by John Sladek
‘What we’d like to know, Doctor,’ said the Army head, glancing nervously towards both ends of the table, ‘and I think I can safely say I speak for my colleagues here in this—what we’d like to know is, what does the QUIDNAC computer look like, and how can we shut it off?’
‘The entire control unit looks much like a transistor radio,’ said the doctor. ‘The bulk of it is control linkage, however. The amplifying section is about the size of a lady’s wrist watch. The DNA memory file is, of course, invisible. Its casing may be seen—it is roughly the size and shape of a light pencil dot.’
‘The US Air Force isn’t likely to have much trouble slaughtering a few pencil dots,’ said Ickers, beaming.
‘Well—’ Smilax began, then sighed.
The admiral emitted a pained snort, his equivalent of a laugh. ‘I guess that finishes us,’ he said. ‘I always knew the human race was bound to be finished off by something like a bunch of pencil dots. It figures.’
‘Perhaps we’re beaten,’ cajoled General Meany, ‘and perhaps
again we have a chance. I think it’s too early to tell, at this stage of the game. I defer judgement until we hear from our expert here.’
‘Are you trying to tell me,’ asked Ickers, ‘that in only a few days these invisible bugs have piled up enough junk to cover twenty thousand square miles? And we can’t stop this?’
‘I’m afraid that is correct,’ said Smilax, ‘though rather pessimistic. They have worked underground for over two weeks, preparing for this takeover. Moreover, they have only fenced, or enclosed, rather than covered the area, and I believe it to be only about 17,213 square miles. That you have had no success thus far in stopping it is evident,’ he added, with his eyes downcast. ‘That is why you have sent for me. I do foresee one way of stopping the Reproductive System—though you may find my way repugnant.’
‘I knew we weren’t beaten !’ screeched the Air Force head, and gave an exultant laugh. ‘What is your idea, doctor?’
‘Sure, go ahead. What have we got to lose now?’ said the admiral. ‘The human race is a dead letter, now.’
Smilax lighted a display map. ‘The System seems to have three centres of growth, at the moment, and it is fencing off and surrounding the area between them. They are the lab at Mill-ford, Utah; Altoona, Nevada; and Las Vegas. The judicious detonation of three thermonuclear devices of the order of 150 megatons each would, I feel confident, completely neutralize the System at these points. The remainder would be a simple matter of—I believe the expression is “mopping up”—using smaller thermonuclear devices. I know what question you are going to raise in advance, so let me say I estimate the total number of civilian casualties at no more than a million.’
‘Did he say a million or a billion?’ murmured the WAF.
‘If it’s the cost of our commitment,’ said the smiling Ickers, ‘I’m all for it !’
‘That’s about the population of Nevada and Utah combined,’ Admiral Nematode pointed out. ‘And this is election year. We’ll never get Congress to buy the idea of bombing hell out of two states. Might as well throw in the sponge now.’
‘My colleagues both have a valid point,’ said Meany carefully.
‘Have you any alternatives, doctor?’
‘Only a plan for a new line of research towards altering the System genetically. It has, fortunately or unfortunately, the ability to pass along acquired characteristics. Given about two
months, we could—’
‘Two months !’ Nematode shouted. ‘In two months, it’ll be covering the globe.’
‘No, by my estimate, if it grows at the present rate, it would reach 88 times its present size in eight weeks. It would then cover most of 1,514,788 square miles, that is, roughly the size of fifteen of our westernmost states, not including Texas or Oklahoma, but with the area of Maine thrown in.’
‘Oh, Christ.’
Ickers had called in Grawk and seemed to be in a furiously jubilant state over what his subordinate was whispering to him. ‘Great ! Great ! Great ! Tell them about it.’
‘I know this sounds like kind of a crazy idea,’ said the ugly little general. ‘But maybe it’s just the kind of wacky thing that would work. Give a listen: I remember once in an old science fiction movie they got rid of the monster by electrocuting him. Remember that? Well we could try the same thing—just hook up the high voltage and juice it to death !’
‘Science fiction,’ snorted the admiral.
‘I think he has something,’ said Smilax. ‘It may work—by shorting out the fine circuitry—but if it fails, we gain nothing.’
‘At least we lose nothing,’ shrilled Ickers. Clapping Grawk on the back, he bawled, ‘Your idea, my boy. You’re in charge. Tap the power line at Altoona. Get to work on it right away. Thumbs up.’
‘And when you fail,’ said the admiral with bilious charm, ‘it’ll be thumbs up for you, all right. You’ll be Airman Third Class Grawk—if we don’t shoot you.’
Meany summed it up. ‘Godspeed, Grawk,’ he said. ‘We wish you success and warn you not to fail.’
‘I ain’t worried.’ Grawk carried his yellow grin and black cigar out of the door.
Another camera had been set up at Altoona, and now, Smilax having been invited to join the Joint Chiefs in their weekly game of Go-to-the-Dump, the four watched the new scene on the Big Board. A group of young people were parading in front of the barbed-wire barrier which the military had thrown up around the city. They carried signs saying: ‘WHAT HAPPENED TO ALTOONA?’ ‘DOWN WITH DOOMSDAY’ and ‘GIVE US BACK OUR WORLD.’
‘They’ll find out soon enough what happened at Altoona,’ said the Army head, dealing. ‘If Grawk’s plan comes off, and we get
the thing on the run, we’ll “leak” the story tomorrow, through our usual reliable sources.’
One girl seemed to be in the wrong parade. She wore white boots, and carried a sign saying: ‘GO GO GOPHERS!’
Then she turned, and Smilax could see another message hastily lettered on the back of the sign:‘END OF THE WORLD UNFAIR TO YOUTH!’
A platoon of soldiers arrived, surrounded the protesters and began dragging them away.
‘Where are they taking them?’ Smilax asked General Meany.
‘We’ll keep them locked up until tomorrow night, or whenever this blows over. Why?’
‘It’s that girl in the boots, she seems a perfect subject for my latest pain experiments. I wonder …’
‘I get it,’ said Meany, and nudged him. ‘Haha, I get it. Of course I’ll have her seized for you. Where do you want her? Here?’
‘Yes, I’ve set up in the infirmary. Thank you.’
‘Haha, you old scoundrel!’
‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Smilax, gazing up at the girl—the image of Nan Richmons. He was already picturing the perfect symmetry of her kidneys.
CHAPTER XI
BEELE OF THE CIA
‘Pause there, Morocco.’
SHAKESPEARE
Suggs killed time while waiting for his new partner by writing another postcard to his wife. He chose one which depicted the snake charmers in the market at Dar El Fna. ‘Dear Madge,’ he wrote, after some deliberation. ‘Still having wonderful time, though I miss you and Susie. Love, Bubby.’
He wondered if he ought to say something about the insurance game being slow in Marrakech—insurance was his cover story—but decided against it. Madge probably thought he was just living it up with harem girls anyway. And so he would have been, if Suggs had not been terrified of disease. He remembered
only too well the CIA training films of tertiary syphilis and advanced gonorrhea. …
A rumbling in his stomach reminded Suggs the Near East held other diseases for the unwary. He wished now he had brought along his own supply of food. Today Suggs had made fifteen trips to the bathroom, scoring them off with a kind of grim satisfaction in his journal.
He was not sure which of the descending passengers would be the new man, but he fin
ally settled on the skinny young man in the eyeshade, who was shaking off a pack of urchins.
‘You Green?’ Suggs breathed, drifting past him.
‘Huh?’
Suggs drifted past again. ‘You Mr. Green?’
‘Oh, you must be Mr. Gray.’
‘That’s right. Only my friends call me Suggs. B. Suggs. Why the eyeshade?’ Suggs turned to confront his new partner openly. ‘What’s your cover story? I guess you could say you’re a sheep rancher, come to look over some rare breeding stock.’
‘My name is really Beele, Barthemo Beele. I’m under your orders, Mr. Suggs, but—’
‘Just Suggs, please.’
‘Suggs, I don’t know what kind of corruption is going on in this town, but I want to do my level best to put an end to it. Do you know what just happened? One of those little kids tried to sell me something I feel certain was a narcotic!’
Suggs picked up Beele’s suitcase and motioned towards the shay. When they had settled into place he told the driver the name of their hotel and turned to his new agent with a bit of advice. ‘Don’t pay any attention to these little packs of beggars. They go on all the time, trying to sell you their sisters, hashish, brothers, mothers, kif, and so on. You’ll get used to it.’
‘Used to it! I hope not! It’s a disgrace and a crime. Haven’t they a truant officer around here? Those kids ought to be in school. I mean to find out what kind of crime bosses are at the bottom of this. But, as I say, you’re in charge here—’
Suggs shook his head sharply and indicated the driver. They rode on, sizing one another up in silence, silence broken only by the clopping of the horse down a scenic avenue of tangerine trees, and by the sick growling from Suggs’s abdomen.
Looking at the older man, Beele saw a sunburned, bullnecked man with short-clipped greying hair, regular, unmemorable features. Suggs looked to be about forty and a pipeline engineer,
and there was nothing to mark him off from the ordinary run of men but his cold, lacklustre eyes and a thin white scar on his forehead. So this was what CIA men looked like, on the job!
He wondered how he himself would turn out in the Agency. Did it take brains, guts, curiosity and honesty? Barthemo had these in abundance—yet did he have the indefinable something which distinguishes the CIA agent from others?
When Barthemo Beele was two years old, he was trained to use a little potty stool that was kept in a cupboard with a hanging cloth in front of it. This little secret, with its aura of shame, interested him so keenly that he had to lift the cloth and look at it a dozen times a day. To this single episode, he later felt, all of his curiosity could be traced. For little ‘Themo’ developed an unfortunate habit of lifting hanging cloths to peer under them. And after he had lifted the skirt of a visitor, a bishop’s wife, ‘Themo’ received his first sound whipping.
Yet, as if his motto were Video, ergo sum, Barthemo went on lifting hanging cloths and looking under them, and was unable to resist doing so. He would lift the corner of a tablecloth and stare at the table’s legs, fascinated, flushed with guilt and a strange pleasure he could not name.
He grew to a skinny, secretive kid, addicted to tattling, to forming, with friends, secret clubs, and to writing what he hoped were dirty words on fences: FUDGE, SHAME, ORGANISM, and especially LOVE. One day by chance he lifted a blanket and found a couple of organisms making love: his mother and a man not his father.
Barthemo hastened to tell his father, who thanked him for his information by spanking him and locking him in his room for a day. When he decided the boy had learned his lesson, the elder Beele relented and let him out—but on condition that he mind his own business. Barthemo actually did have a business at this time, which was selling information to the police. For nickles, dimes and quarters, he would tell them which members of which secret clubs were stealing bike tyres from gas stations and magazines from drugstores. Later, for larger sums, he told them about car thefts and burglaries. This continued well into high school, when his duties as a school reporter took up most of his free time. The police gave him a present of money when he left for college, and told him he was the ‘Best little stoolie we ever had.’
Someday, he thought, as the shay rolled along Boulevard
Mohammed V, someday he would write a book, a defence of police informers: They Call Me Stoolie. ‘Why is it,’ he would write, ‘that those who risk their lives exposing murderers, thieves, dope peddlers and every crooked and vicious element of our. society, that those who do their duty as citizens (for not to report a crime is misprision), are looked on by society with loathing and distaste?’
Looking at Beele, Suggs saw a skinny, nervous-looking young man on whom an eyeshade, with a press card in the band, seemed a needless affectation. Suggs amused himself by imagining better cover stories for Beele. In a neat, dark suit, with an attache case, he could pass for an IBM salesman, perhaps. Or he could have grown a beard and looked like one of them Peace Corps freaks—buncha Commie fanatics. Fanaticism, that was it: the old-young look he had, the coldness in his face and a pinch of the true fanatic, summed Beele up for him. He wondered what it would take to make Beele kill a man. The kid might make a passable killer, with the proper instruction from Suggs—maybe too good a killer. Suggs wondered how long it would be before he would have to kill Beele.
‘By the way,’ he said. ‘Try not to eat anything or drink the water here. I’m trying to get in a consignment of American food and water. The stuff here is murder.’
‘The runs?’
As if in answer, Suggs’s stomach growled. Only it was not his stomach, he realized, but Beele’s.
The younger man nodded glumly. ‘Yup, I got ’em, too. Must have been that Denver sandwich and cup of Boston coffee I had before I left the States.’
While Beele signed the register and filled out the police form at the hotel desk, Suggs wrote on a picture postcard of the snake-charmers at Dar El Fna, ‘Dear Madge. Still having wonderful time, though I miss you and Susie. Love, Bubby.’ He handed it to the smiling clerk and received in exchange his room key and a thick airmail letter. It was from Madge’s lawyer’s office. There was no need to open it.
‘It’s not fair!’ he whispered, crushing the letter into his pocket. ‘To dump a divorce on me now, of all times! Well, I just don’t have time to worry about it, that’s all.’ Nevertheless, he bit his lip, thinking of the possible effects this might have on his career. In the Agency, men with marital problems were
passed over for promotion.
In the room, Beele relaxed on a settee while Suggs paced back and forth, explaining the mission. He took up a long, curved knife and toyed with it as he spoke.
‘The French are launching a new missile from somewhere in the vicinity—we don’t know where yet. They call it Le Bateau Ivre, and I’ve found out the name of the astronaut—young French Air Force pilot named Marcel Brioche. It cost me one of my best men to find out that little piece of information.’ His guts growled with scalding pain, and Suggs began to pace like a caged animal.
‘I know the shot will take place soon, but I don’t know where in the environs of Marrakech they’re stashing the ship. Our first objective, therefore, will be to find out the date and precise point of launching.
‘They have two reasons for hiding it. First,’ he pared one fingernail with the knife, ‘they have some new super-fuel, better than anything we’ve come up with so far. We want it, so does Russia. Only we want it worse, and I’ll tell you why. This stuff is so hot, the only kind of exhaust nozzle they can use is made out of a material called reuttite. And the world’s supply of reuttite is—’
‘In Nevada!’ Beele exclaimed. Then, thinking of the bright boxes of the day before, he wondered if the reuttite still were in Nevada. ‘They used to make gas mantles out of it, and—’
‘Yeah, yeah, I see you been briefed on that already. Well, the French have been secretly buying up old gas mantles for years, preparing for this coup.
‘Which brings us to their s
econd reason for hiding the mission.’ He decapitated another nail. ‘We think they may try to actually put a man on the moon. That means they could claim the whole works—with nasty consequences for the rest of the world. See what I mean?’
The kid looked thoughtful. ‘No, I guess I don’t see,’ he admitted.
Suggs snarled, ‘What’s the matter, you dense or something? France on the moon means more than just a tricolor on the Mare Nubium. It’ll mean French control of the Earth! How’d you like to be a slave of the French Republic, eh? Imagine what that would be like: All the restaurants stunk up with garlic and all the roads choked up with crummy little cars. They’d make you eat snails instead of decent food (like a steak and french
fries). You couldn’t even get a coke anymore—they’d make you drink their rotten wine! Fairy art museums! Lousy beer! VD! Crumbly cigarettes! No men’s deodorants!’
He wheeled and flung the knife at the door. Despite its awkward shape, the blade spun end-over-end neatly and caught, quivering. ‘That’s what I think of Frogs!’ he grated.
‘What are we supposed to do, stop the moon shot?’ Beele asked, when he dared breathe.
‘Only as a last resort. There’s another way, I think. The rocket they designed is supposed to have a two-man capsule, but only one Frenchy is going along. Now we’ve got to persuade him to take one of us along with him, so we can “study the effects of the new fuel”, but also we can counter-claim the moon. The trouble is, the Russians are trying to do the same thing. There are two of them in town, Vovov and Vetch.
‘It should be easy to persuade him to throw in his lot with us, rather than them,’ opined Beele. ‘I don’t see how he could quibble, when it’s a matter of choosing between democracy and totalitarian slavery.’
‘Yeah, yeah, and the chief OK’d a voucher for a quarter million dirham, too,’ said Suggs, thoughtfully. ‘That’s fifty grand. I hope Moscow can’t go higher.’
