An Enemy of the State

by Wilson, F. Paul

  There was silence again, and again Zack broke it. “If you weren't a Tolivian, and if I didn't know what I know about the Kyfho philosophy's code of honor, I'd say you were asking too much. But frankly, my friend, you're all we've got at the moment. We have to trust you.”

  “Well, I don't know all that much about the Kyfho philosophy,” Sayers said, “but I agree you're all we've got.” He looked past LaNague to Pierrot. “You've always got that tree around. Does that have something to do with Kyfho?”

  LaNague shook his head. “No. Just an old friend.”

  “Well, it looks like he needs water.” Sayers didn't understand why LaNague seemed to think this was funny, and so he continued speaking over the Tolivian's laughter. “What does Kyfho mean, anyway? It's not a word with any meaning in Interstellar.”

  “It's not a word, really,” LaNague said, marveling inwardly at how much a little laughter could lighten his mood. “It's an acronym from one of the Anglo tongues on Old Earth. The philosophy was first synthesized on preunification Earth by a group of people in the Western Alliance. It could only have been formed in the Western Alliance, but as it experienced slow and limited growth, it was picked up and modified by people in the Eastern Alliance. Modern Kyfho is now a mixture of both variants. The acronym was derived from the title of the first book—a pamphlet, really—in which Kyfho was expounded, a supposedly scatological phase that meant ‘Don't Touch.’ Does either of you understand Anglo?”

  Sayers shook his head. “Not a word.”

  “I used to know a little when I was in the university,” Doc said, “but I remember almost nothing. Try me anyway.”

  “All right. The title was Keep Your Fucking Hands Off. Mean anything to you?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Nor to me. But it supposedly summed up the philosophy pretty well at the time.”

  “The important thing,” Zack said, “is that we trust you. The next question is, when do I get to do my bit?”

  “Very soon. Especially now that our public personality here,” he indicated Sayers, “has been moved into the limelight. I forgot to congratulate you, by the way, Radmon.”

  “Nothing more than I deserve,” Sayers said, beaming. His numbers had risen steadily thanks to the ratings fix and to the follow-the-leader phenomenon that causes people who hear that lots of other people are watching a certain program to start watching it too, thus inducing still more people to start watching it, and so on in a geometric progression. The result was an offer of a spot on the early evening news show of one of the larger vid services, thereby assuring him a huge audience. The ratings program would now have to be returned to its untampered state.

  “I'm all set to go,” Zack said. “Have been for months on end now. Just give me the word.”

  “Take the first step.”

  “You mean change the course name?”

  “Right. But don't show them your lesson plans until they're good and mad. Hit them with those when they're in the wrong mood and the regents will be sure to cancel your course.”

  “And then will they be sorry!”

  “I don't care if the regents are sorry or not. I want Metep to be sorry.”

  Sayers stood up and walked toward the door of the cubicle. “And I'll be sorry if I don't get home and get some sleep. Tonight's my first appearance on the new show and I need my beauty rest. Good luck to us all.”

  “…AND THE BIG NEWS of the day remains the story from Paramer concerning an aborted attempt to repeat the famous Robin Hood caper of three months ago. The end result this time, however, was death, with an Imperial cruiser intercepting and shooting down the hijacked Treasury transport in the air over the port city. But not before the Merry Men had completed their mission—an estimated twenty-five million marks hurled into the sky over Paramer, with the same Robin Hood calling cards as the last time. Four bodies were found in the transport wreckage, burned beyond recognition. The Imperial Guard, it appears, takes its work seriously. Let all would-be tax rebels take a lesson from that.

  “More news from Earth tonight on the strange behavior of Eric Boedekker, the wealthy asteroid mining magnate. It seems he has just sold the mineral rights to half of his asteroid holdings to his largest competitor, Merritt Metals, for a sum that probably exceeds the gross planetary products of some of our brother out-worlds. The mineral rights to the rest of the Boedekker asteroids are reportedly up for sale, too. Anyone interested in buying a flying mountain.?”

  The Year of the Malak

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  BRAIN: In our civilization, and under our republican form of government, brain is so highly honored that it is rewarded by exemption from the cares of office.

  Ambrose Bierce

  The confrontation had been considerably delayed by a computer programmer who either meant well or didn't pay too much attention to what she was doing. Any aware and upright programmer, conscious of job security, would have immediately reported Dr. Zachariah Brophy's change in the title of his first-year economics course from Economics: The Basics to Economics: Our Enemy, the State.

  And so it was not until the printed course booklet was issued to all the students at the University of the Out-worlds that Doc Zack's little act of provocation came to light. Reaction was mixed. The course was immediately booked solid, but that only meant that fifty students were interested; it hardly reflected the view of the campus at large. The university was state-supported—grounds, buildings, materials, and a full 75 per cent of tuition was paid for by the Imperium. Even room and board at the university dorms was state-funded. This could have resulted in a free, open forum for ideas, where no point of view was proscribed. Could have, but did not.

  There was a long waiting list for seats in the University of the Out-worlds; students who made the slightest ripple, such as objecting too loudly to course content and narrow viewpoints among the faculty, soon found it most difficult to obtain passing grades in key courses. And without those passing grades, their educational support was withdrawn. They had to drop out and join the great unwashed, monitoring the courses and taking examinations via the vid. It always happened within the first months of a term to the few free spirits who had managed to slip in with the new class. And it only took the academic demise of a couple of those to enlighten the survivors to the facts of life at the University of the Out-worlds: co-operate and graduate.

  Doc Zack's move was something else. This was not a questioning voice speaking out of order; this was no mere breach of academic etiquette. This was a red handkerchief fluttering in the faces of the regents and those to whom they had to answer. And what was worse, the offending course title was now in the hands of every student at the university. The semester was about to begin. Something had to be done, and quickly.

  They canceled the course. A message was sent to each student who had possessed the temerity to enroll in a course entitled Economics: Our Enemy, the State informing him or her that a new course would have to be chosen to fill that time spot. The names on the class list were placed in a special file of students who would bear watching.

  But Doc Zack had his own lists and he sent word to the students who had signed up for his class, and to favored students from past years, that he would be giving the first lecture as scheduled in the course catalogue. Anyone who was interested was welcome to come and listen. Radmon Sayers was also informed of the time and location of the lecture, but by a more circuitous route. He would see to it that Dr. Zachariah Brophy's first and last lecture of the new semester would have a much larger audience than the regents or anyone else anticipated.

  “I'M NOT EXACTLY overwhelmed by the turnout this morning,” Doc Zack said, strolling back and forth across the front of the classroom in his usual speaking manner, looking as cadaverous as ever. “But I guess it would be hoping too much to see a standing-room-only crowd before me. I know that the prices of everything are keeping two jumps ahead of salary increases, and that many of you here are risking your places in this glorious institution just
by being here. For that I thank you, and commend your courage.”

  He craned his neck and looked around the room. “I see some familiar faces here and some new ones, too. That's good.” One of the new faces sat in the last row. He was young enough to pass for a student, but the square black vid recorder plate he held in the air, its flat surface following Zack wherever he went, gave him away as something more. This would be Sayers’ man, recording the lecture. Zack took a deep breath…time to take the plunge.

  “What we're going to discuss here today may not seem like economics at first. It will concern the government—our government, the Imperium. It's a monster story in the truest, Frankensteinian sense, of a man-made creature running amuck across the countryside, blindly destroying everything it touches. But this is not some hideous creature of sewn-together cadavers; this creature is handsome and graceful and professes only to have our best interests at heart, desiring only to help us.

  “Where most of its power lies is in the economy of our land. It creates the money, controls its supply, controls the interest rates that can be charged for borrowing it, controls, in fact, the very value of that money. And the hand that controls the economy controls you—each and every one of you. For your everyday lives depend on the economy: your job, the salary you receive for working that job, the price of your home, the clothes on your back, the food you eat. You can no more divorce a functioning human being from his or her ambient economy than from his or her ambient air. It's an integral part of life. Control a being's economic environment and, friend, you control that being.

  “Here on the out-worlds, we live in a carefully controlled economy. That's bad enough. But what's worse is that the controlling hand belongs to an idiot.”

  He paused a moment to let that sink in, glancing at the recorder plate held aloft at the rear of the room, noting that it was aimed in such a way that if it happened to include any of the students in its frame, only backs of heads would be visible.

  “Let's take a look at this handsome, ostensibly well-meaning meaning, idiotic monster we've created and see what it's doing to us. I think you'll soon see why I've subtitled this course. Our Enemy, the State. Let's see what it does to help those of us who can't seem to make ends meet. I won't start in on the Imperial Dole Program—you all know what a horrendous mess that is. Everybody has something bad to say about the dole. No…I think I'll start with the program that's been most praised by the people within the government and press: the Food Voucher Program.

  “As it stands now, a man with a family of four earning 12,000 marks a year is eligible for 1,000 marks’ worth of food vouchers to supplement his income and help feed his family. That's okay, you say? You don't mind some of your taxes going to help some poor working stiff make ends meet? That's lucky for you, because nobody asked you anyway. Whether you like it or not, approve of it or not, he's going to get the 1,000 marks.

  “But putting that aside, did you realize that the Imperium taxes this man 2,200 marks a year? That's right. It takes 2,200 marks out of his pocket in little bits and pieces via withholding taxes during each pay period. And the withholding tax is a very important concept as far as the government is concerned. It is thereby allowed to extract the income tax almost painlessly, and to force the employer to do all the accounting for the withholding tax free of charge, despite the fact that slavery has never been allowed in the out-worlds. It needs the withholding tax, because if the Imperium tried to extract all the year's income taxes at once it would have the entire citizenry out in the streets with armfuls of rocks…it wouldn't last a standard year.

  “But back to our food voucher recipient: his 2,200 marks are collected each year, sent to the Regional Revenue Center, and from there shipped to the Central Treasury in Primus City—if Robin Hood doesn't get it first.” This brought a laugh and a smattering of applause from the class. “Now don't forget that everybody who handles it along the way gets paid something for his time—from the lowliest programmer to the Minister of the Treasury, everyone takes a chunk. Then the money has to be appropriated by the legislature into the Bureau of Food Subsidization, and the case workers have to decide who's eligible, and how much the eligibles should get, and somebody has to print up the vouchers, and somebody has to run the maintenance machinery to keep the floors of the Bureau of Food Subsidization clean and so on, ad nauseam. Everybody along the line gets paid something for his or her efforts.

  “In the end, our lowly citizen gets his thousand marks’ worth of food vouchers, but in the process, not only has his 2,200 marks in taxes been consumed by the bureaucracy, but an additional 830 marks of your taxes as well. A total of 3,030 marks! That's right: it costs 3.03 marks in taxes for our enemy, the Imperium, to give a single mark's worth of benefits. And has anyone along the line suggested that we just cut this poor citizen's taxes by a thousand marks? Of course not! That would save us all a net of 2,000 marks, but it would also mean cutting appropriations, and fewer do-nothings in the Revenue Service and the Bureau of Food Subsidization, and who knows

  where else. The men who run these bureaus and run these out-worlds don't want that. And they have the say and we don't. And that's why the Imperium is our enemy, because it is filled with these men.”

  Zack paused briefly here for breath and to allow himself to cool. He always got worked up talking about the excesses and idiocy of the Imperium, and had to be careful not to say more than he meant to.

  “And so you can see why you have to understand the working of a large and powerful government if you are to understand modern economics. The Food Voucher System is only a very obvious example. There are economic machinations going on within the Imperium which are far more subtle and far more sinister than the buffoonery of the Bureau of Food Subsidization, and we shall delve into those at a later date. But first we must teach you all some of the rudiments of free market economics, a realm of economic theory that has been the victim of de facto censorship in teaching centers from here to Earth for centuries. We'll begin with von Mises, then—”

  Noticing alarmed expressions on the faces of some of the students, and sensing that the focus of their attention had suddenly shifted to a point somewhere behind him, Zack turned around. Two university security men stood in the doorway.

  “We have a report of an unauthorized class being conducted here,” the burly one on the right said. “Are you a member of the faculty, sir?”

  “Of course I am!”

  “And what course is this?”

  “Economics 10037: Our Enemy, the State.”

  The guard on the left, taller but equally well muscled, frowned disapproval and scanned the readout on his pocket directory. “Didn't think so,” he said, glancing at his partner. “There's no such course.”

  “What's your name?” said the burly one.

  “Zachariah Brophy, Ph.D.”

  Again the pocket directory was scanned. Again a negative readout. “No one on the faculty by that name.”

  “Now wait just a minute! I've been teaching here for twenty years! I'll have you know—”

  “Save it, pal,” the burly one said, taking Zack's elbow. “We're going to escort you to the gate and you can find yourself somewhere else to play school.”

  Zack pulled his arm away. “You'll do no such thing! I demand that you call the regents’ office and check that.”

  “This is a direct link to the regents’ computer,” the taller guard said, holding up his pocket directory. “The information out of here is up to the minute—and it says you don't belong here. So make it easy for all of us and come quietly.”

  “No! I won't go anywhere quietly! This is supposed to be a university, where all points of view can be heard, where inquiring minds can pick and choose among a variety of ideas. I won't be stifled!” He turned to the class. “Now, as I was saying—”

  The two guards behind him could be seen glancing at each other and shrugging. Each stepped forward and, grabbing an elbow and an armpit, dragged Doc Zack backward from the classroom.

/>   “Let me go!” Zack shouted. He dug his heels into the floor, struggled to free his arm but to no avail. As a last desperate hope, he turned to the class. “Some of you help me, please! Please! Don't let them take me away like this!”

  But as they dragged him out through the door and around the corner and down the hall, no one moved, and that was what hurt most of all.

  “…NOW I THINK you all know that it's not my policy to editorialize. I merely report the news the way it happens. But I believe that what we've just seen is so extraordinary that I must comment upon it. The exclusive eyewitness recording of the expulsion of Professor Zachariah Brophy from the campus of the University of the Out-worlds that was just replayed was obtained because I had heard that this renegade professor was determined to give his treasonous course despite the fact that his superiors had canceled it. I sent a recorder technician to the classroom to see just how the regents would handle such an incident, and you have seen the results yourselves tonight.

  “I must say that I, as a citizen of the Imperium, am proud of what I have just seen. Enormous amounts of our tax marks are spent yearly to keep the University of the Out-worlds one of the top institutions of learning in Occupied Space. We cannot allow a few malcontents to decide that they are wiser than the board of regents and to teach whatever they see fit, regardless of academic merit. We especially cannot allow someone like Professor Zachariah Brophy, impressive as his credentials might be, to denigrate the Imperium, which supports the university, and therefore denigrate the university itself by his unfounded and inflammatory criticism.

  “I support freedom of speech to the fullest, but when it's being done on my time and being supported by my tax dollars, then I want some control over what's being said. Otherwise, let Professor Brophy take his podium to Imperium Park and give his message to whoever wishes to gather and listen. And to anyone else who tries to waste the taxpayers’ money by trying to besmirch the Imperium at their expense, let this be a warning.”