His eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch, and for a long minute he gazed at me thoughtfully. I held my mental breath; and then the faintest wisp of a smile touched his lips. “My friends at the U.N. have mentioned you,” he said. “I’ve often thought that if I was ever ferreted out you would be the one who did it.”
I felt my heartbeat pick up. “Then the Peace Accords were your brainchild?”
He snorted gently. “Please. All that flowery legal language, those paragraphs and sub-paragraphs, mine? You flatter and insult me in the same breath.” He shook his head. “No, Mr. Kelly, I did none of the work drafting the Accords—nor any of the hard work since then that’s gone into making them mankind’s success story, for that matter. All I contributed was one, simple suggestion.”
I licked my upper lip. So the whispers had been right ... “And that suggestion was ... ?”
“What ultimately made the whole thing work,” he said, with neither false pride nor false modesty. “Tell me, do you have an insurance card on you?”
“Ah—sure,” I said, the change of subject throwing me just a little. “Health and auto both.”
“Show me.”
I dug out the little chip card, thumbed it on and handed it over. “Prudential,” he nodded, looking at it. “You know who owns Prudential?”
“Ah ... I think the Chubb Group bought it a few years ago—”
“And Chubb is owned by ... ?”
I had to think about that one. “The Anderson Portfolio?”
He nodded. “Owned by?”
I shook my head. “I give up.”
“Split, right down the middle by Citibank and the Exxon conglomerate. They also own Hartford and Century Casualty, by the way, through other channels. In fact, if you were to trace through the connections, you’d find that all the major insurance companies are owned by one or more of the multinationals. Corporations so big that together they control most of the world’s resources and wealth ... and a fair number of its governments, as well.”
I nodded. It wasn’t exactly a surprising revelation. “All right. And?”
He handed the chip card back. “Pull up the list of exclusions,” he instructed me.
Wondering where he was going with this, I complied. “Uh ... expenses not specifically provided for in the policy, pre-existing conditions, self-inflicted injury, confinement in a federal hospital, treatment covered under Worker’s Comp ...” I looked up at him, frowning. “And?”
He sighed; a patient, professorial sort of sigh. “Come, now—you’re certainly old enough to have had insurance policies ten years ago. So tell me: what’s missing?”
I stared at the list again ... and then it hit me. “Are you. saying ... ?”
He nodded. “Economic forces are the real king in this world of ours, Mr. Kelly,” he said. “For all their police forces and armies, governments really have very little of their old power left. But they had enough. Enough power to force the statutory elimination of one small phrase from all insurance policy contracts.”
I nodded. “The exclusion of payments,” I said quietly, “for injuries sustained due to war.”
It was unquestioningly the single most momentous interview of my entire career. Now, ten years later, the world almost entirely at peace, I still haven’t had the nerve to publish it.
The Terminal Beach
J. G. Ballard
At night, as he lay asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon, reminding him of the deep Atlantic rollers on the beach at Dakar, where he had been born, and of waiting in the evenings for his parents to drive home along the corniche road from the airport. Overcome by this long-forgotten memory, he woke uncertainly from the bed of old magazines on which he slept and ran toward the dunes that screened the lagoon.
Through the cold night air he could see the abandoned Superfortresses lying among the palms, beyond the perimeter of the emergency landing field three hundred yards away. Traven walked through the dark sand, already forgetting where the shore lay, although the atoll was only half a mile in width. Above him, along the crests of the dunes, the tall palms leaned into the dim air like the symbols of some cryptic alphabet. The landscape of the island was covered by strange ciphers.
Giving up the attempt to find the beach, Traven stumbled into a set of tracks left years earlier by a large caterpillar vehicle. The heat released by one of the weapons tests had fused the sand, and the double line of fossil imprints, uncovered by the evening air, wound its serpentine way among the hollows like the footfalls of an ancient saurian.
Too weak to walk any further, Traven sat down between the tracks. With one hand he began to excavate the wedge-shaped grooves from a drift into which they disappeared, hoping that they might lead him toward the sea. He returned to the bunker shortly before dawn, and slept through the hot silences of the following noon.
As usual on these enervating afternoons, when not even the faintest breath of offshore breeze disturbed the dust, Traven sat in the shadow of one of the blocks, lost somewhere within the center of the maze. His back resting against the rough concrete surface, he gazed with a phlegmatic eye down the surrounding aisles and at the line of doors facing him. Each afternoon he left his cell in the abandoned camera bunker and walked down into the blocks. For the first half hour he restricted himself to the perimeter aisle, now and then trying one of the doors with the rusty key in his pocket—he had found it among the litter of smashed bottles in the isthmus of sand separating the testing ground from the airstrip—and then, inevitably, with a sort of drugged stride, he set off into the center of the blocks, breaking into a run and darting in and out of the corridors, as if trying to flush some invisible opponent from his hiding place. Soon he would be completely lost. Whatever his efforts to return to the perimeter, he found himself once more in the center.
Eventually he would abandon the task, and sit down in the dust, watching the shadows emerge from their crevices at the foot of the blocks. For some reason he always arranged to be trapped when the sun was at Zenith—on Eniwetok, a thermonuclear noon.
One question in particular intrigued him: “What sort of people would inhabit this minimal concrete city?”
“This island is a state of mind,” Osborne, one of the biologists working in the old submarine pens, was later to remark to Traven. The truth of this became obvious to Traven within two or three weeks of his arrival. Despite the sand and the few anemic palms, the entire landscape of the island was synthetic, a man-made artifact with all the associations of a vast system of derelict concrete motorways. Since the moratorium on atomic tests, the island had been abandoned by the Atomic Energy Commission, and the wilderness of weapons, aisles, towers, and blockhouses ruled out any attempt to return it to its natural state. (There were also stronger unconscious motives, Traven recognized, for leaving it as it was: if primitive man felt the need to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche, twentieth-century man had reversed this process—by this Cartesian yardstick, the island at least existed, in a sense true of few other places.)
But apart from a few scientific workers, no one yet felt any wish to visit the former testing ground, and the naval patrol boat anchored in the lagoon had been withdrawn five years before Traven’s arrival. Its ruined appearance, and the associations of the island with the period of the Cold War—what Traven had christened the “pre-Third”—were profoundly depressing, an Auschwitz of the soul whose mausoleums contained the mass graves of the still undead. With the Russo-American detente this nightmarish chapter of history had been gladly forgotten.