F. Wilson - An Enemy of the State

“Very soon. Especially now that our public personality here,” he indicated Sayers, “has been moved into the limelight. I forgot to congratulate you, by the way, Radmon.”

“Nothing more than I deserve,” Sayers said, beaming. His numbers had risen steadily thanks to the ratings fix and to the follow-the-leader phenomenon that causes people who hear that lots of other people are watching a certain program to start watching it too, thus inducing still more people to start watching it, and so on in a geometric progression. The result was an offer of a spot on the early evening news show of one of the larger vid services, thereby assuring him a huge audience. The ratings program would now have to be returned to its untampered state.

“I'm all set to go,” Zack said. “Have been for months on end now. Just give me the word.”

“Take the first step.”

“You mean change the course name?”

“Right. But don't show them your lesson plans until they're good and mad. Hit them with those when they're in the wrong mood and the regents will be sure to cancel your course.”

“And then will they be sorry!”

“I don't care if the regents are sorry or not. I want Metep to be sorry.”

Sayers stood up and walked toward the door of the cubicle. “And I'll be sorry if I don't get home and get some sleep. Tonight's my first appearance on the new show and I need my beauty rest. Good luck to us all.”

“…AND THE BIG NEWS of the day remains the story from Paramer concerning an aborted attempt to repeat the famous Robin Hood caper of three months ago. The end result this time, however, was death, with an Imperial cruiser intercepting and shooting down the hijacked Treasury transport in the air over the port city. But not before the Merry Men had completed their mission-an estimated twenty-five million marks hurled into the sky over Paramer, with the same Robin Hood calling cards as the last time. Four bodies were found in the transport wreckage, burned beyond recognition. The Imperial Guard, it appears, takes its work seriously. Let all would-be tax rebels take a lesson from that.

“More news from Earth tonight on the strange behavior of Eric Boedekker, the wealthy asteroid mining magnate. It seems he has just sold the mineral rights to half of his asteroid holdings to his largest competitor, Merritt Metals, for a sum that probably exceeds the gross planetary products of some of our brother out-worlds. The mineral rights to the rest of the Boedekker asteroids are reportedly up for sale, too. Anyone interested in buying a flying mountain.?”

The confrontation had been considerably delayed by a computer programmer who either meant well or didn't pay too much attention to what she was doing. Any aware and upright programmer, conscious of job security, would have immediately reported Dr. Zachariah Brophy's change in the title of his first-year economics course from Economics: The Basics to Economics: Our Enemy, the State .

And so it was not until the printed course booklet was issued to all the students at the University of the Outworlds that Doc Zack's little act of provocation came to light. Reaction was mixed. The course was immediately booked solid, but that only meant that fifty students were interested; it hardly reflected the view of the campus at large. The university was state-supported-grounds, buildings, materials, and a full 75 per cent of tuition was paid for by the Imperium. Even room and board at the university dorms was state-funded. This could have resulted in a free, open forum for ideas, where no point of view was proscribed. Could have, but did not.

There was a long waiting list for seats in the University of the Outworlds; students who made the slightest ripple, such as objecting too loudly to course content and narrow viewpoints among the faculty, soon found it most difficult to obtain passing grades in key courses. And without those passing grades, their educational support was withdrawn. They had to drop out and join the great unwashed, monitoring the courses and taking examinations via the vid. It always happened within the first months of a term to the few free spirits who had managed to slip in with the new class. And it only took the academic demise of a couple of those to enlighten the survivors to the facts of life at the University of the Outworlds: co-operate and graduate.

Doc Zack's move was something else. This was not a questioning voice speaking out of order; this was no mere breach of academic etiquette. This was a red handkerchief fluttering in the faces of the regents and those to whom they had to answer. And what was worse, the offending course title was now in the hands of every student at the university. The semester was about to begin. Something had to be done, and quickly.

They canceled the course. A message was sent to each student who had possessed the temerity to enroll in a course entitled Economics: Our Enemy, the State informing him or her that a new course would have to be chosen to fill that time spot. The names on the class list were placed in a special file of students who would bear watching.

But Doc Zack had his own lists and he sent word to the students who had signed up for his class, and to favored students from past years, that he would be giving the first lecture as scheduled in the course catalogue. Anyone who was interested was welcome to come and listen. Radmon Sayers was also informed of the time and location of the lecture, but by a more circuitous route. He would see to it that Dr. Zachariah Brophy's first and last lecture of the new semester would have a much larger audience than the regents or anyone else anticipated.

“I'M NOT EXACTLY overwhelmed by the turnout this morning,” Doc Zack said, strolling back and forth across the front of the classroom in his usual speaking manner, looking as cadaverous as ever. “But I guess it would be hoping too much to see a standing-room-only crowd before me. I know that the prices of everything are keeping two jumps ahead of salary increases, and that many of you here are risking your places in this glorious institution just by being here. For that I thank you, and commend your courage.”

He craned his neck and looked around the room. “I see some familiar faces here and some new ones, too. That's good.” One of the new faces sat in the last row. He was young enough to pass for a student, but the square black vid recorder plate he held in the air, its flat surface following Zack wherever he went, gave him away as something more. This would be Sayers’ man, recording the lecture. Zack took a deep breath…time to take the plunge.

“What we're going to discuss here today may not seem like economics at first. It will concern the government-our government, the Imperium. It's a monster story in the truest, Frankensteinian sense, of a manmade creature running amuck across the countryside, blindly destroying everything it touches. But this is not some hideous creature of sewn-together cadavers; this creature is handsome and graceful and professes only to have our best interests at heart, desiring only to help us.

“Where most of its power lies is in the economy of our land. It creates the money, controls its supply, controls the interest rates that can be charged for borrowing it, controls, in fact, the very value of that money. And the hand that controls the economy controls you-each and every one of you. For your everyday lives depend on the economy: your job, the salary you receive for working that job, the price of your home, the clothes on your back, the food you eat. You can no more divorce a functioning human being from his or her ambient economy than from his or her ambient air. It's an integral part of life. Control a being's economic environment and, friend, you control that being.