Robert Adams - The Clan of the Cats

Furthermore, the problems never seem to improve, only to get worse and even worse, everywhere … and those are only the problems of which almost everyone is aware, things that can be easily seen, experienced, read in everyday life. There are other things, however, things of bone-chilling terror, which I am forbidden to impart to you or most people due to my security oaths, and seemingly there is nothing that the Congress, the Executive or any others can do to halt or even slightly ameliorate these things.

“My boy, I am deeply fearful. I am fearful that we now are living out the last days, weeks, months, possibly years of civilization as we know it. I feel a sense of foreboding, of an impending doom looming, glowering, gathering closer and ever more closely around us all … and I, I just feel so utterly helpless. With all my wealth, despite all my power, I feel completely alone sometimes, and as defenseless as a day-old baby. I can only pray that I be proved wrong.”

Riffling back through the read pages until he found a date, Milo shook his head sadly. “No, you weren’t wrong. Senator. Only a few more years prove your forebodings with a vengeance. And you were helpless to stop it, by then. Of course, no one will now ever know exactly who started that last, deadly exchange, not that it is of any importance; it just happened, and a whole world, billions of its people and ten thousand years’ worth of cultural accretions, went down the tubes in mere weeks of elapsed time.

“The Russians of course thought we, the U.S., had started it, and we immediately assumed that they had, but from what little I was able to pick up over that powerful private radio setup, other persons around the world had other culprits in mind. A few of them suspected China, though how they could’ve gotten their relatively short-ranged missiles to points as far distant as Cairo and Rome or why they would’ve targeted such cities to begin, no one seemed able to imagine, not even their accusers.

“Some accused the Union of South Africa, too, but here again the distances and targets would’ve been unreal for South African equipment and motives. Not a few thought it to have been Cuba, but if so it was most odd that some of the earliest strikes were on a couple of far-southern Russian areas. The same is true as regards Iraq, too. Why would Iraq have struck at its longtime ally and armorer?

“A good deal of suspicion, from a good many quarters, fell on Israel, and with good reason. For decades, by then, they had been growling a nuclear-tipped threat at all their neighbors while their so-called Defense Forces gobbled up a bit of land here and a strip of land there from neighboring states for ‘purely defensive purposes.’ Had they for any reason or none at all come to feel threatened? Well, both their civil government and their military had full quotas of hotheads who could’ve launched at all real or imagined enemies. Others suspected India and/or Pakistan, too. But the weight of opinion was that it had been done by an aging, megalomanic Moslem dictator in North Africa—a man who had been so meddlesome and erratic over the years that even most of his own coreligionists had ended by virtually outlawing him and his country, and after a brief flirtation following his illegal seizure of power, not even the Kremlin or its satellites would have any more dealings with him than selling him military hardware for hard cash on the barrelhead. And what in hell could this United States senator have done to halt such an act of hatred and madness from so totally unexpected a quarter? What could anyone have done?

“And, sadder still, even if that one madman had been taken out of the world picture by some fortuitous happenstance prior to his final act of savage aggression, I’m dead certain that it would’ve been only a matter of time—likely a very short time, all things weighed and considered at that—before one of the other suspects or yet another aggregation of fanatics or lunatics did the same thing.

“And, saddest of all, in the world political and military climate of that era—every nation of any power or aspiration armed to the teeth, treatied to the eyebrows, trusting the sworn words of neither allies nor enemies but fully expecting treachery at any moment, scared shitless of annihilation, yet determined to take any attacker down into death with it—what finally happened to the world and its people was a foreordained outcome, the worldwide nightmare of billions of folks for decades of time that became horrible reality overnight.

“By the time of Senator Taylor Bedford’s tenure of office, it was become impossible for anyone to do anything to reverse the trends, save the nations from themselves, almost half a century too late. But my country the one nation that could have done something to help set the other nations and nations then unborn, undreamed of, on a different, less destructive course, didn’t; it let the brief chance slip by. The U.S. just let … hell, helped! … the juggernaut of global disaster start to roll, ignored by everyone until it had gained such momentum that no one, no nation or group of nations could’ve stopped it or even slowed it down.

“Eustace Barstow,” he thought, his lips shaping the words, soundlessly, a horde of bitter memories welling up from below his conscious level, “General Eustace Barstow might, just might’ve been able to do something, there very shortly after the beginning of the thing, of that juggernaut’s roll that took so much of the world and its people down into dark disaster, doom, death.

“He recognized the menace, the true enemies of all freedom, of all civilization, early on, before World War Two even was concluded in Europe, but those who even took him seriously mocked him and his aims, called him ‘superpatriot,’ ‘red-baiter’ and much, much worse, most people just ignored him, wrote him off as some variety of looney-tune and forgot him. And I, more’s the pity, especially so as I had experienced firsthand just what the foe was capable of in pursuance of its selfish ends, deserted him too, got to hell away from him and the army and set about getting married and falling into a pisspotful of money I’d done nothing to earn or even deserve, a fine and loving woman I deserved even less and four children I adopted and reared as my own. And the end of it was suffering and death for all five of them and uncounted billions more, and all because none of us few who might’ve helped the even fewer who knew, who could look below the surface or into the future, if you will, and see what must be unless it could be quickly brought to a screeching halt, would do so.

“Eustace at least was able to keep his freedom, his status, his life, despite his lifelong efforts to fight the menace, to convert others to his beliefs. Some of the visionaries were not so fortunate. Rudolf Hess was imprisoned for nearly half a century, the last twenty-one years of it in what amounted to solitary confinement, until at last the poor old man hanged himself. General George Patton, unabashable, suffered an auto ‘accident’ that proved fatal. Others, like Ezra Pound, were locked away for years in madhouses and there subjected to the spate of twentieth-century tortures known as ‘behavior modification’ or were rendered intellectually impotent through means of icepick lobotomies. Most were simply pressured or ridiculed into silence.

“Oh, if only I …”

A brace of his uncle’s bodyguards collected James Bedford’s luggage and effects and they arrived at the senator’s tightly guarded suburban residence at almost the same time as the elected legislator and his guest. James had been to the house in times past, but only for meals or small, informal gatherings.

While they had awaited the senator’s copter on the roof of his office building, he had said. “You could’ve been put up in one of the so-called security-guest areas of several of the bigger hotels in town, but security is relative in such places, I’ve found; why, only last month one of those wild-eyed terrorist types got into one of them long enough to thoroughly kill a Turkish businessman before being cut almost in half at the waist by a guard’s machine pistol.”