The vehicle squealed to a halt beside the landing stairs, and three Black soldiers in shiny, steel helmets and neatly pressed white uniforms leaped out. Behind them came a bony European in civilian bush-shirt and shorts.
“Hey, up there!” the latter shouted. “You! Lessing! Muh-fuk-kah!”
Lessing gaped. It was Johnny Kcnow. They had been meres in the same unit during the Baalbek War.
The pilot smiled weakly and lowered his weapon, but Lessing hesitated. He wasn’t ready to be thumbed by an ex -comrade now working for a different side.
“Johnny? Put your piece down and come on up. Leave your doggies there.”
There was a puzzled expletive from below. He heard the clatter of a weapon being tossed into the back seat of the car. Then Johnny Kenow came loping up the metal stairs, two at a time.
Lessing backed into the shadows inside the door, unwilling to let Kenow within close-combat reach until he knew more. Those troopers down there could be up and into the plane within seconds.
“Hey, man! He-e-y!” Kenow grasped the situation at once. He stopped and flung his arms wide. “Clean! I’m clean! What the hell’s up?”
“Nothing, I hope. Just being wise. Come on in.” He bent an eyebrow at the pilot: he wanted to know instantly if Kenow’s buddies decided to join the party.
Johnny Kenow was as Lessing remembered him: a lanky straw-sucker from Montana with pallid, mottled skin; oily, dark hair that covered his skull like a coat of paint; and eyes so close-set that people said he had to look through a pair of binoculars one eye at a time. After the Baalbek War Kenow had taken service in the Imperial Palace at Conakry. Now he was the Supreme General of the Emperor’s Ever-Victorious Army, and it was rumored that he had acquired a squad of Eurasian concubines, a chest full of medals — and a chest full of gold to match.
Not such bad duty. But then the life expectancy of imperial generals was no longer here than it had been in ancient Rome.
Lessing asked, “How did you know I was on this plane?”
“Keep my ass clean and my eye on the passenger manifests.” Kenow winked, an unprepossessing sight. “Down here to pick up a French girl, a gift from the Emperor to his pig-suckin’ son. Royal reception.” He snorted. “Best I tell her what’s happenin’ before she gits in with the wrong parties.”
“Palace intrigue?”
“Yeah. ‘Nough bull-pucky to fertilize all o’ Africa.” Lessing began to relax a little. Kenow’s next words brought him back to full alert.
“Boys here lookin’ fer you. Two, three weeks ago.”
“Who?”
“Dunno. Euro-mercs, mebbe, or Arabs.” He pronounced it “Ay-rabs,” even after fifteen years in the Middle East. “Told ’em you was croaked.”
“Any idea what they wanted?”
“Not a goddam. Heard there was other guys askin’ about you, too.” He gave Lessing a sly look from narrow, red-rimmed eyes. “You stash some loot you was s’posed to lake home to papa?”
Lessing’s “samples” of Pacov rose instantly to mind. But no one could know about that. The little globe and the tube were concealed behind a metal inspection plate in the very innards of Indoco’s
Lucknow plant. He knew for a fact that nobody had looked there since.
“Or mebbe you thumbed somebody you shouldn’t?”
Lessing felt relieved; Kenow was just fishing. He smiled. “Hell, I’m too smart to screw up like that. Just do my job.”
“You always was a careful sonuvabitch.” The other dug into a shirt pocket, produced a tattered pack of American cigarettes and held it out. Lessing shook his head. “Heard somethin’ else, too. Some kind of big rumble between the Israelis and the Rooskies. Mercs, regular soldiers, lots of scurryin’ back ‘n’ forth. Americans and Brits and everybody else in the fuckin’ world all hoppin’ around. More kikibirds than you kin shake your dong at.”
“Kikibird” was slang for a spy, an intelligence agent; Lessing had heard that it came from some archaic joke about a big, dumb bird that sat out in the snow all winter and hollered, “Kee… kee… kee… rist, it’s cold!”
There was a shout from below, and they stood up to look. One of the helmeted soldiers pointed across the moisture-slick runway toward the blinking lights of a plane just landing. Kenow spat out through the doorway.
“There’s our French hoor now. Got to go. Mebbe I can knock off a bit o’ nookie before Mademoiselle La-de-fuckin’-da becomes Queen Empress.”
“Hey, at least tell me what you think’s going on!” Lessing, also at the door, spied the lights of a second car coming toward them. Mrs Delacroix’ coiffure glittered like a silvery tiara in the back seat.
“God damn it, I got no idea.” Kenow shook hands, clapped Lessing on the shoulder, and started down the stairs. “It’s big, though. Mebbe the Big Boom that’ll take out the world. I got the Emperor diggin’ a bomb shelter right down to the middle of the earth! If anybody phones, that’s where I’ll be.”
He waved and was gone.
Once there might have been room and food for those who do not or cannot serve the social weal. Support for such individuals is now almost impossible. Not only is the planet overpopulated. but resources are already insufficient, and transport is often not available to deliver supplies to those who need them. The economic system, too, is not tailored to serve great numbers of drones who cannot or will not contribute to production.
Saying this is neither “humane” nor “inhumane”; it is simply the truth. The starving child who receives a barely sufficient diet today will grow up with serious physical and mental deficiencies tomorrow. He or she will give birth to an average of three or four new mouths to feed— and so on, into the unthinkable future.
This is insane, an impossible situation. Weak and defective individuals cannot be supported forever without weakening the stock and exhausting the resources, it is no longer permissible to evade the problem and say. “God will provide.” This is an easy excuse for doing nothing. God often does not provide, as the many great catastrophes of history prove. If God offers a lesson, it is that each species must provide for itself — or perish, like the dinosaurs.
A solution, if there is one, will not come through petty reforms, pious words, or the good-hearted charity of individuals. The essential, inescapable requirement for survival is an efficient world state, not a motley crew of inept national governments, which are too weak and too slow and too impotent to solve the terrible dilemmas ahead. The time for disorganization is past. What is needed is a totalitarian world government.
Those steeped in the mush of so-called “liberal” thinking will now throw up their hands and cry. “Not totalitarianism! That is bad!” This response reveals only ignorance, a misunderstanding of the meaning of “totalitarianism.”
Simply put, a totalitarian state is one in which ideological and operational unity has been achieved: no more patchwork of tradition, religion, superstition, local customs, parochial prejudices, worn-out ideas from earlier centuries, partially implemented structures that overlap and compete with other structures, and muzzy “idealism” that conceals “practical” greed.
A totalitarian state must scrub the slate clean. It must reorganize, restructure, and redistribute. It must care for its people.
A true totalitarian state values social cohesion, efficiency, and rationality. It must possess the means to implement these values— unlike earlier states, which churned out “high ideals” as an automobile spews exhaust fumes but were too incomplete and inchoate ever to realize them.
To paraphrase Plato, the best form of government is a good monarchy; the worst is a bad monarchy. A democracy can never be very good or very bad. because it is too inefficient. Monarchy, rule by a single, hereditary “king,” cannot work today, however; the world has grown too complex. For the same reason, true “democracy” (which was never really practiced, anyway) also cannot serve. Intermediate forms, such as those in which each person votes for one or more representatives, are too cumbersome, piling layer upon layer of “government.”