Serpent's Walk

CHAPTER FIVE

Wednesday, July 9, 2042

The boardroom could have been anywhere: plastics, mahogany-J. veneer paneling, soft lights, air-conditioning, metal chairs with green upholstery, a polished, oaken table as big as two king-size beds, cut-crystal decanters, smeary-looking abstract paintings on the walls, and an enigmatic sculpture of crusty, black metal in one corner. All the trappings of corporate grandeur.

This particular room was part of a concrete-and-glass penthouse. Outside, seven stories down, were the streets of Guatemala City, rebuilt after the great quake of 2031. Colorful morning crowds bustled through the cement canyons, neither caring nor knowing about the assemblage gathered above.

Lessing leaned against the west wall, that farthest from the windows. The sun beat against the tinted glass, and he preferred the cooler, shadowier depths at the opposite end of the room. Chairs had been placed along the side walls for the “hired help.” Wrench sat in one of these, and Goddard occupied a place of greater glory just behind Herman Mulder himself. Lessing was tired of sitting. He had already drunk his fill of ice water, read two pages of Wrench’s news magazine, and nibbled on the bland crackers that the three dark-eyed Guatemalan female secretaries provided.

Lessing had spent much of his life among dark-eyed, brown-skinned people, men and women who gesticulated and spoke in alien tongues, who wore strange clothes, who ate foods that blazed with hot peppers and spices, who struggled and pushed and crowded… and hungered… and yearned… and demanded.

He considered that. The cover of Wrench’s magazine pictured a myriad of tiny, naked bodies swarming over one another like ants in a sugar bowl. Those at the bottom of the page were portrayed as crushed under the weight of those above and were colored a bloody scarlet. The yellow header said: “How ya gonna keep ’em…?”

The world overflowed with restless people, hordes of Asians and Africans and Latin Americans. Only disunity, inertia, and a certain lack of technology and organization kept them from spilling out of their boundaries and swamping the rest of the world beneath a sea of flesh. The magazine was not known for irrational doom-saying.

The West was moribund, it said. North America and Europe were strangling in their own pollution, their jungle of bureaucracies, their greedy lobbies, their economic woes, and their insoluble social ailments. The will to act was slipping away from Western society, day by day, hour by hour, like a rope from the clutches of a drowning man.

Wrench’s magazine also contained yet another fright lesson, one that was repeated almost daily: the specter of all-out war, the Atomic Debacle, the Big Ka-Boom! In 2010 the Vietnamese and the Chinese had lambasted each other with small but very dirty fission bombs. Now both Shanghai and Hanoi were fit only for tourists who enjoyed their vacations in radiation suits. A million people suffered from bums, wounds, and genetic defects.

It was a fright lesson indeed, one that might recur at any time, given humanity’s usual stupidity, poor judgment, and bad luck. The weapons were all set and ready; yet not even the saber-rattlers wanted to use them. Satellites infested the skies, silent fireflies in the dusk, but their particle beams, lasers, and missiles remained inert, and their functions were limited to intelligence gathering and communication. The ground silos were jammed with rockets and warheads, but none had ever gone screaming up to burst into flowers of crimson death. The submarines, the aircraft carriers, and the underwater launching sites were maintained, but toy boats in a bathtub saw more combat. The land armies and bases and all the rest of the accoutrements of war were the same: they stood idle in the fields and cities of the world, and no mighty hero dared send them to the attack.

An end to war? No Armageddon? No kidding?

Hallelujah!

It should be a happy time: children growing up in peace, their parents free of fear. Utopia! The Millennium! Humanity could go down on its collective knees and give thanks that the raging Flame Lord of the Rockets lay chained, gorged upon blood from the mayhem of all the ages gone before.

Yet there was a cost, one that was only now becoming apparent. It was a high cost indeed.

The world was at peace, but that peace could be maintained only by a dangerous and frustrating balancing act. Pull society one way, and something else had to tug it back again; otherwise equilibrium would be lost, and the rockets would rise, shrieking and hungry, upon grasshopper legs of fire.

It was a balancing act above a tiger pit. The world teetered and sweated above the lunging beasts of chaos. One could not allow changes, reforms, or major repairs to the social fabric. Inventions of the more radical sort were out, too; they were too unpredictable, too dangerous, too unbalancing.

One false step, and down went the circus’s only acrobat from the high-wire. Not with a whimper but with one hell of a thud. A fine finale for an audience on Alpha Centauri.

The world could make no major changes: none that mattered, not the ones needed to halt pollution, to slow the birthrate, to increase efficiency, to end festering social ills, to alter the structure of government and law and custom to conform with modern exigencies. The world hadn’t moved one way or the other in half a century. It didn’t dare.

There were improvements, of course. Most of these were minor. Compared with the changes that occurred between 1850 and 1950, most of those from 1950 to 2042 were trivial. The earlier century had seen the coming of electricity, of automobiles and highways, of radio, of television, of airplanes and rockets, of drugs that worked miracles — of flush toilets and telephones and movies and who knew what else. The list was endless. The first decades of the next century saw one really significant change: the introduction of the computer and other microelectronic devices. Then the pace slowed. During the next fifty years or so there were better fuels, a few dandy medicines, more efficient guns and space hardware, cars with more gizmos, pop with more bubbly, longer-lasting sugarless chewing gum, more elaborate video games, and louder ear-blasters for the “Banger” music freaks. But very little that was radical. Very little that was important.

The comparison wasn’t even close. Why? The think-tankers denied that humanity had invented all that could be invented: much more could be done, they said, provided “development” was there — and provided the Powers That Be lei change occur.

That last was the kicker.

Change usually meant loss of control, loss of money, loss of entrenched investments. Those were the things that sent empires reeling. Invent something basic — cheap synthetic fuel, for example — and watch the economic and political order go clattering down like a Japanese domino exhibition! Reform one minor tax, end a program, close one bureau, and see the lobbyists scurry to the rescue! The Powers did not want — could not permit — adventurism. Important, far-reaching technical, political, and cultural changes were out.

Brave, new world? Hell, Wrench insisted — and Lessing reluctantly agreed — that it wasn’t even a very brave old one: too chick-enshit to get its act together and do anything about anything! Sides, lobbies, interests, propagandists, voices big and small, multiplied into an uproar of opinion, demand, and contradictory advice that outdid the Tower of Babel by umpty-ump million decibels! Change, you say? Develop? Reform? Not likely! Not with everybody pulling this way and that, from Big Oil and Big Steel to the Lesbian Dirt-bikers for Jesus!

Politically the maps hadn’t changed very much since the beginning of the twenty-first century, which kept the map makers poor but pleased the Establishment. Russia and the United States, after a brief rapprochement in the 1990s, now glared at each other again across various international chessboards, and everybody else waited breathlessly on the outskirts like kids watching two gang leaders about to duke it out in the locker room. So the West put up satellites with more sophisticated computers? The Soviets immediately followed suit with smart bombs that travelled underwater, then emerged and flew for short distances to smash land installations. The Chinese, the Brazilians, the Indonesians, the Indians, the Israelis, and everybody else with a dime’s worth of technology strove to copy as best they could. It was an endless race, a “keeping up with the Joneses,” that was both unwinnable and utterly wasteful of the planet’s diminishing resources.

Britain was a shell, a tourist attraction, a moldering hulk immo-bilized by economic woes. France, Spain, Italy? Business as usual; nothing new. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Northern countries? All well, thank you, but no sudden bursts of progress. After all, progress was tied to change, which might mean unrest, and unrest led to — well, to trouble. For Europe, trouble might mean war, and that meant death. Who wants to light a match in a fireworks factory? Europe wanted no wars, no trampling armies, no bright, atomic suns kindling over Rome, Zurich, London, or Berlin.

The only real winner over the past century had been Israel. The Zionists had busily expanded their “defenses” and “retaliated” themselves into the position of the major power in the Middle East. Israel owned everything from Libya over through Iraq and into Iran: more than five million square kilometers of territory and about a hundred million sullen slaves! Even President Rubin’s friendly American government occasionally made tsk-tsking noises at the Zionists’ odd conception of “civil rights” for their Arab citizenry. Nobody listened to the Arabs, as one might expect, except the United Nations — which had become a meaningless wailing wall for the powerless. The Israelis made good use of propaganda. They squawked about “provocations,” then they “retaliated.” When those arguments didn’t work, they trotted out their century-old lamenta-tions about the “Holocaust” yet again, and their Western critics fell into embarrassed, silence, as always.

The Russians hadn’t changed much in the last forty years either, it was just like it had been before the collapse of communism back at the beginning of the 1990s: the same secretive bureaucracies, the same missiles festooned with warheads like Christmas-tree lights, and the whole gamut of social injustices — which the Soviets saw as properly necessary measures to hold a restless and disillusioned empire together. They held down their end of the teeter-totter nicely. No wars, no forays into alien lands, a few “advisors” here and there, maybe, and lots of propaganda. Balance. The Soviets understood the lesson of Hanoi and Shanghai too.

Balance did impel the Russians to take Pakistan into protective custody, using the “Red Mullah,” Sajid Ali Lahori, as their puppet jailer. Central and South America were not yet their property, but several presidents, generalissimos, dictators, and “People’s Revolutionary Heroes” jigged obediently whenever the Kremlin played the balalaika. During the past century various South American nations went from democracies to People’s Republics to military tyrannies and back again to democracies. Not even the historians could keep track. Ceniral America served as a free-fire zone for weapons testing, causing local misery and evoking dismal cries from the drug smugglers whenever somebody napalmed their coca or cannabis crops. Yet nothing halted the violence. Cuba was once more solidly pro-America (or pro-Big Crime, depending upon one’s point of view). Castro’s death in 1997 and the abysmal failures of his short-lived successors quietly ended any hopes the Soviets had for a foothold close to the United States. Moscow shrugged, figuratively, and sought elsewhere.

China was the third major party to the balancing act, its hegemony spread through Thailand, Burma, and above India’s northern frontiers to confront the Russians in Pakistan. The Americans believed — hoped and prayed were more truthful — that Peking would come down on their side in any shoot-out. Japan was still mostly in the American camp, although Japan now owned a lot of that camp and would have much to say in the international corporocracy taking shape to rule the decades to come. Korea, unified after the strife of 1998, was as Russian as Tashkent. Indonesia, Malaysia, The Philippines, New Guinea, and the United Republics of the South Pacific were supposedly within the American perimeter; they squabbled, fought, and shook with political convulsions as devastating as their lava-spouting volcanos. Australia and New Zealand went their own way, still profoundly British but aloof from the woes of Europe and the Americas. In 2009 a large part of Canada offered to join the United States, but Congress still hadn’t ratified the accession three decades later; there were too many other things to worry about.

The saddest of all was Africa. The Israelis occupied the northeast, the United Islamic Republic of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia the northwest, and the interior was mostly up for grabs, all the way down to the fortress-state of South Africa, stronger than ever behind its Siegfried Line of bunkers and barbed wire and mercenary battalions. Africa was the favored playground of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The Africans had little to say about it; they starved, suffered, and died on cue, just bit-players in the tragicomedy of history.

Armageddon, the War at the End of Time, hadn’t happened. All told, humanity really ought to be grateful. Only when one looked at the crowding, the hunger, the unemployment, the frustrations, the dilemmas that would soon become insoluble for all time, did the gloomy visage of the future become manifest. Humans, one school of anthropology averred, were essentially aggressive, pugnacious, and acquisitive “killer apes.” If true, then sealing off the vents through which these traits were expressed would eventually blow the kettle. If man couldn’t lust, covet, fight, grab, and wave his collective privates at his foes, then he had to have escape valves through which he could release these estimable emotions harmlessly. There were no new frontiers for the privates-wavers to conquer, no badlands where they could pioneer and fight without hurting the stay-at-homes, no heroic conquerors, no knights, no dragons, no maidens to rescue. The moon and the planets were habitable only by tiny parties of skilled astronauts. The earth was too crowded and its balance too delicate to permit much more brandishing of genitalia.

Exercise, sports, and the caterwauling, orgasmic catharsis of “Banger” pop music satisfied many; the rest were fed TV. The average citizen of the twenty-first century lived vicariously; he watched football, hockey, wrestling, suicidal car races, soap operas, talk shows, sitcoms, maim-and-jiggle dramas, game shows where everybody always smiled even when they lost a million dollars, and vicarious violence for all ages and sexes. Every show was laced with “The Message”: Be passive, be peaceful, be bland.

“The blanding of the world,” as Wrench once put it; to which Jameela had replied, “Oh, you mean blandishment.” They all laughed, but Lessing thought about the two words later.

In spite of the “blandishments” of the media, the tangle of social and economic problems produced a sense of futility, a feeling that there wasn’t much point to things. Unrest burgeoned: racial imbalances, labor unions, immigrants both legal and illegal, Born-Agains versus the godless and the heretics and the cuckoo cults, prolife versus pro-choice, rich versus poor. All bubbled and frothed together in the overpopulated, polluted, crumbling cities. Suicide surpassed heart disease as a major cause of death. Other urbanized nations suffered similarly, and the regular armies spent much of their time quelling internal, rather than external, trouble. This twenty-first century was no Utopia after all.

Nor were international hostilities completely ended. Small wars were permitted as long as they didn’t escalate. “You steal my sheep, and I rustle your cattle, and I’ll see you in town Saturday night for a beer!” Some regions — the unlucky ones like Africa, Central America, and parts of the Middle East — made dandy, reusable battlegrounds. Allowable and containable conflict gave rise to the mercenaries. The aggressive individual, the sociopath, the loner, the one who could not be “blandished” and was not satisfied with cop shows and football heroes, could join a mercenary unit and fight and die to his — or her — heart’s content. Keep most of society down with indoctrination; help the occasional unredeemable looney find a suitably bloody heroic death.

The media loved the “Merc Wars.” More vicarious violence for the folks at home; sell more breakfast food, pantyhose, and deodorant. Like the gladiators of Rome, mercenaries were eminently expendable, watchable — and bankable.

Yet it wasn’t a game, no matter how the TV-casters prated about heroes, insignia, weapons, and “kills.” There were real causes, encroachments, terrorists, guerrillas, rebels, tyrants, and exploitation. The use of regular national forces would lead to escalation and confrontation, and those, in turn, led straight into the gaping maw of Doomsday. And, anyhow, the Establishments had always loved mercenaries. The Romans had hired, bribed, and eventually been swamped by barbarian troops. King John of England had used European captains and their bands to such an extent that the Magna Carta expressly ordered that they be sent packing. Read about the Hundred Years War or any of a dozen other European conflicts, and there was always the mercenary, grinning his cold grin, polishing his weapons, and ready for a “spesh-op.”

The game was in deadly earnest in the longer geopolitical sense, of course. Better arms, organization, and ruthlessness would eventually win, as the Soviets, the Israelis, the South Africans, to name just a few, well realized. Wear the enemy down, be patient, and keep coming back. Eventually “thine is the power.”

Was the West ruthless enough? Could it win against opponents who played for keeps? Lessing doubted it, and he was not alone. The “blanding” of Euro-America might help suppress internal strife, but it made for damned poor fighting men. There were always barbarians out there, circling, ready to pour in and pillage, rape, and take over. Barbarians eventually settled and became urbanized; then they became decadent in turn and were trampled into slavery by the next horde of wild goombunnies from the boondocks.

The wise man looked at history philosophically: you were out, then you were in, then you were up, then you were down, and finally you were out again. Maybe a hundred, a thousand years down the line you got a second chance. Round and round

Western society had grown passive, as fossilized as a lump of coal. The West would soon go the way of the later Roman Empire, squabbling over ancient traditions that no longer mattered, prattling of the splendors of its past, and unable to defend against the inevitable Attila the Hun, the Barbarian Who Must Surely Come.

“Down the tubes of eternity without a paddle,” as Lessing’s father used to say, quoting from some twentieth -century philosopher or other. And: “You only get one grab at the brass ring” — whatever that had originally meant. Lessing’s father had been quaint and antiquarian, a mild and prissy veterinarian who ran a pet shop in Iowa. Lessing had

He did not like thinking about his past. Yet the older he became the more he found himself doing exactly that. He rubbed his nose, cleared his throat, and sat down in the chair next to Wrench.

The conference dragged on through the morning. The seven men and five women around the table struck Lessing as unlikely Nazis. Descendants of the fearsome SS? More an insurance agents’ sales meeting! These people looked like accountants, executives, stock-holders, coupon clippers! Good, grey, solid citizens all. Instead of ideology they spoke in measured tones of profits and losses, new products and old, advertising, sales, commissions, government regulations, shipping, aircraft, tariffs, unions in Sweden, miners’ strife in France, taxes in Israeli-held Egypt.

The minute hand on the black-glass wall clock went around twice. Wrench nodded off and had to be nudged. Lessing felt his own eyelids drooping, and he gazed at the svelte Guatemalan secretary by the door until her cheeks flushed. She murmured an excuse and slipped out. No playing with that one. She probably had her eye on something more exalted than a lowly bodyguard.

He scrutinized the conferees themselves. Aside from Mulder, who spoke with an urbane, East Coast American accent, there were two other Americans, one male and one female. Two others had English surnames but talked like Spanish-speakers; these were again a man and a woman, middle-aged, prim-looking, and businesslike. Another pair of males bore Spanish surnames and sounded like Latin Americans. One was plump, the other swarthy and dapper. With them was a youngish woman who appeared to be the dapper one’s wife. Beside the latter sat the oldest of the conferees: a powder-pale woman who resembled a British dowager but whose English bore a decided French lilt. The man opposite Mulder at the end of the table appeared to be an Arab; some SS officer in exile must have succumbed to loneliness! The last two, again male and female and middle-aged, were Europeans, but so cosmopolitan that there was no trace of any accent. Not a German in the lot! Lessing’s mid-twentieth-century history was as vague as only an American high school could make it, but he did recall that some thirty years ago one of Israel’s military rulers had vowed to visit the sins of the fathers upon the sons, as it said somewhere in the Bible, quite literally, and with interest. Many Germans abroad had then found it prudent to alter their identities.

Lessing dozed but then awoke again. Mulder was talking about the breakin at Indoco’s Lucknow plant.

“…Even though we do have copies, the originals are precious to us as history. More importantly, the diaries contain information on our corporate structure, companies owned, stock held, interlocking boards of directors, and the like. They would be quite devastating if used as propaganda… or to create legal entanglements for us with half a dozen governments.” Mulder glanced back at Lessing and Wrench. “Unfortunately, my security men here had to dispose of the two intruders. We have no idea who they were.”

“Nothing on them since?” It was the dapper Latin American male. Mulder shook his bald head, and the man asked, “Has anyone else seen… heard… noticed… anything?”

Papers rustled. The two Americans conferred in whispers. The Arab straightened his conservative English tie, shot back his cuffs, and smiled raptly at the ceiling. The ostensible English dowager, a Mrs. E. Delacroix according to her place marker, turned to a woman behind her, a blonde, female assistant. She gestured her forward and said, “Liese, please.”

Lessing noticed her for the first time. Liese? It could be Lisa. Was that the blonde’s nickname or her real name? It might be worth the trouble to find out. She was tall, slender, late twenty-ish, pale of skin but not pasty or sallow, with a high forehead and angular cheekbones. Her hair was a darker blonde than Lessing’s: straight, smooth, shoulder length, and cut in the page-boy fashion that was popular once more. From what he could see of her pearl-grey blouse, she didn’t offer much in the bust department. Not like Jameela — guilty thought — but then Lessing had never restricted himself to the worship of the great American Cow-Goddess. Liese had long, slender legs with good ankles.

“Edouard Mestrich.” Liese nodded toward Mrs. Delacroix and held up a manila file. “Trade liaison officer for Lejeune et Fils. Tractors and farm machinery.” The company must be part of the conglomerate network Wrench had mentioned. Liese had a good voice, low and articulate, with a purring, throaty quality, but her delivery was curt and choppy. “Mestrich. Our man. Trip last month to Moscow, Leningrad, Smolensk. Held up by very unusual Soviet roadblocks, customs, special checks. Soldiers. Followed everywhere. Hard time getting out. Others report the same.”

Lessing concluded that it would be nice to teach this Liese about verbs, adjectives, and complete sentences. Business efficiency should be carried only so far!

“They changin’ leaders again?” the American gentleman drawled.

“No. Something else. Something secret. Very secret.”

“Sheee-it!” the American groaned. “What they plannin’ now!” He sounded as though the Soviets intended to discommode him personally.

“Nothing to do with us, eh?” inquired the Arab in near-unintelligible Oxonian English.

“No. None of our agents say so.”

A Sr. Arturo Delgado, by his name card, interrupted from across the table’s polished expanse. “Excuse me. Let me add here. We in Santiago do business in Vladivostok, and our representatives report similar tightening of security… suspicion, much checking. One of my salesmen reported that the Russians had arrested several foreigners: Pakistanis, maybe, or Afghans.”

“Did you find out why?” Mrs. Delacroix patted her blue-white coiffure. The dye job was beautiful. For a woman in her late seventies, she was a work of art.

“No, sehora. We tried.”

“Assembly of the Holy Qur’an? Pakhtoon People’s Front?” Her blonde girl, Liese, tapped a polished fingernail on the table for each name. “Islam International? Martyrs of Allah? All of the predominantly Moslem republics in the Soviet Union still resent Russian rule. Attempt on the Red Mullah’s life a month ago.”

“The fourth this year,” chuckled the Arab. “B lighter’s still alive.”

“Something odd in the state of Israel, too,” the unknown European male remarked. Lessing squinted but couldn’t read the man’s place marker from where he was.

“Security. Like Russia.” Liese rapped. “High tension between Israel and the U.S.S.R. since last November. Soviet raid on Baghdad. Albanian meres. Regular Red Army staging in Baku. Nerves.”

Mrs. Delacroix sniffed. If cool and efficient Liese wanted to keep her job, she must learn not to take over conversations at meetings.

The man continued: “There are some… eh… wrongnesses in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. American Eastern Mediterranean staff arriving, and highly placed Israelis coming and going. More than the usual conferences and military movements.”

“Naughty Muslims!” the Arab intoned dryly. “Want their countries back.”

“That is not it, Mr. Abu Talib,” the European replied. “The Arabs are quiet—”

“Slaves are supposed to be quiet!”

“Please!” Mulder rapped on the table. “We’re getting side-tracked.”

“Better than halftracked!” Mr. Abu Talib pantomimed a tank rolling over his immaculate Savile Row lapels.

“Order! Order!” the second American, the woman, commanded. She had a voice like a drill sergeant. “Our plane leaves at 1900 hours.” Her name card said she was Ms. Jennifer Sims Caw. The surname struck Lessing as fittingly onomatopoetic. She was clearly not connected to the older American male with the soft, slightly Southern accent; that worthy drew away from her as though she had bad breath.

“We have several things to find out, then,” Mulder said above the ensuing hubbub. “First, who Indoco’s intruders were and what they wanted with our records and diaries. Second, whether this man Bauer… my Mr. Lessing ‘s, uh, comrade… was connected with them. Third… and much harder… discover what’s agitating the Russians. And the Israelis. And anybody else around the world. There’s something in the wind.”

They broke for lunch at noon.

At one o’clock Lessing and Wrench returned to go over the boardroom with debugging devices. They also scanned the place with a metal detector and three kinds of electronic sensors. They found nothing.

Mulder appeared at 1 :20, perspiration staining the back of his white, Bylon jacket. This, he announced, was a special, private session, and he had Wrench and Lessing check one another for bugs and concealed weapons. Then Goddard arrived with Liese, followed by three of the Latin Americans’ security men. Lessing examined each with impartial care. Liese made no objection to Lessing’s gentle, pat-down body search. She was talking in her rapid, staccato fashion with one of the beegees and affected not to notice.

The other board members and their retinues filed in and received the same treatment. Lessing and a gaunt, nervous youth who worked for Mr. Abu Talib were deputed to stand just inside the door, Wrench and two others by the windows on the north, and three more beegees along the south wall.

Lessing expected some sort of ritual. Nazis at least ought to cry “Sieg Heil” or something equally dramatic. But Mulder only fumbled with one of the slim SS diary-books and read, “Minutes of the last meeting. December 17, 2041, Jakarta, Indonesia.” There followed a list of attendees, most of whom were different from those present today. He turned a page and continued:

“I report the following actions. It was resolved: One. To fund the film on the life of SS Sturmmann Fritz Christen, one of the heroes of the Totenkopf Division on the Eastern Front. Christen held out for three days by himself after all his comrades were killed, and he personally did for thirteen Soviet tanks and about a hundred enemy infantry. War Films are popular, and we stand to make a great deal of money . Georges Kaletanis will direct. Cost sheets and projections are appended.

“Two. To offer 800,000 U.S. dollars to Columbia University for the establishment of a fellowship fund for students working on modem socio-political history. Three of our people will likely be chosen for the selection committee, and we’ll thus have a very large say in the choice of candidates. Any useful recipients can then be recruited by our cadre there.

“Three. To withhold further support from the Congress of Americans for Personal Freedom They’re attracting unfavorable attention, the FBI is investigating them, and their theories smack too much of discredited Born-Again theology. If their president, William Gardner, were to be replaced by Grant Simmons, the treasurer, we could reconsider.

“Four. To purchase the property of Club Lingahnie on the Micronesian island of Ponape, in the South Pacific. We need a rest and recreation center in that region, and we can ensure privacy. Worthy students will be sent there for seminars and holidays, as will certain well-disposed political leaders. The cost will be in the neighborhood of 1.3 million U.S. dollars. Here’s the prospectus, if anybody’s interested.

“Five. To provide 500,000 German marks through our Austrian branch for legal aid to Franz Ulrich Koch, accused of debunking the ‘Holocaust’ last summer. He’s not a crank, and we’ll get some favorable publicity out of his trial. He’ll have sympathy: a gang of Jewish fanatics, the… ah, ‘Vigilantes for Zion,’ broke into his house to teach him the usual lesson. He wasn’t home, and they raped his daughter instead. The Israelis and the Euro-American Jewish groups disavow any connection with the culprits, but we do have evidence of their financial backing for the Vizzies. Win or lose, the trial should help us.

“Six. To continue support for our regular list of newspapers, television stations, magazines, and other media organs at present levels. We’ll be buying the Cairo Misr al-Yaum and the St. Louis Weekly News within the month. These will fill important gaps in our coverage.

“Seven. To offer private aid to Speaker of the House Jonas Outram in the U.S. Congress. He and his allies are already anti-Black and anti-Zionist. They’re also hostile to our Movement, but then they don’t need… or want… to know who’s behind the curtain, eh?

“Eight. To evaluate and standardize the curricula of our chains of private schools, military academies, and gymnasia across Europe, Australia, and the United States. Offerings have become uneven. Students in the United States are behind those in Germany, England, and other places, due not only to the decline of American education generally, but also to the tangle of local regulations and needs and a lack of coordination on our part. A report and a budget are included.”

He stopped and looked around. “Questions? New business?” Someone asked, “Progress on the book? The revision of Mein Kampf?”

“It’s not really a ‘revision,’ as we’ve said before. Nobody could revise the First Führer’s work. Mein Kampf was written for German readers more than a hundred years ago, and some parts of it are as irrelevant to our present situation as Karl Marx… or the Bible, for that matter. No, our book is a position statement and philosophical-historical foundation for the movement as it exists today. We have a team of good people… publicists, psychologists, journalists… working on it. It’s hard to sell a cause as maligned as ours, and we have to do the best job possible.”

Jennifer Caw raised her hand. Lessing noticed that she was actually a strikingly attractive woman, however brash her manners might be. She had auburn hair, probably natural, and the ruddy complexion that comes from days in the sun. She said, “I still doubt that a committee can write a book that’s worth anything. It needs a single individual, somebody with fire, a cause, a driving compulsion.”

“We need a Führer,” Mr. Abu Talib interposed bluntly. “That’s your point?”

“Yes, but who?” The American woman shot back. “Name one of us!”

“Blast it, madam, you know we haven’t anyone with the talent, the charisma, the bloody balls to rewrite Mein Kampf for the twenty-first century!” He stopped, embarrassed. “A committee is really the only available method, you know.”

Mulder said, “It will take time, and we have time. We’re at the bottom of the popularity barrel. There’s nowhere to go but up.”

“Which makes some of us agree with our street-brethren,” the Arab retorted coolly. “March. Speak. Fight.”

“Break heads and get heads broken in return?” Mulder sounded mildly reproachful. “This isn’t Munich in the 1920’s. Beerhalls and despairing veterans of World War I… inflation and communists, Freikorps and anarchists… in a dying Weimar Republic! Although the basic principles he enunciated remain as valid today as they were then, the First Führer spoke to his own times. We must do the same.”

“Write a book by committee, and you get what you pay for: a Hollywood script!”

Mulder looked uncomfortable but said no more. Jennifer Caw gazed across at Lessing, probably not seeing him at all, and the others stirred restlessly.

Lessing lost interest after that. The conferees discussed further business matters, arrangements for publications, organizational details, and trivia. He managed to make eye contact with Liese, which he counted as a minor triumph. She watched him covertly, and he resolved to speak to her. Goddard was smirking at her too; his macho “Tower of Power” routine worked well with lady executives.

Jameela came unbidden into Lessing’s thoughts. Damn it, he wasn’t seriously planning a night in the sack with this blonde! He was only fantasizing. Yet he knew Jameela would regard even that as infidelity. Indians and Pakistanis were still largely monogamous, a legacy from Queen Victoria and the stuffy, old British Raj, combined with attitudes from their own heritages. He’d had a hard time persuading Jameela to live with him, even within Indoco’s isolated compound. Outside, she never showed him anything beyond impersonal friendliness; to do so, she said, would rouse prejudice and objections no Westerner could imagine. Whatever the starlets of the Indian film industry in Bombay did, Lucknow was still thoroughly provincial and conservative.

American mores were radically different. Queen Victoria would have turned up her patrician nose at what passed for morality in the modem U.S. of A. Currently, just for starters, some fifty-eight percent of all births were out of wedlock, divorce split two couples in three, and many young people opted for “Banger” lifestyles ranging from homosexuality on through polygyny, polyandry, group marriage, and Califomian Dildo-of-the-Month parties! Marriage was increasingly rare among the educated, although small-towners, rural folk, and wealthy “old culture” families still kept up traditional values. Shades of the last days of the Roman Republic!

Lessing’s own family had been virtuously Midwestern and middle class: one previous marriage for his father, no issue, that they never talked about. His mother had been nicknamed “the Ice Princess” in high school — not because she could skate. His father found out too late what her nickname meant but stuck with her anyway for fifty years, a pallid, grey ghost of a man long before he died. Lessing’s mother then continued to live on in respectable, clammy piety, which caused him to flee at the first opportunity. He had never looked back. Even then he feared that he had escaped too late.

Did he “love” Jameela, or she him? The word was too simple for what they had together. English needed more fine-tunings of such terms as “love,” anyway, just as the Eskimo tongue was supposed to have a score of words to express different kinds of snow. There ought to be separate names for platonic friendships, once-for-the-hell-of-it larks, casual rolls-in-the-hay, pay-as-you-lay commercial couplings, motel afternoons, one-night stands, beach-blanket weekends, let’s-try-for-a-week experiments, month-long serious relationships, share-the-apartment-until-one-of-us-gets-bored-long-term stuff — all the way up to eternal matrimony sanctioned in Heaven and stamped with God’s holy thumbprint.

Lessing’s relationship with Jameela Husaini did not fit any category. They cared a great deal for one another, but neither was sure where it went beyond that. He didn’t want to marry Jameela, settle down in India, or, God forbid, back in Iowa, and grow old and squishy like a potato in a bin. She hadn’t mentioned marriage either. Wrench had once suggested that opportunity and proximity were the mainsprings of love. The Indoco plant was a zoo, and Lessing and Jameela were tiger cubs tossed into the same pen. What would they do if the cage door were opened?

It would be easy to hide any extra-curricular games from Jameela. Indoco’s wire-mesh fences locked things out as well as in. Here in Guatemala City it was simpler still. He could lose Goddard and Wrench in a revolving door. Jameela would never know.

To get down to bedrock, however, Lessing was no Captain Marlow Striker, the steely-eyed, granite-thewed, stereotypical mere of the movies and TV. Fantasy was fine for the kiddies and the frustrated, but it wasn’t reality. Fictional heroes might treat women as objects to be acquired, laid, and discarded; Lessing preferred women who were people, responsive and intelligent, with humorous, quirky personalities. He wasn’t like Goddard, who went for TV sex-goddesses with teats like a pair of mortars. Such women were about as real as the Tooth Fairy. Wrench — well. Wrench had never been known to have sexual congress with anyone or anything, animal, vegetable, or mineral. Nobody knew what turned him on.

Lessing groaned inwardly. He was arguing himself out of what, for want of a euphemism, could be called a Great Lay. Here in this alien city he could have bar girls, booze, gambling, man-talk with his fellow beegees, but those didn’t appeal. He might as well read a book or count the little guys with sombreros pictured on the wallpaper. Liese appealed, even if only platonically. He made eye-contact with her again. This time she smiled back at him.

Mulder’s smooth voice insinuated itself between them. “…And in view of the breakin at Indoco, I propose to transfer the movement’s historic diaries to Mrs. Delacroix. Security in Pretoria will be better than ours in India, and, as a Descendant” — Lessing could almost hear the capital letter— “she has a right to retain the diaries, just as my family has had them for the past quarter-century. I shall thus send them along with my chief of security, Mr. Lessing… sorry, Alan, about the surprise trip… and Mrs. Delacroix’s people can take over once they reach South Africa.”

It looked as though he and Liese were going to have something more than dinner together after all.

What matters? What is worth establishing and maintaining?

Survival. Only survival. Individual survival is first; then comes the survival of the family, the clan, the tribe. These are immediately comprehensible. Beyond them lie ever larger and more diffuse, long-term loyalties. Eventually one arrives at the only objective that matters across the vast span of evolutionary time: the species.

When the species prospers, it is possible for the individual to prosper. Fulfill the basic species needs, and individual members then have the leisure for art, literature, crafts, and all of the other enhancements of life. The primary goal is thus service to the species. Every individual has a duty to contribute to this.

Yet, it must be noted, humanity itself is not homogeneous. Just as there are different species of apes, each with its own physical traits and temperament, so there are different races of men. We define breeds of dogs, horses, or cattle, yet some of us balk at speaking of different varieties of human beings. Why?

Physical differences between races are manifest; variations of temperament and mental ability are just as real, even if they are less evident to the uncritical eye. Some groups may be more inventive, others more contemplative; some more aggressive, others more cooperative and placid; some more powerful and with more stamina, others weaker. These differences have been poorly studied, due to the belief that to investigate racial differences is somehow dangerous or “not nice.” But it is no more reprehensible than saying that one breed of cat has longer fur than another, or that Poodles respond to training differently than Labradors.

This is fact, not theory; empirical truth, not propaganda. Some human sub-species may not be as distinct from one another as, say. Saint Bernards are from Pekingese. Yet the sub-specific variations which exist within the human species make for psychological and cultural divergences that become immensely important in the aggregate. Each sub-species’ basic genetic makeup combines with environmental, historical, and other factors to produce what may be termed a “racial character.”

We may call a human group identified with a distinct racial character an “ethnos.” As one goes down the scale from sub-species to nations, from communities to families, and finally to individuals, the manifestations of the ethnos appear at every level. In essence, this is “race”; this is “society”; this is “ethnic identity”; this is “regional character”; this is a large part of “personality.”

The word “ethnos” includes, but is not limited to, the German term Volk. That term was inclusive enough for the nationalistic “peoples” of the early twentieth century, but in this age of mass communication, easy travel, constant population shifts, and overlapping international economic and political power-spheres, a new and broader term is required. “Ethnos fills this need.

Except at the highest levels of abstraction, it is difficult to serve the human species as an undifferentiated whole. Attitudes and ideas and objectives diverge as one passes from one sub-species to another.

It is feasible to work for the communal goals of one’s own sub-species, one’s ethnos, however. This is intelligible to the individual; it is an extension of the tribe, the group, the community, and the family. It is the object of a human being’s primary loyalty. What does not serve the ethnos is irrelevant, superfluous— and possibly dangerous both to the ethnos and to its individual members.

Every sentient entity possesses a control center, a brain, which weighs perceptions, evaluates responses, and orders actions. In the past the control center of each ethnos was fragmented: kings, chiefs, princes, and pontiffs ruled moieties, clans, tribes, nations, factions, parties, sects, and other such groupings. These were shored up by such underpinnings as myth, ritual, ideology, morality, nationalism, tradition, the law, and the like. These sanctions were often further strengthened by declaring them to be “God’s Eternal Law” or attributing them to some other authority. Reasoning past these obstacles was difficult. Acting counter to them cost many martyrs their lives.

The time has come when there is no more room on earth, too little food, too many competing ideas and pressures. Catastrophe looms, and not for one species such as the dodo bird, but for life on earth. Humanity can no longer remain a mindless, purposeless organism whose parts cannot respond because there is no brain, no ganglia, no nervous system to issue commands.

The human entity as a whole must develop such a brain: a leading, guiding, directing force. It is imperative that one ethnos, the one best qualified by its historical record of invention, organization, and development, should create a control center and lead humanity into the future.

That ethnos is the one associated with Western European civilization. The control center is the Party of Humankind.