Curt Clark - Anarchaos

The suitcases were my answer to the problem of Gar’s death, my final answer. I had tried avoiding the problem, with death or antizone. I had tried giving it a limited response, avenging Gar upon the persons of Phail and the other involved parties from Sledge. But I now saw that it would end only when I had accepted my responsibility to the fullest and completed the vengeance I’d come out here to start.

It was the colony that had killed my brother. That was true, finally. After the specifics of inter-corporation intrigue and lost strikes, there was still the fact that Anarchaos had produced the climate in which Gar’s life could end as it had done. Phail and Gar, working for the same corporations on other planets, would never have met one another across a loaded gun.

If the colony was responsible for Gar’s death, it followed that I must somehow kill the colony. I had tried to believe for a while that it was best to leave the place to its own slow self-destruction, as in the empty shacks around the perimeters of the major cities, but the rough health of Cannemuss had proved it would be a long while before that slow suicide completed itself. I had tried to believe with Rohstock, who wrote in Voyages To Seven Planets that “All are guilty on Anarchaos, and the guilty are invariably punished — by life on Anarchaos,” but it is true that man is infinitely adaptable, and if a man knows no life other than the Life of Hell, eventually Hell becomes normality and ceases to be Hell. I had tried to evade the issue by telling myself the task was too big for one man, but even as I’d thought it I’d known that the magnitude of a duty is never an excuse for shirking the attempt to perform it.

When I had seen in Colonel Whistler’s eyes the look I remembered from Phail, I had known at last there was no choice. Anarchaos was a cancer, and to merely snip off a few of the sick cells was to do nothing. The entire cancer had to be rooted out and destroyed.

Thus the suitcases.

It was my job to kill the colony, and what was it now that kept the colony alive? The Union Commission, bound this way and that by rules and regulations so that it could supply Anarchaos the necessities of its life without supplying the discipline and order it so urgently needed. Some underling members of the UC might be disgusted by the arrangement, might want to do something more forceful, but those at the top were too ensnarled in red tape and the balance of power, aided and abetted by those off-world corporations who were fattening themselves on this rich carrion world.

Well, I had just seen to it that the red tape would disappear. Tourists might be slaughtered, missionaries and merchants might be obliterated, engineers and prospectors and all honest workmen might be slashed and hacked, and the UC, wrapped in its own regulations, would stand to one side and do nothing. But now something was going to happen, and the UC would have to move.

According to the timers and my watch, it would happen in two standard days, eighteen hours and twenty-one minutes after my spacecraft lifted off Anarchaos. At that moment in time, the five suitcases would explode, each with enough force to demolish a city block, enough to topple one of those towers.

Four of the suitcases were hidden in the four UC Embassies in Chax, Ulik, Prudence and Moro-Geth. The fifth was hidden in the spaceport at Ni.

In less than three days, the entire personnel of the UC mission to Anarchaos would be wiped out. Records gone as well, and the heart of the monetary system. And all the equipment in the spaceport.

I wasn’t sure in which direction the UC would cut the red tape, whether they would merely pull out entirely and leave Anarchaos to rot in its own juices, or rather move in emphatically, take over full-time governing of the planet, and replace its absurd anarchy with some protectorate government of its own. In either case, this colony at Anarchaos was dead. We were even.

Alone in the blank passenger compartment of the spaceship, I sat a while in thought, and slowly boredom crept over me, the boredom of travel by shuttle, until at last I took Gar’s notebook from my pocket. Neither then nor later did I look at any of the sections in code. Instead, I opened it to the remembered spot and began to read:

ROLF

I am going to have a second chance…