Whiting pointed out these fallacies and many others to the Martian people twice a week and she had succeeded in transforming what had been seething resentment towards the Earthlings into white hot hatred of them. As William Smith had noted to his superiors, anti-Earthling graffiti had begun to spring up everywhere, on every building where Earthlings could be found. Leaflets expounding everything from general strikes to actual terrorist violence had begun to appear on apartment doors and bulletin boards in housing buildings. And reports of violence against Earthlings — usually random in nature and usually little more than minor harassment — had begun to crop up everywhere on the planet. Though Laura Whiting did not advocate these violent acts in her speeches — on the contrary, she begged her people to show restraint — years of frustration and apathy were being released and it was inevitable that many of the Martians would chose the most basic of human natures to express their discontent.
What was perhaps the most startling about this wave of anti-Earthling violence and vandalism was not its existence in the first place but the acceptance that the Martian criminal justice system showed towards it. There had never been any official memos on the matter, there had never even been verbal instruction from superiors, but through a strange form of osmosis the message had been passed up and down the ranks of the system, from the lowliest patrol cops to the judges and lawyers that ran the show: Crimes against corporate Earthlings were no longer the big deal that they had once been. Why should they be? Why should those that exploited and raped the planet receive special treatment? Reports were still taken of course but gone were the days that resources were wasted in any way tracking down the perpetrators of acts that were being looked at less and less as crimes with each passing Laura Whiting speech.
"So," Lisa asked their latest victim, "what seems to be the problem here today?"
"What seems to be the problem?" Mr. Ronald Jerome III asked, his cultured Earthling accent sounded decidedly high-pitched and whiny. "Look at my face!" He took the towel away revealing a left eye that was starting to swell. "Look at what those vermin did to me!"
"Somebody popped you in the face did they?" Lisa said.
"A whole group of them attacked me!" he yelled. "They surrounded me when I came out of the building and they started pushing me from person to person, calling me the most horrible names. They took my PC off of my belt and smashed it on the ground!" He pointed to the remains of his personal computer. It was lying against the base of the planter in a heap of plastic parts and microchips, it's screen broken cleanly in half. He seemed particularly outraged about this.
"That's a shame," Brian said without the slightest trace of sincerity. "That looks like it was one of those top of the line models."
"Probably set you back twelve hundred bucks getting a new one," Lisa added, making a few notations on her computer. "You look like you can afford it though, rich corporate Earthling like you. Hell, what do they pay you here?"
"That's none of your business," he said indignantly.
"I guess not," Lisa agreed. "I was just asking. Being a poor Martian and all, I can't really afford stuff like that."
"I'm not here to talk about your problems," Jerome said sternly.
"Of course you aren't," she said complacently. "Please continue with your narrative."
"Right," he said, nodding carefully, unsure whether he was being condescended to or not but strongly suspecting that he was. "So anyway, after they smashed my PC up, they threw me to the ground and one of them kicked me. He kicked me right in the face!"
"With his foot?" Lisa asked blankly.
"Of course with his foot! What else do people kick with? What's the matter with you people? I've been assaulted by a bunch of vermin! I want you to do something about it!"
"We are doing something about it," Lisa told him. "We're taking a report."
"To hell with your report! I want them caught!" he yelled. "I demand you go out and find them right now!"
"You demand?" Lisa said, letting a little chuckle escape. "Listen to this crap, Bri. He demands."
"He does seem very pushy, doesn't he?" he said, picking at a piece of fuzz on his chest armor.
Jerome looked at them in disbelief, clearly unaccustomed to being treated this way by mere civil servants — and greenie civil servants at that. "Are you telling me that you're not going to do anything about this... this crime?"
"I told you," Lisa said, "we're taking a report. We'll log it as a misdemeanor assault and it'll go into the tracking computer as such."
"And that's it?" he asked.
Lisa shrugged. "The detective division will take a look at it when they get around to it," she told him. "That'll be when they work their way through the felony assaults that they have pending first."
"And how long will that take?"
"Actually," Lisa said with a smile, "they'll probably never get around to it. You see, there are about five times as many felony assaults that come in as there are detectives to handle them. That's because the politicians that your little corporation and the others bribe to do their bidding won't let us kick loose any money to build jails and prisons. Therefore there's nowhere to put criminals even if we do catch them and since the criminals all know they won't be punished, there's really no reason for them not to assault someone when the opportunity arises. But you don't want to hear all about our greenie problems, do you? My point is that they have a hard time closing out the felony assault complaints so the misdemeanor assaults — like what happened to you — just sit there and accumulate month by month. I heard there was more than a hundred thousand of them pending, that sound about right to you, Bri?"
"Yep," Brian agreed. "That sounds pretty much on the mark."
"I am an Agricorp executive," the man said self-righteously. "I was attacked by vermin! Surely you don't consider that an ordinary crime do you?"
"A crime's a crime," Lisa told him.
"And a report's a report," Brian added. "Welcome to the wonderful world of Martian law enforcement. A world that your corporation helped create."
The man kicked at the pieces of his PC angrily. "You can't treat me like this," he told them. "Your administration will hear about this!"
Lisa and Brian both shrugged disinterestedly, both knowing that the captains and the deputy chiefs, career oriented pricks that they were, no longer officially gave a shit what corporate executives complained about. "You go ahead and tell them," Lisa said. "But in the meantime, you wanna make the report or what? It doesn't really matter to me."
"You'll be vermin by the end of the week," the man threatened. "I swear to you. I'll have your jobs!" With that he stomped off, taking his towel with him as he headed for the MarsTrans station two blocks over.
"I guess that'll be a no then," Brian said.
"I guess so," Lisa agreed, clearing the screen of her patrol computer and putting it back on her belt.
Six o'clock that evening found Matt and Jeff sitting in the latter's apartment, each with a fresh bottle of Fruity in their hands, watching the large Internet screen in the living room. They sat in scarred and battered plastic chairs that were older than their parents — furniture that had been purchased in a welfare store when Jeff and his new bride had set up housekeeping. In the kitchen Belinda was mixing up some sort of dish made from the cheap hamburger that was sold in the welfare grocery stores. The smell of cooking meat permeated the small living area.