame in a long, high angle shot of the city, its industrial plants, homes and recreational facilities spread out under sunny skies.

“This is the town of Summitt City, Tennessee,” Correll said. “To aid in your orientation, the state of Tennessee, whose hospitality we are presently enjoying, is in the southeastern section of the United States. Neighboring states you may be familiar with are Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama and the Carolinas.

“Summitt City, as you can see for yourselves, is a pleasant place. It supports a prosperous chemical industry, and other congenial amenities. But before I tell you more of Summitt City, let me digress for a moment to talk to you about freedom.

“We might all agree that freedom is a desirable condition for human beings,” Correll continued, “but it is unlikely we would agree on a definition of that condition. Army officers regard freedom of behavior as an aberration harmless in children but dangerous license in the case of, say, rebels and students. Novelists tend to think of freedom as a character’s striving for transcendence or epiphany, the obligatory climax of a work of fiction — a break with tradition, a defiance of family loyalty or religious tradition.

“But to social engineers, Marxists and their religious counterparts, freedom is always an act of basic and disruptive anarchy. Now while such distinctions may be intellectually diverting,” Correll went on, “they seldom if ever result in any reasonable consensus. That problem, that ageless semantic squabble, is a luxury none of us can any longer afford. Because it is not a luxury anymore, it is a death sentence.

“Therefore my colleagues and I — General Taggart, Mr. Thomson and Lord Conestain — decided it was essential that we cut our way out of that philosophical labyrinth while there was still precious time left, and create a truly free society to meet our generation’s desperate, last-ditch needs.

“The fact is, we had no choice, because everything in our world today is at risk. Our equities, our birthrights, our privileges, our very lives, can be extinguished in a finger-snap. The old palliatives and restraints no longer work. The placebos, sedatives and titillations which either made life bearable or purported to give it meaning are useless. Religion, Marxism, sex, art, science and all the other therapeutic abstractions have turned out to be nothing but excess baggage.

“Because we live on a razor’s edge in a time when any fool or madman, a despot with terminal cancer or a simple soldier neurotically ambitious or impatient with peace, can totally destroy this world of ours. Any border clash could activate a decision that could turn this planet into a speck of lifeless dust floating in space for the next few million years. Perhaps time would start things up again, a microbe in a rock eventually creating sonnets and cathedrals but we saw no reason to chance that. Instead we created Summitt City.”

Correll pointed to the screen. “What you are looking at is a community free from most of the social viruses that infect modern society — crime, pollution, terrorism, racial injustice, discrimination by color, religion or sex, unemployment, energy shortages, bankruptcy, mental illness, divorce, alcoholism, sexual dysfunction.”

Correll turned back to his audience. “But most importantly, Summitt City is a community without fear. That is what we have built, a pilot social organism which works together in harmony for the advantage of all parts, a society that is contented and without disruptive curiosity, a society, in fact, incapable of analyzing and therefore criticizing itself, and needless to say, incapable of revolt or civil disobedience, a society of men and women as orderly and productive as a beehive.

“We have accomplished this vision with drugs. Our systemic revolution has been chemical. As I’ve warned, the film you will presently see may upset some of you. But view it with your own best interests in mind.

“There is nothing artificial in confronting and testing our problems with chemical modifiers, with synthetic opiates and stimulants. Because we have to change the way men think before we can change the way they act. And to change their thinking means breaking destructive mental habits, to alter their memories of themselves and refine their concepts of the world around them.

“Our true enemy was and is invisible, of course. The terrors of the world stem inevitably from the memory of man, the rage of flogged slaves, the arrogance of kings, shame and horrors men have always both inflicted and lusted after, fantasies of sexual and physical domination over their brother and sister human beings, the avenging and restoring of so-called national honor and so forth.

“These poisons, lesions, must be cut away as selectively as possible by employing chemical rather than surgical lobotomies. There is a nice justice, symmetry, in using drugs to save ourselves, because we have been using them in a suicidal form for decades. We are, in fact, already a drugged society.

“We have lived in a world surrounded by chemical compounds since the end of World War II. It is illusory but comforting, of course, to polarize our concern in the ghettos of America’s decaying cities, or on the docks of France, or the narcotic production fields of South America and Turkey and Pakistan and the Far and Middle East. We can thus relegate the drug problem to the trinity of the supplier, the dealer and the user — corrupt entrepreneurs, inhuman pushers and helpless addicts — the last condemned to steal and murder to supply their habits. That is a grim picture, and accurate as far as it goes. But it is in truth only a smokescreen that hides the true dimension of our chemical dependence and addiction.

“The facts are even worse than what the staggering police statistics tell us: millions of doses of powerful tranquilizers are routinely prescribed for pregnant women; a typical standing antepartum order for nearly every woman awaiting delivery includes Nembutal, Demarol, Scapolamine, Largon, Deladumone, Riger’s lactate — notwithstanding the medically proven fact that the fetus is vulnerable to brain damage. The drug generation is a helplessly programmed entity; people of this group turn not to drugs but, in a real sense, back to them, finding again the first essential mood of their existence — the experience of being drugged at birth.

“From infancy on, chemical toxins reach all of us through the air we breathe, the water we drink, oil and asbestos, millions of square miles of crops dusted every season by poisonous contaminants, the vinyl chlorides, which are related to various cancers, including those of the scrotum and the reproductive organs.

“Brain cancer is now the second leading cause of death among children under fourteen in this country, and in addition these chemical cripples are tragically susceptible to cleft palates, severe thinking impairments and tendency to suicide — the last increasingly common when the child is old enough to prefer oblivion to pain, depression and chronic insomnia. And for those who survive the rigors of a chemical childhood, it is enough to tell you that one out of four Americans living today will spend a portion of his life in a mental institution.

“It is virtually impossible to plan a diet free of cancer-inducing agents. DDT is linked to liver tumors. Heart disorders and birth defects are the price we pay for the contamination of plastic garbage bags, bread wrappers and nylon clothing. Nitrites preserve meats, chlorine purifies drinking water. They both contribute to intestinal cancer. Great freshwater lakes around the world have become so layered with flammable vegetation and chemical debris that they are becoming both health and fire hazards.

“We are killing off the world and everything that inhabits it. There are approximately five million species on the earth at present — humans, animals, insects, plants and mosses. They are dying off at the rate of one species per hour — lost forever to pollutants in the air and soil and water and by our destruction of forest and sea habitats.

“A dozen years ago my associates and I decided to try to stop this mindless genocide and urbicide. Our problem was where to begin. We choose the United States, specifically Summitt City, rejecting France, Japan, Sweden, Brazil and certain smaller nations.

“In America, or rather in the peculiarities of the American character — stubbornness, a prickly independence, deep-down patriotism — here we decided would be the fairest test of our program. If we could chemically curb and modify these characteristics, we believed it would reflect a more significant success than a similar one in a starving or already subjugated population sample in — say — Asia or Latin America. If that is chauvinism, so be it.”

Correll pressed the keyboard and pictures flowed across the screen. Workers entering a plant. Ball games, fishermen and golfers, children laughing under lawn sprinklers. People chatting on the steps of a church. Men and women strolling through nighttime streets and parks.

“The irony, of course,” Correll observed, “is how little surface difference there is between Summitt City and communities regulated by other artificial stimulants. Religion, socialism, art and patriotism — yes, and television — tend to grind out citizens as uniform as sausage links.”

Correll paused to study the scenes on the screen. “The difference here,” he continued then, “is simple but profound. This is a social group that cannot be aroused to endanger its neighbors or itself. The emotional climate at Summitt City is permanently programmed and controlled.

“As you know from your indoctrination” — again Correll froze the frame — “we are prepared to produce and license the use of Ancilia Four, franchise is a more exact term since we will retain both the formula and the manufacturing rights. We will function as suppliers to those client-states who agree to all our conditions and, more importantly, who can afford them.

“The emphasis in the contracts is on money. You may wonder why I talk of mutual survival, and those sonnets and cathedrals in one breath and money in the next. That is because money is the quickest and most effective way to convince you that we are serious. Money is the only medium of exchange I know of which will ensure without question your respect and cooperation in the use of Ancilia Four.

“A word now from General Taggart. The general and I are not in philosophical agreement in certain areas. Perhaps I can illustrate that by the phenomenon among insects known as ‘stigmergy.’ A Greek coinage, it means roughly, incitement to work.

“It has been observed that three or four termites in a group are harmless. In a human reference, they are ‘peaceful.’ In small numbers, they know nothing and more importantly, they do nothing. But when you increase the termite population, competitive urges and instinctive compulsions cause them to build furiously. Prodded by genetic anxiety, these formerly peaceful insects become agitated and industrious. They collect one another’s fecal pellets and stack them in perfect heaps, construct towering structures to support and enclose their termitarium. They do this though they are, by nature, blind. A mass of termites becomes a single entity, a flawless architect, cunning, driven, tireless. But the result of their robotic labor is always chaos. In their fearful zeal they destroy everything. Columns and arches collapse, they are crushed and smother, their world ends.

“To me there is an analogy between those termites and the human race on this crowded earth. The Russians and Americans are building nuclear weapons in a mindless compulsion. Statistics have become meaningless. Each can destroy the other ten times over, fifty times, a hundred. The same instinctual fears have driven other nations to join the frenzied competition. To create ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy, Iraq, for example, used a French reactor, Italian processing equipment and Portuguese uranium. I believe they could as easily have gone to South Korea, Cuba, Pakistan or various countries in South America.

“The formula exists. Nuclear arms are now as uncontrollable as unregistered handguns. The growth is as mindless as that in a termite castle. The result will be identical. Our house will crumble and collapse about us, our world will end.

“I come to the heart of my difference with General Taggart. He has infinite faith in the capacity of the universe to repopulate itself. Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, is convinced that a nuclear war can be won. If fifty Americans and only five Russians survived, they would both consider that a strategic victory.

“I, on the other hand, believe that man’s fate, his continuing existence, can be protected. Even from himself.

“After an intermission, and a briefing by General Taggart, we will show the film which demonstrates exactly what we have accomplished here at Summitt City.”

At Camp Saliaris’s communication center, a captain processed George Thomson’s call to Dom Lorso in an office humming with air-conditioning units. At various stations, sergeants monitored switchboards and radar screens. Windows gave on the parade ground and playing fields.

Thomson looked out at the exercise fields. Soldiers, men and women in shorts and tank tops, were playing volleyball. Joggers trotted by the obstacle course, weaving around the quilted stocks of a bayonet range.

The captain said, “We’ve got to tape this, Mr. Thomson. I’m required to tell you, sir.”

“I understand that, soldier. But let’s get with it.”

“Should be about five minutes, sir. We’re sweeping the Pennsylvania terminals for electronic surveillance. That’s SOP during alerts, sir.”

Everything looked so normal outside, the joggers, the young people playing volleyball, but circling the perimeters of the camp were chain-link fences with sound sensors, heat and pressure alarms. And jeeps with armed soldiers and guard dogs.

The legs of the women players were slim and white, fragile compared to the men’s, and when they leaped for the ball their longer hair swirled and tumbled about their faces and shoulders. Like a college campus, Thomson thought, except for the radar screens and monitoring helicopters and the orders that had sealed off the air space above Saliaris for the last twenty-four hours to all civilian and military overflights, except one.

Thomson drew a deep breath to relieve a cold ache in his stomach. That pain had been with him since he had got Dom Lorso’s message, telling him that Earl was missing. Gone, without a word to anyone...

Thomson’s nerves were stretched tight, and he found himself envying the stolid composure of the soldiers around him. Strong impassive faces, steady hands, army regulars with stomachs and bowels in fine working order, no need of drink or pills to put them to sleep nights. They were people Thomson knew well, the “three hots and a cot” types who had served under him in Korea, as easy to control as well-trained dogs.

That had certainly been Taggart’s view of them in those days, the “Chief” as he had been called then, because of his intense preoccupation with Rome and Spartacus’s gladiators and those old legends.

The general had the ideal soldierly characteristics, complacently adjusted to male bonding; he had been relieved, Thomson felt, when his wife died and he had been able to settle again into the spartan luxuries of post life — squash rackets and polo, card games and bachelor dinners and solitary officer’s quarters.

Taggart had a son, Thomson remembered, who had been at Rockland with Earl and was now a captain or a major somewhere in Germany. His name was Derek but for some reason he’d been called Ace by his classmates.

They weren’t close, Taggart and his son, Ace, which would be the Chiefs preference, no intimacies, the son posted overseas to make sure that problems, if any, could be cut in triplicate and sent through proper channels to the chaplain’s office.

Maybe there was something in that, Thomson thought, thinking of Earl and Dom Lorso’s call. Not to care, to be free from that... Maybe you shouldn’t try to stay close to people, maybe your own needs were more important than those traps of responsibility and guilt. Any sensation, even pain of a certain kind, had become a surrogate to Thomson for sensual arousal, and now the ache in his stomach from Lorso’s call had settled disturbingly but also pleasurably to his loins as he watched the girls playing volleyball.

“We have your call, sir.”

Thomson took the phone and said, “Dom, I want the rest of it now. This line is hot, but say what you have to say, go ahead.”

“Okay, then. It’s this. They had dinner last night, Earl and Adele. This morning he was gone. It’s the call from that girl that’s bugging him, if you want my guess.”

Thomson heard a tiny click; Lorso had snapped his lighter to light a cigarette. “A cop stopped by yesterday to talk to Earl, a sergeant name of Wilger, some questions on the missing Porsche. That could’ve upset him too.”

“Did you talk to Slocum about that?”

Lorso hesitated. Thomson heard his labored breathing. “No, I asked the captain to check out Earl, make some inquiries. I don’t want him to roadblock a routine investigation. That could just draw attention to the car. You agree, Mr. Thomson?”

“Yes, of course.” The ache intensified in his stomach, the sensation pure tension and pain now, with no suggestion of distracting sexual excitement.

“The thing is,” Lorso continued, “when Earl gets in certain moods he doesn’t trust anybody, not even Uncle Dom.”

“Then you’d better find him. Slocum might talk to some of his friends around the state.”

“We’ll do that. But there’s one other thing. Adele isn’t leveling with us. I think she knows where he is. Earl’s one thing but Earl and Adele together — like they are now — that’s something else. Take care, now.”

When Lorso rang off, Thomson gave the phone to the captain and listened dully to the heavy stroke of his heart. Rain had started and the players were hurrying from the field, but they meant nothing to him now; the long-legged girls were little stiltlike figures running across the parade ground under low, gray skies.