“There: I told you you were an expert on this subject. This is exactly what the draft does, except that it doesn’t take the sort of member your family might spare—grandma aged 107 who’s been senile for years, for example, or that baby who somehow crept through the filter of eugenic legislation and wound up with phenylketonuria. It takes the handsomest, healthiest, most vigorous, and nobody else.
“Remind you of something? It should do; the folk imagination has occasional curious insights and one of them has been repeated for uncountable millennia. From Andromeda chained on her rock to the maidens offered up to the dragon St. George slew, the theme of destroying the most precious, the most valuable, the least replaceable of our kinfolk recurs and recurs in legend. It tells us with a wisdom that we do not possess as individuals but certainly possess collectively that when we go to war we are ruining ourselves.
“But you’re an expert on this, aren’t you? You know very well that it’s thanks to the Confederate dead, or the victims of the Long March, or the heroic pilots of the Battle of Britain, or self-incinerated kamikazes, that you’re here, today, enjoying your wonderful daily life so full of pleasure, reward, love, joy and excitement.
“Actually I’ll wager that it’s rather more full of anxiety, problems, economic difficulties, quarrels and disappointments, but if you’re so attached to them I shan’t be able to shake you loose. Love and joy are incredibly habit-forming; often a single exposure is enough to cause permanent addiction. But I have no doubt you steer clear as much as you can of anything so masterful.”
—You’re an Ignorant Idiot by Chad C. Mulligan
tracking with closeups (11)
THE SEALED TRAIN
“Close now,” said the navigator. He was also the pilot, insofar as there was a human pilot. The course-setting and control were mostly done by computers, but if their delicate machinery were to be disabled by—say—a near-miss with a depth-charge, a man could continue to function after sustaining injuries that would put computers out of action.
The intelligence officer shivered a little, wondering whether this man he shared the fore-compartment of the sub with would be as reliable in emergency as he claimed. However, there had been no contact with the enemy so far.
Overhead, under a clear sky and very little wind, the surface of the Shongao Strait must be almost like a mirror, rippled only by tides and currents. The sub itself, creeping along the deepest part of the channel, would not visibly disturb the water.
“That’s it to within a few yards,” the navigator said. “I’ll put up the listeners now. Better go warn the cargo.”
The intelligence officer looked back along the spinal tunnel of the vessel. Just big enough for a man to ease himself through, it framed Jogajong’s head in a circle of light.
Sealed train … Lenin …
But it was hard to think in those terms. The agelessly youthful Asian, who was in fact over forty but could have passed for ten years less, with his neatly combed black hair and sallow skin, had none of the charismatic quality of a man like Lenin.
Perhaps revolutionaries on your own side never do seem so impressive? How about our own Founding Fathers?
Annoyed for no definable reason, the intelligence officer said, “I don’t care for the way you keep calling him ‘the cargo’. He’s a man. An important man, what’s more.”
“On the one hand,” said the navigator in a slightly bored tone, “I prefer not to think of the people I deliver out here as if they were people. It’s a lot better to think of them as expendable objects. And on the other, he’s a yellowbelly same as the rest of them out here. It’s your business to tell them apart, I guess, but for me they all look like monkeys.”
As he spoke he had been operating the controls which released the listeners, allowing them to bob gently to the surface. Now he activated them, and the hull was suddenly alive with the night noises of the world above: the murmur of waves, the screeching of parakeets disturbed at their roosts, and the immense plop-plopping of something very close at hand.
“Turtle,” the navigator said, amused at the way his companion started. “Friendly. At least I hope so. You’d be the one to know if the slit-eyes had started to enlist them on their side, hm?”
The intelligence officer felt himself flushing, and concealed the fact by turning to climb along the spinal tunnel. The navigator, behind him, chuckled just loudly enough.
The bleeder. I hope he doesn’t return from his next mission.
The sounds from the listeners had already alerted Jogajong. By the time the intelligence officer completed his crawl down the tunnel, he was ready except for his helmet. He was clad in a flotation-suit of pressure-sensitive plastic which would resist the water rigidly until he surfaced, then relax to allow him to swim ashore. Empty, it could be infected with a small vial of tailored bacteria and reduced to an amorphous mess on the beach.
They must have rehearsed him very well … No, of course: he’s done it before, and for real. He’s going back the way they got him out. Him, and lord knows how many others.
“Any time you like now,” the navigator called. “Don’t stretch our luck, will you?”
The intelligence officer swallowed hard. He checked over the security of the suit as Jogajong silently turned around for inspection. Everything was in order. He picked up the final item, the helmet, and set it in place on the neck-seal, wondering what was going on behind that so-calm face.
If they wanted me to do what he’s going to do—pop out in midocean, risk the coastal patrols on my way to the shore—could I?… I don’t know. But he seems so relaxed.
He thrust out his hand to grasp Jogajong’s in a final good-luck gesture, and realised too late that the pressure-sensitisation of the plastic instantly turned the gauntlet into an inflexible, chilly lump. He saw Jogajong’s lips form a smile at his discomfiture, and was all of a sudden angry with him too.
Doesn’t the bleeder realise—?
No, probably not. The computers gave this man better than a forty per cent chance of being the next Leader of Yatakang, provided the intelligence assessments of his contacts and influence were to be relied on. The intelligence officer could cope with that kind of power only as an abstract; he could not feel in his bones what it would be like to give orders to two hundred million people.
“Move it along there!” the navigator shouted. “Blast off, for pity’s sake!”
Jogajong drew back to await the flooding of his compartment. The intelligence officer scrambled feet-first into the tunnel again, dogged the door shut and listened to the noise of water beyond it.
You have to envy a man like that. What makes you jealous is the confidence he feels. Forty per cent chance of making out … I wouldn’t have come on this free-falling stroll, as the navigator terms it, if I’d been told the odds against my return. Wonder if I should ask when I get back? Better not, I guess. I prefer to think of success as a foregone conclusion.