Don Pendleton - Civil War II

by Don Pendleton

  FOREWORD

  The time is late 20th century, the place is America, and the circumstances are... ominous. Three decades of upheaval and redirection have produced a new rural nation . . . almost. Metropolitan centers of commerce have been replaced by gleaming strip-cities, linear communities geared to the housing and servicing of the citizens of an agricultural economy. A imall number of favored great cities of the past have been carefully preserved and virtually enshrined as cultural centers; a large number hav© crumbled into great ghastly hulks,, incredible ghettoes utterly abandoned by most Americans but grimly dung to as the final refuge of a despairing and poverty-ridden minority of some twenty million citizens. These giant ghettoes, once proud cities, are now generally referred to as, simply, "the Towns."

  As a contrast to the national gloom and depression of the seventies and early eighties, when the nation lost its prominence in the world markets, America has turned ha technological genius into the perfection of agricultural technique® and has become the grocer of a world slowly falling into piecemeal starvation. International tensions now revolve chiefly about the food problem and other ecological considerations; the former "nuclear powers"

  have been defanged by the obviously suicidal nature of their arsenals—no wars are fought today which could endanger man's precarious balance with his environment.

  The lifestyle of the average American has undergone vast changes—economically, politically, philosophically. The focus of government has altered radically sine© the series of constitutional amendments which began in the early 8Q's. With on© important exception, the new look in the economy has produced, on the surface at least, a truly classless society in which the general preoccupation is with more and better ways to produce and package foodstuffs for the world market. The national philosophy has been altered accordingly. Problems involving domestic economy have been neatly resolved through automation, and the Automated Monetary System—a computerized complex evolved from the old credit card schemes and now wholly federally controlled—has completely replaced the archaic currency method of monetary exchange. Some would even say that AMS has replaced the archaic forms of American government.

  That one exception to the classless society, mentioned above, rests with the people whom America has tried to forget. These have been split into three principal classes: the residents of the nation's towns; low-echelon federal civil service employees; and the armed forces.

  The first and largest of these three sub-classes are generally referred to as, simply, town niggers; the second and third collectively as government niggers. Within these classifications exist all of black America, but for another negligible exception, that small number who live and work in the white society—the Uncle Toms.

  There has been no "racial problem" in America for most of two decades. Indeed, there have been few apparent problems of any nature during the past few years of this nation's history. Deep within the nation, however....

  BOOK I

  OMEGA PROJECT

  CHAPTER 1

  Michael Winston left the pedestrian tube at the heliport atop the San Francisco Hilton and went directly to the Avis hovercar ramp. The powerfully built figure was impressively garbed in a conservatively-tailored knit suit of the new sheenthetics, a glossy black double-breasted affair with built-in clima'tizer. He stood impatiently shifting his weight from one leg to the other as the attendant brought the hovercar down, then he turned briefly to inspect Ms image in the window of the rental office. Handsome in a square-jawed, rugged manner, the National Commissioner of Urban Affairs was athletically trim and even a little mean-looking when he wanted to be. At the moment, he had caught the reflecting glint of premature silver at his temples and was suddenly struck with the realization that he was getting old.

  "Thirty-six," h© murmured half aloud. "Forget it, Pops, breathe twice and you'll be forty-six."

  The Avis attendant had just stepped out of the hovercar. He gave Winston a curious glance and asked, "Sir?"

  "Talking to myself," Winston told him, smiling. "Sure sign of old age, they say."

  "Yes sir. Uh, this is the new twenty-one-hundred model, sir. The air jets are automatically programmed for—"

  Winston said, "Yes, I know." He turned over his AMS

  Creditor to the youth and watched disinterestedly as the boy slipped the plasticized card through an aperture in a small box worn at his waist. There was a barely perceptible click and the card popped out the other end of the box.

  The attendant returned the creditor and commented, "F-VIP. And it's about expired, sir."

  "What's that?" Winston asked absently, his mind elsewhere.

  "Your monetary card. It's about to expire."

  "Oh yes. Thanks."

  Winston climbed into the little one-seater and stowed his briefcase, then went through the formalities of the pre-flight checklist and cranked the engine. A smooth hum told him that the powerplant was perfectly meshed, and a moment later he was airborne and slipping gently toward San Francisco Bay.

  The grand old city, one of the few remaining cultural centers for whites, gleamed at him in the mocning sun. No problems down there, he was thinking. No Winston-type problems, anyway. Cities like San Francisco were meticulously cared for—practically enshrined—by a nation gone back to the land but highly conscious of the value of cultural centers such as these. The towns, now—the towns were a different matter altogether, and all twenty of them together constituted a massive headache for men like Winston who worried about such things. Not that there were many men in that category—but of course he was being paid to worry.

  A tone sounded on the console in front of him, announcing his incursion into the automated airflow control zones. He punched a button and announced, "Hover-Ford, Four-Five-Nine-Alpha. Enroute San Francisco Hilton to Oakland Town Central. Request uncontrolled transit."

  An automated voice whirled back from a speaker in the ceiling to inform him that the request could not be granted, due to "congestion." Winston sighed and sat back with arms folded across his chest as the hovercar'a controls were taken over by the electronic traffic flow-er. He did not mind being talked to by a computer, nor even ordered

  around by one. He did resent being shunted around u Nfi v mile course to cover an eight mile journey.

  The automated flowlane would carry him across (ho Golden Gate and then over the upper bay for a southerly approach to his goal. Winston lit a cigarette and tried to think of something other than the unpleasant business awaiting him in Oakland. The electric cal-chron on tho dashboard was indicating 08:39AM-09MAR-1999. Below him at the moment were the lush fields and terraced hillsides of the Marin headlands. A few years back, he was thinking, there had been nothing down there but rugged wastelands and sprawling subdivisions.

  Now, thanks to the breakthrough into agricultural technology, there was field after lovely field of lettuce and cabbage and tomatoes and cauliflower—once plunging mountainsides were now beautifully terraced with avocado and grapes and Lord knew what els©—and off in tho distance the gleaming plastics of the new Marin Strip City reaching all the way to San Rafael in a quarter-mile-wido swath through the fields, where the workers lived and worked and played and laughed and loved. Yes, back to nature, that was the ticket—but Michael Winston was headed back to the ghetto, and that was a ticket of a different color.

  Some minutes later he hit the Oakland approach lane and heard the controls cycling over to manual. Directly below was Berkeley and what had once been the campus of the largest university in the land. It, too, had passed—removed from the proximate danger of Oakland and consolidated at the Los Angeles campus, where nice white kids would not daily face the danger of eyeball confrontation with the black rabbl
e of "town."

  Winston shook Ms head over the memories of things passed, and dropped into the five hundred-foot corridor for town central. Not much traffic here, for sure. What damn fool would wish to drop in on a million town niggers?

  The car settled into the pad with a gentle sigh. As Winston threw the door open and stepped into the town, ho felt like an alien visitor from another planet. A couple of hundred blacks had moved into a semi-circle about the pad

  and were standing there gawking at him.

  "It's Uncle Mose," declared an anonymous voice.

  Sure, Winston had heard that one before too. The cynical tag was meant to infer the exact opposite of an Uncle Tom. Winston was not impressed by tags. He grabbed his briefcase, set his shoulders, and marched straight at the crowd. A wide avenue opened for him and he passed through and onto the steps of town hall. A little boy of about four toddled down to meet him, eyes aglow with curiosity and ivory gleaming from ear to ear. He's never seen a white man. Winston thought to himself. A breathless mother appeared from somewhere and whisked the child away. Never fear, mother dear, Uncle Mose won't eat your child.

  The news of his arrival had preceded him, and Mayor John Harvey was standing there in the doorway to greet him. A rotund black man of about fifty, Harvey always managed to greet his visitors at the front door of town hall. Winston could not decide whether it was some sort of a safe-passage guarantee or simply a status symbol to be seen with the money-man from Washington. And somehow there always seemed to be a crowd of people standing around outside town hall and roaming the corridors inside for what possible motive Winston could not fathom. Not just here in Oakland but in all the towns everywhere.

  He shrugged away the feeling of desperate depression and stuck a smile on his face as he wrung the big black hand of Mayor Harvey. They walked arm in arm along the corridor and passed startled and curious black faces which seemed never to tire of gazing into a white one. When they reached the Mayor's office, both men stopped smiling and began fiddling with material objects—Harvey at his desk and Winston in his briefcase.

  Sure, Uncle Mose from Mars—and now what do these two aliens say to each other to crash the communications barrier?

  Harvey was first. He cleared his throat noisily and said, "We expected you last week, Commissioner."

  "I "got hung up at Cleveland," Winston explained.

  He made a face and added, "You think you have

  problems. Cleveland has three miles of clogged sewers and a polio epidemic. Can you imagine polio in 1999?"

  "Sure, I can imagine it," Harvey replied quietly. "We had it here in '97—why not Cleveland in '99?"

  "No sense to it, John. You know that." Winston withdrew a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and dropped them on the Mayor's desk, then he stepped to the window to gaze onto the grimy ghetto streets.

  "Why are there always so many people on the streets?" he asked in a cool tone. "They never seem to be doing anything in particular. They're just there."

  "I guess they just want to prove they're alive or something," the Mayor replied, sighing. He was flipping through the tabulated sheets from Washington.

  Winston said, "Put them to work, John."

  "You know I can't do that."

  "Why not? Pass out waste baskets, if nothing else. Let them pick the crud up off the—"

  "What is this shit?" Harvey cried, suddenly slapping the desk with the stack of papers.

  Without turning away from the window, Winston told him, "You're getting cut again, John. That's what it is."

  "Hell I can see that! But I can't believe it! How can they cut me? Dammit, Commissioner, I requested an eight percent increase! I can't live with a cut I won't live with it."

  Winston sighed and left the window to drop into a chair facing the desk. "I warned you last time about those work refusals, John."

  He raised his hands and dropped them. "You're not operating at maximum employment potential, and you know it."

  His eyes wavered from the harsh gaze of the black man and shifted to the stack of papers. "It's all in the tab run, and you can't argue with a computer."

  "Screw your goddam whitey computer," Harvey muttered. "I don't want arguments, I want credits." He sighed heavily and asked, "All right, how much of a cut?"

  Winston lit a cigarette and exhaled noisily toward the ceiling. "I warned you last time ... I told you what would

  happen. Four and a half percent, John."

  "Dirty bastards! The dirty rotten whitey bastards! Okay, what is it? It's not the work refusals, is it? So what is it? That little bit of noise on the Bay Bridge last month? The excursion to Castro Valley? Listen, we disciplined those kids. And that's all it was, kid stuff, regardless of what you damned honky newspapers had to say about it. We don't need to be slapped with a four and a half percent cut to stay in line."

  Winston smoked quietly for a moment. The guy needed to save face, and Winston could stand a bit of abuse. Presently he said, "You know I can't do anything about the cut this time, John. Pull up your performance during this quarter and we'll try to restore it. You know the routine as well as I."

  "Some routine," Harvey replied, snorting with repressed rage. "Listen, you listen. Those work refusals. You know what they were. Ten credits a day, in the Vallejo cabbage fields. Ten credits. The work is twelve hours long, the transportation day is four more hours. Sixteen damn hours a day, Commissioner, for ten lousy credits. White men in the very next field are getting twenty five, and they work eight hours, and their transportation day is ten minutes long. Work refusal!" He snorted some more, then muttered, "It's slavery refusal, Commissioner."

  Winston returned his attention to the man at the desk and told him, "It's not the fields that are hurting you. It's your Uncle Tom quotas that are killing you."

  "Oh, hell—that again," Harvey growled.

  "Sure. You carried something better than a thousand unfilled requisitions this past quarter. That's a hell of a lot of jobs going begging, and permanent jobs at that."

  "Permanent is right!" the Mayor yelled. "You call those jobs? That's worse slavery than the fields. It's twenty-four hours a day and it's total isolation in an alien world. I can't force my people out there to live with the whiteys!"

  "What's so bad about it?" Winston wanted to know.

  "You really don't know, do you."

  "Frankly, no. I'd like it if I was a light—a fractional Negro. I'd get to live in a natural environment instead of in this stinking cement ghetto. Instead of working fields in the hot sun or swinging back and forth on the factory shuttles or barely existing on a government handout, I could chauffeur some rich guy around, or take care of his garden—maybe even service his wife or daughter when nobody was looking. What's so damn tough about Uncle Tomming?"

  "You really don't know."

  Winston shook his head. "No, dammit, I don't."

  "The black man has his pride, Winston. Even a fractional black man. He's not going out there and serve Ol' Massa, not for all the material comfort in the world. And living like that is grinding to a man's soul. You can't expect a man to live totally isolated from his own kind."

  "A lot of 'em are doing it," Winston pointed out.

  The Mayor shook his head adamantly. "Not real black men, Winston. Black is not in the color of skin, it's in the quality of soul. No black men are serving Ol' Massa. Uncle Toms, sure. But no black men."

  Winston was certain that they had repeated this stale argument several thousand times. But he went on. "And the federal blacks? What of them? Four million of your people, John, serving Ol' Massa on the federal payroll, practically running Ol Massa's white establishment for him, and protecting him against foreign adventures to boot."

  "Not my people," the Mayor insisted. "A government nigger is even worse than a Tom, and you know it. Those people live in a fool's dream. Some day they're going to wake up and feel those chains on their ankles."

  Winston sighed and leaned across the desk to put out his cigarette. "Try to improve you
r performance figures this quarter, John," he suggested. "You do and I'll get that four and a half percent back for you."

  "And in the meantime what do we do?" Harvey asked dismally. "This town is bankrupt, as of the minute you walked in that door. I wanted that eight percent raise for street repair. As bad as the streets are, we needed the jobs even worse. Instead, you're taking away. We have no tax base now. What good does it do us to send out Uncle

  Toms? A few bucks off the dole roll, sure, and that's a drop of sweat in the bay. What we need is—"

  "Get that performance curve climbing," Winston interrupted with a heavy sigh. "You know that's the only thing that counts."

  "People count."

  "Not to a computer, John." Winston picked up his briefcase and went to die door.

  The black man remained dejectedly at his desk, eyes studying the palms of Ms hands.

  Some of the starch went out of the Commissioner of Urban Affairs and he muttered, "Dammit, I feel as bad about this as you do, John." He went on through the outer office, showed the pretty receptiomst a sober smile, and made Ms way through the heavy traffic of the corridor, stonily avoiding the stares being directed his way. Then, on an impulse, he spun about and retraced his steps to the mayor's office.

  The receptionist was disappearing through the doorway to the private office. Winston crossed quickly, followed her to the threshold, and pushed his shoulders through for a quick word.

  The girl had turned about and was regarding him with obvious confusion and indecision, frozen in her tracks halfway across the big room. Harvey was standing behind Ms desk and grinning at two, other black men who were entering from an adjacent office. His grin also froze as he became aware of Winston's presence.

  The two men in the opposite doorway halted momentarily, and it appeared for an instant that they were going to turn and leave. Then the one in the lead smiled at Winston and came on in.

  Winston's gaze flashed across to the dismayed face of Mayor Harvey, and he told him, "I just wanted to say, John, that I am not a computer. I'll delay the funding for a week. Give me at least an indication of a promising curve characteristic and I'll override the machine's decision."